“It was literally the best I’ve ever done,” he said, remembering how such moments fueled big ambitions for life after high school. “Half the fun was 
 getting to perform at some college that I even thought about going to — like Stanford or Berkeley.”

But less than two years later, the smile had faded — and so had the dreams. Just weeks into remote learning in the spring of 2020, Jason stopped attending class at American High School in Fremont. By the middle of the following year, he had descended into academic failure and depression. After months in which he had trouble getting out of bed, plagued by thoughts of suicide, he spent 10 days in a residential mental health facility.

“I felt so worthless,” he said. “I had no clue when things were going to go back to normal.”

As scholars debate the pandemic’s effect on lost learning and student well-being, Jason’s story is a reminder of the suffering millions of young people experienced when they were no longer tethered to school. Cut off from friends, teachers and extracurricular activities, students reeled from the effects of school closures. And the aftershocks continue: Into early 2022, were still seeing spikes in students admitted for eating disorders, depression and suicidal behavior. 

“Connection to one another is a core need for all of us. Having that stripped away is traumatizing,” said Karen Larsen, CEO of the Steinberg Institute, a Sacramento-based think tank focusing on mental health. She added that while some teens quickly bounced back, others “may never fully recover from what they have lived through these past few years.”  

The shutdown 

Another snapshot, also pre-pandemic: A laughing Jason is carried by a friend in student council. They’re wearing pajamas, part of a promotion for a school movie night.

Typical Jason, thought his mother, Carol Finuliar. She posted on Facebook: “My son does not have a self-conscious gene.”

He was popular — and gifted. In sixth grade, he got 1,150 on an SAT practice test, a competitive score even for students much older.

By sophomore year, he was active in student council and president of the speech and debate club at his school in the 33,000-student Fremont Unified district. When the pandemic shuttered classrooms in March 2020, he was a kid whose “identity was tied to school,” Carol said. 

Like most students in the Bay Area district, Jason faced lockdown with a mixture of shock and relief: He looked forward to an extended spring break. At first, he participated in Zoom classes and tried to have a “cool background” on his screen to stand out. 

But, as a teacher noted in comments later used to evaluate him for special education, and shared by his parents with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Jason quickly disconnected from school. 

“He was always a happy student ready to help others in the class,” wrote Purvi Mehta, Jason’s 10th-grade life sciences instructor. “After March 13, when we started distance learning, he stopped responding to my emails and submitting work.”

Over time, Jason started thinking no one cared whether he made the effort. Rolling out of bed right before class, he grew self-conscious. 

“My hair is sticking up, and I’m wearing the same shirt for days on end,” he said. “I didn’t really feel like I was even in school. It felt like I was watching this movie on repeat, and I wasn’t necessarily enjoying this movie.”

Like schoolwork, Jason’s favorite outlet —  â€” went virtual. That, too, felt dispiriting. In junior high, he rehearsed speeches every day, starting a few weeks before a tournament, and practiced in front of friends and family.

A favorite selection was a one-man show in which he acted out a scene of a boy and girl running for class president, altering his voice to play each character.

But as competitions went remote, Jason found it too easy for students to cheat because they could read a “script” on screen and record their entries.

All of this ran counter to what he loved about speech: the thrill of delivering a well-prepared address before a live audience.

“That was the point of competition,” he said.

‘I thought he was being lazy’

Jason also lost motivation in other aspects of his life. By the summer of 2020, he had stopped taking care of Cookie, the family’s 3-year-old shih tzu, and doing other chores. Increasingly frustrated, Carol sent him to stay for a month with her brother in Sacramento. 

“I just thought he was being lazy,” she said. She and her husband felt “blindsided” by their son’s struggle. “I didn’t know that you don’t choose to be depressed. I didn’t understand that at all.”

In fact, she initially worried more about Jason’s younger sisters, Julia and Cherie, who are more reserved than their outgoing brother. Julia, now a senior at American, said she actually found school easier online and “way more relaxed.”

Jason, for his part, doesn’t remember a single argument that led to his ejection from the house — just that his mother “yelled at [him] for random stuff.” 

When he returned home in the fall and again refused to participate in remote classes, Carol made him get a job. 

That turned out to be a blessing.

Taking orders and making chalupas at Taco Bell funded his love of Nintendo Switch games like Minecraft and Mario Kart. Streaming games to Twitch, an interactive online platform, linked him to other players. In those moments, he felt less alone. 

And working fulfilled his need to interact with people in person. His mother remembers: The days he worked were the only times he got out of bed.

He also looked forward to sessions with Yvette Helmers, a school psychologist for the district and the only staff member to see him in person. At school, they talked about his anxiety. In psychology-speak, she said Jason experienced an “embedded level of maladaptive perfectionism.” Avoiding stressful situations, for fear he couldn’t control the outcome, only made them harder to face. 

“He felt like, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I manage this? I’m just supposed to go to school,’ ” she said. His response to closures, she added, was not atypical.

Jason’s decline from A and B sophomore to clinically depressed teen is a reminder that even students who had sailed through school and lived relatively comfortable, middle-class lives didn’t escape COVID’s gauntlet. But they also enjoy privileges many students do not. They typically have access to quality medical care and parents with the time and financial security to care for them. Scholars studying how prolonged continue to affect students say the damage to learning was far worse in high-poverty communities and for those who were already struggling.

By contrast, the median household income in Fremont is $142,000, roughly twice the statewide average. The district serves a majority Asian population, where many parents work in the tech sector for familiar brands like Apple and Tesla. In 2018, Meta’s Facebook expanded into a research and development hub not far from Jason’s high school. His father, Jesse, works as a computer programmer and networking engineer.

Growing up in a Filipino-American family, Jason lived with high expectations. Carol, a self-described “tiger mom,” enrolled him in SAT prep classes in elementary school and, the summer after his freshman year, placed him in a community college astronomy class taught by a former NASA engineer.

A doctor later suggested that maybe Carol was pushing him too hard. At the time, she was offended.

Such behavior is by no means unique. “Fremont is a very high-performing district,” Helmers said. “Students already have a high level of depression. People say, ‘They have everything — access to tutors, technology. Why would they not do well?’ ”

But beneath the high GPAs and extracurricular activities, she said, is often an unhealthy pattern of behavior — staying up past midnight and going to school sleep-deprived. By the time the pandemic began, she said, “they were already taxed.”

