WFAE
Oakdale third grader Treyson Rodriguez, who spent most of the year learning from home, took his first End of Grade exams this month.
Third in a three-part series looking at how the pandemic played out in one Charlotte elementary school. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
At Cathy Moore’s home in northwest Charlotte, five children spent most of this year learning from home. All five are students at Oakdale Elementary School, from kindergarten through fourth grade. And they share space with a baby born during the pandemic.
As crazy as it was juggling five kids, with their iPads, laptops and earphones, Moore thought staying remote was safest for her family. But when North Carolina gave families one last chance to bring their kids back in person in April, Moore took it.
In this second of a three-part series on how the pandemic played out for students, educators and families at Oakdale Elementary School in northwest Charlotte, WFAE education reporter Ann Doss Helms looks at hybrid instruction. Juggling remote and in-person students while handling tech glitches and monitoring COVID-19 safety is a lot to handle.
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.