Five years since start of pandemic, Aurora school districts talk technology, mental health and lessons learned

Chicago Tribune

26-03-2025

When students showed up to their junior year English class at East Aurora High School remotely in the fall of 2020, their teacher, Melinda Thomas, had not met them face-to-face. The seniors she'd met the year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this group of students was new to her.
As the year went on, she continued to face obstacles getting face-to-face interaction with her students.
'A lot of students were either reluctant to turn on their cameras or, for various reasons, you know, maybe their technology didn't allow them to turn on the cameras,' Thomas recalled.
She said sometimes she would work one-on-one with a student and ask them a question, and they would type a response instead of answer out loud – sometimes because their microphone didn't work, and sometimes because they didn't want to speak in the remote class.
Even when her school returned to in-person instruction, Thomas said it was difficult to communicate with students without seeing their facial expressions and difficult to convey her own emotions as she wore a mask herself.
Those days are over now, but some of the difficulties still persist, Thomas said. She said she sees more social anxiety and mental health issues in her classrooms, which she attributes to both the pandemic and to an increased prevalence of technology use. She still has trouble getting students to participate like they used to.
'We've always had students who said, 'I don't want to work in groups,'' Thomas said. 'That's not new. But, having students who won't talk to anyone else in the room, that's more unusual.'
A lot has changed in the five years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Life has largely returned to normal, as has classroom instruction in local schools. But, in many ways – from technology use to student mental health – Aurora-area districts say the pandemic forced great change in their schools, and accelerated changes that were already underway.
Technology was one of the first major shifts. To adapt to the district's remote learning policies, which lasted from the start of the pandemic to the following spring, East Aurora School District 131 had to rapidly play catch-up on technology access.
The district scrambled to get computers out to all middle school and high school students, said Jennifer Norrell, who was superintendent of the district through the pandemic up until earlier this month. Unlike some nearby districts, students didn't have 1:1 access to a district-provided computer.
East Aurora gave out physical packets of classwork to elementary school students, Norrell said. Federal pandemic relief funding not used for health and sanitation measures in the district immediately went toward buying iPads for elementary school students.
The district also began using Google Workspace, a system the district continues to use, according to Andrew Allen, East Aurora's executive director of information systems.
'Normally, that's kind of a slower rollout,' Norrell said of the transition, saying that the district would have ordinarily done a smaller pilot of the technology if it weren't for the pandemic. 'But, I mean, we couldn't. … That was the only way for them to teach with the kids.'
They also provided hotspots to students without reliable home internet access, another school policy that has continued, Allen said.
East Aurora's enrollment is roughly 12,000, down about 1,000 students since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education. Allen said just over 3% of students still use hotspots to complete their coursework at home.
At Indian Prairie School District 204, families were encouraged to enroll in T-Mobile's Project 10Million, which provides free internet to students, according to Rod Mack, the district's chief technology officer. Now, the district pays for a number of hotspots that students can use if they don't have reliable internet access at home.
Indian Prairie had recently shifted to 1:1 computer access before the pandemic, so they didn't have to make a total technology overhaul, Mack noted. But they have since moved to primarily submitting assignments online, Mack noted, a shift that might have had a greater impact on the staff than the students.
'Teachers learned that on the dime,' Mack told The Beacon-News. 'Students kind of grew up with it.'
He said his office devoted considerable time to helping teachers learn how to use technology for remote teaching – instruction that also had to be done virtually. Zoom, for example, was updated with new tools constantly, Mack said, which required teachers to learn new functionalities for remote classes.
Now that schools continue to use this technology, it can be used on an as-needed basis, noted the Indian Prairie Parents' Council, which oversees the district's Parent Teacher Associations and Parent Teacher Student Associations. It means the end-of-year school calendar is 'not as fluid as it used to be,' the Indian Prairie Parents' Council said in a statement to The Beacon-News, because snow days can be conducted remotely. But the downside is kids may not get to experience a true 'snow day,' they noted.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, school districts across the country received federal money from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, which is commonly referred to as ESSER funding, to help them operate during the pandemic. At Indian Prairie, the first installment of that funding went toward cleaning and social distancing efforts, said the district's Chief School Business Official Matthew Shipley.
Subsequent waves of federal funding went to capital projects and additional programming to support student learning for the more than 25,000 students in the district, according to data from ISBE. The district received around $13 million from 2021-2024, Shipley said, but it had to be spent by Sept. 30, 2024.
