Following COVID, 4 In 10 Baltimore Public High Students Earned Below A 1.0 GPA

Four in ten Baltimore public high school students earned a 1.0 GPA during the past school year.

Fox Baltimore’s “Project Baltimore” — which “examines the unique challenges that confront the Baltimore area’s public school systems” — discovered that nearly half of students in City Schools earned grade point averages below a D.

The outlet reported:

Project Baltimore obtained a chart assembled by Baltimore City Schools. The chart shows the average GPA for every high school grade in the city — freshman through senior. In the first three quarters of this past school year, according to the chart, 41% of all Baltimore City high school students, earned below a 1.0 grade point average. In other words, nearly half of the 20,500 public high school students in Baltimore earned less than a D average.

On the other end of the chart, 21 percent of city high school students earned a GPA of 3.0 or better; a B average. That’s about half as many who earned below a D. We can also see the district lost 706 high school students during the first three quarters of the year.

“It’s heartbreaking,” former Baltimore City Council President candidate Jovani Patterson told Fox. “If almost half of our kids are failing, what options do they have after high school? This is really disheartening. It’s sad to see this.”

COVID-19 and government lockdown policies have presented significant challenges to the United States — and particularly to students affected by school shutdowns.

For instance, a group of economists from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School forecasted that American economic productivity will be reduced by 3.6% over the next three decades as a result of school closures. Since labor productivity is “an integral component of the production of goods, services, and wealth in an economy,” students affected by “reduced education and lower productivity” will be a “drag on the future GDP of the United States for decades in the future.”

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently revealed that the number of emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts rose by 51% among teenage girls during 2020. Although the number of incidents dipped between spring 2019 and spring 2020, the rates began to drastically rise at the onset of COVID-19 and lockdowns. 

As The Daily Wire has reported, teachers unions are working to delay school reopenings. Emails between the American Federation of Teachers, the CDC, and the Biden administration indicated that the union lobbied to keep learning virtual. 

The New York Post detailed:

The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials — with Biden brass being looped in at the White House — in the days before the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening guidelines.

Emails show a call between Walensky and Weingarten — the former boss of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers — was arranged for Feb 7.

An October study involving more than 200,000 K-12 students found that COVID-19 transmission rate on campuses was negligible, with a transmission rate between students of 0.13%. The figure climbed to 0.24% for school staff.

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