There have been cases where a school system makes headline news by cancelling in-person classes as the infection peaks in their area. These shutdowns have only been for 1-2 weeks. The kids are in school. The kids are doing activities. The kids are alright.
School is in person this school year, although there have been about 10 virtual days so far for his school, all have been in 2022 because of Omicron making staffing really tough. There are a handful of after school activities, but many are canceled. Sports are largely back to normal.
Hope your son is doing okay.
My kids and their friends repurposed their remote learning tools (MS Teams) and have had more creative interaction with their peers than they would have had otherwise (it's always been a pain organizing real-world play-dates). I'm surprised that this wasn't a more widespread experience.
Plus a lot of parents are paranoid about online interaction to a crazy degree and will hardly let kids interact online - it makes no sense, but they consider it to be the great bogey man of the 21st century and think that pedophiles are ready to instantly jump on their kids, even if they are in a private discord room just chatting.
It’s hard to measure this systematically and I’m glad that your experiences were positive. My kids had marked drop in grades and really suffered. It wasn’t so much the social aspect as teachers and schools not being to adapt to new methods.
I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
For both fully-remote and alternating-day in-person, if schools still failed kids, they'd have had to fail over half of most classes. Percentages of engaged-enough-to-be-OK kids in online schools tended to sit in the 10-20% range. It wasn't unusual for half or more of kids to effectively be absent for an entire semester. [EDIT] The alternating-day half-in-half-out in-person schedule kids, in the one district that I have insight into that did that for fall 2020/spring 2021, seemed to fare even worse than the online cohort, incidentally.
> I’d like to see trends in standardized tests during this period as I think the real harm was in knowledge not gained.
Any places that did them, they'll be awful, guaranteed. IIRC at least some states skipped them in Spring 2020 since it'd have been nearly impossible to proctor them and everyone knew they'd be "tainted" anyway. The main point of them is to compare year-over-year progress to see what needs to be adjusted and whether progress is being made, for which a during-remote-learning standardized test would be worthless, since you already know it'll be bad and why it's bad and won't be able to get any actionable info out of comparing it to prior or future years. It'll probably be another couple years before we have something like a new baseline and the tests start to be useful for their intended purpose again.
Stop inventing new problems that don't exist - there's already enough to go around.
The result is these children don't learn how to read. And studies have shown for ages that if a child is not a proficient reader by grade 3, they will likely never be proficient, ever.
That's just one of many costs. We're leaving these children behind.
Minimizing this does nothing for them. And remember, a depressed kid doesn't always look sad, but can seem happy go lucky as they are trying to be what their parents want them to be.
There is deep psychological damage to kids who sat alone, by themselves for the past year. Have others had it worse in history? Sure. But that's like saying if you get run over by a Prius, it doesn't matter because people that got hit by a truck had it worse.
And for all that keeping kids at home, we really didn't gain anything. If you look at places and regions that kept kids in school and compare them to places that shut schools down, there's no discernable difference in outcomes. Because people intermingled anyway. So we could've at least had kids socializing and developing normally for that cost.