'There was always a challenge of, 'How do we provide programming that addresses, that directly addresses, the concerns we're having coming out of the COVID period – so, the specific learning recovery that needed to be accomplished – but also recognizing these funds were temporary,' Shipley said.
Indian Prairie reduced class sizes in kindergarten through second grade, for example, by hiring about 20 teachers across the district, Shipley said. Although the pandemic-era federal funding has run out, the district decided to continue with these class sizes using local funds to pay for the additional staff.
They also added summer school and after-school programs to catch students up academically to account for interruptions in learning from the pandemic, and offered 'take-home tote bags' for elementary school students over the summer with books, arts supplies and math resources. Those programs won't continue now that the COVID funds have expired.
West Aurora School District 129 also instituted new programming to address learning challenges during the pandemic, according to a district spokesperson. They created a supplemental program called Success Through Academic Recovery for high school students, offer small-group virtual tutoring and provide supplemental instruction in reading and math through an online program called iReady.
East Aurora, too, implemented summer school programs and new curriculum initiatives, Norrell said. They also used pandemic funds to build a new facility at their old district office called the Resilience Education Center. It opened in March 2024, according to the district. It has mental health counseling with social workers and clinicians, career programming – including a recording studio and broadcast journalism studio – and art and physical wellness offerings.
Norrell said the district was deliberate in using pandemic funding toward long-term investments like capital projects and training for teaching staff.
'By doing that … we were able to make sure that when the money went away, we didn't have to change gears,' Norrell said.
Instead of having to add a significant number of new staff, for example, Norrell said the district provided training to classroom staff to support student well-being.
'We needed everybody to be a social worker, so to speak,' Norrell said about the training given to teachers during the COVID period and the district's attempts to avoid what she called an 'intervention cliff.'
At East Aurora High School, the district also instituted 15-minute office hours in the morning once learning resumed in a hybrid format, according to Jonathan Simpson, who was the principal of East Aurora High School during the pandemic and now works as the principal of Allen Elementary. During office hours, students could get one-on-one academic help, talk to their social worker or speak with a coach or other staff member.
Addressing mental health challenges was top-of-mind for the districts, officials said, and a lasting legacy of the pandemic.
Indian Prairie recently began offering free after-school counseling via a grant from Endeavor Health, Shipley said.
Last year, West Aurora opened the Jeff Craig Family Resource Center, which provides physical and mental health services and a small food pantry for its students, in partnership with VNA Health Care. They are also in their third year of having 'restorative practice counselors,' who help with handling disciplinary issues and conflict resolution in the district, a district spokesperson said.
The causes of student mental health concerns upon returning to in-person classes were wide-ranging, Norrell said. Not only did students miss out on a year of socializing with their peers, some had lost loved ones to COVID and others had family who lost work.
'There was so much social-emotional wellness … that was equal to what we experienced in terms of learning loss,' Norrell said. She also noted the impact of racial tensions in 2020 following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 'That too was a huge part of the trauma.'
Nevertheless, officials at East Aurora said the return to in-person learning was a formative memory. Former East Aurora High School principal Simpson said the 2021 graduation – which the district held outside at Northern Illinois University's football field to comply with COVID restrictions – was a notable turning point in the return to normal.
'I can't even begin to describe it in words,' Simpson said. 'It will be an image I remember forever.'
Still, despite COVID-era programs and changes, some of which have continued through today, some issues have persisted.
Thomas, who continues to teach English at East Aurora High School, said distraction during class and attention span remains a problem in her classroom.
'We've always struggled with, 'OK, we're going to assign this book, and what do we do with the kids that don't read it?'' Thomas said. 'But, now, it's, it's almost like, 'OK, we're starting on the assumption that almost nobody is going to read it? So, how do we teach it instead?''
Thomas said teachers will sometimes show movies to accompany the books they read, or break up class time into multiple segments to keep students' attention, or do close readings of sections of books.
But it's not all due to the pandemic, she said.
'COVID exacerbated a lot of issues that we were already beginning to see,' she said. 'COVID sped up the process.'
But some district officials say the pandemic has offered some valuable lessons in adapting to technology – and adapting in general.
Mack said he doesn't think school districts would have been ready for the explosion of AI use otherwise.
'If AI happened before a pandemic, teachers would be like, 'Turn the internet off … I'm not ready to handle this,'' Mack said.
Going forward, the districts hope they'll be able to continue adapting, no matter what uncertainty they face.
'I think COVID taught us some valuable lessons,' Shipley said. 'Pivoting, and being flexible and ensuring we were able to meet the needs of our students and our families. … Hopefully, we kind of take some of (those) lessons learned and take some of that spirit, if you will, that allowed us to function during that time.'