Stability of the school education system depends on many factors, and one of the most significant is professionalism of the teaching staff, willingness of the teaching staff to respond to new challenges and effectively carry out professional activities in 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 transfer of the educational process to a remote mode. Despite timely measures taken at the federal and regional levels to ensure continuity of the educational process and preserve a unified 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 practice of teaching remotely and by the beginning of the pandemic were not ready to organize educational process using distance learning technologies. The article presents results of a sociological survey on the readiness of teachers to carry out professional pedagogical activities in the conditions of restrictions caused by the pandemic, based on a comparison of the monitoring data on the eve of the pandemic with the data of 2021.