CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — With school districts seeing a new surge in COVID-19 cases, some might wonder if virtual learning will help or hinder students?
3News asked officials from our largest and smallest districts about what their statistics show. The goal was to analyze the failure rate from last year and compare it to this current year when students returned to the classroom.
School officials now have the statistics in hand to show what the difference is when it comes to the failure rates of their students who attended classes virtually last years versus their in classroom environment this year. Premont Superintendent Steve VanMatre said that his district's latest statistics that he has shows that in-classroom teaching is far better for students than learning virtually from home.
"The data clearly shows particularly with K-12 kids that staying at home there's an academic price," VanMatre said. "There's a social/emotional price that has to be paid that negatively impacts the child."
Early college high school students in Premont had a 63% failure rate last fall during 100% remote instruction. That failure rate dropped to around 25% this fall. For the rest of the students the district last year saw a failure rate of 30% versus 13% right now.
"The remote learning didn't work with our kids and quite frankly the instructors were not very skilled in it as well either," VanMatre said.
CCISD's student failure rate from last year to this year didn't show as big of a gap as in Premont. Deputy Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction for CCISD, Kimberly James, said the district knew it had challenges coming into this year.
James provided 3News with the statistics. At CCISD's 2 early college campuses the failure rate last year was 11.5%. This year it dropped to 8.5%. Now, when you compare the failure rate for the rest of the district over the second six weeks of the first semester, last year's failure rate was 27.8% and this year it's down to 18.9%
"We know that in person learning is the key to that. So, right now everyone is concerned about Omicron and how is that going to erode any progress," James said.
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