Test results show Connecticut students have still not caught up to where they were before the pandemic, according to data released Thursday by the state.

Ajit Gopalakrishnan, chief performance officer for the Connecticut State Department of Education, said student achievement is lagging across the board – from students who already needed more attention to those who didn’t.

“The pandemic affected, really, all students,” he said at a press conference in Vernon, which was recognized for being one of the better performing districts in the state. Also recognized was Norwich’s Integrated Day Charter School, where scores have bucked the state trend by going up in all three tested areas compared to pre-pandemic levels.

The education department said student proficiency – which is measured on an index ranging from 0 to 100 using scores from English, math and science tests administered every year at certain grade levels – declined 6 to 8 percentage points in English and math compared to pre-pandemic levels, and 4 percentage points in science.

A score of 75 or higher is considered to be proficient. At that level, students are considered to be “performing solidly” by the education department.

Among area towns, districts that have reached that level in English language arts include Stonington, Salem and Lyme-Old Lyme. Proficiency in science can be seen in North Stonington, Salem, and Lyme-Old Lyme.

No area school districts have reached that threshold in math.

Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, commissioner of the State Department of Education, described two “unusually challenging" years as schools have worked to recover from the pandemic.

“Though all schools consistently offered full-time in-person learning in 2021-22, it was far from a normal school year,” she said. “Student and staff illnesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting quarantines and isolations caused significant learning disruptions.”

To illustrate the change in student performance over the past school year compared to the last full school year before COVID-19 pandemic hit, a graph available on the agency’s Edsight web page uses a baseline of zero to show where districts were in the 2018-19.

Gopalakrishnan said districts or schools that fall below zero are “not back to where they were.”

“They still have some work to do,” he said.

Integrated Day Charter School is an outlier on the positive end, with proficiency scores of 70.4 in English, 63.6 in math and 71.3 in science.

The preschool through eighth-grade charter school features multi-age classrooms, combining students in kindergarten and first grade, second and third grades, and so on.

Ellen Retelle, the school’s executive director, credited federal pandemic-relief aid with helping the public charter school succeed. She cited the purchase of small laptops and tablet computers for virtual learning, bringing back retired teachers as “online teachers” in the remote learning phase of the pandemic, hiring temporary tutors for every grade level, and adding a school counselor for a two-year duration.

It purchased various online programs to make learning fun and created a homework club for students in grade seven and eight that “they actually attended,” she said.

“We switched, we swerved and we swiveled for three years,” Retelle said.

An outlier on the other side is the Griswold public school system, which went from a pre-pandemic proficiency score of 66.9 in English to 58.6 in the past school year. Math went from 64.9 to 54.3 and science went from from 65.5 to 62.6.

Griswold Superintendent of Schools Sean McKenna did not return a call for comment by press time.

Russell-Tucker said the agency is encouraged by signs that students are learning faster than they did before the pandemic. That trend is the most evident in elementary school students and most of the middle grades.

But Gopalakrishnan said the state’s biggest challenge remains middle school math.

The department estimates students in grades six through eight may be a year or more behind in math. In English, they may be 5-7 months behind. At the elementary level, the lag in grades four and five is pinned at about 2-3 months.

“We’re not all the way back yet, but there are definitely signs of acceleration and recovery,” Gopalakrishnan said.

For Retelle, her small, public charter school in Norwich is past that point.

“IDCS has moved on from recovery,” she said. “We are focused on resurgence.”

Data is available at edsight.ct.gov.