Just overheard a conversation from a teacher on school closings during the pandemic

[ClimateHawk]

Last edited Tue Dec 3, 2024, 03:47 PM - Edit history (2)

I was having lunch at a fast food restaurant just now. There was a guy who was talking about being a teacher to another guy. The teacher guy started taking about how education changed after Covid.

He said: "Keeping kids at home during the pandemic was the biggest mistake this country ever made and we’ll look back one day and realize that”.

I don’t have kids so I don’t care to comment. What do you all think? I don’t really agree with that at all but wanted to know your thoughts.

[Scrivener7]

1. At the time I was working in a huge urban school system.

I personally know 8 school employees who caught covid before quarantine and died.

Quarantine was difficult. Not quarantining would have killed hundreds of thousands.

[brush]

52. EXactly. That guy is a moron. Sounds like he listens to RFK jr. too much.

[in2herbs]

60. Wonder what his thoughts are on home schooling. nt

[riversedge]

77. My nephews and nieces stayed home as I did. Their moms and dads were glad

to keep them home even though in one case the dad took time off and in another the mom stayed home.
I babysat lots of times as did others in families who could do so.
I myself never contacted a cold during the epidemic-basically stayed away from crowds and did the masking. I usually catch a horrible cold each year but did not those years. Masks work--even though I admit they are a pain most of the time.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

79. Yep. I have friends who are teachers and have/had young families at home.

The teachers had just as much right to worry about their health as the rest of society.

Maybe the parents at home should have done a better job “babysitting” their own kids.

[Scrivener7]

89. I am not a teacher. I worked with the kids in a medical capacity,

so I was talking to the families over video and getting to know them in a way I never had before. I will say that about 95% of them were amazing and did a wonderful job in a really difficult situation.

But, man, that 5% broke my heart.

I retired after a year of it.

[LakeVermilion]

2. He might be right about the educational outcomes,

but I guarantee that there would have been a lot more dead teachers. I think those teachers and their families are grateful.

So now we would have more kids at grade level, but fewer teachers to instruct them.

A conundrum.

[Sanity Claws]

10. Fewer parents and grandparents to take of those school kids too

I am in NYC and saw how bad it got and how necessary the shut down was.

[ClimateHawk]

35. He was speaking in terms of educational outcomes

Specifically test scores

[LeftInTX]

54. It did. Kids just disappeared afterward.

[brush]

58. He's a moron. Kids are resilient. So what if they graduate a year later.

They had the whole rest of their lives to live and catch up. They might not have if the caught covid in school and died.

[MichMan]

68. They didn't hold them back a year, they just promoted them to the next grade whether they learned the material or not.

Zoom learning wasn't anywhere near as effective, and the number of hours taught each day were less than normal classroom instruction.

I don't know how people taking STEM classes managed. If during Covid, someone learned 60% of Algebra I, and were promoted to the next grade, there was no way they could continue into Algebra II without spending a significant amount of time learning what they missed the year before. Now they go to college and need to take remedial classes at $400 per credit hour.

Should have required Summer School to catch everyone back up, but too much resistance from the education system.

[brush]

70. My point was there should've been nationwide shutdowns...

Last edited Tue Dec 3, 2024, 07:41 PM - Edit history (1)

no promotion to te next grade. It was a difficult situation for the nation, and we had the very worse president and admin possible to work out a solution.

I mean people needed income to live and the bungling fools in trump's admin were certainly not up to the challenge.

[MichMan]

73. Any state governor could have acted as you say without the Federal governments permission.

I don't know of any that shut down entirely and cancelled the entire school year. The governors certainly had the power to do so. I don't believe the Federal government has the authority to close schools and dictate school policy on grade promotions.

People not working did get an extra $600 per week unemployment. In some cases, that was more than they made by working.

[brush]

74. Such a policy should've come from the federal government, not state of local entities...

Last edited Tue Dec 3, 2024, 09:13 PM - Edit history (1)

as guaranteed, universal income would've had to be considered, and again, certainly trump, already downplaying the pandemic, would have none of that.

Again, we had the worst possible admin in charge in DC.

