WASATCH LEADS UTAH AS THE ONLY DISTRICT WITH LEARNING GAINS DURING COVID
With students and teachers heading back to the classroom, Wasatch County School District is excited to announce it was the only school district in Utah with gains in both Math and ELA (reading) learning during the three-year period defined by COVID, as reported in the recently-released Education Recovery Scorecard. A collaboration between Harvard and Stanford universities, the study provides the first nationwide district-level analysis of learning loss for grades three through eight, showing students in Wasatch experienced a gain of more than two months of learning in both areas.
That achievement was highlighted by The Salt Lake Tribune in the paper’s Sunday, July 30 edition, which focused on the ways Wasatch focused on maintaining learning targets for all students while managing the challenges families and staff faced during the pandemic.
In the article, Wasatch’s Assistant Superintendent, Dr. Garrick Peterson, and Superintendent Paul Sweat credit the District’s teachers and parents – along with the Board of Education – with maintaining a focus on achievement to ensure local students didn’t fall behind.
“They were determined that kids were going to learn on grade level, and they just went at it,” Dr. Peterson told The Tribune. “They figured out ways to provide additional support for those kids that were struggling, but a lot of it was being really determined that we were going to keep the bar where the bar was for the kids.”
“We didn’t change anything,” Superintendent Sweat told the paper. “Our learning targets, our learning goals, all the academic guidelines and goals that we had in place stayed exactly the same.”
Wasatch focused on supporting its teachers by leveraging its $6.2M in COVID relief funds to provide additional Professional Development and teacher training, and maintained its Board-directed commitment to keeping students and teachers in the classroom.
“The greatest factor that’s going to affect learning is always the teachers,” Dr. Peterson explained to The Tribune. “And we used that money to get our teachers really, really good at the basics of teaching and working together collaboratively.”
The median U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading, which means that in spring 2022, students were half a year behind students in the same grade in spring 2019. While Wasatch was the only district with a gain in math and reading learning, other Utah districts experienced anywhere from two to eight months of learning loss.
The following charts show where Wasatch placed among all districts in Utah for Math and ELA gains during the pandemic. The study projects a total lifetime economic loss of between $33M to $104M for districts in Utah where achievement fell dramatically.
“When a crisis like that hits, I think one of the biggest things you’re tempted to do is lower the bar for kids,” said Dr. Peterson. “Our teachers were very determined to not lower that bar.”
The study highlights Wasatch’s success in moving toward its three primary goals, which are:
• Become the highest-achieving district in the state as measured by national and state tests.
• Become a nationally recognized model PLC district.
• Have all secondary students involved in an activity that connects them to the school (extracurricular activities, clubs, houses, etc.)
