First of all, congratulations to Columbian newsroom kids Jack and Amelia, and thousands more Clark County high school seniors who are graduating this spring. While most of our lives are lived in seasons, graduations – like weddings, or launching a new career – mark distinct corners. For 13 years, as neighborhood children they assembled to get a basic education. Now, as the caps and gowns come off, the graduates go their own direction, never to reassemble in the same way.
Most members of this class were still eighth-graders when schools closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When they started attending high school that fall, it was by remote learning. They missed, or postponed, those opening-day jitters of navigating the halls, meeting their teachers and finding their tribe. It is likely that educational researchers will follow this class for years, trying to discern how the disruption affected their education and their preparation to live life as adults.
It’s easy to look at the trends and reports and worry for the future of this group. According to Clark County’s 2021 Healthy Youth Survey, which measured this class when they were sophomores, 40 percent reported suffering anxiety within the past two weeks, and only 43 percent expressed high hope for the future. (That might have been linked to too much screen time, as reported by 68 percent of the class, and less than six hours of sleep per night, reported by 42 percent.)
And, as critics of public schools frequently point out, this class as a whole didn’t perform well academically. According to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, as ninth-graders only 68.1 percent of this class statewide passed all of their classes. Even among students considered “highly capable,” more than 10 percent failed at least one class that year.
