TUNKHANNOCK, Pa. — Stuck inside, falling behind in classes, feeling depressed and anxious—those are just some of the struggles students in the Tunkhannock Area School District have been dealing with for the better part of a year.
"There's actually some classes where they're there for like two to three minutes, and then they're like, 'OK, I think you got everything,'" said eighth-grader Jayden Cavanaugh.
"Most the time, I'm sitting in my room. I'm all alone while I'm trying to do stuff. I like to be around people. I'm a very social person, so I like to be around people my age, and it just really helps," eighth-grader Noah Knight said.
It's taking a toll on entire families, too.
"The platform isn't conducive for a 9-year-old to be able to go through it on their own, so you're sitting there with your child, trying to teach them, both getting frustrated. And, you know, ends up in the evening when you're supposed to be enjoying your family, you're now all kind of mad at each other, or you're just exhausted," said Lynelle Farber, parent to a third-grader.
"On Monday, he and I sat at the kitchen table for at least 14 hours doing schoolwork, and he's still not caught up. It's so hard to stay caught up because he's self-teaching himself. When he's in class for 10 minutes, he's getting instruction and told to get on a Chromebook," said Jeanette Porcoro, parent of an eighth-grader.
Both students and parents we talked with feel like their voices aren't being heard.
"Something that made me kind of angry was at the last school board meeting when some of the parents came up to talk about like what they thought was important about it and stuff, and like raise their concerns. A couple of school board members, when they like, when to sit back down were shaking their heads, and they just, they seemed like it wasn't as important to them as it should have been," said eighth-grader Lauren Bulkley.
"Even when we voice our opinion, we're just met with, instead of solutions, we're met with barriers. And we shouldn't be looking at it that way; we need to look at how we can make this work instead of how we can't," Shirah Knight, parent to an eighth-grader, said.
"You hear a lot of times the rhetoric of 'follow the science.' Well, the numbers are not supporting the kids being out of school right now," parent Jennifer Brody said.
Tunkhannock Area Superintendent Heather McPherson says the reason for the delay is threefold:
- The district is waiting for the level of community spread to be consistently lower in the area,
- There is a foot and a half of snow covering all the outdoor spaces that could potentially be used for classes,
- More federal money is likely on the way.
A plan will be presented at the next school board meeting on Thursday.