On a recent afternoon, members of a Providence High Odyssey of the Mind team were working on props to prepare for Saturday's state competition.
Odyssey of the Mind — known as OM — is an elaborate international contest of creativity for students from kindergarten through college. Each team chooses a problem to tackle.
This team is staging an original musical that focuses on outdoorsman John Muir’s trip to Yosemite with President Theodore Roosevelt. Their props include a mask of a bear wearing a top hat and monocle, as well as a contraption that simulates an outdoor scene rolling by train windows.
"It promotes not only the theatrical aspect but the building and engineering aspect," said 17-year-old Lucas King, who's been competing in OM since second grade.
It's the thick of the spring tournament season for OM and other academic competitions. They're back in person for the first time since COVID-19 shut things down in March 2020.
But some students, parents and community members say pre-pandemic participation isn't back yet.
Bella Peter, a 16-year-old teammate of King's, said the March 5 regional competition at Wingate University wasn't what she was used to seeing. "It was really quiet this year, which was a little strange because normally there’s so many," she said.
Pre-pandemic, the OM regionals at Wingate drew 80 to 90 teams. In 2021, there were about two dozen, and this year there were only 35, said regional director Mitzi Lynch. She said some teams, like the one Peter and King are on, won because there was no competition.
"They were phenomenal," Lynch said. "But it’s got to be hard. You know, you don’t want to compete against an empty chair, right?"
The change left team mom Kate Uslan pondering.
"I just thought, 'Where did everybody go?' " she said. "They’ve been sitting in their bedrooms for two years, and then afterwards, you know, did they turn to other activities? Are they still in their bedrooms? Did they just not have parents at the schools that were pushing to form the clubs?"
Not tracked like academics
The academic impact of the pandemic and the recovery efforts going on in schools has been the subject of intense scrutiny. There are test scores, research reports and school board meetings devoted to analysis.
The impact on extracurricular activities is harder to track. Some, like OM, are conducted outside of school systems. Others are done through schools, but there’s less centralized reporting.
"I know both of my kids are in like orchestra and band, and their numbers have gone down," Uslan said.
These kinds of activities may not show up in state reports and school ratings. But when Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board member Margaret Marshall attended a recent public discussion of school safety, she said they’re an important part of rebuilding school climate.
"Because what students do after school and before school is as important as what they’re doing in school, in terms of their belonging and their activities in the community," Marshall told the group. "And I think to give students a chance to belong outside of their school area is really, really important."
Marshall said later that most extracurricular activities rely on volunteers and/or teachers working extra hours.
"I kind of think that the volunteer ranks, which are what you need to keep everybody going, have fallen off a little bit and there’s just an inertia to get it back. You know, it takes some time," Marshall said.
Alisa Wickliff of UNC Charlotte is regional director for Science Olympiad. She says that event, as well as other math-science academic competitions she’s involved with, have seen the same pattern as OM: Participation is better than it was last year, but nowhere near pre-COVID numbers.
She suspects that's because such events rely heavily on faculty.
"These educators are, quite understandably, still catching up due to COVID," Wickliff said. "We are patiently waiting and working with educators as they add STEM competition back into their schedules and as they do, student participation will increase."
Building back the buzz
Marshall suspects the disruption of in-person classes also hurt this year’s recruiting because students often follow friends into clubs and competitions.
"Because you weren’t in school, people didn’t talk about it as much, didn’t create the buzz, and so the next group of kids didn’t hear about it, didn’t know it was an opportunity, didn’t know how cool it was," she said.
On Saturday, OM teams from across North Carolina will gather at Western Carolina University to demonstrate their creative projects for in-person judges. Lynch, the regional director, says the crowd should be about the normal size, but only because of a rule change.
Normally only first- and second-place finishers in regionals advance to state, she said. "But we decided this year to extend that, to just give kids more experience and allow them to participate longer. So we’re sending first through fourth place."
Lucas King says regardless of the numbers it feels good to have a competition that doesn’t involve computer screens.
"I’m glad to be out of that and back to a sense of normalcy almost," he said.
