Succumbing, Surviving, and Thriving: The Development of Low-Income Students in the Long Shadow of COVID-19

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Project Summary The COVID-19 pandemic poses a sustained threat to the wellbeing of all children, but particularly for low- income, racially minoritized, and special needs subgroups. This unpredictable, complex, racialized crisis has exposed millions of children to massive disruptions of their educational contexts when schools closed, with growing accounts of associated learning loss, social isolation, and emotional distress. Scholars have mobilized to study the pandemic, yet much of this emerging research draws on small, relatively homogeneous (mostly white) samples, limiting applicability to the subgroups most affected by this pandemic and its multisystem disruptions (e.g., Latinx [including ELL]; Black; children with special needs). Little of this new research contains extensive, repeated measures of pre-COVID-19 child functioning. Nor does it capture the multisystem culturally-embedded protective factors likely to influence short- and longer-term developmental recovery for the current US child population. Thus, there is an urgent need for culturally-relevant, longitudinal research spanning the period from before the pandemic and continuing, on diverse samples of children to inform current and future pandemic preparation and response efforts. The proposed project fills this gap by capturing children’s pre-k-1st grade pre-pandemic functioning and following them through - and well beyond - the period of widespread quarantines and school closures, as they enter adolescence. Leveraging data from an existing, ongoing, large, highly diverse sample of low-income students in Title I schools who have been followed since they were preschoolers in 2016, the proposed study will (Aim 1a) determine the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions when schools were closed on children’s short-term outcomes in the years immediately following school reopening (3rd-5th grade); (Aim 1b) investigate how short-term outcomes are exacerbated or mitigated by individual differences in children’s pre-COVID-19 strengths and vulnerabilities; (Aim 2a) explore the longer- term impacts of disruption on development by adding repeated measurement of children’s outcomes in the longer term following school reopening, through 9th grade; and (2b) identify the most potent features of children’s post-school-reopening family, school, and peer contexts – including culturally-embedded family factors – that mitigate the longer-term impacts (through 9th grade) of COVID-19 disruption on recovery of consequential early adolescent outcomes, including mental health. By determining effects of educational and family-based disruptions during school closures, and family disruptions that continue after schools reopened, on varying developmental trajectories, and identifying culturally-embedded protective factors, this project moves well beyond identifying risk groups to specifying shared and unique aspects of children’s family, school, and peer contexts that promote long-term resilience in a highly diverse sample. It thus holds tremendous promise for advancing knowledge to improve public health and inform current and future disaster preparation, relief, and recovery efforts tailored to children especially susceptible to negative outcomes.