Sonya Whitfield did not have a guidebook for what was happening.
A 33-year employee of the Pulaski County Special School District, Whitfield was the principal at Baker Elementary School in Little Rock when the nation’s school system shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A lifelong educator, Whitfield was used to consulting with others and using “best practices” whenever any kind of crisis popped up, but zero best practices were available for the total shutdown of student learning. No script existed for how to keep a school district going in the face of something that had never occurred in modern America.
Whitfield, along with thousands of her colleagues nationwide and millions of students and their parents, was cast adrift without an anchor. The world of education is grounded in schedules and calendars. Each class has a set number of minutes, each day has a set number of classes, and each school year has a set number of days. The basic American school year, which had changed little in over a century, was suddenly wiped out with little warning and even less reassurance about the future.
“We were always scared,” said Whitfield, now the district’s deputy superintendent of learning services. “We were scared.”
More than five years have passed since schools shut their doors in the spring semester of the 2019-2020 school year. For many today, the evidence of the sea change in daily school life that took place is hard to find. Traditions such as Friday football, dances and senior skip days are back like they never left. Inside schools, administrators, teachers and students hustle about from class to class, not much different from how it looked a generation ago.
Dig deeper, however, and there is an education system — both public and private — that is still grappling with the fallout of lost time.
“There was a definite learning loss,” said Steve Straessle, head of school at Catholic High School for Boys in Little Rock. “You know, the world hit the pause button during COVID, and the kids did too.”
Just how much of a learning loss took place has only been recently verified. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University in California and the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University in Massachusetts ranked Arkansas 23rd among states for postpandemic math achievement and 19th for reading.
Certain in-state districts, such as Bentonville, Jonesboro, Van Buren and Rogers, have reported math scores that are already above the 2019 pre-COVID-19 numbers. Yet other districts, including Benton, Conway, Little Rock, West Memphis and Jacksonville North Pulaski, were reported to be almost a full grade level behind in math.
The same study found that one of the biggest factors affecting learning loss in Arkansas is largely out of the control of the schools. Chronic absenteeism, defined as students who miss 10 percent or more of the school year, rose in Arkansas from 22 percent in 2019 to 28 percent in 2024.
“There’s not that urgency about getting kids to school, and it’s not just the kids,” Straessle said. “A lot of parents have taken that route too.”
When Whitfield, Straessle and others talk about making up the loss, it is surprising how little they talk about actual classroom subject matter. Sure, missing months of instruction sets students back — anyone who ever took high school algebra would say as much — but in 2025, the secondary effects of the shutdown have come to the fore. Unlike academic progress, which can be easily charted and affirmed through data, the struggles of today’s students are largely unquantifiable.
“The biggest thing that I see still is soft skills are lacking,” said Luke Davis, an algebra and calculus teacher at Little Rock Central High School.
Davis, who emphasized he was speaking for himself and not the Little Rock School District, said students failing to retain subject matter is part of teaching, and there are always ways to combat it. What he sees now are students who missed a crucial year of social and personal growth, and that is something difficult to put into numbers.
“The piece that has stuck out the most to me is the communication, the teamwork,” Davis said. “I don’t think we’ve even started recovering from that too well. The knowledge gap, I think that’s getting smaller, but the soft skills loss is still very much the elephant in the room.”
Those interpersonal skills are vital for students and not just for successfully socializing with their peers in the hallways between classes. In modern classrooms, the emphasis on group work and peer-to-peer communication is far greater than a generation ago, and it is not uncommon to walk into a classroom and see desks arranged in groups with teams of students tackling the day’s concepts together. Given that, why are so many students still scuffling when it comes to communication?
Whitfield, with her background in elementary education, thinks she may know why. While high school students were hit with a loss of subject matter knowledge during the shutdown, the younger grades involve so much more than academic material. Those early grades are often where students are taught classroom norms such as how to communicate, how to take turns, how to ask for help and how to keep to a schedule.
All of that was pulled out from under students right at the age where such development begins, and many have been playing catch-up ever since.
“Before, we’ve always done, like, lots of group work and group projects,” Whitfield said. “That’s the life of an elementary school, so learning how to get in a group and talk and take turns and listen and respond, it’s like you had to teach that all over again.”
From his vantage point in the classroom, Davis agreed.
“We heard for two, maybe a little over two years, show them grace and give them extensions,” Davis said, “and for a lot of students, deadlines turned into suggestions. We’re still struggling because they were kind of given a free pass for so long, but now that’s the expectation, so when that free pass is pulled off, they feel like you’re singling them out.”
Straessle said he has faced the same tug-of-war between acknowledging the effects of the shutdown and also pushing for a return to prepandemic standards and expectations.
“For our school in particular, we gave a lot of grace,” Straessle said. “I don’t regret that at all, but after the pandemic, that grace became normalized. By normalizing grace, what that did was steal the urgency of education from the kids.”
Yet catching up is not as simple a proposition as going back to the “old days.” A longer shutdown was averted because schools converted to distance learning, providing laptops to students and making curriculum materials available online. Yet when students returned to their school buildings, this time with laptops in tow, educators faced a fresh batch of new challenges such as web surfing and the use of ChatGPT.
Schools have been dealing with the “paper-versus-computer” question ever since.
“We still use technology as a tool,” Whitfield said, “and it doesn’t take the place of a teacher or instruction, so it has its place. We don’t want it to be a babysitter. It can never take the place of an actual teacher.”
The legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic on schools may not, in fact, even be about learning loss. Schools are making up the disruption to academics, though the extent varies from district to district. Likewise, teachers and administrators have doubled down on teaching the sort of behavioral norms students may have missed out on while they were quarantined.
But the increased role of technology? Schools are still feeling the ripple effects. Like so many other aspects of the pandemic, the true outcome may not be known for a long time.
“Prior to the pandemic, we saw what appeared to be the future, which was virtual school,” Straessle said. “I believed that was the future until the pandemic hit. Then you realize that, no, virtual instruction is good for some, but for education as a whole, it is not. You’re getting them out of the regular schedule and out of the daily discipline. We see that was not the right move.”
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