BETHLEHEM, Pa. — After the coronavirus pandemic, some students across the Lehigh Valley struggled to return to brick-and-mortar schools.
Ninth-grader Grace Stapp, who attends Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts, said coming back after COVID-19 hit in March 2020, schools shut down and students started doing remote learning, was hard.
- Students struggled to return to public schools after the pandemic
- Home-schooling in Lehigh Valley increased between 45% to nearly 50% between 2019-2020 and 20210-2022
- Public schools are still working to engage students in their districts
“I ended up having a really bad panic attack,” Stapp said. “I was just kind of like all over the place. I was having difficulty staying organized. I would panic a lot, actually. Panic attacks all the time.
"I think that I didn’t know that a lot of kids around me were struggling like I was.”
Stapp made it back into school and succeeded because of the resources she said the staff gave her.
“I got back into the groove of things and was really able to start communicating more,” she said
Many students didn't return
But other students didn’t make it back.
School enrollment dropped during the pandemic, especially for public schools.
According to data from the state Education Department, from 2019-20 to 2021-22, the total public, private and home-school numbers dropped 6,852, and the total estimated population of youth ages 5 to 17 decreased 15,642.
It's unclear where those students went, with some going as so far to call them "lost."
State education officials said it's more appropriate to say they're students who changed their educational placement without being properly documented in school data management systems.
Allentown and Bethlehem Area school districts saw a modest drop in enrollment through the pandemic.
According to the most recent state enrollment numbers, ASD has a student population of 15,988 — a drop of 742 from 2019-20 to 2022-23. Bethlehem’s student population is 12,973, a decrease of 327.
Incoming Bethlehem Schools Superintendent Jack Silva said that when virtual learning started because of COVID-19 in 2020, it was challenging to get students to focus in the new environment.
“I think some of our most vulnerable students, and just regular kids did have challenges engaging with such a dramatic change in format, no doubt about it,” Silva said.
“And when they came back into the hybrid, every other day, you know, teachers said, ‘You know, they, they don't participate like they used to.’”
While school enrollment declined during that time, the number of families in Pennsylvania choosing to home school shot up 53%, according to an AP report. That trend was mirrored in the Valley.
State data shows the number of home-schooled students in Lehigh County rose from 449 in 2019-20 to 672 in 2021-22, a nearly 50% increase.
In Northampton County, home-schooled students went from 486 to 709 during those years, a 46% hike.
To home-school kids in Pennsylvania, a parent has to submit a notarized affidavit to the local school district and submit their goals and objectives for each subject they plan to cover in the 180-day school year.
At the end of the year, they must submit a portfolio showing what their children learned to a private evaluator.
Morgan Stein has twin 12-year-old daughters, Laurel and Ellie. Stein said she started home-schooling Laurel after the pandemic hit because her daughter was bored with virtual learning at the Arts Academy Middle School. The two are in different grades despite being twins because Ellie has Down Syndrome.
Laurel is so "ridiculously smart" that she learns things much more quickly than other children in her class, her mother said.
“So, it was making her crazy,” Stein said. “When her sister was able to go back to school in person, I said, ‘Look, I'll pull you and I'll home school you’ and it's been fantastic.”
Stein takes Laurel to Rising Roots, a secular Lehigh Valley cooperative where home-schooled kids get together to socialize and do activities or get additional academic instruction.
Many home-school parents organize such groups as a source of support and to conduct group learning. Some charge a fee or tuition, are religious-based or only serve certain grades.
Many parents said they like the flexibility home-schooling offers.
“The state isn't going to tell someone that they have to teach about the Civil Rights Act in the same way, they're not going to tell us that we can't teach about the LGBT queer history."Jenn Terfinko-Barnett, director of operations for Rising Roots
“Learning is not linear,” said Deanna Ruzanski, director of It Takes a Village Co-Op, a hybrid co-op in Wind Gap that hires teachers instead of parents to teach classes.
“And I feel like that's what we're seeing a lot. We have several students that have taken certain interests in different areas, and we're able to foster those interests and continue to let them grow, while also providing the age-appropriate and learning level appropriateness for that specific age group or learning level.”
Pennsylvania once had one of the strictest home-school laws in the nation. But lawmakers relaxed the regulations in 2014.
The flexibility of home-schooling means that some families may potentially use it to shelter their children from subjects they oppose, which would be standard in public schools, such as sex education or issues around race or gender.
Jenn Terfinko-Barnett, director of operations for Rising Roots, said she agrees with the state’s current amount of oversight.
“The state isn't going to tell someone that they have to teach about the Civil Rights Act in the same way, they're not going to tell us that we can't teach about the LGBT queer history," Terfinko-Barnett said.
“We want to teach that, we get to teach that. So I don't want the state to tell me that I can't teach what I want to teach. So out of respect, that's that family's choice.”
Silva said BASD continues to focus on re-engaging students in the district, even if it’s not the same “hair-on-fire approach” they had early on in the pandemic.
“It's not like you just bounce right back after a pandemic and three interrupted school years,” Silva said.
“But the good news is the structures, the strategies, with some attention and intensity, and some understanding of what the kids and families need and are up to, are capable of bringing back kids and bringing and moving, but the rubber band is not going to snap back immediately to where it was.
"But we're hopeful and, you know, we'll keep at it. And we want our kids with us.”
As for Stein, Ellie will be home-schooled along with her sister in September. Stein said that's because they didn't like any of the local special education programs.
"Next year, I'm going to be going to be brave and I'm going to home-school Ellie, which will be a whole other ballgame because she needs everything repeated 20 times to retain it," Stein said. "So it should be interesting. But she really wants to come here to Rising Roots."