Thoughts of suicide

Midway through the school year, Jason’s mental state worsened. On his 17th birthday, Jan. 21, 2021, Carol made pancakes with whipped cream and berries — his favorite. But he didn’t get out of bed. 

Jason began to think — and dream — about suicide. In one recurring nightmare, he stepped off the end of a pier. By day, he thought of jumping off the Dumbarton Bridge, which connects Fremont to Palo Alto over San Francisco Bay. 

He told a doctor he had placed a metal coat hanger in the closet around his neck to see if it would support his weight. It didn’t.

The situation was serious enough that a psychiatrist referred him to Sunol Hills — a single-story house in a residential area of Fremont converted into a treatment facility for youth with behavioral health problems. In a recurring theme, his stay there wasn’t a dark period he’d like to forget, he said; rather, it filled a deep need for human contact. 

“It felt nice to be around people my age,” Jason said. “I felt understood.”

He had his own room and went to sleep to the sound of a passing train. During the day, patients took supervised walks through the neighborhood and played card games like .

As nourishing as the experience felt, Jason said he never forgot where he was. After the games, staff locked up the cards because some teens had a history of cutting themselves. 

There were no hangers in the closet.

‘Fighting against everything’

Meanwhile, Carol put aside hopes for college scholarships and honed her advocacy skills. A workers’ compensation attorney for the state, she took off as many as four days a week to “deal with the school and get him treatment.” 

By March 2021, roughly 43% of schools nationwide or offered a hybrid split between remote and in-person learning, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a think tank that tracked school closures. Brown University economist Emily Oster’s of test data in several states confirms those with less access to in-person learning saw drops in proficiency as high as 20 percent. 

California were among the last to reopen, and Jason’s district finished out the 2020-21 school year online.

Carol attended regular school board meetings, fired off lengthy emails to administrators with links to about learning loss and pushed officials to evaluate Jason for special education services to alleviate his depression. She hoped to ease Jason back into school by getting him more time on tests and the ability to skip missed assignments.

In doing so, she got a glimpse of the bureaucratic morass so many parents with children in special education face. A “student study team” first met in January 2021 to take up the family’s request. But it wasn’t until May, just weeks before the end of the school year, that the team determined Jason was eligible for an individualized education program, or IEP — a plan that outlined the additional services and accommodations he would receive.

The report determined that “the situational factors of the pandemic cannot be ruled out as contributors to his mental health and academic performance.” 

Despite her activism, Carol felt helpless as neighboring districts gradually implemented hybrid schedules. 

She saw other families flee the district for private schools.

Some left the state.

Fremont parent Nely Rojas-Matteo helped organize to force an in-person option that spring, but soon moved with her family to Florida, where schools were open. 

“We were fighting against everything and everyone,” she said. 

But the situation in Fremont complicates a pandemic narrative that typically pits angry parents against reluctant educators. Rojas-Matteo said it was hard to get the district’s “risk-averse” families on board with reopening, even after said it was safe for students to return and warned of “grave mental health problems” if they didn’t. 

Nationally, Asian families were the most hesitant to resume in-person learning, a fact researchers attribute to of COVID caution and fears of linked to the virus’s origin in China. Even in Fremont, an Asian woman and her 10-year-old daughter were of “Go back to China” by a neighbor in October 2020. 

In an email to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Fremont Superintendent C.J. Cammack insisted the district “centered the well-being of our students and staff at every turn in the decision-making process.”
 
For example, Fremont opened some classrooms for on-site learning in March 2021 and added “wellness centers” at high schools that fall.
 
But the in-person hubs turned out to be classrooms where students sat together while teachers remained virtual. Jason found the scene “chaotic” and asked not to return.
 
Helmers, the school psychologist, described the wellness centers as places where students can read, paint, drink tea or “sit and do nothing.” However, neither Jason nor his sister Julia said they knew anything about the center at their high school.

In the push to reopen, several California districts took advantage of from the state and reached agreements with unions for teachers to return. Not Fremont. By the end of that March, Cammack — appointed just before the 2020-21 school year — that talks with the union had broken down. 

The union the district for the failure to find “middle ground” and said teachers “carried the weight” of knowing that most parents weren’t even interested in returning to in-person learning before the end of the year.

Brannin Dorsey, current president of the 1,700-member Fremont Teachers Association, wasn’t in charge then.

And she’d rather not play “armchair quarterback and critique how it could have been done differently,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. 

“I think the entire nation is thinking about that.”

‘Genuinely wanted 
 my diploma’

As the school year drew to a close, Jason grew so desperate to escape the daily pressure of signing on to Zoom that he was prepared to leave high school for good. In his IEP evaluation, he told educators he “saw no value” in remote learning. He took the high school equivalency exam — an option far more typical of students who have already dropped out. 

For Carol, the test offered a final “ticket out” of regular calls about Jason’s truancy. 

He passed the exam — remotely — despite panicky feelings over a proctor watching him on camera. A picture Carol took of him holding his certificate offers almost a reverse image of the happy kid in the snapshot from two years earlier. Standing in the kitchen, hair almost covering his eyes, he looks defeated.

“It was heartbreaking,” she said. “It was such an accomplishment, but he couldn’t celebrate or find anything to be proud of.”

Something was missing. For a student who had once been so immersed in school, he still felt driven to stay on a traditional path toward graduation. When American reopened in person last fall, his friends persuaded him to return for senior year.

“I genuinely wanted to get my diploma from that school,” he said. 

But he remained emotionally fragile. One teacher refused to give him more time on tests, as his IEP stipulated. He came home in tears the Thursday before Halloween and didn’t join friends going out in costume. By Monday, Carol told the school he wouldn’t be coming back. 

Post-high school, he worked at a grocery store — hours that Carol believes contributed to his healing — and spent spare time playing PokĂ©mon with friends he made at a comic book shop near his old junior high. 

Carol didn’t let up on making sure he enrolled in school somewhere. But the thought of entering college only reminded him why he had left American. Jason worried professors wouldn’t make accommodations for him. During the summer, he said, he still needed “time to work through the trauma.”

A student accessibility office at Ohlone, a community college in Fremont, gave him the time and space to do that. Over the course of several visits to the campus, counselors broke down the admissions process into small steps and assured him that instructors would consider his needs. In late July, he registered for the fall semester. Carol said she “nearly cried.”

