Back to School and Back to Normal. Or at Least Close Enough.

This article is part of our Learning special report about how the pandemic has continued to change how we approach education.

For the last few years, each “back to school” has been radically different.

September 2019 was the last return to school before Covid-19 arrived and sent students home, teachers scrambling and classes fully online. In September 2020, back to school meant logging into virtual class as the world awaited a return to normal. In September 2021, after months of political infighting, students nationwide returned to classrooms, many for the first time since March 2020.

And this fall? Students and teachers are again returning to campus, but this time in a new environment — in which Covid remains an ever-present threat, but no longer frames our everyday lives — as the country collectively adjusts to a new normal.

Last year, in the first days of school, we sent reporters across the country to see how students were feeling about returning. This year, as school began, we sent reporters into the field again, to see how much — or how little — has changed, and to answer a simple yet pivotal question: Where are we now? — Megan McCrea

Liberty Bell Junior-Senior High School, Winthrop, Wash.

Fifteen seniors saunter into Room 126, where hand-painted mountains on a wall evoke the North Cascades outside. The teens are dressed up (it’s picture day), and sipping iced drinks. The teacher, Elyse Darwood, chats with a student about ranching — she and her husband own 85 horses and mules here in the Methow (pronounced MET-how) Valley — then strolls to the light switches.

“How do we feel about the mood lighting in here? Is it kind of nice? A little too sleepy?” she asks. The consensus: dim.

The class is “Current World Problems.” But Mrs. Darwood tells them, “I see this as kind of Adulting 101.”

“This is the last stop of your public education experience,” she continues. She wants them “empowered to ask questions and be curious and challenge the things people tell you.”

It’s the third day of school, and there are nods to Covid. A few students wear masks. At jazz band practice, the teacher, Eva Aneshansley, mindful of spittle, slides a trash can beside a trumpeter.

But mostly, the fizzle and fun of school is back. Angel Arellano, 17, brings in a watermelon he carved into a kind of bob with bangs for others to try on.

At lunch, arts kids sprawl in the open area where the main hallways converge, a favored socializing spot. A year ago, it was vacant except for fans circulating air. Now, students eat nachos and puzzle over the new Wednesday schedule (classes are 29 minutes long).

In other words, school is “freakishly uneventful,” says Crosby Carpenter, the principal, a cool presence in white-soled Nikes. He no longer frets about physical contact as he fist-bumps students entering the building.

Back in Room 126, Mrs. Darwood gives a brainstorming prompt: “What could be possible in our community, our state, in our country, in our world, in our galaxy? What if. …?”

“What if climate change didn’t exist?” says one student. “What if there weren’t different parties, Republican and Democrat?” says another. What if cost weren’t an issue for college? If there were no school shootings? No racism? No genders?

Ideas fly. But Mrs. Darwood wants to hear from everyone. She gazes at a student with a mop of auburn hair and a Scooby-Doo sticker on his tablet and asks, “Isaiah?”

Isaiah Stoothoff, 17, suddenly looks up, then offers, “What if the world was flat?” — Laura Pappano

Billings West High School, Billings, Mont.

It’s a half-hour before kickoff between the hometown Billings, Mont., West High Golden Bears and the Gallatin High Raptors from Bozeman. Knots of teens are milling around the outskirts of the football field at Daylis Stadium, an aging metal-bleacher venue shared by the three public high schools in Montana’s largest city.

While the players run final practice plays on this cool, late-summer evening, the 100-plus members of the West High pep band blast a brassy rendition of the Green Day hit “Holiday.” Three drum majors — Carly Jensen, 18; Hanna Wildin, 17; and Emily Pfeffer, 17 — direct the band with exaggerated arm movements and high energy.

For the first time since the pandemic began, the band is playing for an actual crowd at a football game. Last season, the pep washed over rows of empty seats. Each player and band member could invite two parents, but there were no faithful fans or students wearing face paint. Without a student section to cheer, the team “had to learn to be more peppy,” Emily says.

And last season, the brass and woodwind instruments sported cloth masks, a somewhat futile safety measure. Ms. Jensen, who plays baritone sax, explains that, in a woodwind instrument like hers, most of the air comes out through the keys, not the bell. The band members also spread out in the bleachers. “The distancing was a good idea,” she adds. “Spit does travel.”

When the Billings school superintendent dropped the local mask mandate in early February 2022 — weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its own guidelines — the instruments shed their masks, too. Tonight, the entire stadium looks like a scene from prepandemic times, with few masks in sight and no social distancing beyond the usual high school stratifications. “It feels like a normal football game,” Ms. Jensen says.

