Lessons learned: PA’s educational evolution five years after the pandemic

Five years after COVID-19 became the single most disruptive event in Pennsylvania education history since the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, it may seem surprising that pandemic-era leaders’ main takeaway from the experience is a positive one. 

“It showed what we can do. That fills me with optimism,” said Daniel Greenstein, whose six-year tenure leading the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education included the entirety of the COVID era.

To a one, every pandemic-era leader interviewed for this story had a similar appraisal, marveling at the “resilience” – an oft-cited descriptor – of academic communities that responded under pressure to once-a-century challenges. “When you look back at how quickly schools adapted their curriculums on a dime to make sure the students were getting the instruction they needed – I think that is an overlooked achievement of the pandemic,” said Jim Vaughan, the longtime executive director of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, which represents K-12 public school teachers.

Such an outcome was far from certain in Spring 2020, especially once the first Pennsylvanian was diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 6. One week later, commonwealth public schools closed for what was then described as a two-week pause. Meanwhile, as colleges scrambled to send students home or situate them off-campus, Gov. Tom Wolf issued an emergency state-at-home measure – and the 2019-2020 academic year was over as anyone knew it.

Some campuses would reopen within months; other institutions, including many public school districts, remained largely remote for a year and a half (the School District of Philadelphia, the state’s largest, only welcomed full cohorts back in September 2021). Five years later, class is in session, with many pandemic-era adaptations still in place: Kindergartners tote Chromebooks, apps are ubiquitous for both instruction and communication, school board meetings are full – and college dining halls are often half-empty.

Moving fast, breaking things

Looking back, what stands out to most education leaders was the combination of uncertainty, confusion and a rapidly evolving series of crises that forced unprecedented decisions to be made at unprecedented speed. “Running a university is challenging, but we’re not accustomed to making life-or-death decisions,” said Greenstein’s PASSHE successor, Chancellor Christopher Fiorentino, who was president of West Chester University at the time. 

“I remember in late February, I was having lunch with one of our associate deans, a biologist, and he mentioned this thing going on in China. He said, ‘I would guess probably sometime around April, we’re going to have to shut the campus down for a couple of weeks.’ I looked at him like he was crazy.”

Yet just weeks later ­­– staring down the infectious potential of 3,000 of West Chester’s 17,000 students flying home from spring break trips – Fiorentino closed the campus, he said, to avert a health crisis. 

After scrambling to shift classes online for the remainder of the semester, the West Chester president, like his colleagues across the state, confronted yet another conundrum as summer waned: Should he re-open the campus for the fall term? “Things weren’t getting better. There was still no vaccine, no cure. There was still this ongoing concern about the wellbeing of the community, which we had to balance with the fact that we still had a university,” he recalled of the calculus that kept campus closed.

Much later, Fiorentino said, the Chester County health department told him that West Chester’s quick decision to shut down the campus – and keep instruction remote until vaccines were available – likely explained Chester County’s lower-than-average COVID-19 numbers.

Greenstein said that the pandemic accelerated an already-underway shift toward more autonomy for the state system’s universities, some of which considered face-to-face interaction more critical to their mission than others. “Pennsylvania’s communities are different. And its universities have different student bodies, different regional economies, exist in different social and political contexts,” the former chancellor observed. “COVID confirmed that. It became clear that the universities also had different facilities, different relationships with local health departments, different capacities to manage risk mitigation.”

Nathan Mains, who has led the Pennsylvania School Boards Association since 2013, affirmed that a similar diversity exists among the state’s vast network of K-12 school districts. And those differences added a layer of challenge to the already daunting task of determining policy and practice in a fast-changing pandemic environment.

“We had to think about, ‘How do we help every part of Pennsylvania adapt to this new reality in a way that suits that community?’” Mains said. “It really gets to the heart of Pennsylvania’s long, proud tradition of local control and local input, and we needed to keep respecting that during the pandemic.”It wasn’t easy. Divergent values and priorities divided communities over issues like mask-wearing policy, vaccines, public health mandates and whether in-person education or contagion control should take priority. Throughout the pandemic and beyond, Mains points to a dramatic rise in civic engagement with local education – a trend that, for his 500-district constituency, remains a defining legacy of COVID-19.

“People suddenly became much, much more interested in what was happening in their school districts,” he noted. “School boards suddenly had meetings full of citizens – hundreds, sometimes thousands. People really paid attention, and I think that’s a positive.”

Building back better

Indeed, while headlines often focused on the political polarization that drove bitter disagreements over COVID-19 strategy, educators emphasize the heightened sense of community and purpose that resulted from an all-hands-on-deck emergency. “People worked hard, almost 24/7, and they never complained,” said Michael Driscoll, who has led Indiana University of Pennsylvania since 2012. “I saw, daily, a university community that stepped up in every way possible to help one another when needed, personally and professionally.”

Hewing fastidiously to Centers for Disease Control safety recommendations and migrating more than 1,500 courses online by late March, IUP was recognized with the Pittsburgh Technology Council’s “Top COVID Pivot” award in November 2020.

