Schools Have Struggled Adding Learning Time Post-COVID: Here’s How One District Did It

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It was just after 2:30 p.m. on a recent Wednesday and the school stage had not yet been transformed into a reading room.

Christopher VanderKuyl, assistant principal of Chicago’s western suburbs, hurriedly dragged brown folding chairs across the hardwood floor. He made a mental note to find out who had rearranged the furniture.

“They can’t do that,” VanderKuyl lamented to her teaching partner, Megan Endre. “We’re using this as a classroom!”

A year ago, school would have ended at this time and students at Columbus East Elementary School would be walking out the door. But this year, a group of fifth graders were sitting on the school stage, reading aloud about the life of Rosa Parks while working on reading fluency and comprehension. Similar activities were taking place in nearly every corner of the school: In another classroom, students rolled dice to practice double-digit multiplication and huddled close to their teacher to check their work.

What’s happening at Columbus East is one of the rare efforts nationwide to give students more instructional time in an attempt to make up for what they lost during the pandemic. Here in Cicero School District 99, students receive an extra 30 minutes of reading or math instruction every day, which adds up to about three extra weeks of school. School leaders hope there will be enough time to teach students key skills they missed and improve test scores.

“We do a lot of good things for our students, we have many, many resources, but our students need more,” said Aldo Calderín, district superintendent. “There are challenges, I’m not going to sit here and say there aren’t any. But I know we are doing the right thing by our children.”

The district is about a month into the additional academic lessons and staff say they are still working out the kinks. The initiative has added new educational challenges for Cicero teachers, who were already busy implementing a new reading curriculum and helping students cope with the ongoing consequences of the pandemic.

Still, Cicero stands out for making a longer school day a reality. While many schools used COVID relief funds to bolster summer school or add optional after-school tutoring, far fewer added additional time to the school day or year.

In Cicero, a new contract with the teachers union, extra pay for teachers and support from the school board helped make the change happen. Elsewhere, efforts to add instructional time have faced pushback from school board members and teachers who thought the additional time would be too costly and disruptive.

Thomas Kane, a Harvard education professor who has studied learning loss during the pandemic, said “it’s great to see” districts like Cicero adding instructional time.

“However, it obviously depends on how that time is used, especially if it comes at the end of the day when kids or teachers may be tired,” Kane said. “But honestly, right now, what’s needed is more instructional time to help students catch up.”

How Cicero students got a longer school day

Cicero 99, which extends through high school, serves about 9,200 students in a working-class, mostly Latino suburb of Chicago. About three-quarters of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and more than half of students are English learners.

School leaders floated the idea of ​​lengthening the Cicero 99 school day before COVID hit, but the proposal took on added urgency as educators saw how the pandemic set students back in reading and math.

The year before the pandemic, 22% of district students met or exceeded Illinois English language arts standards, while 16% surpassed that bar in math. By spring 2021, after students spent nearly a year learning remotely, 10% met state standards in English and 5% in math.

At Columbus East, staff remember students hiding under covers or pointing their cameras at ceiling fans during remote learning. Others had trouble hearing over blaring televisions, barking dogs and whirring mixers.

Kane’s research on district-level learning loss found that Cicero students in third through eighth grades lost the equivalent of a third of a year in reading from spring 2019 to 2022, and a little less than half a year in math. The losses were similar to other high-poverty Illinois districts, Kane said, but still “substantial.”

“There is a sense of urgency,” said Columbus East Principal Donata Heppner, who is part of the district team that planned the extended day. “If we don’t grow more than expected, we will never catch up.”

So last year, Calderín, with the support of the school board, negotiated a new contract with the teachers union that included a longer school day.

“At first, we were: No, no, no, no, no,” said Marisa Mills, president of the Cicero teachers union and seventh-grade English language arts teacher at Unity Junior High. “And then we really started to get down to the nitty-gritty and started talking about: Well, what if we did this?”