The Golden Bears beat the Raptors 16-15, and the band played on. — Chris Woolston

MCA Academy, Miami

After lunch, the sixth grade gathers in Adrienne Curson’s classroom for social studies. Laptops covered with stickers flip open; screens light up. As the children settle in, Ms. Curson lays out the day’s lesson: “The First Amendment” “Why would the government want to stop you from reading whatever you want?”

MCA is a private school in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. Exceptionally small, the student body includes native French, Spanish and Portuguese speakers. Ms. Curson, who has taught here for 13 years, loves middle school because the children are in a moment of in-betweenness.

“Have you ever read a book you loved?” she asks the 11-year-olds.

“‘Raid of No Return,’” says Grégoire Lacheteau, who sits at the head of the table, “I’m a history buff.”

Daisy Benz, blonde and freckled, shoots up her hand. “My favorite is ‘Bridge to Terabithia.’ It was magical,” she says.

Sebastian Roelandse fidgets with headphones and bashfully whispers, “‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid.’” A murmur of agreement goes around the room.

“Some of the most important books when you are growing up allow you to express emotions and understand yourself,” explains Ms. Curson. They might be “something that catches your imagination and makes you feel empowered or gives you a sense of confidence.”

Sebastian shifts in his seat.

Ms. Curson continues, “In school, you are exposed to a lot of different kinds of books that open your mind to different things. So I am very worried — and a lot of other people are worried, too — that somebody may take away our right to decide what books are available to us.”

Grégoire raises his hand again and says that it reminds him of the book burnings in Nazi Germany. “That is a lot of history disappearing.”

Ms. Curson smiles, “You guys blow me away with how much you know.” — Patricia Alfonso Tortolani

Patrick Henry High School, Minneapolis

On a warm Tuesday afternoon, in a North Minneapolis neighborhood, four friends sit around a classroom table, nodding in agreement: Their last year of high school better be fun.

For these seniors — Vernon Andrews, Khristian Davis, Joshua Murff and Damiana Sharp, all 17 — this is their last first day at Patrick Henry High School, capping an experience shaped by the pandemic, protests and a teachers’ strike. Inside the red brick building, over 800 students stroll past cherry-red lockers and a freshly painted mural, where the words “Empowered. Joyful. Strong” hover above the Minneapolis skyline.

The four friends, along with a handful of classmates, are waiting for the bell marking the end of an advisory hour for the internship and project-based Community Connected Academy.

Khristian has one goal: “Just to finish with great memories.” For Damiana: “I just want to finish real bad.”

High school has been rough, they say. Joshua feels like he missed out on his “whole high school experience.” Damiana likens it to “the Great Depression.”

Since the spring of their freshman year in 2020, when Covid hit, the students have spent long stretches out of school — remote learning or quarantining — and weathered the cancellation of prom, homecoming and football games. This spring was the three-week teachers strike, sparked by demands including smaller class sizes and higher wages, along with calls for increased work force diversity and better student mental health resources, to address issues that came to the forefront after the police killing of George Floyd. After the strike, the students say, some teachers never came back.

Now, the teenagers want to build back the “vibe” that they had felt before the pandemic. “Everything was good freshman year,” Vernon says. “It felt like a real high school freshman year,” Joshua adds.

But the friends say they are happy to be back at school, and they have a plan: join the senior committee to help organize dances, pep rallies, and generally galvanize the morale of the class of 2023.

“So we can plan fun activities,” Joshua says. “Bring some school spirit.”

“Some life!” Vernon chimes in. — Alex V. Cipolle

Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Afternoon sunlight pours through large windows, glinting off dozens of instruments as a semicircle of students rehearse for Symphonic Band.

Many reported that last year meant practicing alone, attracting the ire of neighbors who weren’t keen on hearing, say, a bass trombone over and over.

But now, in their new building, the rehearsal hall walls are filled with angles to amplify even the softest sound.

Soon, the air is alive with the deep thump of the tuba, the tiny tinkle of the triangle and everything in between, melting into a soothing melody.

After a while, the conductor, Scott Jones, stops them, the thin point of his baton dropping below his wire-frame glasses.

Did you hear that? He asks. He explains what was off, and the band tries again.

For Alessandro Nocera, 20, a trumpeter, the class mirrors his own struggle to create harmony with so many moving pieces.

After this class, he will head to marching band. It’s a discipline that requires precision: Recently, while practicing a formation that requires band members to cross paths, he tried to give another player a fist bump. Instead, he got a face bump, and his trumpet chipped his tooth.

