The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in historic drops in academic achievement for America’s students. However, not all of the pandemic’s effects on students were academic. COVID-19-related school closures, economic upheavals, isolation, and stress led to a rapid falloff in what had already been a decade-long decline in students’ mental health. In 2021, 42% of high school students felt persistently sad or hopeless, 29% experienced poor mental health, and 22% seriously considered attempting suicide (CDC, 2023).

Pulling our schools out of the devastating impact of the pandemic is a challenge we are all facing.  To do it, we need to marshal our collective talent, expertise, and knowledge to identify what is working to positively impact student learning.  The RESTART Network is harnessing this power, as well as research and evidence, authentic collaboration, and broad dissemination to identify and understand what is working across the U.S. to support students and educators.

Rural schools educate more than 9 million (19%) students in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics). Understanding the unique challenges facing rural education is an important step to achieving an equitable education recovery. As part of our research-practice-partnership to understand learning recovery programs across California’s nearly 1,000 districts, we will be launching a statewide survey of school districts in spring, 2023. In our previous work, we found that rural districts were less likely to respond to online surveys.