The teachers came on board after the district agreed that the extra time would be used only for instruction, Mills said, and that students would not be tethered to a device during that time. Teachers also received a “very fair” increase in compensation: a 10% raise and a one-time $5,000 bonus for this school year, paid for with COVID relief dollars. The agreement, which will extend until 2026, obtained the support of 70% of teachers.

Calderín said it helped that the extra time was well received by families. Many students’ parents work multiple jobs and struggle to arrange after-school care for their children, a problem that is somewhat alleviated by a longer day.

Here’s how the longer day works: The district gave students pretests and used them to group students with similar abilities. Students spent the first month of the school year practicing their routes to their extended day groups and getting to know their new teachers.

Now students spend two weeks in a reading group, then two weeks in a math group, or vice versa, and then are reorganized based on their performance. The district provided lessons and activities for teachers that relate to the district’s regular curriculum.

But there are no additional staff working during the extended day. So it takes everyone, from paraprofessionals to social workers to principals, to make this work.

On that recent Wednesday at Columbus East, VanderKuyl and Endre circulated among 16 fifth-graders as they read. This group spent the entire second grade learning remotely, and many now struggle to write their letters in a straight line or pay attention when a teacher speaks.

VanderKuyl stopped to help a student pronounce “prejudice,” while Endre urged a distracted student waving his pen in the air to follow him.

“Alright, who would like to share their summary out loud?” Endre asked.

He pressed his students to explain: “Who is the man you are talking about?” – And he checked to make sure they had the details right: “It wasn’t a school bus, was it? “It was a public bus.” Their goal this year is to increase student confidence and help more students read on their own at the fifth grade level.

It’s about “building that independence in reading,” Endre said. “Maybe not necessarily ‘Oh, I can read a whole fifth-grade text myself.’ But can I read and understand a paragraph?

A longer school day is not without challenges

While it may seem simple, adding 30 minutes to the school day presents many educational challenges.

Not all adults are math or reading specialists, so some staff need additional practice and training. Extended day groups are smaller than students’ usual classes, but they are still large enough that it can be challenging for teachers to provide individual attention. Some students are hungry and tired at the end of the day and miss coming home earlier.

“My brain is too trained!” said a fourth-grader with dark hair and white-framed glasses at nearby Sherlock Elementary School.

And some students struggle with the frequent regrouping. Columbus East, for example, has a program for students with emotional disabilities who typically learn in the same classroom all day. Some have found it challenging to be in a new environment with different peers and without their usual teacher.

On that recent Wednesday, a student sitting at the back table of Arlen Villeda’s fifth-grade math group sobbed as she struggled with the extended-day lesson. At first, the student loved the extra math lessons, Villeda later said, but as the classes became more difficult, the student’s frustration began to rise.

“I hate my life!” she cried. “Everyone is finished!”

Villeda tried to continue moving forward with the four students sitting in front of her, while a classroom assistant nudged the crying student to take a break.

Villeda has tried strategies shared by the student’s regular teacher, such as accompanying the student to the quiet, familiar corner of their classroom when they are feeling overwhelmed, but Villeda says it can be challenging to know exactly how to help. For some students, he said, “consistency really makes a big difference.”

“As with everything, we know that change will get easier as time goes on,” he said. “But honestly, I feel like this is still an adjustment period for us, for the teachers and the students.”

For now, Heppner, Columbus East’s principal, and others are reviewing how the extended day is going and making changes where necessary. In the future, for example, teachers will have more say in how students are grouped. And teachers can get rid of activities that were “a total bomb,” as Heppner said.

Mills, the union president, said she knows some teachers, especially those who don’t specialize in reading and math, are struggling with extra prep work. But she’s already seeing glimpses of progress. She feels that she can do more with her seventh graders in the smaller extended day groups, and some have made great progress in her reading.

“No doubt the first year will be a little crazy,” Mills said. “But if this is something we really want to do for our students, this is how it will have to be.”

chalk beat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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