YONKERS: A new study from NBC News and Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education, is one of the first to shed light on the differences between students whose classes have been exclusively online and those who’ve been able to attend in person at least one day per week.

The survey last fall of more than 10,000 students in 12 U.S. high schools, including #Yonkers, found that students who’d spent time in the classroom reported lower rates of stress and worry than their online peers.

While just over half of all students surveyed said they were more stressed about school in 2020 than they had been previously, the issue was more pronounced among remote students.

Eighty-four percent of remote students reported exhaustion, headaches, insomnia or other stress-related ailments, compared to 82 percent of students who were in the classroom on some days and 78 percent of students who were in the classroom full time.

Remote students were also slightly less likely to say they had an adult they could go to with a personal problem and slightly more likely to fret about grades than their peers in the classroom. And the remote students did more homework, reporting an average of 90 additional minutes per week, the study found.

When Yonkers started offering a hybrid option in October that allows students to attend in person either Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday, most students chose to remain online.

Only about a third of students are currently in the hybrid program, a Yonkers district spokeswoman said, leaving many classrooms with just a handful of students.

Yonkers School Officials tell NBC News that they have not seen significant differences in grades or test scores between remote and hybrid students.

They say things have gotten better since the beginning of the school year when technical glitches were more common and teachers were still adjusting.

The NBC News and Challenge Success study found that online-only students in Yonkers reported an average of 31 minutes more homework on the weekend and 70 more minutes during the week than their classmates in the hybrid program.

Though most students were not getting anywhere close to the nine hours of sleep recommended for adolescents, reporting just over six hours, the hybrid students reported sleeping an average of about 10 minutes more per night than their online peers.

Everything has been more difficult this year for students at Yonkers, an academically selective school that draws a diverse mix of students — half Latino, 20 percent white, 15 percent Asian, 13 percent Black; educators worry about the long-term impact on a generation of children who are stressed out, struggling to learn and missing their friends.

Multiple studies have found that students — especially those with disabilities and from low-income families — are learning less than they should.

The studies will be featured in NBC News reports this week.

You Can read the Full NBC News and Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School at this link:

https://www.challengesuccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/CS-NBC-Study-Kids-Under-Pressure-PUBLISHED.pdf