Although the COVID-19 pandemic has entered our collective rearview mirror, its longer-lasting effects are coming into greater focus. 

Schools across the country have produced alarming reports of pronounced absenteeism, behavioral incidents, learning loss, and, perhaps most concerning of all, a degradation in mental health. Jesuit High School Sacramento has not been spared from these issues. 

As the first part in a two-part COVID-19 retrospective, this article will focus on the effects COVID-19 has had on study skills and testing performance, as well as the pandemic-era changes to our bell schedule that still exist today.

After the pandemic, one of the biggest areas of concern for Jesuit teachers is the deterioration of soft skills, such as organization and note-taking. 

“What I’ve witnessed and what I’ve heard from teachers is a lack of organizational skills, a lack of note-taking skills, and the handwritten note-taking skills that we would have seen and expected students to have prior to COVID,” said Assistant Principal for Academics Mr. Colin O’Connor ’04.

One of the main ways that policymakers and researchers measure academic performance in the United States is through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Administered by the U.S. Department of Education since 1969 and referred to as “the nation’s report card,” it serves as a valuable benchmark for student achievement. Comparing 2023 to 2020, the average scores on their Long-Term Trend (LTT) Assessment for 13-year-olds have dropped 4 points in reading, and a shocking 9 points in math. 

The 2023 LTT provides valuable context for new Jesuit student’s experiences in the classroom. Since the pandemic has ended, many students have sought out additional help in their math classes.

“Community periods for math teachers are probably the most well-attended on campus,” Mr O’Conner said. 

Mr. O’Connor attributes much of this need for extra help to students’ vastly different experiences in pre-high school math during remote learning. 

“If [middle-school students’] pre-algebra skills were interrupted or were taught entirely in this digital space or slowed, I think we’re seeing a lot of the fallout from that,” Mr. O’Connor said. “But I would say, by and large, by the time students are finished with their high school year [at Jesuit], their math outcomes are about the same.”

The NAEP scores can also be broken down into specific scoring percentiles, which can help explain how different categories of students were affected by the pandemic. Every percentile declined from 2020 to 2023; however, the data shows that higher-scoring students’ declines were less stark than their peers. One Jesuit teacher believes that, at least at Jesuit, the way different students responded to the pandemic mostly had to do with their overall effort.

“I’m not sure I would say that it was a difference between the regular and honor levels,” this teacher said. “I feel like those who developed poor study skills and lost their focus during the pandemic struggled upon return. Those who kept up with their work habits and continued to perform when school was online had less of a problem coming back in-person. I see both of these subsets within both the regular and the honors courses with about the same distribution.”

Ryan Bassett ’24 was a freshman in the fall of 2020 and had to spend his first year at Jesuit in a hybrid learning model. In this model, students would attend school for only two days a week, with another two days being virtual and Wednesdays acting as a “catch-up” day. Ryan believes that this schedule was detrimental to his educational progress.

“I never truly learned how to study freshman year like you’re supposed to, [and] we didn’t have to, because everything was open book,” Ryan said. “Having to adjust to that is hard and, quite honestly, still hasn’t been fully figured out by many in our class.”

One of the most unique aspects of a Jesuit education is the emphasis on cura personalis, or the care of the person, which looks to educate the mind, body, and soul. Unfortunately, due to the restrictions on in-person learning during the pandemic, many students were not able to experience some of Jesuit’s most compelling traditions.

“From day one, [the COVID-19 pandemic] affected us: we didn’t have a freshman overnight like most classes,” Ryan said. “We had a drive-thru service where we got an ice cream, a T-shirt, and a mask and then left. So we never got a true chance to meet everyone in our class and bond and make new friends. We never had a homecoming freshman year, didn’t get to go to football or basketball games, and most of us didn’t even get a true sports season for what we loved to do.”

However, once the school returned to in-person learning after COVID-19, some of the changes made to the schedule during the pandemic still remained. Before becoming the Assistant Principal for Academics, Mr. O’Connor worked as the director of curriculum development. One of his main responsibilities in that role was to lead a committee to revise the daily bell schedule, which, before COVID-19, was comparable to a block schedule. The experiences of the student body during the pandemic influenced the development of the Community Period.

“When we came back in hybrid, we split the week in half and Wednesdays were an asynchronous day, so it was like office hours,” Mr. O’Connor said. “It was just kind of a catch-up on homework. We wanted the afternoon community periods to be a bit more student-directed in terms of what they would get used for, like Wednesday was during the COVID hybrid year.”

While many students may have struggled to get their work done during the pandemic, Jesuit teachers were working harder than ever. Ryan noticed this uptick in workload, and is greatly appreciative of the teachers for taking it on.

“[The COVID-19 pandemic] affected the teachers, because kids would sit on their laptops and go off task and be on their phones, not paying attention to the teachers who worked even harder than normal and had to change everything to try to teach us effectively,” Ryan said. “I’m very grateful to the teachers for what they did for us then.”

Though the COVID-19 pandemic may have thrown the Jesuit community for a loop, Mr. O’Connor is confident that the school weathered the storm with success. He attributes this to the unique flexibility of Jesuit’s system.

“I firmly believe what we were able to do during that year was still a sound, excellent Jesuit High School education,” Mr. O’Connor said. “I don’t feel like we made sacrifices that meant that students deserved an asterisk or anything next to their scores. This kind of has to do with [the] flexibility of being a private school, and recognizing that that’s a privilege that we have that other schools didn’t necessarily have and that the students at other schools didn’t necessarily have.”

Ultimately, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic likely will affect Jesuit for years to come. If anything can be taken from this experience, it is that it is crucial for everyone in the community, from administrators to students, to remain vigilant and flexible when facing the potential challenges ahead. 

In the next installment of this COVID-19 retrospective, we will report on our investigation into the social and emotional effects of the pandemic on our community.