After practice, he will spend another hour memorizing new marching band music. Then he might have some time to do homework for his four other classes. On weekends, if kickoff is at noon, band members have to show up at 5:30 a.m.

“So far, this semester has been pretty ruthless. Everything is hitting me like a truck. It feels like I’m drowning a lot of the time,” he says. But he finds comfort in his strong friend group. “Even though marching band is so much, you build this community. It’s like a brotherhood.” — Lucia Walinchus

Northwest High School, Cedar Hill, Mo.

With homecoming in mid-October, planning is in high gear at Northwest High School in Cedar Hill, Mo., a St. Louis suburb where the Lions’ 0-3 record early in the school year doesn’t seem to have dampened enthusiasm in a recent student council session. The divider splitting a large classroom is pushed back, but dozens of students squeeze onto one side, abuzz with excitement.

“The question of the day is, give us a song for the court to dance to,” the student council adviser, Lana Romaine, calls over the crowd.

The council needs to choose music to play as candidates for homecoming king and queen walk down the red carpet, and a slower song for the king and queen’s first dance.

The theme is “Red Carpet Romance” (Hollywood, for short). Suggestions flood in fast. Soon, Ms. Romaine hands off D.J. duty to the student council vice president, Evelyn Bueter, who cycles rapid-fire through a varied discography including “Time in a Bottle” by Jim Croce, and “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper.

“It takes a whole class period just to get a song because they all have their own ideas,” Ms. Romaine says.

The energy is palpable as several students pair off to test the dance songs, while the rest debate their merits. Things largely seem back to prepandemic times here, though there are some residual effects, including an amplified sense of school spirit. Northwest High is considering holding its first homecoming parade in 24 years and will, like last year, host the dance outdoors.

“I think it was just a good experience for students,” says Evelyn, 17, a senior. “It was something new for them to try.”

And, thanks to a chaotic consensus near the end of class, they will have two songs cued up, “This Town” by Niall Horan for the red-carpet walk and, for the all-important first dance — Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” — Charlene Oldham

Brooklyn Science and Engineering Academy, Brooklyn, N.Y.

It’s Wednesday morning, and inside the science teacher Michelle Jennings’s classroom at Brooklyn Science and Engineering Academy in East Flatbush, 27 sixth graders are deep into ‘Circle’ class. They’re throwing a ball to one another, and thinking hard about the questions written on it.

One student catches the ball and reads the prompt: “What’s the nicest thing someone’s ever done for you?” He shares a story, remembering when his mother’s work hours were cut and money was “tight.” But when his birthday arrived, she bought him a game he had really wanted and he knew, he says, that it had been hard for her.

On the blackboard is a list of colors: red, yellow, purple, orange, pink, blue, black and green. Ms. Jennings asks the students to choose a color representing their current feeling, or a significant memory.

Tristan Cole, 11, pipes up, “I feel yellow because I am so happy to be back at school.” Many of the children smile and nod in agreement.

Later, Ms. Jennings asks everyone to write down five songs that have meaning to them. Thiandra Fordyce, 11, chooses “Happy Place” by Lyrikal, while a classmate picks a duet by Brandy Norwood and Monica Denise Arnold, “The Boy Is Mine,” because her mother plays it often. When she plays the song on Ms. Jennings’ computer, her classmates excitedly start singing in unison.

The Brooklyn Science principal Angela DeFilippis, explains that she and her staff work hard to make the school feel like a student’s second home. “We have built ‘Circles’ classes into the program so that students can make connections with one another,”  she says.

The school has also set up programs, trips and activities to help the students make up for the experiences they had missed. For their part, the students are adjusting better than expected, showing up with an earnest desire to be present and learn.

As the guidance counselor Raina Mapp says, “they know how to school again.” — Pierre-Antoine Louis

Vare-Washington Elementary School, Philadelphia

In Jacqueline Bradshaw-Turner’s first-grade class, there’s a high priority placed on listening.

“You can be the brightest person in the world, but if you don’t listen, you won’t do well,” Ms. Bradshaw-Turner told 20 students sitting cross-legged on a colored mat in their first-floor classroom at Vare-Washington Elementary School in South Philadelphia.

But as they started the third week of their new school year, the 6- and 7-year-olds, all masked, were showing every sign of heeding their teacher’s insistence on paying attention. That morning, they had lined up neatly in the playground before the bell rang. Now, they listened attentively to a lesson on rhyming words, unconcerned by their now-familiar masks, which are no longer required by the Philadelphia school district, but encouraged here.

