When Montgomery County officials in Maryland announced that public schools wouldn’t open in fall 2020 (and tried to close all the Jewish, Catholic, and private schools too), county health officer Travis Gayles admitted in passing that “there are downstream effects to not having in-person learning.”
Gayles now is an executive for a “K-12 telehealth” company that “expanded significantly when the pandemic shuttered schools.” Gayles was going to Hazel Health to help the company get business addressing the plague of mental health problems hitting students during the pandemic and the lockdown.
That is, he was being hired largely to address the “downstream effects” of the closures and lockdowns he was involved in creating.
Now from the Montgomery County Council, we get growing concerns about students’ mental health.
NEW: During a committee hearing today, Councilmember Will Jawando said he recently spoke with a former teacher of his about educating in 2021.
“He likened the trauma that the kids are dealing with to post-traumatic stress disorder, to PTSD for people coming back from Vietnam.” pic.twitter.com/FR7VYYQzVy
— Kevin Lewis (@KevinLewis7News) November 10, 2021
Here, we should remind the reader that this same Will Jawando, in summer 2020, angrily attacked Montgomery County parents and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan for trying to keep as many children in school as possible.
An entire year of forced quasi-homeschooling, staring at a computer screen for hours a day, not being able to see your friends, not having sports, not having libraries, not having gyms or gathering places — all of that was probably the primary cause of the mental health problem.
Throw in a school year of constant uncertainty, including draconian quarantines for healthy people just because they were in the same room as someone with a single symptom (a sneeze!).
Then, there is the constant masking, which we know for a fact can cause anxiety and exacerbate it. Take a few deep breaths? Good luck with that.
Additionally, you had parents, teachers, and local leaders inculcating an irrational and destructive fear of the coronavirus into the hearts and minds of young children.
There were real harms that this virus imposed on children’s mental health. Thousands of children lost their parents or saw them hospitalized, which is very traumatizing. But if we could perfectly discern the causes of the current mental health crisis, I am sure we would find the problem is not mostly the virus, but mostly the governments’ and schools’ reactions to it.
Children were mistreated thanks to the fears and irrationality of adults. None of the people in charge are allowed to be surprised.
