BUFFALO, N.Y. — A couple years removed from the height of the COVID pandemic, it’s still having an impact on students, especially the youngest populations.

Katie Holmberg, a teacher for 28 years, has seen the changes firsthand.

“Lots of laminating, lots of cutting things out, lots of organization,” said Holmberg as she got her classroom set up for a new batch of first-graders.

She knows that while there will be an adjustment for students as they roll back in, over the past few years, there’s been an adjustment for teachers too. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many kids were coming in missing a lot of executive functioning skills.

“Some have come in having trouble with taking turns, playing games, losing a game, any kind of cooperative work, teamwork [or] sharing teacher time,” said Holmberg.

Teachers like Holmberg have had to shift to playing games, doing role modeling and talking things over to get students where they need to be.

“These are the most important things because we cannot teach them to read, spell, do math unless they have all of these beginning skills behind them,” Holmberg added. 

But the impact does extend into those essential skills as well.

“I just found that my students needed more early literacy intervention after having missed so much of their early childhood schooling,” said Katie Williams, a literary specialist at the Elmwood Franklin School.

Williams makes sure the teachers here at Elmwood Franklin are up to date on best practices.

“When I went to school, [...] it was expose them to literacy, read books to them and they'll learn how to read by sort of osmosis," said Williams. "We know that through research, that's not how children learn how to read.” 

Things have shifted to more phonics patterns and words that don’t follow patterns. It's a shift to help teachers teach.

“The world moves very quickly now," said Williams. "I think COVID helped us realize that something can always come up or happen or there's always some sort of external forces at play.”

As Holmberg gets ready, she knows the pandemics effects on kids are wearing down.

“The children I have coming in are 6, so during the pandemic they were 2. I think that we are going through it more with maybe like the second-, third- and fourth-graders," she said. "They remember being home. They remember what it was like to leave school on a Friday in March.” 

That doesn’t mean other things won’t pop up.

“I would love to say that the next couple of years are going to be like, [...] we are done with the pandemic and we're starting off, but I'm not naive enough to think that that's true,” said Holmberg.

That’s why she’ll try to stay prepared, as best she can.

“I am hoping that I have a classroom full of 6-year-olds who love school and who love each other and respect each other and are kind to each other," she said. "And I'm hoping that they have fun.” 

It’s not just teachers and parents seeing the impacts of the pandemic.

Teachers say many are quick to keep their kids home for multiple days when they are sick.

They also don’t seem to expose their kids to technology as much as before, so using things like iPads is something teachers have to teach once again.