As the new school year begins, parents, researchers, advocates, and educators are still trying to untangle the academic, mental, and social-emotional consequences of the pandemic.

There is no one answer to the question: Are the kids OK?

Academics with a bird’s-eye view point to numerous statistics that show kids aren’t demonstrating the same academic skills as years prior.

“We're still playing catch up,” said Joseph Bishop, who leads the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools. “We're still trying to understand what students need. We're even trying to find students.”

Individual families are focused on the gains their students made in the last few years and their return to library storytimes and mask-free summer activities.

“It's feeling strange, but also normal,” said Brenda Miller, a parent of three kids in Highland Park. “Should we get used to this or should we not get used to this?”

Bridgette Donald-Blue has been in the classroom for more than 30 years and works at Coliseum Street Elementary School near Leimert Park.

“The kids are a part of society, so, are we OK as a society? The kids are just a reflection of that,” Donald-Blue said. “I feel like they're OK and like the rest of us, we're going to get better. We're going to progress and get better, and move forward.”

LAist asked these and other experts to help us understand where students are today: Are they learning? Have families found the help they need? Are students present? Are they engaged?

What we know about academic recovery

When Brenda Miller’s youngest daughter started kindergarten in 2021, tests showed she was behind on reading skills, such as correctly identifying the sounds letters and words make.

Miller thinks it’s in part because her daughter missed out on in-person activities such as the library storytimes her older children were able to attend at her age.

“She just kind of got cut off from other kids in a major way,” Miller said.

In fact, most California kids are not reading on grade level.

Less than half of students — 47% — met or exceeded the standards for English/language arts in the first set of California standardized tests given statewide since the start of the pandemic. That’s 4 percentage points lower than in 2019.

The loss of proficiency in math was even larger. Just one-third of students met or exceeded the state's expectations in math — the lowest-ever score since the state started using the test in 2015.

For some parents, the connection between how much their students learned and the pandemic is clear.

“Truthfully, her academic level decreased because it wasn’t the same to be in school at home as it is in person,” said Mirzan Velasquez.

Her daughter, Elizabeth Gomez, is an incoming 7th grader at an East L.A. charter school.

“There's so much stress now,” Elizabeth said, adding that math was particularly challenging last year and she struggled with learning how to subtract and divide decimals.

“We couldn't learn anything like really good when we were in the pandemic and now they're like teaching us way too fast,” she said.

California’s test scores also show American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, Latino, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students trailed their Asian and white peers.

“‘Normal’ in education was actually profoundly inequitable,” said Mayra Lara, director of Southern California partnerships and engagement at The Education Trust-West. “What we really saw through the pandemic is the inequities really were deepened.”

Celebrate where students have shown progress

California students were on par with the rest of the country in declining math scores, but did not fall as far behind in reading according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.

Los Angeles Unified was one of few districts to show an increase in eighth-grade reading skills.

“There is a need for assessment. It lets us know what it is we need to do, how hard we need to work, what we need to work on,” said Los Angeles teacher Donald-Blue. “It's also extremely important to understand that students are working hard and have the students understand we are wildly excited about how hard you've worked.”

“We are here every day to celebrate those small successes and help them build upon what they've learned,” said Los Angeles teacher Bridgette Donald-Blue.

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As a school interventionist, Donald-Blue helps students who’ve fallen behind in math develop a toolkit to answer questions.

At the end of last year, one student shared that she was most proud “that she knows how to answer questions now.”

“That was huge,” said Donald-Blue, a 2023 California Teacher of the Year. “It's not always about getting the correct answer each and every time, but if she has a strategy and a knowledge of how to answer, then that means she will persevere.”

Miller, in Highland Park, said her daughter’s teachers kept them updated on her progress and sent home lists of words to practice sounding out together.

Miller said a surprising incentive was her older siblings’ deck-building Harry Potter game. Improving her literacy skills meant she could read the cards and play with the big kids.

“Finding ways for her that don't feel like a chore, but that make it fun and meeting her where she is, is important,” Miller said. And by the time she finished first grade, she’d caught up to her peers.

Understand where your child is now

But most students who fell behind during the pandemic have not caught up yet. The strategies to help students recover vary from district to district and often rely on federal funding that runs out next fall.

