How do you do, fellow kids?

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Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram, and it's October, spooky season, autumn, fall, and it's all happening, and schools have been back for a whole month now. Teachers and administrators have been dealing with two huge, unprecedented challenges at once. Doing live in-person school safely in a pandemic and helping kids get back on track after a year plus of quote-unquote remote learning. But now they're all back. They've been back for weeks. So it felt like a good time to ask how that experiment's going.

Sean Rameswaram: So we sent today explains Miles Bryan back to school. Yeah, I went to Kramer Hill Elementary School. It's in Camden, New Jersey, just across the river from where I live in Philly. And a couple of fast facts. It's a K through 8 school. So it has kids ages, you know, 5 to 13 to 14. The school has about 800 kids and more than 90 percent of them are black and Latino. Most of their families are living under the poverty line. So when you talk about kids that are at the biggest risk of learning loss during COVID, these kids are in that group.

Sean Rameswaram: Tell us when you did your like 21 Jump Street thing. I did my 21 Jump Street thing back in late August. the first week that they were back in school. How can you get some of the week? He's got a VIP press pass.

[Sound of a door opening, footsteps]

Sean Rameswaram: Hi, how you doing? Thank you so much. I showed up a few minutes before school started to meet up with Jesse Gizmondi, Kramer Hill's principal. Good morning. I'm Jesse. Nice to meet you. In the flesh. Feel free to hand sanitizer. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jesse Gizmondi: The first thing that jumped out at me was, you know, I was there before school even started. And even then, there were already a few dozen parents and about 100 kids already queued up to go inside. They want to be with kids. They want to be with their peers. They're excited to go to lunch. They're excited for gym in a way that is like tenfold, which makes like the buy-in of learning even easier this year, which is awesome.

Sean Rameswaram: Principal Gizmondi is 33. She grew up nearby and she's been at Kramer Hill for 11 years. So basically her whole career. You know, she started as a teacher and then became an assistant principal and is now the principal. And she's just one of those people who's always put together and bursting with enthusiasm, which is sort of striking to me after working from home for the last year and a half and only seeing people on Zoom. You know, her nails are always impeccable. She rocks a lot of fresh jumpsuits.

Sean Rameswaram: What time do you get up to get your morning routine and be here? I get up at 5 a.m. every morning to start my morning routine. I was here about 40 minutes ago and usually am every morning.

[Sound of a door opening, footsteps]

Sean Rameswaram: Good morning. Welcome, please. Nice to meet you. Hey, Will. Here's a mask. Why are we eating ice cream for breakfast, love? Just a question. Hey, Caleb, good morning.

Miles Bryan: It's worth pointing out here that all those kids, with maybe the exception of ice cream eating Will, were wearing a mask. Kramer Hill Elementary started the year with a lot of COVID protocols in place. Mandatory masking, weekly testing of at least 50% of students. And this is pretty common, not just in Camden or in a big Northeast city, but basically in all urban school districts. A recent survey of 200 of the biggest school districts found three quarters of them have a mask mandate.

Miles Bryan: How do the kids, other than Ice Cream Will, feel about masking, though? Are they, like, pestered by it? What's the deal? You know, they seem fine. I spent a lot of my time at Kramer Hill with the eighth graders, and they didn't even make it a thing. And frankly, they just seemed so stoked to be back in school. Like, that was such a big change for the better. They weren't that concerned about still wearing masks.

Miles Bryan: What were these kids' experiences with the pandemic like? You know, Principal Gizmondi said it was really tough. she told me about this moment she had in April of 2020 so that's maybe a couple weeks after schools in the state of New Jersey and the rest of the country had shut down due to COVID and she goes into the school building anyway she goes into the school building and she's holding this conference call with her teachers to try and figure out how the heck they're going to keep teaching these kids and I was like telling everyone I know we're going to be okay I'm happy you're safe. I'm happy our kids are safe. And we're going to figure this out day by day. I hung up the phone and cried.