On Aug. 29, his father made him a breakfast burrito and Jason reported to class. 

In looking back at her son’s two-year ordeal, Carol remains bewildered by how quickly school closures knocked Jason off course. Despite her disappointment that he’s not attending a traditional university this fall, she has learned to focus on his happiness.

“We are all a little bit more aware of mental wellness,” she said. “It is so hard to accomplish anything when you’re depressed. The healing process is so slow, it’s painful.” 

Carol believes that Jason no longer feels like a failure, but still worries “one little obstacle will set him off.”

His progress, while visible, is far from linear. Relearning study habits hasn’t been easy.  Sometimes, he procrastinates on assignments and skips class.

Carol tells him to break up homework into one-hour increments and often sits with him in his room to get it done. He especially enjoys his Japanese class, and a county rehabilitation agency is helping him look for a new job.

For Jason, there’s solace in knowing he’s not alone. A friend in his early morning English class recently opened up about feelings of anxiety. 

“It’s kind of comforting knowing that he’s sharing with me what he’s going through,” he said.

When his own dark thoughts return, Jason remembers he’s “been through so much worse.” And he’s in a counseling program at Ohlone that will give him a better shot at transferring into highly competitive Berkeley — a goal he’s rekindled.

“There’s much more that I want to accomplish.”

Like so many of her peers returning to classes after two years of pandemic isolation, Crockett High School senior Klyrissa Porter often feels overwhelmed.

But the Austin, Texas, teen noticed when she would reach out to her friends to share that her mental health was suffering, the replies she received were not exactly what she’d hoped for. 

“They’d just be like, ‘LOL, same,’” Porter said.

The hallways are full of teens struggling, she said, but no one seems to be able to help anyone else move forward. “Everyone is going through a lot, and because of that we’ve forgotten how to be friends,” she said, “
to be there for each other, support each other, love each other.”

That’s particularly difficult for Porter who has been part of Students Organizing for Anti-Racism (SOAR) since her freshman year to help confront the systemic racism at school. But confronting such large troubling issues on campus requires stamina people seems to have lost during the pandemic, said students in SOAR, which meets as a regular class at Crockett. 

To honor diverse perspectives, they first have to relearn how to hear and see beyond themselves. 

“There is not a person in the world who doesn’t have something they’re going through,” Porter’s classmate, senior Lilly Swearingen said. 

Now, the same skills they use to ground their anti-racist work are helping the SOAR students rebuild the basic social skills and healthy relationships they lost during the pandemic. 

Specifically, they said, have helped them repair their relationships and see themselves in the context of community again. 

When the students in Crockett High School in Austin gather to address conflict or deepen their connection to each other, they usually gather in a circle and pass a talking piece from student to student while answering a question or responding to a prompt. 

These circles, familiar fixtures in social and emotional learning and restorative discipline, have sacred roots, said Iztac Arteaga, the restorative practices specialist at Crockett. Circles have been healing and grounding for Indigneous communities for centuries, and their power is more vital than ever in the middle of a nationwide teen mental health crisis.  

“When people feel held and seen and valued as humans, there’s just so much more that can be done as you’re navigating difficult situations,” Ateaga said. 

Difficult situations abound.

As Arteaga teaches students and teachers how to participate in and eventually facilitate circles, she is adamant that the practice not become perfunctory or sloppy. While it’s tempting  to just, for instance, grab a dry-erase marker to serve as a talking piece, she said, for a circle to be most effective, it also has to be, in some sense, sacred.

“If we knew the history and how indigneous people literally died and lost their lives to maintain these practices we’d probably treat it with a little more respect,” Arteaga said. 

Instead of a dry-erase marker for a talking piece, the group should choose something to convey respect, and remind them of their shared values. Same with the centerpiece, where students can rest their eyes if looking at each other becomes uncomfortable or painful. 

In her position, Arteaga facilitates and teaches “community-building” circles, which start out light, giving people the opportunity to know each other. Cross-talk and phones are not allowed. She also does trauma-informed “mediation” circles when a conflict has occurred between students or between students and teachers. 

When they returned to school, the first emotion Porter noticed was anger. Fights broke out, people lost their tempers daily. “It got to the point that we were scared to come to school,” she said, as other students nodded along with her. 

Circles at Crockett are uniquely suited for these complicated dynamics. While punitive discipline might address the behavior, restorative practices like those students learn in SOAR, speak to the pain behind the outbursts. 

“SOAR gives us a place to express ourselves, and a space where everyone can just say what they need to say,” said junior Daniella de Guzman. 

Community circles gather students to address harm done and feelings hurt, but instead of doling out punishments according to a policy handbook, each member of the circle can say what they need. Even the offending party gets the chance to express the unmet needs or pain that led to their hurtful actions. Addressing the pain keeps them in the community, and accountable to it. 

Arteaga knows the power of circles to sustain community, not just as a facilitator in schools, but as a participant.  As an Indigenous person whose ancestors were colonized out of their home and identity, ceremony is critical to her understanding of her own heritage. She participates in circles with the broader Indigenous community in Austin, and confers with the people there about how to best facilitate the practice in schools. 

It’s a careful balance, she said. Some aspects of ceremony need to be exclusive to Indigenous communities, because of the long history of cultural appropriation. 

Circles are a sacred part of the governance, community preservation, and identity of Indigenous groups, Arteaga explained, and were part of the religious and cultural practices outlawed for most of the history of the United States until the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

While she recognizes the circles happening at school will be inherently less authentic to Indigenous culture—the circles in the SOAR class are named after the houses in the Harry Potter series—Arteaga wants them to be respectful of it as they gather around a centerpiece—often a fire—and designating a talking piece to pass from person to person.

“If we knew the history and how Indigenous people literally lost their lives to maintain these practices, we probably would treat it with a little more respect,” Arteaga said.  

While she sometimes has to educate students and teachers simultaneously, the teacher for the SOAR class had the kids well-versed and acclimated to circles, Arteaga said. With the additional grounding in history and tradition, the SOAR students have been able to facilitate on their own. Her goal is for more students and adults on campus to be able to do the same, so that circles become a regular and reliable resource. Skilled listeners and communicators can strengthen the entire support network of the school.

Freshman Will Haskell actually did learn a lot about himself during the pandemic, he said, and he knew that what he’d learned about his own mental health would help his friends, but after two years online, starting the conversation in person is challenging. “SOAR has helped me to be able to actually talk about it,” Haskell said. 

