Head of School Feb 3, 2023

As many of you may have read, now three years in, elementary and secondary schools are still struggling with some of the residual effects of the pandemic.

In school districts across the country, teachers are reporting “skills gaps,” a lag in students’ academic skills that is particularly acute in schools that were unable to provide continuous in-person learning. Schools are also seeing lags in social skills because students who had to isolate during the pandemic missed out on some of the socialization activities that help build interpersonal skills. Finally, in many school communities, students are still experiencing anxiety or depression, engendered by long periods of isolation and worries about their health.

Here at Seven Hills, we were able to offer robust in-person learning throughout the pandemic, with only a couple of mandated hiatuses. For the most part, our students were able to be here in school, learning from their teachers and each other, with minimal disruptions.

Nevertheless, our students have not been immune to the effects of these highly unusual years. For some students, extended absences or the challenges associated with remote learning have caused some delays in the acquisition of phonics, decoding, or numeracy skills. For others, prolonged periods of isolation or the suspension of normal social activities seem to have slowed the development of interpersonal or behavioral skills, or, in some cases, caused lingering anxiety or depression.

In the wake of the pandemic, we have responded to these challenges as robustly as possible. To assist with our students’ mental health and wellness, we have developed a new relationship with MindPeace to provide, for students who need it, on-campus access to mental health professionals. We have also added a fifth guidance counselor to our counseling team. Department chair Angie Bielecki and her counseling colleagues have kept an especially watchful eye on our students’ social and emotional development, and, through our guidance and advisory programs, have introduced new lessons to help students acquire some of the social and self-regulation skills they might have missed over the last two years.

Similarly, to address some of the pandemic-related lags in academic and study skills, we have also added new personnel to our learning support team, one new full-time teacher for 2022-23 and three additional learning specialists for 2023-24. Led by Meredith Brown, our learning support team is providing individual and small group interventions for students who have experienced skills gaps. 

Moreover, the learning support team has begun to organize more extensive professional development for our teachers in all four divisions, including training in how to meet the needs of students with learning differences or with challenges in attention, memory, or executive functioning, or with anxiety or other mental health challenges that may affect their learning. This more extensive training program will include classroom coaching, when our learning specialists will visit classrooms to observe students and provide expert guidance to our teachers on how to restructure lessons to meet the needs of a wide range of learners. 

I am extremely grateful to our guidance and learning support teams who have collaborated so effectively to help us meet these unprecedented challenges.  

As an additional step, thanks to some temporary government funding made available through the EANS (Emergency Assistance to Non-Public Schools) program, we have secured the services of some educational consultants through the Hamilton County Education Services Center. Over the next several months, until we have our own new learning specialists on board, some educational consultants from the Hamilton County ESC will be on our campuses to observe in classrooms and to provide professional training and coaching to our teachers on how to respond to some of these new academic, social, or behavioral challenges. The team we have secured, who will be working with us for the remainder of this school year, includes consultants with expertise in learning differences and social and emotional skills, as well as mental health counselors and a school psychologist.

We are fortunate to be able to provide this additional training for our teachers. This interim training program — coupled with the expertise of our own learning support and guidance teams — will help our teachers guide their students through these unprecedented challenges.

Christopher P. Garten
Head of School

Click here for the COVID update for Feb. 3, 2023.
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