Miles Bryan: And you know, Sean, they got through it. The Mastery Charter School Network, which runs Kramer Hill, it had some grant money that they could use to buy Chromebooks for every kid. But even with those resources, there were huge educational impacts. It's going to take a while to figure out exactly how the pandemic has impacted school-aged kids nationwide, but there is some preliminary data, and it's already pretty clear. One, the pandemic definitely caused learning loss. And specifically, it most affected the kids who were already behind their peers when the pandemic hit.

Miles Bryan: The way Gizmondi put it was kids that were in sixth grade in the spring of 2020, the ones that were reading and doing math at grade level, most of them continue to be on track. They're probably okay. But the kids who are already behind when COVID hit, the ones who were reading at a fifth grade level when they were in sixth grade, a lot of them are now in eighth grade and still reading at that fifth grade level. They got left behind.

Miles Bryan: It is my goal and mission, and the thing that keeps me up at night as a principal, is by May of 2022, my eighth grade state test scores are equal to what they would have been or what they were on track to be two years ago. So is like playing catch up the big focus of this new school year at Kramer Hill Elementary?

Miles Bryan: You know, it's definitely a big focus, but there's this other equally big focus, which is just how to make sure these kids know how to be around each other. You know teach them how to exist in a social environment again This is especially important in middle school particularly for those eighth graders I talked to You know they preparing to make the jump to high school next year It a really important transition but socially, a lot of them are still back in sixth grade. You know, they're not ready.

Miles Bryan: Gizmany told us about this incident in the second week of school when one eighth grader came up to another and like made a comment about their shirt or their shoes. And that first kid was ready to throw down and have a physical fight. We were able to like talk to their parents and do that peer mediation. but they're rusty on like how to engage proactively or ignore somebody when they're being a jerk.

Miles Bryan: I also think that there's social fatigue. So did you spend the entire day in the principal's office or did you actually get to hit some classrooms and talk to some kids? I did get to hit some classrooms and talk to some kids and a teacher, this dude named Justin Newell. He teaches eighth grade language arts at Kramer Hill Elementary. And he kindly led me into his classroom to kind of shadow what he's doing.

[Sound of a classroom]

Miles Bryan: Does anybody want to share today, before we get started on our actual academic work, anybody want to share whatever it is you have to overcome or whatever it is that you're trying to grow from? Just to paint you a picture, you know, it's like a pretty traditional classroom. There's little desks lined up in rows facing whiteboard, lots of construction paper art on the walls. Newell has been a teacher for about 20 years, and sometimes it showed.

Miles Bryan: Are you all too young to remember the Wii? Oh, the costume Wii? Remember you make a character that looked like yourself? A Wii me? My Wii me looked exactly like me. Hold on a second. Your example of how he's been a teacher for 20 years and it showed is that he referenced the Nintendo Wii, which is like a recent Nintendo? I must be like Methuselah out here if that is your example. But anyway, he's got to me like kind of a cop vibe, at least in how he looks. He wears this tight polo shirt every day, really, really strong, shiny bald head. But he's actually like a pretty goofy guy. He goes by the nickname Pooh, like Winnie the Pooh. And his class is a bunch of Winnie the Pooh stuff given to him by former students. Cute.

Miles Bryan: And generally, he's just one of those teachers that kids love. That week, they were covering literature about Chicago. And Newell was lecturing on a Kanye West song, that 2007 track Homecoming. Newell treated the verses like stanzas in a poem and asked the kids to give it a close read. You skim that first line of the second verse or the second stanza, and it says, I met this girl when I was three years old. Could any predictions come out of that? Any predictions come out of that, Chantal?

Miles Bryan: For Newell, having all his kids back in the classroom, it just felt great. He said trying to teach on Zoom for most of the past two years was humbling. Even his best students struggled. And then you throw in those kids who weren't as academically motivated, and they're not showing up. They're figuring out how to make their screen go black so they can tell grandma that it was broken and they don't know how to work it. And all they did was turn their brightness down all the way and grandma had no idea. Like there were just all these different things you had to deal with in order to get these kids to see that we could still learn and come out on the other side.

