Marguerite Roza, Seattle-based director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University: My daughter and I were driving to go pick up some fish for dinner. My husband sent me a text telling me to get out of Kirkland right away, and everything felt ominous. Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education: I was having brunch with my sister in Kirkland, Washington, when the news broke that there were multiple cases and deaths at the Life Care Center nursing home just a few miles away. Susan Enfield, superintendent of Highline Public Schools in Washington: A very good friend of mine who works in the Northshore School District called me, end of February, and said, “I think we’re going to close … and I think the rest of you won’t be far behind.” I said, “No way, there’s no way they’re going to close schools.” I mean, I really was incredulous. The district’s closure offered a glimpse into what many thought would be a short-term disruption. In late February, one of its schools shut for deep cleaning after an employee traveled out of the country with a family member who had become ill. And in the Northshore School District, a system of 22,000 students northeast of Seattle, schools had already been closed for over a week. Two days after that, then-President Donald Trump called a national emergency. The World Health Organization had declared a pandemic only five days earlier. “There’s the one camp of ‘This too shall pass,’ and then there’s the other camp of ‘Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.’”īut none of this was on anyone’s mind on March 16, 2020. “There are kind of two camps,” said Beth Lehr, an assistant principal of Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson, Arizona. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. COVID heightened inequities long baked into the American educational system. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. Īs spring approaches, there are additional reasons to be hopeful. To mark what will soon stretch into a third spring of educational disruption, The 74 spoke with educators, parents, students and researchers about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” They talked movingly, often unsparingly, about their missteps and occasional triumphs, their moments of despair and fragile optimism for the future. The effects have been immediate - students lost parents teachers mourned fallen colleagues - and hopelessly abstract, as educators weighed “ pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance. Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. Within nine days, the nation’s remaining districts followed suit. On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. That’s how long it’s been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era.
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