Journal of Education & Social Policy Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2021 doi:10.30845/jesp.v8n2p11 80 An Ex Post Facto Study on Student Performance of Elementary Education Students of Initao College during the First Year of Flexible Learning Implementation Kevin Client B. Matutes 1 Anne Pauline C. Panoril 2 Jurielle Q. Galaroza 3 Johara P. Fragata 4 School of Teacher Education Initao College, 9022 Initao, Misamis Oriental Philippines Abstract COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the system of education and distance learning has plunged as the new approach. This ex post facto study has investigated the academic performance of 305 BEEd students of Initao College in offline and online flexible learning modalities. It was found out that amidst the community quarantines, 6% of the enrolled students for the first semester and additional 6% for the second have gone inactive in class activities. Moreover, students in both learning categories had a declining level of student performance in the four quarters of the first new normal school year with -0.0675 and -0.0287 regression slopes for online and offline learners respectively. Inferential statistics at 0.05 level of significance (t-value = 5.6656; p-value = 0.00001) has also revealed that with the same curriculum, offline students have a significantly different average performance which is way lower than the students with online access. Keywords: Distance learning, Ex post facto, BEEd, flexible learning 1. Introduction Education has been the pillar of development of every country and it is principal to the development and growth of all countries. However, although out the history, he education system has been affected by several challenges ranging from changes in the education curriculum to closing down the education system due to widespread pandemic diseases (Owusu-Fordjour et al., 2015). Recently, COVID-19 impacted not only the overall economy of many countries and peoples’ day to day lives, but also has greatly affected our emotional, mental, and physical health (Niranjan, 2020). Education is no exception (Onyema et al., 2020).COVID-19 pandemic is overwhelming the functioning and outcomes of education system. This is true across the world and affects all children. Therefore, analysis and planning of future actions for managing the education system and implementation of changes in the approach of educational institutions are essential (McKibbin and Fernando, 2020). Based on medical researches, there seems to be a global consensus among infectious disease specialists and public health officials to limit face-to-face classes as a means of protecting the students and the community at large from the spread of the pandemic (Micheal and Murphy, 2020). Lockdown and staying home strategies have been put in place as the needed action to flatten the curve and control the transmission of the disease (Sintema, 2020).Several schools, colleges and universities have discontinued face-to-face teaching. Due to the suspension of classroom teaching, a switch to the online teaching for undergraduate and graduate students become effective (Sahu et al, 2020.; Yamin, 2020; Mahdy, 2020). On the other hand, the pandemic has provided an opportunity to pave the way for introducing digital learning (Dhawan, 2020). This form of learning provides an alternative way to minimize either the contact between students themselves or between the students and lecturers (Pragholapati, 2020). Distance education, which has started its journey as correspondence learning, now has a variety of forms such as web based, online, blended, ubiquitous, mobile and e-learning, and all these terms are used interchangeably (Karatas et al, 2017).In the Philippines, teaching in a traditional manner is the most common practice even until the year 2019. However with the recent outbreak, the system of education of the country from basic to higher education was described to have completely turned when the envisioned national education system with intermediate to advanced 21st century