Changes in School Climate During COVID-19

To assess how school climate changed during the pandemic, the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s (PDE’s) Office for Safe Schools partnered with REL Mid-Atlantic to conduct a study using data from PDE’s school climate survey. This survey, which is available on a voluntary basis to any school in the state, provides a way to track school climate and identify schools that need additional support to improve school climate.  The REL study analyzed changes in scores from a pre-pandemic year (2018/19) to the 2020/21 and 2021/22 school years. In a sample of Pennsylvania public schools that took the survey in all three years, students and teachers reported more positive perceptions of school climate in the 2020/21 school year, during hybrid and remote learning, compared to 2018/19 (before the pandemic) and 2021/22 (when schools had returned to fully in-person operation). This was an unexpected positive bump in the year in which schools experienced the most pandemic-related disruption. In contrast, school climate scores were steady across the years before COVID-19. The study also found no evidence of a significant decline in school climate scores between 2018/19 and 2021/22, suggesting the pandemic did not have a lasting negative effect on school climate in this sample of schools.  One important caveat of this study is that the sample of schools was small and not representative of the state of Pennsylvania. In the future, increasing the number of schools completing the school climate survey over multiple years will allow PDE to conduct more informative analyses of the relationship between school climate and other factors, such as interventions to improve school climate.