The stability of the school education system depends on many factors, and one of the most significant is the professionalism of the teaching staff, the willingness of the teaching staff to respond to new challenges and effectively carry out professional activities in the most difficult conditions. The coronavirus pandemic has led to the need to make significant changes in the functioning of the education system as soon as possible, including the transfer of the educational process to a remote mode. Despite the timely measures taken at the federal and regional levels to ensure the continuity of the educational process and preserve a single educational space, while maintaining the health of all participants in educational relations remained an absolute priority, the school education system faced serious difficulties. The situation was complicated not only by the presence of certain problems in the provision of educational organizations and households with the necessary technical means, but also by the fact that a significant part of the teaching staff did not have the practice of teaching remotely and by the beginning of the pandemic were not ready to organize the educational process using distance learning technologies. The article presents the results of a sociological study on the readiness of teachers to carry out professional pedagogical activities in the conditions of forced restrictions caused by the pandemic, based on a comparison of the monitoring data carried out on the eve of the pandemic with the data of 2021.