“Whether it was teaching swimming lessons or Sunday school or volunteering in my mom’s classroom, I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” she said.
Now, 17 years later, all at Sierra High School, she believes her work is as important as ever.
Despite public education being a consistent fixture in the U.S. dating back to the 1850s, weathering political and societal shifts, the past five years presented dramatic shifts in instruction, student performance and public engagement during and following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
A 2020 study by Howard University reported that classroom assessment, teaching and learning, and measurement and interpretation of student growth were among the major areas affected by the sudden switch of schools to online instruction. It also noted that student learning was impacted by stress, anxiety and illness, due to the shift to a completely foreign method, and increased potential to fall behind due to lack of access to materials.
Across the country, debates raged on about school closures, mask mandates or social distance requirements and the role and extent of parental rights in their children’s education. In the schools themselves, remote instruction led to a myriad of challenges, ranging from class attendance and management challenges to diminished learning and performance.
Coming out of remote learning, students at various stages of development exhibited lingering signs of learning losses, behavioral issues and lost socialization time.
In Colorado alone, the state education department reported that standardized test scores in math and English language arts proficiency declined to their lowest levels in recorded history in some cases. In some cases, losses were so great that some metrics have yet to fully recover.
In the 2018-19 school year — the last year data was collected before the pandemic — Colorado’s average attendance was 92.3 percent, and the average chronic absentee rate, when a student misses 10 percent or more of the school days in a school year, was 22.5 percent. In 2021-22, chronic absenteeism increased by over 10 percent.
In Bottolfson’s case, she recalled days of remote instruction where only two of her students would be logged in. For those who did sign in, some remained completely disengaged from classroom discussions, others took up more housework and responsibilities and others craved discussion to account for being home alone.
Upon returning to her class, she said it was like meeting them for the first time since it marked their first in-person interactions.
“When we first came back, that in-person connection wasn’t as natural,” she said. “And it’s been interesting in the past few years, because it’s almost completely shifted.”
In Monument, Lewis-Palmer High School English teacher Wendi Westfall noticed the lasting impact of technology on students’ education. She said that, ever since the pandemic, most classes have permanently shifted from students using pencil and paper to assigned school laptops during class.
She added that she’s since reintroduced the paper-pencil approach for certain activities and interactive lessons between classmates to increase engagement and discussion.
“It used to be like it was fun at first, now we use it when we need to use it,” Westfall said of technology in her class. “I’d rather have them (the students) discuss things and actually work through things then just be stuck behind the computer, typing the answers by themselves.”
While both Bottolfson and Westfall said their students have been receptive to limiting laptops in their respective classrooms, another factor exacerbating both distractions and declining student mental health has been the growing presence of smartphones in schools.
Recognizing these debilitating effects on education, statewide efforts to combat this have included new legislation requiring all school districts to enact a policy limiting cellphones and other personal devices during school time.
As for individualized efforts to address today’s students’ needs, local teachers recognize the importance of closer relationships with their students.
“Now, it’s a whole lot more intentional, where they come up to you and say, ‘Can we just talk about this? Help me,’” Bottolfson said. “And really, teachers and students are a lot more connected and those relationships are a lot stronger than they used to be.”
Westfall noted that emphasizing interactions in her classes has resulted in improved relationships, rapport and engagement with her and her lessons.
Harrison High School social studies teacher Andrew Hill noted that students in his district face unique circumstances and challenges and that he has recently made efforts to make himself available during and outside of his classes.
In addition to making himself more available after school, his class now starts with a “questioning period” where students can to discuss what’s on their minds with him one-on-one. He admitted that not all of his students take advantage of this increased availability, but those who desire to succeed through education often take him up on these offers.
He added that, while his subject material or approach to teaching hasn’t changed, his learning tools have grown to account for his students’ lost time or development over recent years.
Teaching in Harrison D-2, Colorado Springs’ most diverse school district, Hill explained that since his current freshman students were in the fourth grade at the start of the pandemic, they missed out on vital academic time, such as vocabulary growth, that indicate of what kind of students they will be going forward.
Test results from 2021 in the Pikes Peak region found that 45.3 percent of third-, fifth- and seventh-graders met or exceeded expectations in reading, writing and communication subjects, according to previous Gazette reporting. A 2022 report by the Northwest Evaluation Association found that learning loss recovery efforts were disproportionate for minority populations like low-income, Hispanic and Black students compared to White and Asian-American students.
To account for this, he now provides a series of tools for students to access that include a word bank for essays and sentence-style guides for speeches for his debate class.
He explained these weren’t added because his students are now less intelligent, but simply because they received a different education from previous students.
“If you missed out on formative years that taught you your voice, your writing style and the small things that it takes to be a good writer, I now need to provide those if I want to get what I think they’re capable of doing,” Hill said.
Another local effort driving educational recovery has come directly from their communities. Bottolfson noted that, throughout the pandemic, additional resources like food through the Care and Share food bank and hotspots for students lacking Internet at home were provided during remote learning days.
Since then, Bottolfson said teachers and staff now share more ideas on effective classroom practices with each other, while community members have continued to volunteer to this day.
“I’ve heard people from other schools say they were worried that this would all go away, but I had alumni come in and say, ‘We want to come back and we want to give,’ and COVID brought that out and they still come back five years later,” she said.
While steps have been taken to move on from the pandemic and move forward with student instruction, teachers agree that there is still work to be done, with Westfall adding there will always be work to be done given the constantly changing nature of classrooms.
She specifically pointed to the development of artificial intelligence and its use by students in classrooms as the latest development in instruction and learning. While the district has already begun to take measures to rein in this latest technological development, she anticipates further change.
“I don’t really think that it’s gotten back to normal because there’s always a new normal,” she said.
Despite the ongoing changes and past challenges in their field, their dedication or initial pursuits haven’t wavered.
“For teachers, they don’t get into this job for the summers off. We don’t get into this job because we make an extraordinary amount of money,” Hill said.
“We’re in this job because we genuinely care about our community, the young people in our community and the idea that we are constantly trying to uplift, even if it’s calling a parent to let them know their kid’s not doing so well.”
© 2026 The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
