The lockdowns with the pandemic have produced yet another disastrous consequence. Approximately 41 percent of public high school students in Baltimore, Maryland, have a below D grade point average, based upon school district data from the first three quarters of the 2020-2021 school year.
Public schools across Baltimore designed a chart that illustrates the GPA for every high school grade across the city. The data regarding GPAs was provided by Project Baltimore, which is an investigative reporting series operated by WBFF, a FOX affiliate.
According to a statement from Baltimore City Schools, the students’ low GPAs are merely “consistent with the experience of many school districts across the country” since the “pandemic created significant disruptions to student learning.” These significant disruptions were further magnified by the transition to online learning.
The statement also observed that numerous students’ GPAs began to decline precipitously as early as Summer 2020, at least when comparing current classroom performance to previous classroom performance.
The massive downturn in student GPAs began to occur after schools across the nation closed down and instituted online learning instead, all due to the COVID pandemic. Prior to the school closures, 24 percent of the high school students in Baltimore had a GPA below 1.0, as revealed by data from the 2019-2020 academic school year.
Jovani Patterson, who previously ran for Baltimore City Council President in 2020, proclaimed, “this is terrible,” adding that the massive increase in students with a GPA below 1.0 “is just further perpetuating a cycle of poverty, of despair.”
“If [nearly] half of our kids are failing,” then “what [possible] options do they have after high school?” Patterson persisted, noting that it is truly “sad’ and “really disheartening” to observe this downward trend in students’ scholastic performance. Extremely low GPAs significantly limit students’ opportunities for acceptance into various community colleges and universities across the country.
While 41 percent of students across public high schools in Baltimore have a GPA below 1.0, only 21 percent of students have a GPA of 3.0, which is a B average. Thus, nearly twice as many students are failing relative to students with a reasonably good enough GPA to enter universities post-high school.