Knowing how to offer help is one skill the kids are developing, so is asking for help. Circles teach them the importance of asking for consent in both roles.

A lot of kids seemed totally dissociated— disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, and emotions, Swearingen said. They shove the feelings down to make it through the day, and some then overshare with their friends online. She calls it “trauma-dumping” and says it’s almost a trend now. 

When one person posts about a mental health challenge, she said, their comments will often fill with others echoing the complaint, or even seeming to “one-up” the severity of the original poster’s distress. “If we can at least tone it down a little bit, it would help a lot.”

Even when it’s not competitive, she said, rarely do teens ask for consent before sharing their burdens via social media or direct messages. They don’t check to see if the recipient is in the right place to receive the extra weight. For two years students were isolated from each other in real life, she said, but grew accustomed to constant, around-the-clock access to one another on social media.

“It’s an expectation that has been set and it’s very uncomfortable,” Swearingen said.

Circles provide a structured way for students to listen, to see that others are going through their own struggles, without immediately hopping on board to trauma-dump. When the talking piece moves to their hands, they will have a turn. 

That predictable, structured place to safely share is critical, especially for students who want to take on society’s bigger challenges, Swearingen said. “It puts us in a spot where we can be vulnerable with each other, and because we can be vulnerable together we can be productive.”

Nystrom chose to run for the board of Brainerd Public Schools, which serves a small city surrounded by lakeside resort towns. A pharmacist by trade, he wanted to help lead the district because he believed the area’s top-flight schools were one reason so many visitors chose to stay.

But last fall, Nystrom cut his fifth term short, joining an unprecedented number of Minnesota school board members — many of them living in rural areas — who have resigned prematurely since the start of 2021 in the face of harassment and threats from constituents they were elected to serve.

According to the Minnesota School Boards Association, during the 2020-21 school year and in the first two months of the current one, more than 86 of the state’s 2,200 elected district board members left their posts. So far in 2022, at least 26 have stepped down — six in the last month alone, with the two most recent resignations taking place Monday. In a typical year, 12 to 15 leave their seats before their terms are up.

While some resigned for a job or to run for another office, the number who have simply quit in frustration has mushroomed. Districts have seen multiple resignations — sometimes on the same day. Some of those who quit say they were under public pressure to disobey state and federal policies. Some left because their positions became untenable when their board allies resigned.

Especially in smaller towns, the tensions have spilled over into some board members’ private lives. One was forced to sell her home and move when her 8-year-old was outed as transgender.

“These are supposedly your friends who are yelling at you,” said one former member who did not want her name or community identified because her child is still in school there. “These are people you go to church with.”

The beginning of the end for Nystrom came when critical race theory was added to the list of school-related controversies that had simmered since the start of the pandemic. The night of June 14, he looked out at a small but angry group assembled for the meeting and saw lifelong friends and neighbors.

One speaker was a high school classmate whose family Nystrom knew well. Critical race theory — a graduate school-level framework that education leaders nationwide insist is not taught in K-12 schools — was “demonic,” the man said, going on to reference an Old Testament directive on punishing an enemy who won’t listen.

“I will be back,” the man warned. “I am here to dump hot coals on all your heads.”

It was the last straw for Nystrom. For months, he says, just walking down the hall to get to the boardroom had meant enduring jeers from people waiting to get in. “They would say, ‘Oh, here comes the CRT supporter,’ “ he recalls. “Or, ‘Here’s the guy that requires masks on our kids.’ “

There had been anonymous threats against the entire board, too — people on social media saying they planned to break into members’ homes or beat them. As board chair, Nystrom had asked the district superintendent to make sure police were stationed nearby during meetings. By the end of the summer, tempers had flared to the point where the officer on duty had to stand in the boardroom itself.

“In a small town like this, that’s just never happened,” Nystrom says. “This is scary, that you have to have a police officer in the meeting to protect you.”

‘I don’t need to be the punching bag for everything going on in the world’

Kirk Schneidawind is executive director of the Minnesota School Boards Association. He says violent or chaotic school board meetings are still the exception, not the rule. But the wave of resignations is concerning.

During the first year of the pandemic, Gov. Tim Walz used emergency powers to make decisions about things like school closures. But in the second year, individual boards were left to decide how to respond to hot-button topics like mask and vaccine mandates — and to deal with a backlash no matter what they did.

“People just said, ‘There are multiple reasons why this isn’t what I signed up for,’ ” Schneidawind says. “ ‘I don’t need to be the punching bag for everything that’s going on in the world.’ ”

During one week in January, three of six members resigned from the board of the 414-student Clearbrook-Gonvick School District, which serves two towns in northwestern Minnesota. Board members had deadlocked on whether to comply with what at the time was a White House order mandating staff vaccines.

In a small district southeast of St. Paul, members of a now-inactive Facebook group called Concerned Parents of Hastings outed ‘s 8-year-old as transgender and accused Waits of child abuse. The family was forced to move. 

In August, in the wake of intense fights over whether masks would be required in the fall in its four schools, board members. One cited his mental health in his letter of resignation. Another said people who had harassed her at board meetings had targeted her real estate brokerage and that she feared her kids were next. A third quit in January.

In Robbinsdale, a board member broke down as she told colleagues she was resigning. “The hate is too much,” said Pam Lindberg. “Continued permission the community members give themselves to say whatever they want and however they want is oppressive, it’s demeaning and damaging.”

After striking teachers picketed his home and posted flyers bearing his face on lampposts, Minneapolis board member Josh Pauly quit. Next door, in the suburb of St. Louis Park, one board member resigned in January and another in February.

In his now-ended “” column in the local Advocate Tribune, Granite Falls Mayor Dave Smiglewski wrote in January that he was hearing about rural and suburban mayors worried they could not recruit replacements for school board and city council members who quit because of a “downturn in civility.”

‘A backwater of American politics has become a fast-moving stream’

Rice University Professor Melissa Marschall has studied both education politics and local elections, including in Minnesota and five other states. People traditionally see holding an elected office with long hours and no pay as a civic duty they take turns fulfilling, she says, sometimes with the added benefit of increased visibility or respect for one’s name or business. 

