School Mask Mandates Have Lifted, but Covid Isn’t Over for Students and Teachers

“I figure, you wouldn’t ask for a hug or a high five if you really didn’t need it,” she said.

And for Ms. Barros in Tulsa, the work looks like this: grading assignments on Sundays, spending her planning periods in meetings with families whose children are struggling and mentoring a new teacher partly to supplement her comparatively low Oklahoma teacher’s salary.

She hopes she’s pushed past the worst of her exhaustion — when she was out sick for seven school days with Covid in January, wracked with guilt, waking up each morning to record a video lesson so her students wouldn’t fall behind.

Now the end of the school year feels within reach. Come fall, she won’t be as in the dark about where her students are, academically and emotionally, as she was this year.

Other challenges aren’t going away. Ms. Barros goes without adequate staffing support even in a normal year, helping translate for the school’s Spanish-speaking families as one of the few bilingual staff members. Her school also serves a disproportionately high share of students with disabilities. Without other teachers or aides in the room to help, it’s Ms. Barros who slips a pillow under the foot of a student with autism to soften the sound of his tapping foot, and Ms. Barros who pulls aside a student with dyslexia to read tricky passages aloud.

After months back together in the school building, she’s seen her students make real progress — reading full chapter books, building friendships with classmates. But they’re still dealing with the ramifications of the Covid years. It will take a wider network of support to truly give her students what they need, Ms. Barros says. To her, that includes greater investment in Tulsa’s under-resourced neighborhoods, stronger bonds between schools and families and more counselors and therapists.

“We haven’t seen fine, ever,” she said. Pre-pandemic, many of the students with disabilities and students of color at her school were “already so underserved.”

“I feel like I’m a piece of the puzzle, and I see myself as a piece of the puzzle,” Ms. Barros said. “And sometimes it’s like, damn, some of those pieces are taking a long time to get here.”