Teachers Edmonds & Steele on The Case of America's Missing Students

It didn't have to be this way...

Stephanie Edmonds and Lea Steele are both mothers and teachers. Stephanie has taught for over a decade, including five years in New York City public schools.  Lea has taught for over two decades in a rural area of Northern California and has previously written about her experiences for Restore Childhood. 

A Life Saved in the Classroom

In the fall of 2020, when schools did not fully open in their districts, Lea and Stephanie saw the damage being done to their students, as well as to their own children. In January 2021, Stephanie founded Teachers4OpenSchools and Lea was the first teacher to join.  Since then, they have been outspoken advocates for students and their families in the effort to restore normalcy to schools and remediate lost learning.  WATCH Stephanie’s moving interview with Lea and READ their essay below.

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“Where is your school spirit?” 

That’s the question seniors were asked during an assembly where Lea’s son attends school.  As administrators and teachers encouraged the students to improve their attendance at school and participation in extracurriculars, her son recalled that most of the students sat in silence or continued side conversations.

We ask the same question of these administrators and teachers of the past three years:  

Where was your school spirit when schools closed in March 2020? 

Where was your school spirit when you saw dozens of ceiling fans and black boxes during virtual learning? 

Where was your school spirit when kids were forced to sit in classrooms all day and to play sports in masks?

For students in the class of 2023, this is their first year of what one might now refer to as “normal” high school.  Schools shut down when these students were in ninth grade and many of them didn’t return to the classroom in any capacity for over a year.  Then, when they finally did all get back in the building in the fall of 2021 as eleventh graders, many features of school such as field trips and sports were limited and students were forced to mask all day. 

For eighth graders, the story is similar: they never had any “normal” middle school years before this year. If you are considering the facts, student disengagement from the school community is perhaps the only thing that makes sense.

For over two years, kids were effectively told that school wasn’t important and that a screen was an acceptable replacement; that sports were luxuries reserved for kids whose parents could afford private leagues and out-of-state travel; that socializing with peers was dangerous and it was safer to communicate via social media.

The term chronic absenteeism is used to describe students who miss 10% or more of the days each school year.  Before the pandemic, chronic absenteeism was around 16.5% nationally.  During the pandemic this figure skyrocketed.

Omaha Public Schools 25%

Detroit Public Schools 69%

Sacramento City Unified School District 25%

Connecticut’s largest school systems 28.9%

That is, if the schools even bothered to take attendance… Because, according to a report by the Center on Reinventing Education, only 27% of a nationally representative sample of 477 school systems even took attendance in spring 2020.

At other schools, teachers were given new new guidance as to what counts as present and absent.  For example, as a high school teacher in New York City public schools, Stephanie did not take attendance based on the students that were in her daily zoom classes, but rather only for her advisory group, which could be done via daily phone call, text, or email.  Often, students revealed that they were attending class through their phone while they worked as a cashier at the grocery store, or while they were on the go from one place to another, or while they played video games.

In the current 2022-23 school year, the trend of chronic absenteeism does not seem to be letting up.  For example, in Connecticut, only six percent of students without high needs were deemed chronically absent in the 2019 school year, but that number has steadily increased to 7.2%, 12.4% and now 17.6% over the last three years. Data from the first three months of this school year shows a jump from 29,000 to 41,000 chronically absent non-high-needs students.

In another example, San Diego Unified is seeing slightly better rates this year, 28.5% down from 34%; however, they are only half way through the year and like Connecticut, their chronic absenteeism rates are trending in the wrong direction.  This is especially true for students with disabilities in San Diego Unified where more than a third of these students – or 37.8% – were considered chronically absent in January, up from 26.1% in October.

Although the number of chronically absent students is shocking, their stories are even more harrowing.  In rural California, Lea has seen these stories play out far too often.  One of her students was lured to Las Vegas and nearly became a sex trafficking victim.  Another was impregnated by her 17-year-old half brother. The frequent late night emails filled with cries of distress sent Lea running to her truck to conduct wellness checks giving her too many opportunities to practice the fine art of coaxing students through panic attacks.  One time she was too late and could only serve as witness to one of her students experiencing a drug overdose.  

Chronic absenteeism captures the most severe situations, but all students are struggling more than ever socially and academically.  Kids are learning less in school, spending more time looking at screens, eating less healthy foods and are more overweight, and they have more anxiety and depression.  It was recently reported that almost half of the students that graduate from public schools in NYC need remedial classes when they enter the City University of New York system.  Similarly, a recent study revealed that young people are less emotionally prepared for the workplace.  While the mental wellness of children and the academic rigor of our schools has been trending downward for years, school closures and masking greatly accelerated these trends.

So what do we do? 

In the education world, there seems to be a big emphasis on mental health and wellness support in schools both in the form of more counselors or social workers and in social emotional learning based curricula.  There also seems to be ever more of an emphasis on technology in the classroom even for our youngest learners.  We believe that while these efforts may be well intentioned, the pandemic demonstrated they are exactly the opposite direction we should be moving in.

Even before the pandemic there was a clear link between screen time and the decline in mental health, as well as the negative impact on brain development in children.  The pandemic only served to prove this point further. Additionally, there are important processes that occur in the brain while writing that enhance student learning that don’t occur when using a computer to type or play a game.

“The use of pen and paper gives the brain more ‘hooks’ to hang your memories on. Writing by hand creates much more activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain. A lot of senses are activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write and hearing the sound you make while writing. These sense experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning. We both learn better and remember better,” according to Norwegian brain researcher Audrey Van der Meer.

Instead, we believe the answer is fewer screens and more learning from teachers who have high quality written curriculum with daily lesson plans.  When students can read and do math on grade level, they can participate in age appropriate high order thinking tasks and engage with the world around them productively.  When students are given ample opportunities to participate in a range of high quality art, music, and athletic activities, they develop interpersonal skills and learn how to work through failures and have more opportunities to experience success. Students learn best from teachers and peers, not screens.

As teachers, our greatest hope is that we can help our students process the impacts of the pandemic policies to emerge stronger and more empowered. While it is tempting to try to forget the past, we believe in using lessons learned to inform and improve our children’s futures.