In the past, decisions made at the municipal level have been less ideological and more about distribution of resources, like whose streets get new sidewalks. For school board members, that meant trying to persuade their neighbors to vote in favor of a referendum or to prioritize one construction project over another. 

It’s much easier to agree to disagree on these types of issues than on the things that have divided people during the last couple of years, Marschall explains. A tax debate, for instance, “You can talk your way through,” she says. “It’s about your community, and it’s a collective good. Whether you have kids in school or not, the quality of your schools [influences] your home values.”

But the current acrimony is different. “It’s personal, it’s people deciding you’re a bad person because you differ in your beliefs or your opinions or your preferences about some public policy,” she says. “Where it’s completely detached from facts, how do you try to convince someone that isn’t even willing to look at evidence or rational arguments?” 

Indeed, Nystrom is worried that the next election might be won by people who have shouted conspiracy theories at board meetings — or are just interested in a narrow set of issues. Even if that doesn’t happen, he says, districts may suffer from the loss of institutional memory. School boards make decisions involving huge amounts of money and potentially impacting every household in the community. As members serve, he says, they develop expertise to make these technical decisions.

At the same time, elections could serve as a backlash against protests. In early April, voters in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, re-elected three school board members who had been targeted as “” by Fox News. The losing candidates had protested district policies regarding LGBTQ students.

And there is the possibility that heightened interest in school boards can be a positive disruption, drawing candidates with fresh perspectives. “Local school boards in America have been kind of a closed shop for a very long time,” says Chester Finn, distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Now, “what has been a backwater of American politics has become a fast-moving stream.”

But Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University Teachers College, is concerned that groups at the national level are roiling local political waters. The incentives to serve in elected office in small communities, he says, are different than in cities — and are dwindling. There, school boards are not a springboard to higher office, and when constituents are so divided in basic values, the amount of effort needed to reach consensus and address challenges can be herculean.

“What would make someone stay in a job like that,” he asks, “when they’re getting so much grief and spending so much time and have marginal prospects of really doing good, which is often the motivation for people, especially in smaller communities?”

School boards can almost be viewed as political pawns. Inserting culture war issues into local elections can be “a way to motivate rural voters and get them more involved not just with school boards, which some of these national actors don’t care that much about, but in order to affect turnout in November congressional elections, in particular,” Henig says. “There’s a clear sentiment among some Republicans that this is the way to recapture some suburban communities that they lost under Trump.”

‘My phone literally blew up’ 

In October, Jodi Sapp, chair of the school board in Mankato, located about an hour south of the Twin Cities, asked a man who wanted to speak during a meeting’s public comment period to provide his address. The policy had been in place for all of her 21 years on the board. 

Within days, a district video of her exchange with the man had gone viral, followed by stories on Fox News, in the Washington Examiner, the and the Daily Wire, among other conservative outlets. It was posted to the website “School Board Watch,” along with board members’ photos, contact information and an of the meeting.

Sapp received hundreds of calls and emails, virtually all of them from out of town or from bots. “My phone literally blew up,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “Just call after call. I couldn’t even call out to the superintendent.” 

“Payback is a b****, right fascist Mankato MN school board dictator Jodi Sapp?” tweeted to her 55,000 followers. “You forced a parent to reveal their address so they could be doxxed & harassed. Hopefully people feel free to contact you now too.” 

Some of the messages threatened violence, so Sapp notified the Blue Earth County Sheriff’s Department. “A couple implicated my grandchildren or my animals,” she says. “Those were upsetting.” 

Republican Roger Chamberlain, head of the state Senate Education and Finance Policy Committee, introduced a bill that would prohibit school boards from asking for commenters’ names or addresses. And a right-wing Minnesota site, Alpha News, continued paying attention to Mankato Area Public Schools. 

In December, for example, the site reported that the school board had voted to pay non-white staff extra. In fact, in accordance with state law, board members had voted for stipends for teachers of color and Native American educators willing to mentor junior colleagues in an effort to increase the number who stay on the job.

Nonetheless, the Twitter handle @libsoftiktok — by the Washington Post as “an agenda-setter in right-wing online discourse” — sent a to its more than 600,000 followers. 

Sapp didn’t quit. “I hate bullies,” she says. Plus, she adds, the threats against her probably wouldn’t be carried out: “But if they are, so be it. This is the sword I am willing to fall on.”

In Brainerd, Nystrom worried about resigning. Two longtime incumbents are not running for re-election to the six-member board in the fall, and the district is facing some serious issues. Enrollment dropped over the course of the pandemic as families unhappy about Brainerd’s mask requirement or distance learning moved their children to smaller districts nearby or to private schools.

Fewer students means less state and federal funding, which will translate to layoffs or other cuts that will be especially painful as students and teachers struggle to recover from the effects of the pandemic. The district can ill afford new board members focused more on banning books or stamping out diversity and inclusion efforts than on ensuring schools continue to contribute to the community’s high quality of life, he says.

Nystrom assumed he would get a lot of flak for stepping down, but folks were understanding, he says: “People came up to me in the grocery store or at the gas station and said, ‘I want you to know I’m really proud you resigned because you decided you were going to take care of yourself.’ “

Lead illustration by Meghan Gallagher for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ

San Antonio high school band leader Alejandro Jaime Salazar knew something was off — really off — when he listened to the Mighty Owl marching band practice one morning this past winter. 

Salazar, a tall man with a friendly face, even when concerned, walked between the rows glancing over shoulders, studying fingers to see what was wrong. 

Finally he stopped them. 

“Raise your hand if you’re on page six,” he said. To his surprise, most of the students in the Highlands High School band hall were not.

So, with a fluttering of pages, the Mighty Owls began again. It was better. 

And it’s getting better all the time. 

This kind of gaffe would have been pretty much unheard of years ago, when the band from Highlands High School in San Antonio consistently earned top marks in competitions, bringing home trophies, plaques, and ribbons.

But this school year, as the strain of the pandemic has worn on, and on, Salazar now says he takes mistakes in stride. 

After all they’ve been through, all they are still going through, he says he knows it’s going to take time to get back on the same page and playing the same tune. 

“They regressed a lot, but I’m okay with it because we brought them back,” said Salazar who spent the earliest days of the pandemic, March through May 2020, using every tool he had to hunt down more than 70 band members, stay connected to them over Zoom — sometimes with his own baby on his lap — and muster what enthusiasm he could to create structure, routine, and dependability in their lives.

