The COVID-19 pandemic severely affected teaching and student outcomes throughout the world, yet the long-term impacts of the pandemic on teachers and students in Latin America and Spain remain largely underexamined. This study examined the experiences of 5416 teachers from 20 Spanish-speaking countries during and after the pandemic, with an emphasis on teachers’ health, teaching experiences, and school-based support; perceptions of their students’ experiences and struggles; and relationships with students, families, and colleagues. The study used an online survey design with recruitment primarily based on snowball sampling, with most variables being collected using Likert-style responses. Descriptive statistics as well as bivariate correlations between variables were calculated. The results suggested that teachers were mostly healthy and reported moderate fear of COVID-19, though there was much variability. While, on average, teachers did not believe the pandemic had had a negative impact on their relationships with parents, colleagues, and students, they believed that the pandemic had a meaningful negative impact on their students by increasing problems in five key domains: educational, behavioral, social, emotional, and familial. Teachers had received very little training regarding online teaching, although they were moderately satisfied with the resources they had received to teach online and the safety measures their schools had implemented. Schools should provide additional support to teachers, students, and families during times of prolonged stress such as pandemics to help mitigate their lasting effects on students’ academic and psychosocial functioning.

Prior research highlights the complex interplay among disability, education, employment, and poverty, underscoring the importance of investigating how positive academic experiences among disabled individuals may predict employment status and poverty levels, potentially many years later. To address this gap, this study examined how educational factors including academic satisfaction, college degree attainment, and unmet academic accommodation needs predict employment and poverty among adults with disabilities or chronic health conditions. A sample of 409 adults with disabilities or chronic health conditions while they had attended school in the United States completed an online survey of these constructs. Random forest models and their built-in measures of feature (or predictor) importance were used to predict the binary outcomes of employment status and poverty status using academic satisfaction, college degree attainment, and unmet academic accommodation needs as well as several common sociodemographic characteristics, including age, disability level, gender, rurality, and minority racial/ethnic identity. Across measures of feature importance, the academic factors showed comparable or greater predictive importance than all other sociodemographic predictors, and correlational analyses revealed that these academic factors were associated with higher levels of employment and lower levels of poverty. These findings suggest that positive educational experiences and accommodations are important predictors of both employment and poverty outcomes for individuals with disabilities. Future research should further explore how specific educational experiences impact employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities and examine supports and interventions that can create positive academic experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).