"There's this kind of fantasy that people have like, ‘Oh, well, we'll just do better instruction during the school day. We'll accelerate kids' learning,'" said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education. "If we knew how to do that, we would have done it already."

Instead, researchers and policymakers point to frequent, one-on-one tutoring as an effective way to help students catch up. Los Angeles Unified has tried — and struggled— to implement such a program.

Another option is to extend the school year. Los Angeles Unified administration and the teachers union squabbled over the addition of four optional days of school to last year’s calendar. Each of the next two school years in the district will include three voluntary instructional days.

“We must recognize that the amount of additional schooling required to catch students up cannot be compressed into a one-shot intervention or single school year,” wrote researchers from NWEA, a nonprofit that creates standardized tests, in a recent policy brief about pandemic recovery.

NWEA estimated it will take the average student more than four months of additional schooling in reading and math to catch up to pre-pandemic levels.

Eric Nuñez and his daughter Emilia check out the backpacks at a resource fair at the East L.A. Civic Center. Families could also get food and information about educational and mental health programs.

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At the start of school last year, public schools reported half of their students were at grade level, but not all families are getting the message, Polikoff said. A survey of families in California and nationwide this summer found only a quarter of families say their child was identified as needing help or support in school.

“If parents just don't think that kids are really struggling, they're just not likely to opt in,” Polikoff said.

Seek help in and outside of school

The parents that seemed the most comfortable about how their kids were doing in school told LAist they sought out additional resources.

L.A. mom Gabriela Heredia enrolled her daughter in a summer program ahead of her freshman year of high school. Her son, who is a special education student, goes to a socialization program at a community-based organization.

At a recent backpack giveaway at the East L.A. Civic Center, she got information about community mental health resources and youth services, and her kids looked through free comic books.

“I really keep them busy,” Heredia said. “I look for programs aside from the school.”

Gabriel Gomez, Elizabeth’s dad, said parents are key partners in their kids’ schooling.

“I educate her to pay attention in school,” Gomez said. “I educate her to do homework, to read, to do everything that the teacher is telling her to do.”

Gomez also encourages his daughter to ask questions in class.

“If you see the teacher gets mad, you say, ‘I'm just trying to learn,'’’ Gomez said.

Get students to school

Data shows that in the three years since the start of the pandemic, fewer students consistently attend school.

Several parents LAist talked to said non-COVID illnesses caused their children to miss so much school they received letters about truancy in the mail last year.

About 30% of California students in grades K-8 were chronically absent during the 2021-2022 school year— triple the rate of students who missed at least 10% of school before the pandemic.

The rates of American Indian, Alaska Native, Black, Latinx, and Pacific Islander students who missed more than 10% of school were even higher.

“Chronic absence is usually a symptom of a lot of things,” UCLA’s Bishop said. “It's not usually because students don't want to come to school. It's that they're struggling.”

For instance:

• Transportation to — and from — school is one barrier. California schools are not required to bus students and until last year hadn’t increased transportation funding levels in more than four decades. 
• A lack of access to health care and meaningful relationships with school staff also contributed to rising absenteeism before the pandemic.
• Some students also say they’re not going to school out of concern for their safety.

In 2021, 9% of high school students told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention they didn’t go to school because they felt unsafe at or going to and from class. American Indian, Black, and Latinx students were most likely to skip school, citing safety concerns. 

Bishop said fears of gun violence play a role, but that students also equate safety to their ability to be heard and ask questions like “Do I feel like my peers and my teachers will listen to me?”

Students who miss a lot of school can fall behind and are more likely to drop out. Students in California school districts with larger increases in chronic absenteeism scored worse on the state’s standardized English/language arts and math tests, according to a recent analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.

Families can also be penalized for multiple unexcused absences. Students can lose access to extracurricular activities and parents can be fined.

“Punitive responses are unlikely to improve attendance when absences occur for reasons beyond the control of the student and their family,” wrote researchers at Policy Analysis for California Education, a consortium of research universities.

Gabriela Heredia, right, said aside from a few people wearing masks, her son and daughter's parent orientation and open houses felt "pretty normal and the same like before."

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Gabriel Gomez, left, said he he saw a drastic change in his daughter's education during the pandemic, but that he's hopeful the future will be better. "[A] parent has to get involved and say, 'What are you doing? Are you doing your homework? Are you reading? Are you doing all the things that the teacher is telling you?" Gomez said.