Now that he has them back in the band hall, is able to check in on their mental health, can make sure they are eating and sleeping somewhere safe, he can start to revive their joy of playing, the thing that brought them together in the first place. 

The entire U.S. school system has been in survival mode for the past two years, focused solely on getting kids back into buildings. Now, feeling as if they’re through the worst of it, one band teacher is determined to see his kids thrive again. “We’re bringing music back.”

Seasons of Love

In some ways, bringing the music back is a sign of hope and progress. Back in the spring of 2020 Salazar remembers being happy if he was able to get even a stanza out of his clunky Zoom practices, with his players waiting out the pandemic at home. He says most of his effort then went towards making sure everyone was safe — while some kids were juggling internet connections and noisy houses, others were facing food insecurity, newly unemployed parents, and mental health crises. 

Salazar quickly realized that the band was often students’ strongest connection to school, and the essential resources it could provide — not just individual academics, but the community that was only as strong as its members. 

But in other ways, bringing the music back doubled as a sign of just how much had been taken from the Mighty Owl Band over the last two years.

Sitting down with Salazar this past December, it was difficult to tell if it’s determination, weariness, hope or relief one now hears in Salazar’s voice. Maybe all of those, as he considers what it means to lead a marching band in the middle of a persistent pandemic and an escalating mental health crisis. 

Salazar knows he probably won’t be adding much to the line of trophies in the Highlands High School band hall in southeast San Antonio — not this year, anyway. This year, it’s about using music to strengthen the bonds of the band, the same bonds he’s been relying on for almost two years to keep students within reach, safe from the ravages of isolation.

A lifelong performer, Salazar knows how close a band can be — he still plays trumpet with a group of mariachis. In fact, touring with a band was his original career goal. He eventually pursued teaching so that he could have a stable gig and start a family, and quickly realized giving students life experiences and confidence they didn’t have before was even more fulfilling than focusing on craft alone. 

“I’m very competitive,” he admitted, and is at times envious of the well-resourced bands where students can afford private lessons and well-funded booster clubs make a band director’s every dream come true. But he says his wife, also a teacher, reminds him: “You wouldn’t do well in one of those places where the kids don’t need you. What is a trophy going to do for you?”

It’s great to make beautiful music, sure, he said, but the real reason he’s remained in his role is to see students grow as people, as a team. In sharp contrast to the isolation of the pandemic, he said, band is about more than just music — it’s about being part of something bigger than yourself, caring for others and being cared for, and believing in others and being believed in. It’s also about finding a connection with people you might not otherwise spend time with. 

“I think that’s what’s going to turn this pandemic mentality around for the people who are not having a positive experience right now,” Salazar said, finding more spaces to forge new connections.

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

Even before the pandemic, Salazar knew camaraderie among the band was the reason some of his students showed up to school, the reason they kept their grades up, so they could stay eligible. In March 2020, that bond became a lifeline.

When schools closed and students were disappearing by the thousands, Salazar had flute-players tracking down flute-players and trumpet-players tracking down trumpet-players. He tracked down every single one. But making contact once didn’t guarantee a student’s situation was stable. One student became homeless in the early months of the pandemic, and it took a band-wide effort to keep in contact with them. 

Like many, he hoped the pandemic would pass, and kids would be back in formation by marching season. It was not to be, of course. San Antonio ISD brought back only 20 percent of students in September 2020. More and more trickled in throughout the year, but none without scars.

“Their communication skills regressed quite a bit. They forgot how to reach out and ask for help,” he said, adding it’s up to him and his assistant directors to offer it. 

The kids in the band call him their “Band Dad,” he said. “The first time I heard it, it was very odd for me. Now it’s a normal thing.”

As someone who had involved and supportive parents whom he credits with much of his success, being a strong “Band Dad” isn’t a responsibility he takes lightly. He knows other teachers who feel this too, like surrogate parents, whose main job isn’t conveying information or handing out grades but being a consistent, supportive presence. 

Lean On Me

While Salazar’s expertise uniquely qualifies him to be a band director, he’s just one of many adults who can take the time to listen, encourage, and help connect a kid to the help they need. That’s the part of his job he takes more seriously than making sure the horns are on cue and the winds are in tune.

Sometimes Salazar says he just listens. The students trust their band family, but sometimes he has to convince them it’s time to bring a counselor or social worker into the conversation. He said some of his students have seen family members get sick and die. They’ve watched their parents go from stable working class incomes to wondering where next week’s groceries would come from.

In the depths of the pandemic, he said students couldn’t worry about mastering marching formations or concert pieces, because they were worried about supporting their families, caring for siblings, and keeping up with classwork, he said. Like the virus, those concerns haven’t evaporated entirely. San Antonio ISD only allowed remote learning in a few circumstances at the start of the 2021-22 school year, but a couple of the kids from the band took it.

“They went through so much at home, it’s hard to leave because they have so much to take care of,” Salazar said.

His compassion and care for the kids is bottomless, it seems, but he’s a true believer in the power of a good routine. Even when the entire band was remote, he conducted regular practice, as a way of creating regularity and normalcy when days, nights, weeks, and months were blending together. 

From the earliest days of the pandemic, Salazar felt it was essential to reach every kid, every day. “I want it to be as normal as possible,” he said back in May 2020, “There are kids who are freaking out. So I want to be that consistency in their life if that’s what they need.” 

Even though other teachers only required contact once per week in the early days, he insisted on daily check-ins. “A lot of teachers don’t understand how important the relationships are,” he said in 2020, during the height of the crisis. 

He also believes band can now play a key role in rebuilding the social and emotional skills kids have lost. He thinks back to his own band directors in high school, who emphasized teamwork and conscientiousness just as much as trumpet skills. 

Whereas some activities and sports tolerate selfishness and arrogance from superstars, that’s not how Salazar learned to train the band. ​​”They encouraged me not only to be a good musician but to be a good person,” Salazar said. 

“They’d say, ‘you’re a good player, you know, but you can’t be a jerk.’” 

We Are Family 

For those who are now back at school in person, the majority of the band, Salazar expects hard work. He drills them on the fundamentals, he connects the effort they put in at band practice to the character they will need to succeed in the future. But the support and acceptance he gives in return is just as committed — he’s all in. “There’s days when I feel like I don’t make an impact at all, but that’s not true,” he said. He knows band is making a difference, because the kids prioritize it. Given the crushing stress of the pandemic, he said, when kids are showing up for 6:45am band practice, he knows they see the value in what they are getting. 

“We’re here all the time,” said flute-player Victoria Martinez, “This is my family.” 

Martinez is a junior and a drum major. While her freshman year was cut short by the pandemic, marching season in the fall and concert season in the winter had given her a taste of what it feels like to win, and a vision of the triumphs that awaited in her years as an upperclassman. 

Now, her perspective is different, she said. Returning to in person school at the end of last year, spring 2021, she could see the toll of the pandemic on her peers, many of whom felt disconnected. Those who have band have somewhere to reestablish that connection. 

“My freshman year success was about trophies,” Martinez said. “My junior year it’s about giving it all to the band.”

Giving their all doesn’t mean perfection. It can’t. The band is inexperienced. Practicing at home in apartments or full houses was not an option for some. Parents were working, siblings were studying. It wasn’t the right environment to pick up a trumpet. 

ABC

To bring back the music, Salazar said, he’s got to do it note by note, and he needs space to do that. 

“We’re expected to come back 100%,” said Salazar, referring to statewide reinstatements of academic testing and band competitions. “It’s like we’re pre-COVID again, and that’s not realistic. They want to call it a rebuilding year, but it’s not a rebuilding year if we’re not able to go back and work on these fundamental skills.”

This is the kind of basic back-and-forth that takes up time. Salazar reviews breathing and posture. Basics. It’s tedious, but the kids are up for it. Band President Isaiah Vigil urges them on, reminds them to focus.

Vigil is only a sophomore, and this is his first year with a full varsity band, but as one of the few who were in school in person all year last year, he’s actually one of the more well-rehearsed. Being the president, as a sophomore, he said, is, “Weird
really weird.” 

But he likes it. Band teaches responsibility, determination, and respect, he said. Getting it right, practicing, showing up — even when motivation is lacking, those are things the band members do for each other. That’s the thing about band, the members said: No one succeeds or fails alone. If a trumpet wants to sound good, they need the other trumpets to be on cue too. It works the other way too, even when individual members might be tempted to slack off, have an “off day,” they still don’t want to let the band down.

“They really care about each other a lot,” Vigil said of his bandmates.

Better Days

Salazar knows one of the main contributions of a band program is motivation and connection it provides. It’s why some kids come to school, he said. Students have to be academically eligible to perform, and pre-pandemic, that kept the kids on their toes. 

Now, he said, no matter how hard they work, eligibility has been a struggle. 

Even with about 70 kids enrolled in band, Salazar went through most of marching season with about half that on the field. It’s difficult to prepare for competitions with so many students at risk of sitting out. 

But he’s also seeing growth. At the beginning of the year, he said, it was difficult to get through the first four measures of a piece, basically the first line. At a competition a few months later they earned a second tier recognition at a competition. Salazar celebrated it as much as he had cheered the top marks the band had gotten at that same competition in previous years. “The growth was there.” 

He posted the win on social media, and band directors and composers around the country celebrated with him.

Bittersweet Symphony 

Jose Pulliza hadn’t imagined quite so much growth in his senior year. He wants to be an engineer, so he pictured himself playing his baritone, having a blast with his friends while they earned high marks and trophies.

“It’s nothing like I would have thought,” Pulliza said, reflecting on the difference between his freshmen and senior year. “A lot changed — I grew.” 

The pandemic struck at the end of Pulliza’s sophomore year, just before the band was set to perform in San Antonio’s lively parade season. His junior year would be spent entirely at home, as his parents weren’t willing to take the risk of sending him back to school in person. He didn’t march in half-time shows or perform from the stands as the air turned cold during football season of his junior year. 

“A year and half really threw me off,” Pulliza said. “It was like being a freshman again.” 

He quickly got back on top of his academics — he’s been accepted at the University of Texas at San Antonio — but when it came to band, rebuilding meant more than just polishing his own skills on the baritone.

Pulliza may have been rusty, but he was one of the only members of the band who had actually completed at least one full year. Salazar would need him in leadership. 

Pulliza auditioned for drum major, successfully, and he’s been surprised how he’s taken to the role. The responsibility bonded him to the band, helped him settle back into a community. 

“People don’t understand how good band is for an individual,” he said. He’s focused on growing as a person, and that’s the message he passes on to his bandmates: success is measured by how you show up, not what accolades you get.

“We just give it our all. We don’t worry about the rewards,” Pulliza said. 

One Love

Salazar knows the slim odds that few, if any, of the Mighty Owls will go on to musical professions. But what they are getting from band can still carry over into their future. Passion, caring for each other, hard work, commitment — these are themes in Salazar’s lectures to the band, which he admits are more frequent than they used to be as he focuses on social and emotional health. 

“You make them a winner by being there for them, supporting them, and by making this a safe space where they can express themselves.” 

Whether it’s the notes on the page, or the melody in their laughter, or the harmony as they work together — that’s what brings the music back.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the Weave Project and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Lead Image: San Antonio high school band leader Alejandro Jaime Salazar (Bekah McNeel)

That’s how long it’s been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era.

On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Within nine days, the nation’s remaining districts followed suit.

Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. 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.

To mark what will soon stretch into a third spring of educational disruption, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ 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. [You can scan through our expanding archive of testimonials right here.]

As spring approaches, there are additional reasons to be hopeful. More children are being vaccinated. Mask mandates are lifting. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities long baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. Teachers are burning out.

“There are kind of two camps,” said Beth Lehr, an assistant principal of Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson, Arizona. “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.’”

But none of this was on anyone’s mind on March 16, 2020.

The World Health Organization had a pandemic only five days earlier. Two days after that, then-President Donald Trump called a . And in the Northshore School District, a system of 22,000 students northeast of Seattle, schools had already been closed for over a week. 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. The district’s closure offered a glimpse into what many thought would be a short-term disruption.

‘I realized it wasn’t science fiction’

Susan Enfield, superintendent of Highline Public Schools in Washington: A very good friend of mine who works in the 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.

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. My husband sent me a text telling me to get out of Kirkland right away, and everything felt ominous.

