When Eric Holland took the reins as superintendent of Rome City Schools in the beginning of the school year, he knew that dealing with the aftermath of covid was a huge task for the school system.
“We actually call it learning-missed in my house,” said Rome City Schools Superintendent Eric Holland said earlier. “Because if you learned it, you didn’t lose it. And these kids lost so much time.”
Covid’s impact on education will continue to be felt for years as the months of schools being completely shut down and then some students staying home with an extended period of remote learning continues to affect schools and student.
Compounding this problem is that Rome and Floyd County school systems are scheduled to lose approximately $65 million in federal covid funds once those grants expire in 2024.
These funds — typically used for learning coaches, councilors and other paraprofessionals — are set to expire at the end of the 2023-2024 school year in May 2024, according to GeorgiaInsights.com, an initiative of the Georgia Department of Education.
The federal pandemic funds are meant to give students and teachers extra support in order to correct educational lapses which occurred during the pandemic.
State School Superintendent Richard Woods, who was reelected to his third term in the office November, acknowledged the pandemic has taken a toll on Georgia’s students.
“Georgia will continue to remain laser-focused on academic recovery,” Woods said. “We know the pandemic had an undeniable impact on student learning — it’s our role, responsibility, and privilege moving forward to ensure districts and schools have the resources they need to continue investing in students and combating the effects of lost learning opportunities.”
The Rome school system will continue to target student underperformance and learning loss with a series of programs because a majority of students at Rome middle and high schools scored below the state average in core subjects in the past school year.
According to the Center for Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, only 21% of teachers believe they taught the curriculum they would have during a typical school year during the 2020-2021 school year as the pandemic’s impact was still felt as schools were randomly closed due to covid outbreaks, often for a week at a time.
Across the state, the College and Career Ready Performance Index released in November showed that a third of Georgia high schoolers have not achieved a mastery of core subjects that would allow them to continue to the next grade.
One of the largest factors influencing those scores is the mastery of the English language, said Rome High School Principal Parke Wilkinson.
Of the students who didn’t rank proficient in each of the subjects, 80% speak English as a second language, he told the board during a meeting in the fall. Two to three years ago, the high school increased the number of programs aimed at bringing Spanish speaking students up to speed.
Students in the lowest percentile have 60- to 90-minute weekly breakout sessions, called Wolf Blitz, to receive additional instruction in lagging subjects, Rome Middle School Principal Christian Barnes told the board education in the fall.
Other measures center around parent outreach and positive behavior reinforcement programs, called PBIS in the school system. The idea is for students to reinforce the positive, and for parents to encourage and boost engagement.
As with any school system, some parents will be involved and communicative with the school while others aren’t. Barnes said they’re aiming to get as many parents involved as possible.
“We’re going to continue to develop ways to communicate positively with parents,” Barnes said. “We’d like to see parents go see the great things their kids are doing in the classroom.”
On average, Floyd students consistently scored above the state average in both the readiness and content mastery sections while Rome students, on average, performed below state averages.
One exception was Rome High School, where students exceeded the state average in the readiness category by several percentage points.
“Our students missed almost half a year of in-class instruction,” said Floyd County Schools Superintendent Glenn White. “And even when they were back in class, covid continued to have a huge impact on learning.”
Across both the city and county school systems, the federal pandemic grants covers around 60 positions. Each school system has or will receive roughly $30 million through 2024, and these needed positions will be very challenging to keep when the grants expire, both superintendents said.