Covid Data

By Abigail Bailey

The Phoenix Student Media

How has the coronavirus pandemic affected you?

That was the main question posed to students and staff at Palmetto Scholars Academy in an investigative report compiled by The Phoenix Newspaper. With the aid of a survey and COVID dashboards, statistics are now available to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the answers to the question above. But what does it all mean?

According to a survey conducted by the Journalism class, 53.3% of the 107 survey-takers would agree that their social lives were negatively affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Of those who didn’t choose this option, only 17.8% would say that their social life was impacted positively, with the remaining 29.9% falling somewhere in between. What this data shows is that if you placed 10 students in a room and lined them up, 5-6 of them would agree that their social life declined over the pandemic. Only 1-2 would say that they were impacted in a good way, and 3 wouldn’t fall into either of those categories, either saying that they weren’t affected at all or that it was a mixture of both good and bad. These answers likely stem from a lack of social interaction during the pandemic and the transition to virtual learning during some of the most influential years for many students. This theme can also be seen in other questions in the survey, where the majority of respondents would say that COVID has impacted their lives.

Another question on the survey asked whether students preferred in-person, virtual, or hybrid classes during the pandemic. Data from this question shows that the majority (61.7%) of respondents preferred in-person classes, with hybrid taking up second place at 25.2% and virtual coming last with 13.1%. This correlates with another question, which asked if COVID had impacted performance at school in a negative way. A close majority (53.3%) said yes, while the remaining 46.7% said it had not. These two questions show that virtual learning was not the best academic environment for most students, and that performance suffered because of it. Coupled with declining states of mental health and a general sense of disaster that the chaos of the pandemic instilled in most people, it’s a safe bet to say that COVID had severely damaging effects on both students and their ability to function in a school setting.

Now that PSA is back to in-person learning, the effects of the pandemic are beginning to wear off. However, there are several factors that still come into play when discussing the coronavirus and education. When polled, 83 out of 107 students (77.6%) said that they consistently wear a mask at school. Put into simpler terms, if you were to ask random students whether or not they wear a mask, 3 out of every 4 would say yes, with only 1 saying no. Also, despite being back to in-person learning, close contacts and quarantines have still ravaged the PSA community. An average student at PSA missed 8.64 days of school from the beginning of the 21-22 school year until March 14, 2022 due to COVID-19. However, this number is likely inaccurate because some students didn’t include the school-wide shutdown in January or close contacts into their counts. For these reasons, the average days missed due to COVID is thought to be much higher. With a tumultuous learning environment constantly throwing lesson plans and grades into instability, it’s not surprising that many students agreed with the statement that COVID has negatively impacted performance at school. As mentioned above, responses to this question indicated that a slight majority of students agreed that their performance at school was negatively affected by the pandemic. Whether in the classroom or on the screen, the numbers don’t lie - the coronavirus has caused drastic changes to the PSA community.

Masking. Academic performance. Days missed. Preferred learning environment. Social life. All of these questions seem so unrelated, so obscure to one another that it seems impossible that they could all be connected by one common thread: the COVID-19 pandemic. Stretching into its 2nd year around the globe, the pandemic is still affecting the lives of students at Palmetto Scholars Academy, whether in the classroom or in the world. With the world still caught in a cosmic struggle against the virus, we can only pose one question to ourselves:

How has the coronavirus pandemic affected you?