Miles Bryan: So all those kids who weren't showing up to class online last year, are they happy to be back now? You know, from what I heard talking to them, they might not have been quite as enthusiastic as their teachers, but the kids basically agreed. I'm not a big fan of online school. You don't do a lot of things. Being in person beats being online. Like field trips, no. Lunch and recess with your friends, no. And Sean, like, I think it's hard to remember if you don't have a kid in middle school, but, you know, that time is intense. Every day there's drama with your friends and your frenemies and there are crushes and adventures. But for the last couple of school years, you know, these kids have been super isolated.

Miles Bryan: I talked to this one student, a girl named Chantal, who said class for her always meant staring at a sea of black boxes. A lot of people didn't like to have the camera on and the teacher would always be frustrated and be like, I want to see all your pretty faces. But none of them wanted to show their faces. How did you feel about that? It felt kind of awkward. Sounds like a box all staff meeting to me, Miles.

Miles Bryan: Yeah, and Chantal didn't love it either. And, you know, she told me she spent a lot of the last academic year in the Dominican Republic, where her family's from. and she said, you know, she was always a good student, but the internet in the Dominican Republic wasn't always great. It's more easier to ask for help now. I could just be like, raise my hand and be like, I need help with this. When I was in computer, I had to text everything and be fast with it.

Miles Bryan: And Newell, the teacher, you know, he told me there's one other middle school vibe that is back in full force with kids back in the classroom. Hormones. They don't know how to interact in person. They don't have the in-person game. Right, the game you can spit online. is not the same game you have to employ when you're in person because they don't have a clue about that.

Miles Bryan: On the day I shadowed Newell's classroom, most of the time was actually not taken up with a Kanye lecture or with adolescent flirting, but with this test. It was sort of a benchmark test to see where the kids were at. Newell says, you know, to make sure the kids advance this year, make up those learning losses, he has to see where they're starting off. I've got a range of kids from the fourth grade reading level up to beginning or mid of where they should be in their eighth grade year. I'm excited about being able to take them from where they are to where they need to be to get ready for the standardized test to play the game, as we said.

Miles Bryan: OK, so crushes and Kanye and this assessment test aside, I feel like the elephant in the classroom here is the Delta variant. You went to Kramer Hill in late August. Were they scared about Delta and its impact in the classroom? You know, to be fair, Gizmondi and Newell both talked a lot, even in that first week, about making sure kids and staff stayed safe from COVID. And like I said, there were some pretty rigorous COVID policies in place already at that time. But, you know, in our first conversations, Newell and Gizmondi were optimistic that COVID wasn't going to be as much of a foreground issue this school year. Still, even in that first week, there were signs that COVID was intruding in all sorts of ways, some of which were pretty surprising to me.

Miles Bryan: Like that first day, Gizmondi said there was a shortage of math textbooks because supply chains were still all messed up. And more importantly, there was a shortage of bus drivers. You might have seen the headlines about this, but there's a bus driver shortage all around the country. What that meant at Kramer Hill is that some kids couldn't get to school. There just simply wasn't a bus to pick them up.

Miles Bryan: Okay, so clearly the pandemic was causing some headaches in that first week, but we haven't even talked about COVID cases in the school. Was that an issue? Well... After a week and a half of in school the hope that I had that COVID would not be at the forefront of the work that we do is just absolutely inaccurate I'm going to tell you more about it in a minute. Fine.

[Sound of a commercial break]

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Miles Bryan: Okay, so Miles, you show up to Kramer Hill Elementary. Principal Gizmondi and Mr. Newell are very optimistic. The students are stoked to be back. But then COVID rears its ugly head. What happens? Yeah, it's sort of like that meme you might have seen. My fall plans on the left, the Delta variant on the right. The first week was the my fall plans half. Very rosy, pretty upbeat. But by week two, Gizmondi and Newell both seemed kind of run down. Gizmondi said that Monday, so the first day of the second full week of school, they found out a kid had been exposed to COVID. And it's like, of course, a kid is eventually going to get exposed. The pandemic is still very much happening. But, you know, this is the Delta variant half of the meme because this one exposure totally blows up the school's teachers and administrators day.

