Five years out from the initial COVID-19 school closures, the education research community faces the question of what lessons we can take from our pandemic era research into the future. For more than three years, the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) has partnered with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) to study the impacts of the pandemic on students in North Carolina and how state sponsored summer programs help students catch up academically and re-engage in school. In this blog, we reflect on key lessons from our research partnership in North Carolina and how we are already applying those lessons as our state recovers from the disruption created by Hurricane Helene. 

Lessons Learned from Pandemic Research 

• Focus on engagement. Like other researchers, we noticed a theme in our research indicating that the pandemic negatively affected student engagement with school. Absences, a primary indicator of engagement, continued to increase after students returned to in person schooling. Attendance continued to lag even as measures of academic growth began to rebound. Efforts to combat declining student engagement were limited by a lack of clear evidence-based interventions to improve attendance. Encouragingly, the summer programs we studied showed consistent positive effects on student engagement. The positive effects occurred even in cases where the programs were too short or not intense enough to create immediate impacts on academic outcomes.
• Data quality matters. Disruptive events like the pandemic make high quality data collection more challenging as the situation constantly evolves and the individuals charged with data collection face other pressing issues. In particular, we saw great challenges in collecting data on program implementation that would help us identify the differences in district-designed interventions and assess the impact of design decisions on overall program effectiveness.
• Partnerships are invaluable. EPIC’s long-standing partnership with NCDPI facilitated data access for quick response to pandemic-related challenges. As our partnership deepened through our work on the IES grant, we were better able to adapt research products to reach stakeholders in schools and in the statehouse. We were able to contextualize findings with administrative insights and generally partner to have greater impact. Our established partnership allows us to react to new situations and address research needs in real time. 

Carrying the Lessons Forward 

In September 2024, Hurricane Helene poured unprecedented amounts of rain on Western North Carolina leading to massive flooding and landslides. Over 100 North Carolinians died in the disaster, thousands were displaced from their homes, and schools were closed for more than a month in some districts. The educational disruption created by this natural disaster created many of the same concerns for students’ academic progress and engagement with school that were created by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the lessons we learned prepared us to respond to Hurricane Helene. 

To support students in districts that were closed for significant periods of time, the North Carolina state legislature allocated funding for a summer recovery program modeled after the summer programs put into place with pandemic relief funding. EPIC, along with new partners at Appalachian State University, will again partner with NCDPI and the NC Collaboratory to evaluate the implementation and impact of these new summer programs, focusing on student engagement and academic outcomes. We are drawing on our pandemic-era research experiences to use new strategies for data collection that will highlight what makes an effective summer program. These practices, coupled with our ongoing partnership with NCDPI, further our ongoing goal of supporting North Carolina’s students even—and especially — when another learning disruption comes.

Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages