The real costs, burdens, and pain of keeping local schools closed

Ryan Mills of National Review explores the damage done to California schoolchildren by the decisions of local school boards and teachers' unions to ignore the science that says it can be safe to reopen on-campus learning.

National Review spoke to a half dozen San Diego-area parents about the impact of the area’s school closures on their kids and on their families. Most of the parents have become involved in local groups fighting to re-open the schools.

They described kids riddled with anxiety, stunted socially and struggling academically. Several parents said they’ve given up job opportunities to stay home with their kids, and their families have suffered financially.

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, the mental health impacts are slowly becoming clearer, particularly the impacts on children who thrive on routine, but who in many parts of the country have been stripped of the consistency of school, teachers, and friends. A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found significant upticks in mental health-related emergency department visits by children during the pandemic. President Joe Biden has called school closures a “national emergency,” and vowed to get most schools open in his first 100 days. However, his administration has since been criticized for setting a low bar for what it means to actually reopen a school – having classrooms open at least one day a week.

But even with increasing evidence that schools can be reopened safely – a late-January article in the Journal of the American Medical Association by three CDC scientists reported “little evidence” that reopened schools “have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission” of the virus – many public schools around the country remain shuttered. The ongoing closures often are driven by indecisive school boards and teachers unions who claim that heading back to classrooms is too risky, and threaten strikes and legal action.

Reopening schools has proven particularly difficult in California, where most schools are still shut and where the state’s largest teachers union has called for all school employees to be vaccinated before returning to the classroom. The vast majority of the state’s 6 million public school students haven’t been in a classroom since last March.

The inability to reopen schools, and the ease with which teachers unions and school boards have found reasons not to reopen, has led parents in school districts across the state to band together to swap stories, share concerns, and to fight to get their kids back in class.

Leslie Hofmeister, co-founder of the Reopen San Diego Unified School District group, launched her group last year after she and another parent struggled to get answers from the district about why their local schools were not reopening. They now have more than 1,000 Facebook followers. They’ve organized protests, and encourage parents to speak at school board meetings. They’ve also joined with Open Schools California, a statewide coalition.

“We believe it’s probably going to take a statewide effort at this point,” Hofmeister said. “We’re not being heard on the local level.”

Marie said her son was a straight-A student before the schools closed last March. At first her son did fine with at-home learning, she said. When the schools in the Carlsbad Unified School District first closed last year, teachers simply posted assignments online, students completed the assignments on their time and turned them in, Marie said. It was mostly unstructured.

Heading into the seventh grade, her son signed up for advanced English and math courses. But the online schooling had changed. Students were now expected to be logged on to their computer all day, following their teachers’ live-streamed lessons from home.

Her son struggled navigating the online system, she said. He had trouble logging on and turning in completed assignments. He began falling behind, and ended up digging a hole he couldn’t get out of. Over the first month of school, her son received more than 1,000 emails from teachers. She said she started finding him in his room sobbing.

“He would click on a class and see that he had a 36 percent in it,” she said. “He would click on another one and he’d have an F, or all these assignments, zero, zero, zero, zero. He’s like, ‘I know I turned them in. I know I turned them in.’”

Marie, who had been busy keeping her small business afloat during the pandemic, said she tried to help her son get caught up, but new assignments kept coming as fast as her son finished old ones.

She ended up pulling him out of school and sending him to a $2,000-a-month private school, where at least he could attend in person. But even in a new setting, anxiety continued to overwhelm her son. He struggled with headaches and stomachaches and sobbing fits. He eventually opened up to his parents that he felt lost. He wanted life to return to normal.

It was early December when he opened up about his suicidal thoughts. He spent a night with his mom in an adult psychiatric emergency ward with people screaming they wanted to die. Marie called it “the worst night of my life.” Her son spent the next night alone in a treatment facility, before a doctor eventually sent him home.

Marie is now homeschooling her son. He’s doing better, but he still sleeps in her bed and she’s still worried.

“I’m paranoid when he’s in his room alone to walk up the stairs and find him hanging in the closet,” she said. “That’s my visual. That’s my reality right now.”

Marie said she blames the local school board and teachers union. She points at schools open in other states as evidence that California schools should be open, too.

Read the whole thing here.

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