Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Rocky Mountain PBS and was shared via AP StoryShare.
DENVER — As Maria Rojas was tending to her husband’s illness in November, she didn’t have a lot of time to worry about her children’s online schooling.
Her husband David was one of the now more than half a million Coloradans who contracted COVID-19. He was admitted to the hospital in December. As Rojas tells it, the case was so dire that the hospital staff told David—who was on oxygen—if he didn’t improve, he would have the option to go home to “die in peace.” Luckily, it never came to that.
But while dealing with the possibility of losing her husband to a vicious virus, Rojas was also juggling something she’d never had to deal with in years past: virtual learning. She started receiving text messages from her children’s schools about their classes and performance.
“Every day I would get messages from the school and I would tell them, ‘Right now, I am focused on the recovery of my husband, I don’t have any more mental space to deal with the school also,’” Rojas, a mother of three, told us in Spanish. Two of her kids are in school: one in kindergarten and another in 10th grade.
“It was so stressful,” she said. “My 20-month-old would be crying. My kindergartner [was] crying, frustrated in front of the computer because she didn’t know how to read. My oldest wasn’t doing well in school and I kept nagging at her to do her homework, eat and shower—all while the food was burning in the kitchen.”
To make this juggling act of a pandemic and online schooling even more challenging, Rojas does not speak English. Her family moved to the United States from Nicaragua three years ago.
The story of Rojas’ family is a familiar one: the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted immigrant families, who are overrepresented among the country’s essential workers, more likely to be uninsured, and more likely to live in multigenerational households, making quarantining and social distancing difficult.
For this story—part of our project “COVID-19 in Colorado: The Long Haul”—Rocky Mountain PBS spoke with parents, educators, and researchers about the ways in which parents and students who speak English as a second language were left behind during the pandemic, and what can be done to address these inequities moving forward.
Spring 2020: Caught Flat-footed
Jeremy Rigotti had a feeling it was all coming to an end. In-person schooling, that is. Rigotti teaches English and an English language development seminar at Denver’s Abraham Lincoln High School. He’s also the coach of the track team.
“About a week before we canceled school, they canceled our track season,” he recalled. “So I kind of had a feeling that the cancelation was coming ahead of some of the other teachers.”
Of course, Rigotti ended up being right. Denver Public Schools initially did what many school districts across the country decided to do: extend spring break for an extra week and try to “flatten the curve” in time for the kids to come back in person. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s now clear that two weeks never would have been enough time to thwart the spread of COVID-19. Even 60 weeks later, cases and hospitalizations are back on the rise in Denver and many parts of Colorado.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when those two weeks were up, the school district “scrambled” to transition to online learning, as Rigotti put it.
“It didn’t really work that well last year, obviously, because [the district] didn’t have... time to set anything up,” he said of online schooling. “They weren’t expecting this to happen.”
According to Kathy Escamilla, a professor at University of Colorado Boulder who researches bilingual education, the sudden transition to online learning in the spring of 2020 had a disproportionate impact on families and students who speak English as a second language.
“And it’s not because they didn’t have the [learning] materials, but those families didn’t have the Chromebooks. Families didn’t have Wi-fi,” Escamilla said. “They had maybe one cell phone and five kids. They all couldn’t be learning online at once. It was really very scary."
In the early days of the pandemic, when not teaching a masters class on bilingual multicultural education to a group of Denver Public Schools (DPS) teachers, Escamilla and her husband were tasked with helping their grandchildren with virtual learning while the parents were at work.
“We both have college educations and after the second week we’re going, ‘We don’t know if we’re going to make it. We can’t do this.’ And the poor teachers on the other end were going, ‘We don’t know if we’re going to make it,’” she recalled. “There was a period when virtually everyone was struggling. But not struggling as bad as the people who couldn’t speak English.”
Clara Abad concurs. Like Escamilla, Abad—who shares a home with multiple children and grandchildren—was the primary adult helping her grandchildren with online schooling while the parents were working. She only speaks Spanish.
Abad said the older grandchildren were able to figure out the learn-from-home technology on their own, but it was a greater struggle for herself and the younger children, like her 5-year-old grandson Daniel, a kindergartener at McGlone Academy in Denver. Just talking about virtual learning was stressful for Abad, who said she was crying by the end of the first day of online classes.
Escamilla said families like Abad’s were left behind in the start of the pandemic.