[MichMan]

80. Does the Federal government have the authority to shut down schools in 50 states?

[brush]

83. The pandemic was a dire, national emergency. A competent president...

would've recognized that and either declared an executive order or worked with Congressional leaders to pass a bill into law to shut down the schools nationwide as thousands were dying every month.

It required capable, national leadership and we certainly didn't have it with the trump cabal.

It was a grave situation and it needed to be handled. trump didn't and thousands died. A shutdown would've saved lives.

[DBoon]

62. and how does suddenly becoming an orphan affect test scores?

How many adult deaths are worth children's test scores?

Do some people not care that over one million people dies of Covid?

[Hekate]

75. Hard to accumulate any test scores from dead kids and dead teachers

Very hard

[Rebl2]

66. Also dead kids

as well.

[Dennis Donovan]

3. Kidless, so I really don't know.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. The scientists appeared to approve of it. They know more than I do so I defer to them.

[ClimateHawk]

39. I'm childless too

I just wanted to know what others thought on the subject.

[Shell_Seas]

4. I didn't keep my kids home.

Depending on the state, they had a choice. However, I remember that my kids' classrooms were half full, with about 50% of parents opting to keep their kids home. Anyway, I sent my kids, I don't know how education in Texas has changed, except it's probably underfunded more.

[rasputin1952]

45. Once Abbott is gone...

there may be better funding for education.

Tyrants feed off of the uneducated and ignorant, it is easier to sow fear.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. I just read that someone posted an OP

I just read that someone posted an OP with a meaningless title. It's brilliant way to make sure most people miss it.

[usonian]

15. For people who bitch about clickbait, some DU'ers are mighty fond of it. Especially trolls?

Asking for a friend.

Since I took the bait (but not the hook), we always know the outcome of some decision that was made.
We never know the outcome of a decision not made

But from a little "cause and effect" reasoning, we can conclude that a damn lot of parents' lives were saved by kids not dragging covid into the home.

Ask any parent who caught garden variety diseases from schoolkids. Speaking as one.

[ClimateHawk]

32. Are you OK?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

36. Something occurred to me

I'm fine.

Are you well?

[Meowmee]

37. Lol yup😹

[Bernardo de La Paz]

38. As it turns out, I was not being alone in being bored enough to click on the title. . . . . nt

[ClimateHawk]

44. I changed the title

Are you happy now?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

53. I am happy for you and your readers. . . . . nt

[Polybius]

78. Damn, I missed it

What did the old one say?

[DontBelieveEastisEas]

88. "Just heard someone say this". If signed in, click on 'Info' at lower left of original post, then 'Show all' nt

[RockRaven]

6. I would say that is a very ignorant or delusional assessment of American history.

Superlative statements are so often incorrect because it is one case/instance stacked up against all other cases/instances. What area the odds that the speaker correctly identified "the one" from the near infinite choices? Usually not very good.

[LuckyCharms]

7. If I were part of that conversation, my question to this person would be:

"If you were in charge of this during the pandemic, how would you have handled this? What do you think the consequences of your decision would have been, and how would you have handled those inevitable consequences"?

[jimfields33]

27. I think the only thing they should have done is kept kids

in the same year. Losing a year or two of schooling probably hurt some kids. Maybe at least the first six grades.

[MacKasey]

8. My response would be, How many lives were saved!

[Think. Again.]

9. I can see his point from his 'teacher' point of view...

...kids during covid did indeed have a screwed-up educational experience for far too long.

But obviously, public health in the face of a deadly pandemic takes priority, I just wish more attention was given to keeping students academically up to par somehow.

But of course, once the nazi admnistration takes over in January, we won't have any public education to worry about anymore anyway.

[Happy Hoosier]

11. My wife is a college Professor....

She has definitely noticed a change. Students are, in her words, "far more fragile." They have difficulty with the reading load. They engage less in class. In short, they have PTSD.

Not sure if that's COVID related, or the result of living in the shitshow that is Trump's America, but she thinks there is a palapable change, and NOT for the better.

[Redleg]

19. I have noticed some of this too

I am a professor and my students do seem less engaged and participative in class in spite of my redoubled efforts to engage them. Maybe Covid affected me instead of them.

At any rate, I don't think we should blame all the decline in test scores to having kept students home from school. I think the mere presence of Covid created a climate of uncertainty and dread for many people, including young people, and this uncertainty and dread undermined learning regardless of whether students attended classes in person on online. I expect there is probably some peer-reviewed research out there that looks at this.

[Happy Hoosier]

21. I agree... that's why I said these kids have PTSD.

I mean, I can't really diagnose them, but they have all the classic symptoms and they've gone through a lot with COVID AND the Trump shitshow. These kids are just living in a world that frightens them and makes them feel less secure. It's hard to oncentrate on ANYTHING in that kind of environment.

[rasputin1952]

47. When you add in the possibility...

of school shootings (albeit small, unless you happen to be in one), it's an awful lot for kids to handle.

I'm 72, and I see it every day, there is a metaphysical "ominous cloud" hanging over the nation.

[Redleg]

91. Yes, it ain't "Morning in America"

and screw Ronald Reagan too.

[Redleg]

90. Good points.

I do think we might be coming out of the post-Covid slump, just in time for round 2 of Trump doom and gloom. Ferchristssakes, will this never end?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

42. It could be deepening effects of social media coccooning, perhaps much more so than Covid

The isolation of Covid may have accelerated it during its time, but social media effects predated and postdate the isolation period.

Social media effects are not well understood, but they are pervasive and deep and getting deeper. Social media's impact is like the impact of the telephone on people's lives. Another example is the impact of automobiles on the dating habits and sex lives of American teenagers. Yet another: the impact of the electric guitar and multitrack recording on the culture of music.

[Redleg]

92. Good points about social media.

My son, 18 years of age, gets on me for watching the TV news. He gets most of his from social media, and surprisingly seems fairly well informed on some of the main issues of the day. I do get a good amount of news and commentary from online sources, including DU. I just don't get much from social media.

[haele]

55. COVID PTSD is a real situation we all have in one degree or another.

I have difficulty remembering the first 8 months of COVID. I, Laz, and my older granddaughter actually caught COVID in the US before that cruise ship was quarantined and the Media was made aware there was a pandemic happening.

I especially have problems remembering the early pre-vaccine situation. I know they were there, but my near photographic memory has blanked out a lot that happened, and whenever I try to visually remember what was going on, I feel numb or axious.
Supply chain issues, companies facing bankruptcy, empty store shelves. Dealing with the overwhelming number of serious hospitalizations and fatalities. Families loosing their elders and vulnerable kids. Long Covid impacts to family and co-workers, picking up the slack if one could work from home or was considered "essential".

People freaking out, being stuck at home. Neighbors being unable to pay rent or mortgage because their jobs were no longer there.

The inability to access doctors if one had a chronic condition, especially pain management.
Or get a "non-critical" surgery.

The empty roads.

But what I do remember, when the vaccine came online, was the push to "Back to Normal", and the overwhelming rage a lot of people were expressing when they couldn't just go back to normal.

We all lost a year. Some people lost health, jobs, family members or friends, homes...things that couldn't be gotten back. Game over. 2020 was gone. Welcome to the new Normal.

I'm lucky, I've been able to cope. I can fall back on my education - my understanding of history, and experiences honed by a transiant childhood (family travelling to pursue jobs that would result in a permanent household income) and years in the Navy, where "Normal" changes every couple years as duty stations change.

But there's too many people who lost their damn minds because they just couldn't return to December 2019 and start over.

Haele

[Bettie]

12. Well, with the return of the orange man

we'll probably see what happens in a pandemic with zero government response.

Should be fun, right?

[Silent Type]

13. Don't think we did everything right with Covid, but we did the right things knowing what we knew then and

without vaccines.

And the closers occured under trump and in many rube red states. I don't doubt it had an impact on educational outcomes, but at the time it seemed right thing to do.

[MiHale]

14. There are three teachers in my immediate family...

And 2 more doing “support” for schools. 2, my son and his wife teach elementary, 1, my SIL teaches High School and some university classes. My daughter has her masters in special education although she doesn’t teach any more, she has to care for her autistic son, but still helps when she can at the schools. My sister is in administrative.
Each and every one never got Covid because of online classes. Their students actually did better online than in class…go figure. Administrative was curtailed in person but there was tons they got done online.

[bluestarone]

16. Tells me that these stupid bastards didn't learn a lesson of COVID.

They can continue to think the way their thinking, THEN pay a price. Next covid outbreak our family will do just what we did last time. Some assholes never learn, i guess.

[Redleg]

17. Hindsight is 20/20

This is a good example of the hindsight bias. Perhaps these assholes have forgotten a few facts.
1. This version of COVID was new and could be lethal.
2. Covid-19 spread very fast.
3. We had incomplete information on the virus including how to prevent or reduce infection and how to treat infection.
4. Our health care administration decided to quickly recommend measures that had been used successfully in the past- namely masking and social distancing combined with hygiene measures. These are fairly innocuous precautions to take.
5. They ultimately recommended closing schools and some businesses but that was left to the local authorities to determine.
6. While it is true that young people were less likely to become seriously ill from the virus, they could still transmit the virus to other people with greater risk of serious illness or death. Furthermore, the teachers at these schools were likely at greater risk than the kids.
7. At least one million Americans died from Covid-19 related causes. The excess death rate suggest that many more died. Plus many Americans are still dealing with long-Covid symptoms.

The key point is that the situation was evolving rapidly and with dire consequences. The experts had imperfect and incomplete information about the virus and thus made recommendations that favored public health over personal preferences.

[DeepWinter]

18. Four kids here

They all did well remote learning, as good as in class if not better. (All be it, curriculum changed) I personally never heard of any covid deaths, outside of elderly people with chronic conditions already.

My community never really did lockdown. People were still going to work, shopping, everything. Was mostly a school system thing.

[Johnny2X2X]

20. Hindsight is 20/20

That's what gets lost, in the moment, our scientists were dealing with a novel virus that they knew next to nothing about. Sure, it became apparent it might not effect kids as frequently or severly as older adults, but who was going to make that call when we weren;t really all that sure about anything yet?

And social distancing for kids still helped prevent its spread significantly and saved lives.

Can you imagine if someone in authority had said, "OK, we know kids are mostly safe, they need to be in school", but then months later they realized that it was just slower in kid, but was 10 times more deadly? That person would literally be in prison or dead right now.

We didn't know a ton about it, we did what we thought was best at the time and we would have done it again. We did a ton wrong for the pandemic, but being too cautiouis about our children was definitely not one of those wrong things.

[LogDog75]

22. The decision to close schools was hard

but it was the right call. I live, literally, a block away from an elementary, middle, and high school and they were all closed because of COVID. IMO, it was the right decision back then and I still support that decision. I have no children so it didn't affect me but considering the it was a pandemic drastic measures were called for.

I'm on another message board, RadioFreeLiberal, where there are a couple of conservatives (maybe not for long) who argued closing the schools was a mistake. No, it wasn't a mistake in that not only did it prevent/reduce the possibility of infecting children but also teachers, administrative staff, janitorial staff, etc...

My career in the AF was in the medical field and during war exercises people would ask us why we didn't go out and retrieve the (simulated) wounded. Our reply was "A dead medic treats no one." A modified answer about closing the schools would be "A dead teacher teachers no one."

[phylny]

23. I think authorities did the best they could

with the limited information they had.

[Baitball Blogger]

24. The kids might have survived Covid, but their parents and grandparents...not so much.

[maxsolomon]

25. there's no doubt it hurt educational outcomes

and damaged some kid's social skills deeply. "school avoidance" wasn't a thing I'd heard about pre-COVID.

maybe kids could have returned earlier, or schools could have somehow moved outside, but kids are disease transmission vector #1.

this country has made several mistakes bigger than shuttering schools during a once-a-century pandemic. hyperbolic statements like that make me nuts.

[ClimateHawk]

40. I agree about the educational impacts

But allowing the virus to spread would have made the situation worse at the time. Closing schools was the right thing to do.

[Farmer-Rick]

65. I missed 30 days of school one year

By skipping out and just not going, that was back in 1975. School avoidance was always a thing, it just was thought of as a discipline issue. Punishment was usually the result for not going to classes. Most school administrators were not seeing it as a reaction to stress, bullying and trauma. But yeah, after COVID, it has become more prominent.

And now we have legal home schooling. That encourages more parents to keep their children at home. And some home schoolers actually turn out better educated kids than what the schools can. And some home schoolers turn out worse, especially in social development.

But you're right, schools needed to be closed to save parents' and grandparents' lives. It's public health 101, especially in the beginning when intubation provided questionable results.

[Trekologer]

26. When schools were closed, we didn't know how to reduce or prevent the spread of COVID-19

By the summer of 2020 we knew that masking + ventilation cuts transmission down significantly. The Trump administration told states to institute lockdowns but had no plan to get out of them and provided to leadership. President Biden got the kids back to schools. His American Rescue Plan (ARP) made funds available for ventilation upgrades but many states took the money and just pocked it. Then there was a backlash to masking because old geezers couldn't see women smile at them.

[Scrivener7]

61. Say what you will about Cuomo, but he created a rational plan so we in NY

knew what the goal was and knew what benchmarks we were shooting for in order to open everything up again.

Definitely a flawed man, but we were ground zero. I live next to the hospital that treated the first patients, and we were over capacity almost immediately. I will say that Cuomo's daily press conferences kept me sane while the sirens were going all night long from the hospital to the huge tent hospital built a mile away to take the overflow.

[bhikkhu]

28. We are inclined to think in dichotomies - where there is a right and a wrong side to any decision

and a correlated good outcome to one side and a bad outcome to the other. Of course there are many situations where there are no good paths forward, and any decision leads to bad outcomes, and making no decision also leads to bad outcomes.

[unblock]

29. How many more people would have died??

School kids are notorious vectors for infectious diseases. Parents and relatives routinely get sick right a few weeks after a new school year starts.

Many school kids themselves handled Covid fine with minimal issues, but their relatives, not so much.

School performance is important, and it does seem like many did not adapt to remote learning well, and that is unfortunate.

But we can't evaluate this in isolation. There's no doubt that remote learning kept many more people alive and slowed the pandemic, allowing more time for the vaccine rollout and other advanced on treatment, as well as reducing the crush of patients at hospitals.

I think, had we kept kids in school, we would have looked back and wondered how many extra people died for maybe a slight academic performance benefit. Is hindsight really 20/20? Not when you're dealing with speculative alternative universes. I think there's always going to be a "grass is always greener" effect looking at the road not traveled, to mix metaphors and bit...

[Demobrat]

30. If they had gotten Covid they would have been

at home anyway. Only deathly I’ll and not learning anything at all.

[dem4decades]

31. Wasn't the goal of the closures to slow down the soread of Covid and keep our hospitals open?

If the hospitals were overrun with Covid cases, more covid deaths, more heart deaths, more deaths from accidents. So if education took it on the chin for a year to save millions of lives, is that a good trade?

You can't become undead but you can make up for lost time in class.

[onecaliberal]

33. The recons want to murder people. Let them murder each other.

I wouldn't have send my kids. Mine were already out of school, but fuck no. NOPE!

[patphil]

34. Children can recover from a lapse in their education. The greater need was to slow the spread of COVID.

It's impossible to say how many lives that decision saved.
History isn't going to see this as the biggest mistake this country made.
The current mistake of reelecting Trump will most likely have that "honor".

[Sundance1220]

41. Geography matters in this argument

I'm sure rural school districts would have likely been okay but in large urban areas like NYC, we had no choice. Teachers were refusing to show up, bus drivers weren't showing, and parents didn't want their kids exposed. Not closing schools wasn't an option. Were they closed for too long? That's a different story.

[Emile]

43. Kids were big COVID spreaders. It was best

for the country to keep them home.

[Iggo]

46. Worse than voting for Trump? Twice?

[GusBob]

48. Yes It was necessary but it was bad

Last edited Tue Dec 3, 2024, 04:49 PM - Edit history (2)

On the Rez where i was working, they did everything they could for the at homers, delivered breakfast and lunch, gave them lap tops and what all

Some kids had a auntie, mom or g-mom at home to tutor. Some of those parents were teachers themselves. Those kids were lucky

Other kids, not so much. Rez home life is one tough piece of work for most kids pandemic or not. Those kids were not lucky at all

When the pandemic was over we had kids in the clinic 7-9 years of age that didnt even know the letters on eye charts

[GusBob]

59. Another factor, which teachers had told me

once school got back in session, the kids that were behind required more attention then the on track kids

and that attention kept the on track kids from advancing as teachers were slogging to get those behind up to speed

[indigovalley]

50. I was teaching high school special ed during COVID

For sure online teaching was tough. Especially with students who had developmental disabilities and didn't have the computer skills to effectively learn online. Also, we had several students with no internet access at home and frankly the school administration wasn't all that concerned. It was rough. I would never want to do online teaching like that again. It was more than challenging.

But I think that for sure it saved lives. There was no vaccine, the virus was spreading rapidly, and effective masks were hard to find. It would have spread through my school like wildfire. I would risk my life to protect a student if there were a school shooter but I shouldn't have to risk my life in a pandemic when there were ways to limit exposure. It wasn't perfect but it was the best we could do.

Special ed. students were given the opportunity for school remediation in the summer to retain skills impacted by COVID. Elementary students suffered the most as any amount of teaching time lost affects their progress. The biggest impact for my high school students is that the stress of it all sent those already having mental health issues over the edge. When I retired in 2023 almost half my caseload had serious mental health challenges. Our school psychologist said COVID just "kicked them off a cliff."

[yardwork]

51. We all would have preferred not to have a pandemic.

There weren't perfect choices. A lot of Trumpsters seem to think that if we'd ignored COVID it wouldn't exist.

[Meowmee]

56. The pandemic was the orange psycho's worst crime

Last edited Wed Dec 4, 2024, 05:25 AM - Edit history (1)

He concealed the dangers, tried to stop treatments to blue states and did many other terrible things which he should be charged for, but he never will be.

The shutdown was needed, and it wasn’t done soon enough, travel in and out of the country should’ve been stopped completely. Much more should’ve been done. As it is millions of people died really I would say were murdered due to him. Many of those deaths are not even recorded because people died at home and did not get medical care and we’re not even tested.

Complaining about having to stay out of school is ridiculous. In my opinion people died also because not all of the schools shut down. Learning transitioned rapidly to online which was perfectly good.

And now there is online teaching, which is a good thing not a bad thing.

[keithbvadu2]

57. Oz made some comment about the death rate of children if they kept school going. He deleted it.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213297826

Something like 2 or 3%.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=oz+death+rate+of+school+children&form=ANNTH1&refig=2c835b1155fe4199896c0d22adc0408e&pc=U531

'...an acceptable trade-off to reopen schools'

[LetMyPeopleVote]

63. We saved a good number of students and their family by closing the schools

Not closing the schools would have resulted in more deaths of students and their family members

[Maru Kitteh]

64. It's not simple is it? Quantitative vs Qualitative and we're still in the middle of the fallout, so

for a large variety of reasons, we can’’t really know, especially right now.

I can say that I think the alienation & lack of structured socialization experienced by a lot of kids was NOT helpful to their mental health. I think it was bad for ALL of our mental health and we are living - globally - through the reverbarations of those impacts right now.

[no_hypocrisy]

67. Keeping kids at home during The Pandemic most likely

saved the lives of countless teachers. I'm serious.

Parents send their kids to school when they have diarrhea, colds, flu, nausea, vomiting, etc. And we teachers often are the victims of their contagion.

I caught Covid in February, 2020 before it had a name. From teaching.

I was lucky because it was early stages of The Pandemic, didn't end up in the hospital, and didn't die.

BTW, I didn't KNOW I had Covid. I went to donate blood four months later and the technician found Covid antibodies.

[617Blue]

69. "ClimateHawk" executes a successful troll.

[ClimateHawk]

71. How does reporting what I hear/see in my red area make me a "troll"?

I've been a DU member since 2012, and have never seen the hostility toward my posts like here lately. Some on here need to grow up. It's important for us to know what the right wing is thinking and saying out in the world. This is a political site after all.

[Johonny]

72. Me being dead would have greatly affected

My kids future education. Given that my family had zero illness for 13 months during Covid compared to the amount of illness they have now back to school, almost certainly they would have flood the hospitals with parents and grandparents.

[La Coliniere]

76. I believe it was the responsible thing to do.

The District I had already retired from closed schools from March 2020 until the end of the school year and only offered online instruction, which most of the teachers hated but they also believed it was necessary. They reopened classes in September 2020 but divided the students into A and B group and attended on alternate days to assure enough room for social distancing. I don’t think one adult working in the District died from the disease. Yes, the kid’s achievement scores suffered but that was a small price to pay in guarding against the worst outcomes.

[Drum]

81. Interesting, considering pushes (by some) to home-school kids, and to subsidize that.

I agree with Teacher Guy in the anecdote. I think that the socialization of children is a very important, and democratic, element in their attending school in person. Separating children during the school-age years seems to result in many more negative outcomes. It’s just my opinion. 🤷🏻‍♂️

EDIT TO ADD!
I reread the OP, and saw it in the public health lens. In that context, I would not agree. There were valid safety concerns…and once again children’s wellbeing were appropriately most important.

[TBF]

82. We homeschooled for a year -

the hardest thing was missing the arts. I think for the youngest kids it was being on screens and missing social time. Obviously not ideal, but we had no clue what we were dealing with initially.

I live in Texas so our district was only technically online for a couple months with the mandatory stay at home (March-May when it started). We are near a medical center and the parents needed to be at work (nurses etc) - so some went to school, and some did remote when they re-opened that fall. The problem, of course, was that only certain people were at high risk - teachers who were older and/or had chronic illnesses, parents/grandparents at home, some students with medical issues. And we didn't know how long vaccines would take & whether they'd be effective. That said, we braved it at home for a year and then sent them back once vaccinated (hoping for the best).

It's really hard to look at something like that in hindsight. I remember at the time my husband and I discussing that they should have opened up the schools for the kids that needed to be there (parents who really didn't have good options for caring for them) and staff it with college students - less likely to get sick than older teachers. There definitely weren't any great solutions at the time.

[kimbutgar]

84. Kids did change after the pandemic

The kids who were in lower grades K-2 did not get the socialization skills and got hooked on the internet. In June of this year that cohort graduated 5th grade. Those kids were the meanest kids I ever experienced as a substitute teacher I had a 5th grade class recently that still had kindergarten and they were so sweet. I purposely sub at only two schools and know a lot of the kids from Kindergarten to 5th. I have discussed this with the teachers and they brought this up to me also so we are all agreement. And you could tell the kids who’s parents were involved and those who weren’t.

That said, though the way covid was spreading sadly we did need to isolate and this is a by product of that unfortunately. Germs spread so rapidly in schools. I have seen it first hand. I picked up something at school recently and gave it to my husband.

[JCMach1]

85. My kid did very well, but some did not

Same thing with school functionality.

[harumph]

86. CACA. My kids did fine because I made sure they kept up with their work.

Lotta bad parenting in this country. Lotta stupid people as we can see.
Covid was a stress test that many people failed. Keeping kids home was
essential to slow the spread of the virus. My wife is a nurse at a major US hospital and they were stacking bodies
like cordwood. But I guess you're "...just asking a question."

[hatrack]

87. Some suggestions for the teacher you mentioned . . . .

He said: "Giving kids access to smart phones was the biggest mistake this country ever made and we’ll look back one day and realize that”.

He said: "Encouraging/allowing the growth of social media among kids was the biggest mistake this country ever made and we’ll look back one day and realize that”.

He said: "Not dealing with guns and gun control was the biggest mistake this country ever made and we’ll look back one day and realize that”.

[Crunchy Frog]

93. It was definitely hard on my sons,

but then, losing their grandmother would have been hard on them too.

I think things like slavery and genocide may have been bigger mistakes.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

94. It was a very tough call

Those first two waves of Covid were unusually lethal, and the schools had a horrible set of options. My daughter was in high school and it definitely had bad impacts. On balance, I'm glad she stayed home.

I think part of why we are where we are today is anger over how Covid was handled. If we did it again, I think a majority of Americans (not necessarily a majority of DUers) would have opted to keep school and businesses open and let it play out -- even if that had cost another million lives and left millions more with some form of long Covid (not unlikely) and broken the health care system in some areas (likely).