Miles Bryan: You know, Gizmondi has to contact trace everybody who's near the kid. She has to send out notices to parents. They're freaking out. It's more than three feet distance. It's more than a mask. It's more than air filters. It's just every single system that a school is run on where there are hundreds of have to have a pandemic proof layer. And this is an elementary school. So like, are any of these kids even vaccinated? It's a little tricky to figure out. So, you know, just as a reminder, vaccines are currently available for kids 12 and up. Kramer Hill Elementary is a K through 8 school. So K through 6 or so, they're out of luck. They can't get the vaccine. But most middle schoolers should be able to get the shot. Principal Gizmondi said 90% of her staff was vaccinated. But those middle schoolers, not so much. When we had to do quarantining in eighth grade, we had to call quite a number of kiddos and only two of the children were vaccinated.

Miles Bryan: The reason she's referencing that process is because the school does not explicitly track the vaccination status of its kids. But if the kid is vaccinated, they don't have to quarantine if they were exposed. It's worth pointing out that a lower vaccination rate for middle schoolers is true nationwide. Only about 45% of 12 to 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated, compared to about 66% of adults in the U.S. So the Delta variant almost immediately starts causing logistical and health concerns. What does that mean for learning, for actual education? Well, in a direct sense, it means that students who aren't vaccinated but get exposed to COVID have to quarantine, which means they have to switch back to virtual learning for up to 10 days.

Miles Bryan: But even kids who aren't exposed to COVID have been struggling back in the classroom. Like, it turns out you can't just spend a year and a half online taking breaks and getting up whenever you want, and then switch back to sitting in a desk eight hours a day. That teacher, Newell, he says his kids are really struggling to stay focused. He calls it Zoom lag. I'm trying to build in breaks. I'm trying to build in like little mental games and things like that to make sure that the kids are staying engaged and they're present in the lesson, like besides just being here, being present.

Miles Bryan: So Newell's working hard to figure out how to keep his Zoom-addled kids engaged in his courses. And actually, during this call, which is in the second week of school, Newell said there was something else that had him a bit run down. And it wasn't just the stress of coming back to school. I haven't been nervous this whole time. And I started having like some chest discomfort. And I was like, I was like, do I have, do I have the Ronin? So I ran down to the nurse. I got a rapid test. It was all nervous. But it came back negative. So I was OK, though.

Miles Bryan: He was nervous about COVID. Yeah, yeah. I mean, who wouldn't be if you're having some chest discomfort, right? I don't catch up with him again until about a week later. I reached out on a Friday in the middle of the day. I texted him because I figured he's in class and would get back to me later. But he texted me back right away and says he's at home. He just finished quarantining. That rapid test was wrong. He had COVID. When I was like 15, I had pneumonia pretty bad, and it felt very similar to that achy and extreme fatigue and a constant dull headache. Even if I just walked up two steps, I felt like exhausted. I had to stop halfway through and just gather myself just to go, like, get some juice or whatever.

Miles Bryan: Miles, do you know if Mr. Noel was vaccinated? Oh, yeah, he got vaccinated as soon as he could. Super pro-vaccine. Hmm. So this is breakthrough COVID here. Yeah, yeah, it's breakthrough COVID. Still sounds like it sucks. What did he do? Did he stop teaching or did he forge ahead from home He definitely wasn't teaching from home He was mostly just sitting around bored trying to avoid contact with his sons and stressing about his students I was worried about my students Like did I give it to my students Did one of them give it to me Like, if I had my way, I would rather get it from my students as opposed to be the one that introduces it to the classroom.

Miles Bryan: So did he get any of his kids sick? Does he know? Yeah, a couple of his students were out that week. And subsequently, at least half a dozen eighth graders tested positive for COVID at Kramer Hill. But Principal Gizmondi said they did contact tracing and every single case had a home link. So it seems like Newell didn't get anyone sick. But you know, Newell's case, at least to me, illustrates just how pernicious COVID's effect on even a well-prepared school can be. As I said, you know, Newell was vaccinated. And remember, Kramer Hill tests at least 50% of its students every week. But nothing caught his case until he'd been teaching for a couple of days, potentially exposing students or other staff.

