When counties closed public and private schools in March, everyone understood why. The threat of the coronavirus was too great because we knew too little about it, and no one wanted to put children or teachers needlessly in harm’s way. Now, however, we have the benefit of experience, and this experience confirms that another round of school closures would do far more harm than good.
Everyone knows by now that distance learning does not work. Academic achievement has been abysmal, attendance continues to drop, and many students are reporting struggles with mental health due to prolonged social isolation. Each of these trends has been confirmed by several studies, many of which were conducted by the school districts themselves.
In Fairfax County, for example, which is Virginia’s largest school system, the school district found that between the last academic year and this one, the percentage of F’s earned by middle school and high school students jumped by 83%. This lapse in achievement is worse among younger students and students with learning disabilities: Middle schoolers reported a 300% increase in F’s, and students with disabilities across all grades reported a 111% increase in F’s, according to the Washington Post.
Fairfax Superintendent Scott Brabrand’s solution is to identify the students who are struggling the most and give them additional support, whether that means implementing “catch-up days” or extending the first quarter to make sure students have learned the necessary material. But this will not be enough. Fairfax’s students need to return to the classroom, in person and full time, which is what they were supposed to do earlier this month until Brabrand delayed the second phase of the district’s reopening.
The county’s rationale for the delay was the same one that New York City officials touted last week when they announced another citywide school shutdown: Coronavirus cases in the area had reached or surpassed a certain threshold. But this is a poor excuse. The schools have not reached the officials’ threshold, and even if they did, the impact would not be severe because schools are not the superspreader sites that many feared they would be.
A recent study by the New York Times found that the transmission of COVID-19 among children remains extremely low. In New York City, for example, there were only 28 positive cases out of the 16,438 staff members and students randomly tested in the first week of schools reopening. Eight of those 28 positive cases were students. Knowing this, and knowing the academic consequences that will follow, government officials in Fairfax, New York City, and several other parts of the country have chosen to close schools anyway.
There is a term used to describe the willful abandonment of a child’s well-being: neglect. Recent school closures fit this description. Officials are actively keeping children out of the classroom despite there being no scientific justification for doing so, and they are putting them in a situation that statistically leads to severe academic decline. This is, for all intents and purposes, child neglect — and we should start treating it as such.
