SCRANTON, LACKAWANNA COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU) — It’s been five years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
Schools all over the nation were told to shut down. Forced to learn online, students and teachers didn’t return to the classroom for at least a year.
28/22 News caught up with teachers in Scranton to talk about how students have progressed over the last five years.
Teachers say the focus over the last five years has been on both children’s education and their mental health. They say younger students fell behind socially, and many older students still lag academically.
In Mrs. Katie Raymer’s first-grade classroom Wednesday, students sat on the carpet together reciting the alphabet. That wasn’t the case five years ago when the COVID pandemic hit and classrooms were left empty.
Mrs. Raymer recalls suddenly teaching students through a screen instead of in her classroom.
“We had to really reinvent how we were teaching because when we went home, we were teaching on the computer, so we were used to that one-on-one interaction with the kids,” Ms. Raymer explained.
Schools remained empty come summer and through the end of 2020. In 2021, teachers were thrown another curve ball: teaching on a hybrid schedule.
Half of the week, they instructed at home, and the other half, reunited with their students at their desks.
Scranton history teachers Sean Curry and Jerry Skotleski spoke about the consequences remote learning had on each child’s education.
“Part of the ability to prepare them is being with those kids in the classroom and not having the opportunity to be there with them really set us backwards in that,” Curry said.
Challenges also arose when it came to testing. Without the ability to see students learning, teachers were unable to tell if their lessons were sticking.
“That’s been a difficult aspect for me because I’m the person who wants to be in the classroom and say ‘Here’s your paper, I want to correct your paper.’ and now it’s, ‘Here’s your questions online.’ And they’re just going ‘Dink.’ So that’s a whole different world,” Skotleski explained.
The pandemic was devastating in many ways, but some teachers are also finding the hidden positives.
“It made us, I think, look at the world a little differently, appreciate some of the things that we have a little bit more and appreciate the time we have with those kids in the classroom a lot more because that was the part that we really missed,” explained Curry.
Five years later, schools are almost back to normal but differences in students might be more visible, including their ability to bounce back.
“We’ve seen improvement every year, coming back from COVID, and I think we continue to grow and to make sure that we don’t just focus on the academic part with the kids. We focus on them socially as well so that they can be good human beings when they go into the world,” said Reymer.
Another hurdle brought up was the lack of time in a day, compared to the ever-changing technology advances in the classroom.