“There is not one district in Colorado that put an emphasis on English language learners. Not one,” she said. “Did they worry about them? Yes. Did they go out and deliver food? Yes. Did they deliver the Chromebooks to the houses? Yes. Did they gear up instruction to make sure students didn’t get behind? No. That didn’t happen until the summer.”
Laptops Don’t Solve Everything
By the end of the 2019-20 school year, it was evident that it would be several months—not weeks—until the pandemic ended. Because of that, school districts ramped up efforts to make sure online learning ran much smoother than it had in the spring.
Rigotti told Rocky Mountain PBS that by the time school resumed in the fall, the issue of technology was solved for most of his students. Escamilla gave kudos to several Colorado districts that she said worked hard over the summer to provide resources for families who don’t speak English.
“But to say there was equity,” she continued, “that’s a long shot.” As Rocky Mountain PBS’ Sonia Gutierrez pointed out after her story on an immigrant family in Durango, access to technology isn’t helpful for those who don’t know how to use it.
“It was a challenge because we don’t know how to navigate the technology,” Abad told us. “We are women who come from other countries with little to no access to technology. That was very, very…frustrating, stressful. I often ended my day crying.”
Escamilla noted that settings and instructions for the computers often came only in English, so the burden of translating fell on teachers who were bilingual.
Abad said she wishes she had more help from bilingual teachers. Data provided by DPS showed that over 76% of the student body at McGlone Academy are what the district calls “Multilingual Learners” (MLLs). This means that their home language is something other than English. And while DPS could not provide data on the number of teachers who speak both English and Spanish, a spokesperson confirmed that 958 of DPS’ 4,780 teachers (roughly 20%) have an ELA-S type designation, meaning they have shown “proficiency in speaking, understanding, reading, and writing Spanish by passing the Spanish Language Proficiency Exam.”
The Disparate Impact on Immigrant Families
Even as more teachers, students, and parents began to get the hang of online learning, many families still struggled, and not just with class. The pandemic, after all, was raging. Cases started picking back up between September and October, and didn’t decline until after reaching record peaks just before the new year.
The economic impact was brutal. Rojas’ husband works in construction and struggled to find steady employment during the pandemic. Her family couldn’t make rent for three months. Abad’s family, meanwhile, turned to food stamps to make it through the pandemic.
One of Abad’s granddaughters, Nallely, a fifth-grader at McGlone Academy, was so terrified of the virus that she would lock herself in her room.
“She wouldn’t come out for anything,” Abad explained. “When she ate, poor child of mine, we had to serve her plate, leave it on the table and lock ourselves in the room so she knew it was safe to come out.”
While some students like Nallely did their best to avoid COVID-19, others had to face it head-on because of their jobs, even during school hours.
“I have a large group of kids who have to work. Maybe their parents lost their jobs, maybe their parents don’t see the value of remote schooling,” Rigotti said. “And they’re working during the day, during my classes and messaging me at night trying to get the assignments to pass.”
He continued: “They’re kind of getting left behind in the remote setting, and I don’t think we could try any harder to help them.”
Rigotti and the parents we spoke with agreed that virtual classes completely changed the dynamics of learning, and it was especially challenging for students who are learning English.
Rojas said her 10th grader is still mastering English. Her daughter was much more likely to ask a question during in-person instruction than she is over Zoom, she said. Rigotti has seen the same thing among his students: when he calls on a student in-person, they have to answer verbally. But online, they often simply respond in the chat.
“I can mandate that everyone has to turn on their microphone and speak, but then that would lead to kids just checking out entirely and I’d rather get the text response than no response,” he explained.
Rigotti said virtual learning — and the lack of in-person, verbal communication — has been detrimental for the language acquisition of his students who are learning English. But as Escamilla points out, there hasn’t been enough research done to determine just how significantly English learners have been impacted when it comes to learning English.
“The bottom line is, we don’t know,” she said. “There are people taking wild-eyed guesses, including testing companies.”
The Pandemic’s Toll on Mental Health
While the loss of language skills remains largely unknown, there is one thing that the four people we spoke with agreed upon: students are struggling with their mental health.
“I’ve noticed a lot of kids are depressed,” Rigotti said. “They’ve talked to me about it. They’ve talked to our school psychologist who I work closely with.”
Abad said Nallely began to exhibit symptoms of depression once she transitioned to online learning. Normally an excellent math student, Nallely started struggling to keep her grades up.