Miles Bryan: Who taught his class when he was out? If you can't find bus drivers, I imagine it's also hard to find substitute teachers. He's lucky enough to have a student teacher who led the class. But he told me that he was painfully aware of all the progress his class was not making when he was out. We have a lot to do. I talked to you about all the testing that we do in our schools, so our non-testing days are at a premium. I don't really have any time to waste. I don't really have time to be sick. And we've just been talking about Mr. Newell's classroom. What's going on at the rest of Kramer Hill? Did COVID spread outside his classroom? Kids kept getting sick with COVID. Eighth graders kept testing positive. And pretty soon after Newell was sick, the entire eighth grade had to quarantine for a day to try and slow the spread.

Miles Bryan: As of late September, they were back in the classroom. And the last time we interviewed Principal Gizmondi around that time, she took pains to point out that the COVID positive rate at Kramer Hill is just 1.5 percent. So only 1.5 percent of the tests they do come back positive. But even so, fear of catching and spreading COVID, it's kind of these ripple effects that just affect the whole school, not just the kids and staff who have to quarantine or get sick, like attendance. Every year, on average, for the last three years before COVID, we had 93% daily attendance. This year, we cannot get above 90%. And I know that those 3% sound small, but I want to call them out as this example of my fear that we're going to be like constantly three to five percent shy of like everything because parents are keeping their kids home when they're sniffly. This stuff adds up.

Miles Bryan: I mean, it adds up for the students. And obviously it adds up for these teachers and administrators who who never signed up to be like pandemic warriors. I wonder, you know, for people like Principal Gizmondi or Mr. Newell, how do they feel about their positions right now? You know, I talked to Newell about this. I asked him about how he was feeling about his vocation after getting COVID. I asked if he was questioning anything. And he said no. He told me that going all in as a teacher means accepting big sacrifices and a certain level of risk that other professions might not. And he made this comparison that sort of surprised me. He compared COVID to the pandemic of gun violence in schools. If it wasn't this, we'd be having lockdown drills and have to worry about classroom shooters and things like that. When you're in this game, like, you don't think about that kind of stuff. You just think, these are my kids, these are my babies, these are who I have to get to the next phase. And it just so happens that my next phase is getting them in high school, which is extremely pivotal.

Miles Bryan: So it sounds like Mr. Newell's just a bit of a hero here, but surely not every teacher out there in the country is having the same experience. I mean, I know a public school teacher who's considering quitting because she just doesn't feel safe and wants to protect her family. How does the Kramer Hill experience compare to the rest of the country right now? You know, what happened at Kramer Hill is actually pretty average. Here's one piece of context from Burbio, a data service that's tracking school closings. By late September, over 2,000 schools had shut down in-person learning entirely due to COVID. So not just quarantining a grade, but actually shut the school down, at least temporarily.

Miles Bryan: What happened at Kramer Hill, what Newell and Gizmondi and those kids went through, You know, it's tough. It's a struggle. They shouldn't have had to deal with it. But every parent should be prepared for something like that this year. Where I landed after spending a couple of weeks with Gizmondi and Newell is that their school, Kramer Hill, it's doing nearly everything right in terms of returning to school during the pandemic. You know, they have masks. They have testing. The adults are getting the vaccines. They've had relatively few cases so far. But even so, COVID has crept into pretty much every aspect of how the school operates. and it's made it all way harder. And that burden is just so brutal for teachers and administrators and students to have to be dealing with right now considering how much ground they have to make up from the last two years.

Miles Bryan: One of the last times I talked to Gizmondi, she told me she'd pegged her hopes for a more normal year on sometime this fall when the federal government is expected to approve vaccines for kids under 12. I really hope that by November we're feeling at like some plateau and like some predictable cadence because the like unpredictability is a roller coaster that I'm like ready to get off. Getting the families of those kids to take the vaccine, that'll be a whole nother challenge.

Sean Rameswaram: Miles Bryan, he's a producer and quite clearly also a reporter here at Today Explained. He had help reporting this episode from Jillian Weinberger, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.

Sean Rameswaram: The rest of the team includes Will Reed, Halima Shah, Hadi Mwagdi, and Victoria Chamberlain. We use music from Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld too. Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's Vipa Vadio. Today Explained is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.