Five years after schools closed, what have we learned?

Mar. 16—GRAND FORKS — Five years ago, COVID-19 closed schools throughout the region. They stayed closed.

On Monday, March 16, 2020, students on either side of the Red River stayed home, following executive orders from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and North Dakota's then-Gov. Doug Burgum. What was intended as a few days' closure turned into months of remote learning and then another year of hybrid and distance programs.

To commemorate the anniversary of the first school closures, the Herald reached out to parents, educators and School Board members for what they took away from living through a pandemic and its aftermath. Here is what some of them said.

(Grand Forks Public Schools spokesperson Melissa Bakke said the district would not comment for the story after the Herald reached out to Superintendent Terry Brenner.)

Brian Loer speaks with the experience of a man who has been a high school principal for 16 years, and an educator in East Grand Forks for 32 years.

He does not mince words.

"It was an awful experience for everyone involved," said Loer, Senior High School's principal. "We forced kids out of the building, we forced everybody out of the building. We had to do a lot of different precautions and different things that upset the apple cart."

Remote and then hybrid classes were "just a royal pain," but Loer does believe there was one upside: it forced educators to learn how to teach distance learning.

Today, only around 20 of East Grand Forks' sixth- through 12th-graders attend school virtually, but schools and colleges like UND are increasingly adapting online learning as a model.

Owatonna Public Schools' online program, where East Grand Forks' students can enroll, is open to every student in Minnesota.

"It definitely is changing the way we educate everybody," Loer said.

Meredith Quinn, a former member of the advisory board for St. Michael's Catholic School, says she and her family had no trouble adapting when schools began formulating their social distancing and masking procedures ahead of the fall semester.

Her youngest daughter is "medically fragile," in her words, and the Quinns recognized the initial safety procedures prescribed by the Centers for Disease Control as essentially the same ones the family had been expected to follow visiting the hospital during cold and flu season.

So while she has sympathy for the parents who resisted the masking, she knows the school made the right decisions.

"You have a responsibility to everyone, and while everyone does get a voice, we cannot succumb to the loud minority," Quinn said.

That sympathy piece is important, though. Quinn's children attended both St. Michael's and Grand Forks Public Schools during the pandemic, so she saw all the different ways people viewed and dealt with the pandemic.

"COVID gave us a lot of perspectives, and our lasting change from this has been to recognize that other people can have a different view, and we want them to protect our position in this and we will respect theirs," Quinn said.

Dave Wheeler took away from COVID-19 all the ways that distance learning didn't work.

"Some of the kids who struggle to learn, really need a teacher, a para, somebody there for them on a daily basis to coach them through the work and support them in that way," he said.

Wheeler was an elementary school principal in Thompson, North Dakota, when the COVID pandemic began. A little more than two months later, he took a job as superintendent of Manvel Public Schools, enrollment 192.

On storm days, the state allows Wheeler to hold virtual learning days in lieu of makeup days. Wheeler picks the makeup days whenever he can.

"Your brightest kids, whether they're doing it online or or they're doing it at school, they're going to be fine," Wheeler said. "But protecting those kids that are most at risk really became a focus for us."

When he's not making sure his students are getting into school, he's making sure there are people there to teach them.

In 2019, in Thompson, eight or 10 people would apply for an open job, he said; now, he's excited to get one or two.

The first weeks and months of the pandemic was actually a positive experience for her daughters, Jenni Gibbs thinks.

St. Michael's would deliver sack lunches to their home during remote schooling, with little supportive notes inside written by kitchen staff.

"We still felt very connected to the school during that time," Gibbs said.

Going back to school in the fall, in retrospect, was the harder part. Classes were stripped down and schedules structured to minimize students' exposure.

One of her kids didn't go on a regularly scheduled class trip; her other daughter didn't get to take art class.

With fewer resources, her kids, and others' struggled to keep up academically; physically isolated, they missed memories and important parts of growing up.

Gibbs thinks that older students, for the most part, got through COVID-19 relatively unscathed. It's the younger kids, she thinks, that will carry the pandemic and the years that followed for longer.

"I think that will linger. They'll carry bits and pieces of it," she said.

For Cynthia Shabb, we're still living in the era that COVID ushered in.

She remembers sitting in socially-distanced Grand Forks School Board meetings, feeling the anxiety of trying to make the right decisions about when students could go back into the classroom, what precautions the district had to take regarding COVID.

At the same time, some community members were increasingly rejecting the scientific guidance issued by public health agencies in lieu of disinformation.

"I think about the hours we spent listening to people talk about how we were killing their children with masks," Shabb said. "That's pretty hard, to sit there through that when you're just trying to do your best."

Shabb watched the COVID-19 pandemic expose many fissures that had gone unnoticed before the pandemic struck. She would hear about kids Zooming into virtual classrooms while taking care of their younger siblings, since their parents had to work and there was no daycare.

For Shabb, who declined to run for reelection to the School Board in 2024, those fissures — socioeconomic and cultural — are the legacy of the pandemic.

"The judgment that we have with other people now, it became so highly politicized, and we haven't really ever gotten away from that," she said. "It's not all COVID-related, but it certainly doesn't help."