JCPS ends another school year overcoming hurdles from COVID-19 pandemic with more looming

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Thursday marked the final day for students at Jefferson County Public Schools, and the 2021-22 school year won’t be one Superintendent Marty Pollio will forget soon.

The 2021-22 school year has “definitely been the most interesting and challenging” of Pollio’s career, he said during a news conference Thursday at Crosby Middle.

“I think most educators would say that, but I’m really proud of the way that JCPS worked our way through this year,” Pollio said.

The 2021-22 term marked the first time students were back in classrooms for the entire school year since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, barring a few days of nontraditional instruction amid surges in coronavirus cases.

The school year began with mandatory masking, though the Jefferson County Board of Education eventually gave Pollio authority to lift that requirement as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations dropped, and eventually included other coronavirus mitigation steps like “test to stay” and “test to play.”

While prevention measures were in place, JCPS had to navigate tens of thousands mandatory quarantines for students and staff who either tested positive for COVID-19 or were exposed. JCPS reported 13,229 positive cases of COVID-19 among students and 4,952 among staff and 36,076 quarantines for students and 973 for staff throughout the 2021-22 school year as of Thursday morning.

“I’m proud of what we did here in JCPS to make sure that we mitigated COVID in our schools, thousands and thousands of tests every single week,” Pollio said.

“Meanwhile, in probably the most significant staff shortage in education history all across the nation, our schools stepped up to meet that challenge, meet that need whether it was transportation, custodial staff, teaching staff, no matter what it was.”

The 2021-22 school year posed new challenges for JCPS as students grappled with lost classroom time because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a process Pollio has said could take Kentucky’s largest school district years to overcome.

While Pollio expressed some misgivings about using nationally normed Measures of Academic Progress testing for student proficiency in subjects, the diagnostic tests showed JCPS students, like others throughout the country, struggled academically because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Winter MAP results show that 45% of JCPS students tested at grade level in reading and 36% hit that mark in math.

“Our drop seemed to be less than some of our other peer cities,” Pollio said of the district’s MAP results, which showed progression from the fall to winter and winter to spring rounds. “… There's no way to replace what we do inside of a school building on a daily basis, the relationships, the supports the teaching.”

JCPS must also grapple with chronic absenteeism, which affects nearly a third of JCPS students. About 30,000 students missed at least 10% of instruction time at JCPS, Pollio said. A WDRB News analysis of MAP and attendance data found a correlation between schools with high rates of chronic absenteeism and lower diagnostic testing scores.

Pollio said he believed the district’s proposed revisions to it student assignment plan, which the school board is scheduled to consider during a special meeting 6 p.m. Wednesday, will help reverse that trend. District data show more than 22,000 JCPS students, or 22.8% of enrollment, were chronically absent in the 2018-19 school year, the last uninterrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Missing school is especially problematic for students who live far from their schools, primarily in the satellite resides areas in and near west Louisville. Crosby Middle in Middletown has about 150 students who are bused in from satellite resides zones, Pollio said.

“If they miss that bus, my question would be, how do they get out here?” he said. “How do they get out here without reliable transportation to make it to the other side of the city? I think they should have access to this wonderful school, without a doubt, and take advantage of that opportunity, but it should be the parent that has the opportunity to say, ‘I would rather my child be close to home.’”

The superintendent also wants to challenge schools, families and the Louisville community to help form solutions to the problem of students regularly missing classes.

About 6,500 seniors are poised to walk for graduation ceremonies in the days ahead, but some are still working to earn enough credits for their diplomas.

The district’s graduation rate for 2021-22 won’t be known until later, though Pollio said he expected it would hold steady compared to the 2020-21 school year. Last year’s four-year graduation rate at JCPS was 84.4%, according to state data.

Pollio said he expected college readiness for JCPS graduates will top 70% in 2022, “which is about a 20% growth for us over the past couple of years.”

“Those years were interrupted by COVID, so it’s hard to directly measure those years, but it will be the highest we’ve ever seen,” Pollio said.