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Researchers have also found several low-cost strategies to engage parents in the effort to get students to school.

A Harvard study found students missed fewer days when their families received several letters a year about the importance of attending school.

Other approaches are more high-touch. During the pandemic, some educators visited students at home and continuing that work could help bring kids back to school.

“That kind of wall-less classroom or school became a reality in a lot of places,” Bishop said. “It's really hard to keep up that practice, but I think it is ... still very powerful.”

Sort through a lot of emotions

It’s a little trickier to pick one metric that represents students’ mental health and its impact on how they learn.

“If I had a magic wand, the thing that I would want to know is how many school days are missed because of a mental health issue,” said Lishaun Francis, senior director of behavioral health at advocacy group Children Now. “We're not really able to easily understand that connection.”

But here’s what we do know:

Young people were experiencing increased feelings of sadness and hopelessness, and attempting suicide even before the pandemic started.

The percentage of students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased 40% between 2009 and 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC has surveyed high school students about their mental health since 1991. The most recent survey, and the first since the start of the pandemic, was completed in 2021. It found:

• 42% of students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the last year. 
• Female, LGBTQ+, Latinx and Hispanic high schoolers were among the most likely to feel so sad or hopeless they stopped participating in their usual activities. 
• 22% of students seriously considered suicide. 

LGBTQ+ students often reported the highest percentages of mental distress.

• 69% reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. 
• 37% made a suicide plan, more than twice the percentage of their peers overall. 

Nicole Stelter, who oversees behavioral health care at Blue Shield of California, said part of the increase may be due to better awareness of mental health during the pandemic.

“A lot of people recognize that we were going through this real, very collective stressor,” Stelter said. “It opened up that door for more dialogue.”

The health plan recently surveyed youth 14-25 nationwide this summer; nearly 9 in 10 respondents regularly felt stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, unmotivated, lonely, or panicked.

Students' feelings are also changing how they show up at school each day.

“We have eighth graders who are running through the halls, pushing and shoving at the same rate you would expect to see from fifth or sixth graders,” said Terrence, a middle school administrator in Westchester who called into LAist 89.3's public affairs show AirTalk earlier this week.

Donald-Blue taught fourth grade at Coliseum St. Elementary during the first year of in-person school.

“There were a lot of tears,” Donald-Blue said. Many children asked her to sit next to them so they could complete their work.

Donald-Blue tailored her lessons to the moment. For example, by changing journal prompts to focus more on feelings.

“We need to have them at grade level,” Donald-Blue said. “But we also need them to be whole emotionally.”

Pasadena mom Anne Marie Molina has noticed since the pandemic her two youngest children, who are 8 and 10, often pepper her with questions. For example, whether their car will flip over in an accident, and, after a lice scare at their school, whether bugs will eat their scalps.

“It seems like it's all stemming from the same place of anxiety and fear of unknown danger,” Molina said.

She tries to reassure them with facts and is honest about what she doesn’t know, but “it feels so heavy every time they talk about all these disastrous possibilities.”

Blue Shield’s survey also found that more than three-quarters of youth say they’ve talked to someone about their mental and emotional health in the last year. Stelter said it’s a positive sign if kids are willing to talk to their parents, or another trusted adult, about what’s bothering them.

“You cannot take care of yourself in a vacuum,” Stelter said.

Find ways to grow confidence

The caveat is that it’s often challenging for families to access mental health services.

“California's problem has always been that they're not widespread and readily available for every child,” Francis said. For example, more than two-thirds of California adolescents who said they experienced a major depressive episode did not receive treatment, according to a study from the California Health Care Foundation.

Molina said she waited almost a year for her son, who has autism, to be connected with a therapist who is helping him improve his social skills.

He also recently started swim lessons with an instructor familiar with autism. Molina said the weight of the water comforts him and after only a month-and-a half he’s now confident in the deep end of the pool. Though he often avoids certain foods, her son's now curious about seafood.

“The fact that he's building up his self-esteem to try different things that he's uncomfortable with? He's really shooting for the stars,” Molina said. “It does make me extremely proud.”

Illustration by Assistant Engagement Producer Adriana Pera.