“I would tell her, ‘It’s not your fault, it’s not your teacher’s fault; it’s the technology,” Abad said. “That’s why I think she is depressed, because she was on top of all her classes and now her grades have suffered.”
Rojas said her daughter had similar problems with her grades and has since struggled with depression. “My daughter in 10th grade went from being an A, B student to a D, F student. Remote learning just hasn’t worked for her,” she said.
“I know a woman who stopped working because her son told her he didn't want to live anymore. She told me she didn’t want to leave him alone. With the pandemic, a lot of kids have had that thought including my daughter,” Rojas continued. “She tells me the only reason why she is still alive is because of her younger sisters because otherwise, she doesn’t want to live. I’ve cried over this. Hearing that was very hard.”
Rojas is right that more young people are struggling with their mental health. There are also concerns that the pandemic has led to an increase in youth suicide. While there are no official numbers for 2020 yet, experts say more children with suicidal thoughts are going to the hospital in worsening mental states.
Again, this is a problem that disproportionately impacts minority students: Speaking with PBS NewsHour, Tia Dole of the Trevor Project said “if you are a person who is in a community that is marginalized, you're going to experience more stressors than other people.”
“Some of our kids, they’re not going to be the same—they lost family members. Some of their parents lost work,” Escamilla added. “So what are we going to do to make sure our kids are healthy mentally and physically and ready to go back to the rigors of schooling?”
Making Adjustments Moving Forward
A vast majority of Colorado educators have received their COVID-19 vaccines, and students ages 16 and up have begun receiving their shots as well. It’s not difficult to imagine a not-so-distant future in which everyone is back in the classroom with masks off.
Escamilla, Abad, Rojas, and Rigotti hope that school districts and policy makers don’t soon forget just how hard the immigrant community has been impacted by the pandemic, and that the inequities that were exacerbated by the pandemic are addressed moving forward.
As Escamilla pointed out, there is currently not enough research being done to accurately determine how much learning was lost during the pandemic years. As such, it will be a difficult task for school districts to figure out which areas need the most attention — how do you make up for lost learning if you don’t know how much learning was lost?
“I’m afraid that if we look too narrowly at what has been lost, then we won’t understand what kids really did miss,” Escamilla said, referencing things like hanging out with their friends in the cafeteria and hallways—things she and Rigotti agreed are vital to language development.
“I really do think kids need to be with their friends,” she added.
In terms of making up for missed time in the classroom, Escamilla is confident that ideas like weekend classes and summer school are not the answer.
“If [the federal government] fears that learning was lost, what are they going to do to try to accelerate learning? And I hope it isn’t making kids go to school every Saturday, because I can’t think of a worse thing,” Escamilla said. “Kids ought to be playing soccer on Saturdays, and doing other kinds of things. I hope it’s not just doubling down on homework and more reading.”
Testing will no doubt play a major role in evaluating English learners' progress. School districts recently completed the annual, in-person ACCESS test for English learners, despite petitions to cancel it (families had the choice to opt out of the test). Both Rigotti and Escamilla agreed that standardized tests are not necessarily the most accurate way to determine a student’s grasp of the subject matter, especially in a year when learning was consistently disrupted by the pandemic.
Rigotti has found success with capstone projects: If a student is not at their grade level based on the SAT or another standardized test score, they are given the option of completing a capstone portfolio. His juniors, for example, have to submit an argumentative writing sample at an 11th grade level, and an informative writing sample at the same level.
“If they have those, that proves they’re at an 11th grade competency level, even if they don’t score that on a standardized test,” Rigotti explained. “So I hope we have more of that kind of thing moving forward, and that sticks."
Abad and Rojas have also given a lot of thought to changes they’d like to see moving forward. When asked what DPS could have done better, Abad had her answers ready: more bilingual teachers and classes to teach parents how to navigate the internet. Rojas agreed that navigating the internet was a major point of concern, but she said emotional support for her children is paramount.
“I’ve been looking for help for my daughter but they always tell me, ‘We understand and we’re going to do what we can to help,’ but nothing ever happens,” she said.
Parents and teachers universally agree: the last year has been an immense challenge. What’s less certain is how those challenges will inform decisions going forward.
“All of our kids suffered. Some kids suffered more than others. And we’ve got to now figure out what we’re going to do,” Escamilla said. “We can’t make up a lost year, but what [are we] going to do going forwards to make it so this isn’t a year that traumatizes anybody permanently?”
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