Elementary school scenes from a pandemic: There was case of the little girl couldn’t stop crying one morning.
In those pre-vaccine days, she was convinced her grandmother, who was coughing and sniffling with a (medically diagnosed) cold was going to die of COVID, even though the matriarch had earlier tested negative for the contagion.
There was the little boy on another morning, in another school, who worked himself into a frenzy – over a chair.
He and a handful of classmates were picked for a read-aloud exercise in the front of the room, and chairs had been set up for the occasion.
Which was fine. Except that it wasn’t.
He was worried the seat designated for him wasn’t “sanitized enough” – and, with a mix of anxiousness and anger, he refused to the join the group.
The student did receive a slight reprimand, as his teacher was trying to navigate the unprecedented, uncharted straits of the coronavirus among an impressionable population.
Now, some three years later, the above students are readying to move on the middle school.
And everyone is still dipping a collective toe into post-COVID waters, to see where the emotional undertows may be.
Michael Ryan, who directs diversity and inclusion services for Monongalia County Schools, did a bit of a sonar sweep for Board of Education members earlier this month.
It was an emotional inventory, of sorts, from Panorama, a national program used by the district that charts such health and well-being among students and teachers.
Data has been compiled most recently from surveys given this fall, Ryan told the board.
Initial data from the first of many surveys to come shows that 75% of students on the elementary school level are able to better control their emotions, given shifting situations of any classroom on any day.
Same for high school – except some students whose parents are divorced, and with joint custody, say moving back and forth between the two locations every weekend makes it hard to focus on homework.
And one middle school student was shouldering weight of a different sort. He was a sports star who feared he was personally letting his classmates down – if his team lost.
“Is it that they were sequestered for so long?” BOE member Nancy Walker asked.
She was referring to the total shift to remote learning at the height of the pandemic during 2020 and 2021, in particular.
Ryan, who was West Virginia’s state school guidance counselor of the year for 2018 before moving to the central offices of Mon’s school district, said yes – Walker’s observation was correct, in part.
Students, he said, likely didn’t have the chance to make the emotional transition to different grades of school, and different buildings altogether, which add to growth and maturity.
There’s that, plus the aforementioned home life for some that can get fragmented, he said.
While the district offers emotional health classes in all grades, Ryan said he’s hoping that households do some literal homework over 2023, to help smooth out the ride.
Ryan realizes, he said, that a lot of it comes from parents getting their kids into several extracurricular activities, which they may see as a way to make up for those remote-learning days.
“People are so busy, we don’t have the time to sit down and have a family dinner because we have two different kids, in two different places, at the same time,” he said.
“We need to work on getting our balance back.”
TWEET@DominionPostWV
