According to a recent study conducted by individuals at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, Wasatch County School District saw improved reading and math test scores through the pandemic in grades 3-8.
The study — called the Education Recovery Scorecard — compared National Assessment of Education Progress scores from 2019 to 2022 in counties across the state and nation that have submitted NAEP data from 2022. NAEP tests score both tests for the relevant grades between 0-500.
Through this process, the study determined that from 2019 to 2022, Wasatch students in grades 3-8 scored 2.62 higher on average in math and 2.39 higher in reading.
This contrasts with most districts within the state, including neighboring districts such as the Park City District, which saw scores drop an average of 2.11 in math and 3.57 in reading.
When discussing why WCSD’s scores increased while the majority in the state and nation decreased, WCSD Superintendent Paul Sweat attributed it to three reasons: He said the district worked to ensure kids could physically attend as much as possible, the district’s curriculum and goals remained intact, and efficiency and intentionality were stressed when students were taught through digital mediums.
Maintaining in-person education
The school board and administration shared a common goal to keep kids “in school as much as possible during the pandemic,” Sweat said. “We had really an entire district from top to bottom that was determined to do that.”
He said they relied on “common-sense decision-making” and kept politics out of the decision on whether or not to hold school in person.
“Decision-making was made with our county health department chair,” he said. “We worked very hard from our custodians to our school nurses to most especially our teachers to keep everything clean and sterilized.”
As school administrators worked to keep the district’s case-count low, the board continued to vote for in-person class.
Though Sweat remembers receiving plenty of criticism both urging him to close classes when they were open or open them when they were closed, he believes the district’s success in its goal to remain open as much as possible was paramount to its success in increasing scores through the pandemic.
Minimal change
“We didn’t change anything,” Sweat said, explaining the second method he believes helped lead to the district’s success. “We still taught in the same ways that we always teach and that’s with a heavy professional learning community philosophy where we have specific learning goals for our students.”
Part of pursuing these goals, he explained, is providing consistent feedback and assessment to assure teachers are aware of how their students are learning.
The district also didn’t alter its schedule in attempts to mitigate the pandemic’s social effect on students, rather relying on the consistency of the established schedule.
“We didn’t say, ‘OK, let’s take Fridays off, let’s have social day on this day,'” Sweat said. “We tried to keep school as normal as possible and we felt like that was best for our students’ education. It was also best for our students’ mental health.”
Efficient use of technology
Before the pandemic, Sweat explained, the district had worked to become “efficient and intentional” in its use of a digital curriculum.
Having established solid digital patterns before the pandemic helped the school district when the pandemic necessitated a heavier focus on digital learning.
“Devices are just devices, and if you don’t use them correctly, they’re not really going to help you much educationally,” Sweat said. “We felt like we had done the research and we had visited some of the top performing digital districts in the nation.”
When Gov. Gary Herbert determined schools should be closed in 2020, the district sent each of its students home with their school-issued digital devices.
“Usually in the whole digital education scope of things, your elementary kids don’t take their devices home,” Sweat explained. “When they got on the bus on that Friday afternoon after the government’s proclamation that school will be shut down, they all carried their iPad with them.”
Aside from his three main reasons, Sweat also mentioned a major component of the district’s ability to help students progress through the pandemic, one he said receives the majority of the credit — the teachers.
“Our teachers stuck with the things that we knew were working,” he said.
It was the teachers who managed to teach two classrooms — one digital and one physical — simultaneously, he explained, and it was the teachers that worked directly with their students during the pandemic.