“That focus on teamwork – on ‘we’re in this together’ – really happened,” agreed Tom Foley, the longtime president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania, which represents 85 private institutions.

Throughout the early months of the crisis, Foley drew on his background as “an old Red Cross guy” (he used to head that organization’s Philadelphia chapter), as well as his decade-long presidency of Mount Aloysius College, on thrice-weekly Zoom calls with dozens of college presidents. “I’ve been a president, and I didn’t want everybody to have to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

It also helped, Foley noted, that nonprofit backgrounds are common among university professionals, so they’re used to mobilizing around a mission. (For his part, Foley was guided by memories of Mount Aloysius’ shrine to campus heroes of the 1918 pandemic, during which not a soul on that campus died.)

Among the crises they confronted was how to situate Pennsylvania’s then-roughly 50,000 international students, who, when campuses emptied and airports shut, were stranded many time zones away from home and family. “But our presidents were fabulous – everybody figured it out,” said Foley. The association also drew on efficiencies of scale to purchase emergency supplies like masks and sanitizer in bulk for its member schools.

Partnerships of all kinds – including political relationships – were key to powering schools through the pandemic. “Say what you want about the federal government, but the federal government bailed us out,” said Greenstein. “That COVID relief money was absolutely critical to the continuity of our schools.

“It shows the strength of partnership with the federal state governments,” he added. “We were profoundly fortunate in the relationships that we had with the governor and with the General Assembly, both sides of the aisle – and our students benefit from that.”

Sudden financial exigencies were among the biggest practical challenges that educational institutions faced, since nobody’s budget anticipated bulk midyear orders of laptop computers or virtual learning software. Colleges scrambled to launch emergency funds to cover the unexpected costs; at IUP, for example, alumni, employees and other supporters raised $300,000 within a few weeks to support 450 students in need. At Cedar Crest College in Allentown, President Elizabeth Meade organized a late-March fundraiser to buy students laptops so they could continue classes online.

Like every other non-cyber school, Cedar Crest also had to marshal its technology team to transfer instruction from classroom to virtual in a matter of days, and to train faculty members, “some of whom had never taught online in any way at all,” said Meade. Then there was the problem of making sure that graduating students in hands-on credential programs, like nursing and teaching, were able to meet state graduation requirements (Cedar Crest coordinated an early nursing program graduation to move novice nurses from the classroom to the hospital front lines).

Meanwhile, with the campus devoid of human activity, she saw nature take over in a way she could never have imagined in the 30 years since she’d arrived as a philosophy professor. “It didn’t take long into the shutdown for herds and herds of deer and foxes and all manner of wild animals to just colonize the campus,” she recalled.

The deer are gone, but across the commonwealth, pandemic-era changes linger. Masks are still a familiar sight at schools. A heightened sensitivity to contagion has also loosened norms around attendance in ways both good (greater tolerance for sick days) and bad (chronic absenteeism). Snow days have given away to remote-schooling days for students at K-12 schools, which also use the virtual format pioneered during the pandemic during natural disasters like wildfire smoke.

New paradigms

Hybrid is the new norm in higher education, both for students and employees. At IUP, Driscoll said the pandemic inspired a program for remote work during summer and winter, when fewer students are on campus, yielding $1.5 million in utility savings while reducing the university’s environmental impact. Online classes are far more popular than before; at West Chester, for instance, most summer courses are now virtual, obviating the need for students to return to campus. And online meetings with board members and alumni have resulted in greater engagement for many institutions.

“As far as lessons from the pandemic, I would say No. 1 is, we recognized that we can operate pretty efficiently in a virtual world,” said Foley. “It is not a complete substitute for anything, but it can be a very useful operating mechanism. COVID got us to practice virtual interactions in a much more professional way, and that has continued.”

The flip side of that transition: lags in student learning metrics and social and emotional development, as well as a lingering reticence around in-person student engagement. 

“For a few years, we saw some learning loss that we have been able to address because of our intimate size and intense focus on student learning,” said Jonathan D Green, the president of Susquehanna University, which has a smaller post-pandemic enrollment. “We also experienced students coming to campus with a new level of social anxiety, having been isolated during important developmental high school years.” 

One-on-one and small-group programming proved effective, he said, “and the students who are now arriving on campus seem to have made those adjustments as a group. We learned how resilient we are as a community.” 

At Cedar Crest, the resident-to-commuter ratio “has flipped, with students now more inclined to commute,” noted Meade. “Often they give costs as a reason, but it doesn’t cost any more than it used to.

“I think we gave a sense of, ‘You’re safer at home,’” she reflected. “We spent a whole year telling students that it wasn’t safe together in the dining hall eating together, and we enabled a culture of takeout. And that has persisted. I see students getting takeout and walking back to the residence hall all the time in the pouring rain…If you had told me in the spring of ’21 that that would linger, I would not have believed you.”

While the ongoing challenges are real, so is the widespread sense of satisfaction among Pennsylvania’s education community. “No one who is alive today had ever seen this before, because the last time it happened was a hundred years ago,” said Aaron Chapin, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, who previously taught for a quarter-century at Stroudsburg Area Middle School. “But now we know how to do this, because we’ve done it.”