More kids are repeating a grade. Is it good for them?

As Braylon Price remembers it, he struggled with pretty much everything the first full school year of the pandemic. With minimal guidance and frequent disruptions, he had trouble staying on top of assignments and finishing homework on time.

It was so rocky his parents asked for him to repeat sixth grade — a decision they credit with getting him on a better track.

“At first I didn’t really want to do it,” said Braylon, now 13. “But then later in the year I thought it would probably be better for me if I did.”

The number of students held back for a year of school has surged around the country. Traditionally, experts have said repeating a grade can hurt kids social lives and academic futures. But many parents, empowered by new pandemic-era laws, have asked for do-overs to help their children recover from the tumult of remote learning, quarantines and school staff shortages.

Twenty-two of the 26 states that provided data for the recent academic year, as well as Washington, D.C., saw an increase in the number of students who were held back, according to an Associated Press analysis. Three states — South Carolina, West Virginia and Delaware — saw retention more than double.

Pennsylvania, where the Price family lives, passed a pandemic-era law allowing parents to elect to have a redo for their kids. The following year, the number of retained students in the state jumped by about 20,000, to over 45,000 students.

Braylon’s mother has no regrets about taking advantage of the new law.

“Best decision we could have made for him,” said Kristi Price, who lives in Bellefonte, in central Pennsylvania.

While the family’s two daughters managed to keep up with school despite limited supervision, Braylon struggled. He went back to in-person school for the first full academic year of the pandemic but it was “wishy-washy,” his mother said. Students were quarantined on and off, and teachers tried to keep up with students learning at home, online and in hybrid models. That winter, Braylon suffered a spinal cord injury from wrestling that forced him to go back to remote learning.

On his repeat of sixth grade, Braylon had an individualized education program that helped him build more focus. Having more one-on-one attention from teachers helped too. Socially, he said the transition was easy, since most of his friends had been in lower grades or attended different schools already.

Research in the education world has been critical of making students repeat grades.

The risk is students who’ve been retained have a two-fold increased risk of dropping out, said Arthur Reynolds, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Human Capital Research Collaborative, citing studies of students in Chicago and Baltimore.

But backers of retention say none of the research was conducted in a pandemic, when many children wrestled with Zoom lessons and some stopped logging in entirely.