It’s been six years since COVID-19 struck. How have schools changed?

Erin Beers started the 2019-2020 school year at Madeira Middle School as a seventh grade English teacher like she normally would, but she didn’t end it at Madeira Middle School. She ended it at home, talking to her class through a computer screen, having to restructure her en-tire curriculum, with “no closure that year,” she says.

“We thought it would be for two weeks,” Beers says. “We thought we would be right back. It was kind of wild. A lot of interdisciplinary units had to be restructured just because the kids had to be apart from each other.”

It’s now been six years since COVID-19 turned the world upside down, causing everyone to lose valuable in-person experiences that they can never get back. Are these moments replaceable? Can everything be replaced by experiences through a screen, rather than alongside your peers? According to Kelly Kusch, the head of Covington Classical Academy, the answer is no.

“We teachers have always known that the most effective way to teach is in person,” Kusch says. “[Everyone has] seen the test scores. Especially in reading and math, they are not where they should be. They haven’t caught up since.”

Indeed, test scores in reading had the biggest drop between 2020-2022 since 1990, and math had its first ever drop in 30 years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Unfortunately for Kusch, who teaches across all high school grade levels, she is now witnessing the effects virtual learning had on students who went through it at what could be considered the most pivotal time in a child’s education: middle school.

“Our seniors would have been eighth graders. That’s really where those skills are refined: being able to do the homework, find it and turn it in the next day. They should be doing these things in the middle grades so that they can be prepared for high school,” Kusch says. “They just really weren’t as prepared for it.”

A general decline in motivation is a common thread among 2025 students. James Orcena, a social worker and counselor for the Campbell County School District, has found that simply showing up to school has been a struggle. “One of the main things we saw an increase in was truancy after COVID and we saw the apex in 2023,” he says.

Students’ absences became so common that some states took matters into their own hands. The Kentucky legislature passed a new law that set the amount of allowed absences to 15 days until a child would be considered truant and there would have to be a legal ramification.

In addition to the students not showing up, if they do, then there is a general lack of motivation once they enter the classroom. “They just didn’t know how to be in school anymore,” says Kusch. “Some of them are still willing to just take the zero or the late penalty because they just don’t want to do the work.”

Beers, who works with present-day middle schoolers, says she is holding her students account-able regarding their executive functioning skills, since it is “one of the places that took the hardest hit” during the era of virtual learning. But she must face a whole new beast that has been introduced to students in the past six years. “Technology is so different. With the ad-vancements of technology and AI, we have to get used to a new normal,” Beers says.

With technological advancements and ever evolving resources that current students are getting access to more easily, teachers are forced to say goodbye to school settings as they were pre-COVID. “We have to take kids where they are and recognize that,” Beers says.

Beyond tangible declines in attendance and test scores, there has been a notable hit to mental health among students. “Because of the phones, some of them can isolate that way instead of being super social,” Orcena says, while nothing this is a phenomenon that he has seen firsthand. “One of the main [issues] is a generalized anxiety for a lot of kids about returning to school … They’re anxious about being able to do the work, and so they fall behind in those are-as, which creates more anxiety.”

If there is one positive to come from students’ time away from the classroom, it is that stu-dents are now willing to reach out when they are struggling amidst the new normal.

“Mental health issues are more common now,” Kusch says. “Or maybe we’re just more willing to talk about them than we were 30 years ago.”

Looking forward, as schools move further into a post-COVID world, educators all hope for the same thing—that their students are fit to have a bright future. “We’re hoping that students understand the importance of education and having to work to learn,” Kusch says. While some want to see their students be better prepared individually in the classroom, others want them to value shared experiences with their peers, something that wasn’t guaranteed after 2020.

“I want to see them have the ability to be seventh grade social beings and continue to keep growing in that capacity,” Beers says. And while schools can’t control the cards they were dealt in 2020, they’re determined to embrace the hand they were given to help make their students the best they can be.

“It gets really frustrating to me when people say, ‘Oh, well, before COVID…,’ Well, COVID was years ago,” Beers says. “We have to recognize that these are the kids that we have. We have to meet them where they are at and move forward.”