Back to Normal: How Daily Attendance is Slowly Increasing at Bryn Mawr

By Gabrielle W. '22

With COVID-19 still spreading rapidly, students across the nation have been stuck at home, learning virtually. Leaders of school districts are eager to get students back into the classroom safely to return to some semblance of traditional classroom education. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools can only accommodate small groups of their students at a time. School administrators hope that more students can gradually return to in-person learning as vaccines for COVID-19 continue to be administered nationwide. A select number of schools began implementing the hybrid method at the start of the school year as students yearn for a pre-COVID style of learning. Students across the country feel like their academic performance has declined due to a disconnect from school. Despite many safety concerns for both teachers and students, parents continue to protest online learning, begging educators to open the door to their students. As a result, some schools chose to offer in-person learning from the start to avoid the possibility of learning deficiencies developing schoolwide.

Bryn Mawr began implementing the hybrid method at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, occasionally transitioning to distance learning when necessary, depending on COVID-19 spread. Bryn Mawr first offered hybrid learning in cohorts. Students were assigned a small group and could come to school when their grade and group were scheduled to be on campus. Unfortunately, few students in the Upper School chose to return to school. Since November, positive COVID case rates in Maryland have declined, so more students have gradually returned to and are enjoying school in person, even for a few days out of each week. For safety precautions, other students choose to stay home and continue to attend classes virtually.

Despite Bryn Mawr’s safety-focused modified in-person learning format, class sizes were much smaller than expected. In January, about half of the Upper School families decided to keep their students at home to attend school virtually. Accompanying the A and B cohorts, only a quarter of students were on campus daily. When the number of students did not meet the capacity that Upper School administrators had planned for, they invited 9th and 10th graders to return to campus daily, hoping that it would encourage more students to return to campus for in-person lessons. Initially, senior class advisors advisors asked how they felt about possibly returning to campus for daily in-person instruction. However, most seniors declined to return, so Upper School administrators decided to invite 10th grade students to attend in-person school daily instead. 

Although 9th and 10th graders can attend school in-person every day, some students in those grades still attend school following the A and B cohort schedule; class sizes vary as a result. About a third of the junior class attends school in-person, and the senior class attendance is much lower. Students from both the freshmen and sophomore classes say that eliminating groups for both grades has not encouraged many students to switch their learning formats. Makenna B. ’23 says, "I think the amount of people choosing to come to school is mostly similar, a few people switched to in-person, and a few switched to distance learning, but overall it [daily attendance] mostly stayed the same. It definitely feels like there are more people at school, which is nice, but that’s because A and B group are all going together every day." Few students who initially chose distance learning at the beginning of the school year have returned to campus. Hopefully, more students will start attending in-person lessons as more COVID-19 vaccines are administered, and it becomes safer for more students to return to campus.