Oakdale Elementary students returned to in-person classes for the second time in mid-February.
In the first semester of last school year, 3% of Oakdale Elementary School’s third-graders got a D or F in reading. That was before the pandemic.
This year, with a fluctuating mix of remote and in-person classes, 69% of Oakdale’s third-graders fell below a C.
That’s one of the more extreme swings, but data on classroom grades provided by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools shows many schools have taken dramatic hits on measures of academic performance during the pandemic. Almost always, they’re schools like Oakdale in north Charlotte, a high-poverty neighborhood school where more than 80% of students are Black or Hispanic.
Munro Richardson, executive director of Read Charlotte If you look at 2019, which is the last year that we had third grade state test scores, 72% of white third-graders were reading at college and career ready, he said. But it was only 35% for Black third-graders and 29% for Hispanic third-graders.
Richardson, whose group works to build early reading skills, says there’s a risk that the pandemic could leave a lasting scar like a forest fire marking the rings of a growing tree. I’m worried about this negative tree ring, if you will, for our children of the pandemic, he said. And so it’s really up to us as adults to try to come together and both identify where our kids are at and do our best work to get them the support, but it’s going to take all of us.