The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is having a permanent effect on education and school districts, according to Peoria County Regional Superintendent Beth Crider.
As school districts adapt to frequent changes to mitigation recommendations amid a surge in COVID-19 cases brought on by the highly contagious omicron variant, Crider said educators and administrators “are all in this together.”
“I think with that determination, we will make it through. It's just things are going to be different,” said Crider. “I just don't see how we will ever go back to normal. I just don't think there's a normal to go back to.”
Crider fears the longer the pandemic alters how students are taught, more kids run the risk of falling behind.
“It's one of my biggest concerns, and it's not just an academic concern,” she said. “It's a developmental delay that happens. School is not just reading, writing and arithmetic. It is being around others and learning how to be in a social environment, and so when you are not a part of that you're delayed.
“We're hearing in the research that it's a two-year delay, so a ninth-grader really is more like a seventh-grader. We have to be aware of that, and we have to think about that as we're approaching these students in the classroom.”
Crider said local school districts no longer have the option on their own to shift to remote instruction methods that were used in the 2020-21 school year in accordance with Gov. JB Pritzker’s emergency executive order.
“We had that tool in our toolkit; we could use it when we needed to. But that is not the case now,” she said, noting districts would only be able to turn to remote learning or take an “adaptive pause” after consulting with local health departments — and only if specific COVID-19 data points indicate a need.
“Here's the problem: If you go on adaptive pause, everything is canceled — the basketball games, the after-school activities, everything. So it's a bigger conversation than simply going to remote learning.”
Crider said she doesn’t anticipate Pritzker issuing a new executive order to allow for more remote instruction.
“The Illinois State Board of Education, the governor's office, and the Illinois Department of Public Health, all of them have consistently stayed with the message the best place for children as in the classroom. So I don't see that changing,” she said. “But locally, if numbers change and shift, in conjunction with the local health department, you might see some things change locally.”
Crider said school districts, like most other industries, are coping with a worker shortage that extends beyond teachers and administrators to bus drivers and cafeteria workers. She said school employees and students alike are facing elevated stress from the pandemic.
“I honestly feel we're facing a massive mental health crisis, not just for teachers and educators,” she said. “There is so much that comes with surviving something like this. There's the unprecedented levels of change. There's losing routines. There are events that people were excited for and wanted to attend, and now you can no longer have them the way that you had hoped.
“So there's a lot of grief that's coming with this pandemic, and people are scared. So you see many industries changing and shifting, but they're telling all of us to go back to school. It feels a little bit like an experiment, and that's weighing heavily on people's minds.”
Coming out of the winter holiday break, Peoria Public Schools delayed resuming classes by one week. Crider said other Peoria County school districts considered similar actions, but opted to reopen their classrooms.
“Every community is different; they serve different populations, they have different vaccination rates. So every community makes a different decision based on what their data is telling them,” she said.
Crider said dealing with the global pandemic is new to everyone, and pivoting at a moment’s notice as case counts rise and recommendations change can be extremely challenging for everyone. But she added she has great hope for the future of education, even if things will never be the same.
“There are exciting things that we've learned. I think you'll see robust online learning. I think you'll see new ways of us gathering and doing things with one another. So I hope that there's positive change,” she said.
“I hope we start to acknowledge some of those mental health struggles that have been there all along, but were exacerbated by the pandemic and, now, that we will truly give that the attention that it deserves.”
