Educators share how disparities impact Oakland high schoolers during COVID-19 pandemic
By Brandy Collins, shades Magazine
As stories citing the impact of COVID-19 on education continue to be published and aired nationwide, several studies are finding that the pandemic has increased the disparities in our education systems.
One place where this holds true is Oakland, California.
During both the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, there were about 35,000 students enrolled in the Oakland Unified School District. Some of it educators are sharing their perspectives on what it has been like for educators and their students over the past 30-plus months.
“When COVID came, it poked a lot of holes or brought to light the discrepancies in how we educated, who we educated … the poor quality of education,” Bryan Massengale, Culture Keeper at Destiny Arts Center, said. “All of those issues came through. Everybody slowed down so that those things could be examined.”
A 2021 study measuring student success during the pandemic called “Challenging Success: Kids Under Pressure”, posed to students the following question: “Compared to the time before the coronavirus impacted your community, to what extent have your experiences in the following areas changed?” Challenge Success – a school reform nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education, in conjunction with NBC News – found 56% of students reported their stress had increased.
During the same year, another study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported seeing an increase in mental health issues among teens during the pandemic.
Educators in several schools in the East San Francisco Bay Area city say stressors in teens have manifested in different ways. Being distanced from on-site education and their peers – exasperated by a combination of social media, the increased isolation, lack of development and lack of mental wellness building – has created a communication divide among students.
Tatiana Church, a restorative justice educator at Oakland Tech High School, refers to the pandemic school years of 2020 and 2021 as “the black box period” – screens of black boxes where students’ faces were absent.
“I called it ‘the black box’ because I felt like most students weren’t on camera or didn’t have their cameras on or didn’t even have a picture,” Church said. “It would be the black box and their name.”
Elisha Davis, a physical education teacher also at Oakland Tech, explained the connection of social identity with the school was lacking and students were disengaged from activities that typically brought them enjoyment.
“The level of school spirit – like when you have rallies, when you have dances, when you have spirit weeks, when you have events – they’re not as engaged,” said Davis, who teaches incoming freshmen. “They’re not really thrilled. It feels like walking zombies.” She added it was difficult to teach students who appear to not care or are disengaged.
“So it makes it really tough and hard to identify how to help or fulfill a student” who seems to care only about “what’s on their phone.”
Church said another thing she noticed was that returning students also showed increased aggression to staff and one another.
“The level of fights and just lack of students being able to interact with each other in person, without it being a conflict or problem, definitely skyrocketed because they just weren’t around each other.”
The 108-year-old school district already has experienced several school shootings, larger enrollments, sexual assault accusations and protests due to district school closures since the beginning of the pandemic. This often-added pressure on educators feeling unsafe at their school sites, some even walking off the job.
“So there’s a shortage everywhere,” Davis agreed. “From teachers to security because staff feel like, ‘why aren’t we protected?’”
Masking the problem
Educators having to reintroduce students into the educational system during an ongoing pandemic proved to be taxing, Church said. In the beginning, mask mandates made it difficult to identify who a student was. “It was so strange going through the mental envisioning of what you thought people look like.”
Davis also found without facial recognition, it was more difficult to make connections.
“So when you see a kid on campus or outside of your class, you couldn’t talk to that child,” Davis said. “It was hard to do that and wanting to be six-to-12 feet from somebody … in addition to not even knowing who it was.”
Both Oakland Tech teachers said the incoming freshman class had not been on a school campus since the seventh grade, which caused a huge social and emotional jump to go from middle school to high school.
“Picture a seventh grader: COVID happens. Two years later, you’re back on campus. So, technically our ninth graders are seventh graders,”” Davis explained. The educational mindset of the incoming freshman is that of someone in the seventh grade.
Physically absent
Destiny Arts Center in downtown Oakland saw different challenges than those of Oakland Tech and some of the other district schools, Massengale said. Students at the arts, dance and movement-focused education campus faced more emotional challenges because they were unable to be together physically, which is key to this type of program.
“That [the physical distance] was really hard on the group because in the group we get really deep. So supporting them was different,” Massengale said about the smaller groups of students the Center works with. “As far as the teens, we have a teen hip hop class that kind of fell off. I think it went from maybe 15 down to about six.”
And because Zoom was the primary way to engage with others during the pandemic, it missed the mark with Destiny Arts students. As an organization it worked well for meetings and retaining staff, but it was difficult to teach a dance class using this method.
“If you’ve got 12 kids in front of you and your computer, each one of them is moving in a different position because the bandwidth is not continuous for every single computer,” Massengale said about one of the issues he faced.
Lessons learned
As newer studies continue to show the disparities in education during the last almost three years, there’s one that is less documented – the lessons educators learned from the pandemic.
“Just making more platforms for dialogue, concerns and help all of those things came out of Zoom,” Massengale said. Online video conferencing helped Destiny Arts’ students, who were normally into dance and movement, share more discussions and dialogue about what they were experiencing.
Oakland educators also shared how they were showing up in service of their students – not just as educators, but simply as caring humans – to help create a different reality for their charges and possibly change their perspectives.
The consistent care and emotional support of the educators made all the difference for the students to return to classes at Destiny Arts Center once the doors were reopened.
“What it [showing support] did do was [provided] more community building with the youth that stayed,” said Massengale, adding a bond was solidified for the ones who were taking classes and were able to continue working with Destiny Arts.
“So that particular set … those kids went through COVID together,” the school’s Culture Keeper explained. “They emotionally collapsed. Like the world collapsed on them and the adults that were trying to check up on them continuously, constantly and consistently … they [the students] showed up for that.” Despite the decrease in enrollment in the beginning to some of its programs, Destiny Arts was later able to increase in class offerings.
A new normal
Back at Oakland Tech, Davis’ PE class had no set curriculum. So she used her class period as an opportunity to build relationships with her students, referred to as “Mental Health Mondays.” During this time, she asked personal development questions like “What are your dreams?” One student reportedly said he was grateful because it was something he hadn’t been asked since he was younger.
Another change teachers saw during the pandemic was a new and/or renewed interest in social activism by students. One example of this was in the spring of 2020 when Oakland Tech students protested along with the rest of the world following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Church said students continued to rally in 2021 and after the schools returned fulltime to in-person education and in 2022, they protested to advocate for themselves and their own needs as students.
“There was a lot of organizing around like sexual assault and harassment and students organizing,” the restorative justice educator said.
During the periods of time when students and teachers were still required to mask up, Davis said she was able to recognize the mask as a visual representation of adolescent physical metamorphosis such as acne or getting braces.
“So the mask literally became their mask of their insecurities,” Davis explained. “They struggle with societal acceptance of the way that they look.”
Davis said transparency about her own experiences and struggles also helped students relate and find some acceptance with their image insecurities. “I would use my own personal struggle as a lesson.”
Despite all the challenges educators experienced, there were some valuable lessons learned that previous generations would not experience. The socialization of a school environment provides cognitive development skills, both positive and negative to their lives, but it takes a humanistic approach to make it successful.
“There’s a lack of learning about my students as humans,” the PE teacher said. “We’re really just focused on learning more about each other and culture building.”
Brandy Collins is a writer and a self-proclaimed Professional Aunty. She is a 2019-2020 Oakland Voices alumni of the Maynard Institute for Journalism and alumni of SF Grotto’s 2022 Rooted & Written fellowship. She’s a correspondent for Oakland Voices, and contributing writer for Oaklandside, Berkeleyside-Nosh, Chronicle Datebook, Thrillist, KCET, The Bold Italic and SF Weekly. Collins – who currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area – also has a drink named after her, is full of Scorpio magic, the funny one in the group chat.