Are we finally allowed to admit that the lockdowns and restrictions due to
COVID-19
disproportionately hurt children? It seems so.
The Washington Post
published a report
this week revealing that the schools that enforced the fewest precautions, including mandatory masks and social distancing, were the
schools
in which students excelled the most over the past two years.
The Lewis-Palmer school district in
Colorado,
for example, refused to change its students’ routines and experiences for a virus that posed very little threat to them. The results prove it was right to do so. While students across the country suffered massive academic losses, the average student attending a Lewis-Palmer school actually made gains in reading and fared better on mathematics exams than the vast majority of other students in the state. And to top it all off, not one student in the district became seriously ill from the coronavirus.
“We didn’t just exist through the pandemic,” said Mark Belcher, the director of communications for the district. “We made progress through the pandemic.”
More than 60.2% of third graders in Lewis-Palmer’s schools were considered proficient in reading in 2021 (a 2% gain from 2019 ), while statewide proficiency rates dropped from 41.3% to 39.1%. Similarly, 75% of fifth graders in the district were considered proficient in reading in 2021, which is a 6-percentage-point increase from 2019. The rest of the state suffered a 1.2-point drop.
But the biggest difference between school districts such as Lewis-Palmer and those that spent the past two years restricting students’ everyday lives is that the former decided to listen to the science, while the latter gave in to hysteria. Multiple studies released in early 2020 proved that children were not at risk of serious infection from the coronavirus and that young children, specifically, barely even transmitted the virus. This data played a crucial role in Lewis-Palmer officials’ decision to reopen for in-person learning in the fall of 2020, said Superintendent K.C. Somers.
Schools that decided to remain shut down into 2021 had access to these same studies. But they prioritized the paranoid concerns of adults over the academic and social well-being of their students — and those students suffered as a result. Now, it’s time to hold accountable the adults who should have known better.
