Seventeen months passed between the closure of schools in March 2020 and Gordon Allen’s return to learning inside East High School.
The Madison Metropolitan School District student senate president and East senior, who opted to finish the 2020-21 school year virtually rather than return via the district’s phased-in return to buildings, said this fall has presented some challenges for he and his classmates as they adapt back to the realities of in-person school.
“It’s a challenge to get back into a setting where you have strict deadlines again, it’s challenging to sit in one spot for a long period of time,” Allen said in a recent interview. “It’s a challenge to be around so much social activity when you’re used to being cooped up in your room on a computer.
“All of those were, I think, challenges for a lot of students.”
Despite some of the events that have made headlines this fall, Allen said he’s proud of how they’ve handled that onslaught of challenges, which he said “shows how adaptable and resilient the youth are.”
“We need to give students more credit for how well they navigated the transition back to in-person learning because I think we did pretty well,” he said. “The year 2021, it was a challenge, but we still prevail.”
For students, the year has been a whirlwind of experiences. It began with a continuation of the virtual learning that had begun in March 2020, with no MMSD buildings open except for select students with disabilities until mid-March.
As the district brought students back in phases by grade levels, more than 16,000 students returned in the spring to a hybrid schedule: four days a week for elementary school students and middle and high school students split into two cohorts, each attending two days a week. The rest continued to learn online.
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