Are Pandemic Kindergartners Still Behind? What Experts Say Heading Into A New School Year

Sitting your 5-year-old in front of a laptop and helping them log in to school for the first time probably felt surreal and a little dystopian. Little did we know the COVID-19 pandemic wouldn’t just mean staying home for a few weeks, or even a few months — no, it meant many of our children didn’t return to school at all that year. And so they were dubbed the COVID kindergartners: the students who began their first year of school in decorated classrooms with welcoming teachers and finished it at home, on tablets and computers, without any sense of closure or social interaction to speak of.

According to Congressional records, “nearly 80% of students were still being offered a remote-only option for receiving instruction” even by May of 2021, meaning another year’s worth of 5-year-olds nationwide missed that pivotal first year of school. Headlines about our children falling behind — academically, socially, developmentally — populated news cycles in between updates about the vaccine and politicians’ hot takes about masks.

And now, these children are heading off to middle school. Even recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, found that this cohort is catching up on their math scores, but their reading proficiency scores have steadily declined ever since the pandemic. So, are our pandemic kindergartners really still behind?

Their academic and social development took a major hit.

You don’t realize just how much your child learns at school until they can’t attend anymore. Then all the academic building blocks put in place in those early years — not to mention the actual act of learning how to be in school — become clear. Because they’re missing.

“I hear from countless parents about their worries and fears related to the pandemic learning slide. The main noticeable setbacks were handwriting — students were looking at screens and typing, versus practicing and building their handwriting skills — math problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, and reading comprehension and inferencing skills,” says Rachel Gold Cederbaum, a former AP English teacher and director of Gold Signature Writers, a K-12 tutoring service. (She’s also a mom of three, including one COVID kindergartner.) “In addition to noticeable academic loss, there was a clear missed opportunity for social and emotional development. The process took years to catch up, but kids and teachers are resilient.”

In recent years, Cederbaum says she has seen an increase in dyslexia diagnoses, as well as the demand for executive functioning support and writing and math interventions.

For many children, kindergarten is their first time being exposed to the machinations of school: lining up, walking quietly in the halls, raising a hand to ask a question. Without that introduction, their return to school was difficult. Time teachers needed to spend on academics instead had to be dedicated to just teaching kids how to act like students.

“Students who returned to in-person learning after the pandemic lacked the structure of understanding school routines and transitions,” says Leslie Travis, M.Ed., director of education at Achieve Academy of Escambia, a transitional program serving middle and high school students who’ve faced behavior challenges in a traditional school environment. “Students in our elementary grade levels also had a noticeable deficit in reading and math skills, as [shown by their] test scores.”

Mary Kiely, head of Stratford Private Preschool and Elementary School in the San Francisco Bay Area, says their classes attended school in a hybrid model, with small in-person classes that still allowed teachers to instill necessary social skills in their youngest students.

“We needed to help students maintain eye contact and learn how to approach a friend to play. Setting expectations as a teacher was more challenging because these students were used to muting themselves and raising a virtual hand to ask a question. It didn’t happen overnight; it did take time, but the good news is that they are now caught up, from our perspective,” she says.

Are the COVID kindergartners ready for middle school?

Well, it depends on who you ask. Kiely says the students in her school show no signs of any academic or social deficits, thanks to the very involved parents at her school who worked closely with teachers to ensure their children had all the necessary skills to advance. This, of course, is not the case for all school children, who may not have had equal access to in-person learning, or the extracurriculars, tutoring, and other resources to help them catch up once the pandemic ended.

Travis says her student body is on par with previous years socially, but is still struggling to regain ground in key academic subjects. “In general, the majority of students in the fifth and sixth grades are achieving results that fall significantly short of both the district and state averages across various assessments,” she says. “The performance levels observed indicate a need for increased support and intervention to help these students reach their full potential in these critical academic areas.”

Cederbaum is of the opinion that pandemic kindergartners are “still somewhat behind in terms of core learning objectives,” but that they’ve made consistent strides in regaining lost ground. Those who have done so successfully are the ones who had “parents reinforcing the skills at home, hardworking and dedicated educators, enrichment opportunities, and social interaction through sports, activities, and in-person learning. They made significant progress towards achieving the pre-pandemic learning environment,” she says.

These educators’ professional and personal experiences align with one of the most disheartening findings of the Nation’s Report Card. “There’s a widening achievement gap in this country, and it has worsened since the pandemic,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, in an interview with The Washington Post. Essentially, high-performing students with parental support and access to resources, such as tutoring, have regained their educational ground. Students without have remained behind.

In a country where nearly half of all parents expect to go into debt buying school supplies this year and the Department of Education withheld $6 billion in funding from schools just last month, it’s incredibly frustrating to feel like your child’s academic success depends solely on you — namely, your ability to afford tutoring and extracurriculars, the ability to spend time off screens together reading, and more.

But as always, we parents make it work for our kids. These experts all agreed that taking advantage of free resources, like your local library, and making homework time and reading for pleasure priorities in your home can go a very long way in helping your child regain any lost ground.