Ms. Bradshaw-Turner and her two assistants said this school year has started more positively than the last, when some students struggled to shift from all-online learning to in-person classes.

“When we were online, we had to depend on the parents a lot to make sure the kids were sitting down and paying attention,” she said. “When you’re online, it’s hard to focus on the computer all day. In person, you get a lot more from children, and you can help their needs more.”

Here in Room 101, the children seem as cheerful as their bright-colored surrounds, practicing addition at small clusters of desks. A sign reminds students to “always be nice and kind to each other.”

Jacob O’Brien, 6, said school was “awesome,” especially because of reading. His favorite book was “E.T.” which he said was about an alien whose spaceship left him on earth. Jacob said he didn’t mind wearing a mask in school even though it’s “the only place” where he wears one. — Jon Hurdle

Downey High School, Downey, Calif.

More than a hundred kids are clustered around a boy standing on a table in the sunny quad during “nutrition,” the daily midmorning snack break. He’s playing hip-hop from a portable speaker, bouncing to the beat and holding a sign with glittery gold letters, asking a girl to be his date to the homecoming dance.

Looking on, Principal Tom Houts smiles. “This wouldn’t have happened last year,” he says.

In August 2021, the 4,000-plus students at this public high school 14 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles returned to school under a strict mask mandate. Hundreds of students were sent home for being exposed to Covid-19, and as a result, Mr. Houts says, kids kept a healthy distance from each other.

This year, he says, Covid’s grip has loosened, and everything is different. Sports teams and music programs are quickly rebuilding; clubs are recruiting.

“It’s like a breath of fresh air,” he says. “There’s a 180-degree difference in the kids’ attitudes.”

The renewed energy extends to the classrooms. Walking through the halls, Mr. Houts drops in on a math class where ninth graders are working together to graph survey results on construction paper, and on an English class where 11th graders in five-person pods are enthusiastically discussing the day’s prompt.

As he heads into the social sciences building, Mr. Houts is pulled aside by an administrator, who informs him that three kids have gone to the nurse that morning for a decidedly prepandemic reason: participating in the social media-famous hot chip challenge.

Mr. Houts waits for the bell to ring, then commandeers the intercom to discourage students from joining the TikTok trend. “You might throw up,” he says. “And if you think it feels bad going down, I promise you it feels worse coming up.” — Robin Jones

Southern Methodist University, Dallas

During lunch on the bustling campus, a seat in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center is a challenge to find, but a chair outside, beneath a sunny, cloudless sky? That’s a unicorn.

After months of indoor isolation Aidan Foley, now a senior at 21, appreciates being outside in any weather.

Even the 2021 snow-and-ice storm that took Texas’s power, water, warmth and food had its bright spots for Ms. Foley, who was grateful for snowball fights and laughter, cracked rib and all. (She injured herself after she tied a 9-foot unicorn floatie to a friend’s Jeep and went sledding in campus parking garages.)

Today, she soaks up every ray of sunshine.

“Feeling S.M.U. again, like a sense of community, was very foreign. I was 18 when I first came to S.M.U., I was 18 when I got sent home,” she says, referring to the period during which the school sent students home because of Covid. “I came back 21 years old. I’m a fully grown adult now at a campus that I haven’t really experienced like this since I was a child fresh out of high school.”

In a nearby studio, Michelle “Mz. G” Gibson, a visiting dance professor, urges students to “walk like you got a purpose.”

M’Shiari Gonzales, 20, wears relaxed red pants that swoosh as she power walks across the darkened studio.

Later, Ms. Gonzales and her classmates reunite in a semicircle, no longer breathing hard under protective masks like they did last fall, though still huffing.

It’s time for a legendary “Mz. G” talk. She explains that a boiled egg consists of three layers: yolk, white, shell.

Ms. Gonzales protests that a thin, filmy lining separates the white and the shell.

Ms. Gibson’s arms shoot up into the air with delight and she works the argument into her talk: the yolk is the narrative, the white is composition and Ms. Gonzales’s insistent lining is choreography.

And the shell?

“Crack it!” Ms. Gibson shouts. — Marina Trahan Martinez

James Shields Elementary School, Chicago

Masks are optional at Chicago’s James Shields Elementary now, but reminders of the pandemic still hang in the hallways. “Please keep your distance,” reads one sign. “It’s always a good day to wear a mask,” reads another.

A class of second graders enter the cafeteria, where banana muffins scent the air.

