With COVID-19 cases rising, a lot more students who have it, or have been exposed to it are being sent home to learn virtually for up to 10 days. The question is, are these students really learning when they are at home?

Wayne Hills freshman Matian Banusi says, “I didn’t learn anything besides I can’t trust myself.”

This is essentially saying that there is no way to actually confirm that students are staying on task and focusing at home.

The Wayne Hills website has a chart with the recent COVID-19 data. The table shows that as of January 6th, there are 99 students positive with COVID-19, and 59 other students quarantining. Wayne Hills has the most cases and quarantining students in the entire district as of now. These numbers have been increasing in every school since December, and it does not look to be slowing down anytime soon. This will most likely lead to virtual learning for all of the schools.

When asked if students actually learn as much from the online class, freshman Alex Cruz said, “Definitely not. Students have way too many distractions and privileges at home that they don’t in school which makes it harder to learn virtually.”

Changes need to be made to ensure that students are at least learning a little bit when they are participating in virtual school.

Karley Inwood, a freshman who has been quarantined already this year says, “In my opinion, it’s extremely hard to learn when you’re virtual. The main thing for me was the distractions and being able to easily go on my phone and ignore the google meet. In a classroom, you don’t get that distraction as much.”

According to CNBC, over 97% of educators noticed learning loss in their students over the times that they were virtual. Children were also found to be 57% behind on social-emotional progress. With the quickly spreading Omicron variant, changes need to be made for the virtual school that may be coming soon. Although, this will most likely be a temporary virtual learning situation.