Remote learning was a disaster for hundreds of thousands of students in danger of dropping out. Now Corey Byrd and others like him are struggling to get back on track.
, school officials had fanned out over the summer to reestablish contact with some of those kids. And they had done so in Baltimore, where spikes in absenteeism were particularly acute among students with disabilities and those living in poverty. Almost a third of Renaissance Academy’s student body was on the same outreach list as Corey.
The answer depended on what lay ahead for students like Corey, who walked down the hallway — past Woodhouse as she greeted her returning students amid the roar of industrial fans brought in to offset a broken air-conditioning system — and into his first-period algebra class. Doreen Andrews, the instructor, knew Corey well: He had failed her class once before.“You know my last name,” he said.“Get to be my age, and we’ll talk about it,” Andrews said.Corey smiled. “Because I was a nuisance.
Corey had never been in that kind of trouble. But Robbie knew from painful experience how easy it was for young men in West Baltimore to stray, and she no longer relished the idea of her grandson spending much time outside her walls. Corey had gamely accepted one of the 44,000 laptop computers distributed by the city, and Robbie dutifully roused him from bed on school days. But for Corey, whose repartee and readiness to chase distractions by turns charmed and exasperated his teachers, learning over a screen was an especially bad fit.
Zykiah Armstead, a Renaissance Academy student whose name was on the same outreach list as Corey’s, found it hard to establish a remote education routine as her family moved repeatedly between relatives’ houses during the pandemic. She now shared a home with 10 people, including her two children, born in 2020 and 2021.
He and Charles knew companies often favored candidates with high school diplomas for those jobs. And they knew they wanted no part of an industry that thrived around them: West Baltimore’s drug trade, where entry-level positions required no qualifications but were both dangerous and — despite what glamorized versions of street life portrayed — not especiallyThe young men sat side by side, staring at the ground.
Byrd, a temporary worker on the school’s support staff who is not related to Corey, varied the tenor of her enforcement efforts in the central hallway.“Your face is beautiful. I just would prefer if it was underneath a mask.” Corey sat at the back of math class during that episode, silently rolling a green rubber ball back and forth on his desk. He was rarely the most obvious troublemaker in a room but was easily distracted — cutting class, leaving school in the middle of the day, bantering with anyone who wandered into his line of sight. He made an inordinate number of trips to the bathroom and spent a good part of those trips meandering in the halls, peeking into other classes.
A month had now passed, and no returning students had tested positive for the virus. The situation at Renaissance mirrored an encouraging picture across Baltimore’s public school system, where just several hundred cases had been identified so far among nearly 88,000 students and staffers. And it worried Douglas Flowers, the school’s social and emotional learning specialist. But it did not surprise him.
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