The students fill two tables, ready for a refresher on lunchroom protocols as they start their second year of in-person learning since Covid upended their lives.

“I’m going to give you guys the lunchroom expectations,” said Jazmin Ortega, a cafeteria and recess supervisor, as some students swing their legs, the brush of their sneakers on the floor accompanying her voice. Most rules are familiar — don’t play with your food, use your utensils and clean up after yourself. The mask guidance is new, however.

Some students wear them, some don’t, and that’s fine, Mrs. Ortega says. If they lose their mask, they can get another from the school, she explains.

“I have multiple masks, just in case,” 8-year-old Leon Kiczula pipes up. Although he’s maskless now, he wants to be prepared, because he sometimes loses them.

This week, students are being reminded of proper school behavior — whether it’s walking in an orderly line to class or waiting for the bathroom.

Some students, like 4-year-old Renata Santizo, are learning these lessons for the first time. It’s her second year at Shields, a public school that runs from pre-K through 4th grade in Brighton Park, a majority Latino neighborhood on Chicago’s southwest side.

Walking from room to room in a line with her classmates, she says she’s excited to see her friends again. That’s why masking doesn’t bother her, she says in Spanish.

“I like masks. I don’t want my friends to get sick.” — Ivan Moreno

Edgewood City Schools, Trenton, Ohio

Head-high stalks of late-summer corn frame the Edgewood City Schools campus on a breezy, sun-splashed day.

Things feel strikingly prepandemic normal in this rural outpost north of Cincinnati, as if the coronavirus had never happened. But at the high school entrance there is a jarring reminder. A bench inscribed:

In Memory of Peg Smith.

Charles Richter, inventor of the seismic scale that bears his name, was born on a farm nearby, a local point of pride. And Covid was, in many ways, like an earthquake in this district of 3,707 students.

For three school years, the pandemic brought masks, remote learning, canceled homecomings, sky-high absences, and, finally, death, when Ms. Smith, a beloved school secretary, succumbed to the disease.

A year later, however, masks are rare, hallways are full of exuberant students and the Edgewood Cougars are packing the stands on Friday nights.

Perhaps no one’s job was transformed more by the pandemic than Pamela Theurer’s.

In 2020, Ms. Theurer, Edgewood’s director of communication and federal programs, became de facto Covid czar as waves of the virus surged through the school.

“Ninety-five percent of my job was Covid,” she remembers.

Ms. Theurer, a deeply religious wife and grandmother with schoolmarm charm, was an unlikely pandemic czar, but she leaped into the role head-on. Her usually-tidy office became a cyclone of clutter, as she spent 12-hour days contact tracing, coordinating quarantines, parsing data and keeping the entire district from buckling under the weight of the pandemic.

“There were some evenings when I’d get home exhausted,” Ms. Theurer says.

But in hindsight, she says Covid forced her, the teachers and the students to be more flexible and, perhaps, to connect with one another better.

“Covid made me, as a leader, feel like I need to dig deeper to understand and try to support people,” Ms. Theurer says.

So if Covid was Edgewood’s metaphorical earthquake, today, only the smallest aftershocks are felt. — Kevin Williams

Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, Los Angeles

In a dark rehearsal space at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, or LACHSA, a cast of students belts out “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” a Stephen Sondheim number about grooming and gratuitous bloodshed.

The music stops abruptly as Allison Andreas, the co-director of the school’s musical theater department, praises one student for being “so present in his scariness,” relative to his size. They are rehearsing “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” after all.

“Hudson is the scariest and also the smallest little nugget,” she says. “We all need to be as scary as Hudson, OK?”

Over the last three school years, coronavirus-related disruptions have meant getting creative: Teachers coached acting over Zoom and provided students with costumes and green screens to film individual performances. This year, without the same requirements as years prior, most are grateful to return to in-person rehearsals, like this one.

“I just feel like I appreciate this year even more just because I knew what could be lost,” said Ava Broneer, 17, a senior who has gotten to perform only a handful of times during her four years at the school.

“Usually when you’re a freshman here, you don’t perform that much,” she says. “And then Covid happened. So my freshman and sophomore year, you know, I didn’t do that much.”

As the music swells in the rehearsal room, Ava reviews lines for her role as Johanna, Sweeney Todd’s daughter. It’s a speaking part and a step up from her role as a fork in last year’s production of “Beauty and the Beast.”

“I just think last year was so rewarding to get to perform,” she says, “and I didn’t realize how much I needed it, and how much happier it made me.”

“I think if anything,” she adds, “Covid kind of made me realize this is what I need to do.” — Lauren Messman