Roughly 70 percent of D and F letter grades given to middle school students between January and March were in virtual courses, said DeLong Middle School principal Michele Wiberg during a Monday school board meeting.
All Eau Claire students had virtual classes this year, even students in the hybrid model, said Michelle Radtke, the district's director of assessment: Elective courses, like computer or foreign language classes, were offered online.
But more impacted were the one-fifth of students who took all-virtual classes.
Data presented to the Eau Claire school board on Monday indicate middle school students in all-virtual classes were more likely to receive Ds and Fs in their virtual classes during Term 3, between mid-January and mid-March, compared to their peers in the school district's hybrid group. (Most students in the hybrid model attended class face-to-face classes two days each week.)
Meanwhile, middle school students in the hybrid group received more As, Bs and Cs proportional to their share of the student body.
Though almost 20 percent of Eau Claire middle school students attended all-virtual classes — an option the district offered to parents in the fall — those students accounted for 39 percent of all F grades between mid-January and mid-March.
Students and teachers were strained by the pandemic and hampered by technology issues, school administrators and teachers said this week.
But teachers are seeing improvement as kids return to the classroom, principals said, and are intervening to help kids bounce back from a pandemic year.
"I truly believe that we were asking kids to do things they've never had to do before," said Wiberg of students' struggles with lower grades. "I know sometimes, as adults, how hard it is for us to keep a schedule. I don't believe kids were being lazy or didn't feel like doing it. I believe they just didn't know how."
Nationwide phenomenon
Schools across the country have reported similar trends. Nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, failing grades for low-income students shot up in Maryland and Virginia, the Washington Post reported.
Thirteen out of 14 surveyed school districts in southern Wisconsin, all of which largely moved students online during the pandemic, showed an increase in failing grades given to students, the Wisconsin State Journal reported in March.
Wiberg doesn't think the grading trend in virtual classes is entirely due to the pandemic, but points to a pre-existing trend that impacts low-income students.
Kids who qualified for free or reduced lunch, about 39 percent of Eau Claire middle school students, were more likely to have received Cs, Ds and Fs during Term 3 than students who don't qualify for free or reduced lunch.
But economically disadvantaged students were more likely to receive lower grades in the last three school years, too. And those economically disadvantaged students were overrepresented in the all-virtual group. Roughly 39 percent of all students in the school district qualify for free or reduced lunches, and 58 percent of students in the all-virtual group do, according to an October report from the school district.
Students of color in Eau Claire middle schools were also overrepresented among those who received Cs, Ds and Fs this spring.
"I think we need to say, 'How do we do something different, because there's obviously some areas of need,'" Wiberg said. "I think the data shows that this is more than just a pandemic year (phenomenon)."
Eau Claire school administrators have also pointed to several factors tied to the pandemic.
A higher rate of absenteeism was correlated with students who received more failing grades, Radtke said.
"There was some struggle getting (students) to the virtual classes," Radtke said. "As we know, when students aren't there we can't teach them ... it's easier to skip a class when you're virtual."
Earlier in the school year, teachers added face-to-face interventions for some vulnerable students, especially kids in special education and kids learning English.
The technology problems and lack of organization that plagued adults this year also predictably caused kids to stumble, Wiberg said.
"What we found is that kids wanted to be engaged in their coursework, but all of a sudden, they weren't sure how to do the technology thing," she said. "We assume kids know how to use and adapt to technology quickly."
By helping kids troubleshoot their tech, organize their classwork and stick to a schedule, "we saw some gains with those kids because they were getting the extra assistance they needed to stay focused," Wiberg said. "Otherwise they were getting so bogged down in the technology that it was becoming too much and they were starting to shut down."
Anecdotally, Wiberg said, she's seen middle school students happier and more connected as they returned to the classroom four days a week. (Middle school students shifted to four days a week of face-to-face classes on April 26.)
"From a social-emotional standpoint, we've seen huge gains with kids wanting to stay connected in school," she said.
Looking ahead
These data on student grades are limited, cautioned Jim Schmitt, the district's executive director of teaching and learning.
The middle school grades stem only from Term 3 of the school year, Jan. 21 to March 19, Radtke said.
"Collecting and reviewing district-wide data through the pandemic has been challenging" and the district expects to have richer, more complete data when the spring semester ends, Schmitt said Monday.
Wiberg and middle school principals are already looking ahead to fall 2021, when they'll try to gauge how far kids progressed during the pandemic, one by one. But Wiberg expects just having kids back in school full time will dramatically help teachers.
"I'd assume, as we go forward, that we'll see kids performing better, but the bigger issue we want to focus on is student learning," she said. "Our main focus is bringing kids in, seeing where they're at, and moving all kids forward as far as we possibly can."
"The hard part is that there's no 'Do this, and this result will happen, guaranteed, 100 percent,'" Wiberg said. "But I do believe we have really good staff in all our middle schools and they're excited to have kids back full time."
©2021 the Leader-Telegram (Eau Claire, Wis.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