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. In the car, they announced the governor’s order — it was with a bigger lockdown kind of order — and we walked into the fish market place, and the guy behind the counter goes, “Have you heard anything yet?” We were like, “Yep.” And he goes, “What did he say?” We said, “Lockdown.” And he [grunts], “Uhhhh.” Already, the streets were pretty empty, and the first person we talked to was the guy packaging up our salmon.

Tony Sanders, superintendent, School District U-46, near Chicago: I was asked to serve on a statewide panel of superintendents 
 to provide guidance to school district leaders across the state. Our first meeting, held on Sunday, March 15, was attended by prominent legislators, state health officials, the deputy governor for education and state superintendent of schools. Hearing the projections of worst-case scenarios should we not “flatten the curve” was surreal. At the conclusion of that meeting, where we worked to socially distance, but had no idea yet about the need to wear a mask, I made the four-hour journey home in complete silence and disbelief.

Michael Mulgrew, president, United Federation of Teachers, New York City: We started tracking this during the Christmas holiday. We had some teachers who were in China. We had them quarantine when they came back. I didn’t realize [things had changed] until March 16, the day after the New York City public schools closed. I was in my car driving around the city and I was shocked that the streets were empty. That’s when I realized it wasn’t science fiction. 

Bridgette Adu-Wadier: freshman, Northwestern University, graduate of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandra, Virginia: By the end of March, Gov. Ralph Northam basically announced that all the schools would be closed due to the pandemic for the rest of the school year. I watched the livestream, and I was texting my friends. One of them was actually really upset and crying about it, just because it was such a stressful situation to be in — like, things are never going to be the same again.

‘We were completely unprepared’

Parents, superintendents and others — many in a state of shock — had little time to plan as events unfolded at frightening speed.

Toni Rochelle Baker: family liaison for Oakland REACH, a parent advocacy organization, Walnut Creek, California: They gave us curfews in our city and then they told us to stock up for food. I don’t live my life like that. I’m a single mother. I go grocery shopping when I can. We get what we need, and now you’re telling me to stock up on food? That was scary. I didn’t have a deep freezer. I didn’t have extra money just laying around [to] go spend $300 on food. I didn’t have Wi-Fi at the time because I didn’t really need it. I have my phone, and now I need Wi-Fi for three people.

Maria Amado, family child care provider, Hartford, Connecticut, who opened her program for school-age children during remote learning: [Translated from Spanish] Educators, including myself, sewed masks for the children, and we looked for resources to support each other. Some gave fabric to make the masks, others the elastic. It may not have been in big ways, but they all contributed. And now I remember this and think, “Where did I find the time to make the masks?” It was the adrenaline to survive, knowing this would protect me and I had to do it.

Tony Sanders: We needed to place emergency orders for Chromebooks and other devices. We had to completely transform our approach to food service so that by March 17 we were feeding our students and community at food pickup locations throughout the district. There were decisions that had to be made that I would never have thought of. We had to determine how we would ensure employees would continue to be paid. During the first days of the pandemic, I recall sitting alone in my office. The view from my window was a large parking lot with one vehicle.

Sherrice Dorsey-Smith, deputy director of programs, planning and grants, San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families: I had to figure out how we were going to open what we called emergency child and youth centers. These were spaces for essential workers to leave their children for the day while they were at work. Child care centers were closed, schools were closed, but some people needed or were required to continue working. They needed a safe place for their children during the day. I had to figure out how to get breakfast, lunch and snacks to all the sites. I remember working through the weekend nonstop, literally 48 hours.

Michael Mulgrew: It was a mad scramble to get everyone trained quickly how to get their classrooms up. How do we teach parents how to help their kids? It was non-stop. It was hundreds of decisions every day. Even though everything was closed, we were still moving stuff literally, like laptops and iPads and different things, trying to get them to our members’ houses so they had something to work off. [Former] Mayor [Bill de Blasio] had resolved never to close the schools, so he would not allow the Department of Ed to put any contingency plans in place. On the Friday before the schools closed, at 3 p.m., the mayor would be banging on the table saying he was going to keep the schools open. And that Sunday afternoon he closed the schools. So we were completely unprepared.

School, interrupted

As the deadline for lifting lockdown kept slipping away, some took longer to grasp the new reality: Life wouldn’t be returning to normal anytime soon.

Mariela Garcia: freshman at the University of Houston, graduate of Eastwood Academy High School in Houston: It was during spring break when we ended up having two weeks instead of one. And two weeks turned into three. This went on for a couple of weeks before we noticed that we weren’t going to go back to school. Stores started closing down, schools started closing, many things started closing because everyone was scared. That’s when I noticed that this was becoming very serious.

Dale Chu, senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute: I realized everything had changed 
 on May 10, 2020. How do I remember the date? My at-the-time 5-year-old daughter — after nearly two months on Zoom — drew a picture of her class for me. Seeing Kellan’s classmates through her eyes on a Zoom grid really hit things home for me.

Ricardo Miguel Martinez, president, Latino Parents for Public Schools, Atlanta: I had people worried about getting kicked out, evicted, lights being turned off, not having groceries. These are people who weren’t making excuses. The people who are fighting masks and stuff, they have a choice to either follow the data or not follow the data. God bless them in their fight. But these people didn’t have a choice. They got thrown into the chicken factories and died. They got thrown into manufacturing and died so that we could have chicken at the grocery store.

Mourning the lost

Some felt the pandemic’s effects up close: sick parents, dead teachers. This month, the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. , with an estimated 2,200 of them educators. Many of the effects have been harder to measure, but are certain to leave lasting damage. Recent four out of five secondary school principals experienced “frequent job-related stress” last year, and educator surveys show over students’ mental health, including anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

Susan Enfield: We lost two middle school students to suicide early in the pandemic. We lost staff members.

Michael Mulgrew: I had to read the names of our members who passed away. I had to make the phone calls to those families. We lost a lot of members, and I always think that if we could have closed earlier, how many more would we not have lost.

Shawnie Bennett, a COVID-19 investigator, Oakland, California: I lost my brother [from COVID] in May of 2020. He was only 32. As a family, when we would gather to try and go see him or just sit outside the hospital window. We were afraid to touch each other, so it was hard to comfort each other. [My son] came home [from college] for Christmas, and he saw me so weak and broken. He had always seen a very strong Black woman as a mother. I was gone, emotionally wrecked, mentally, physically, and it broke him down to the point that he did not want to return to school. He’s in Atlanta now, got an apartment and he’s just trying to figure life out. He was very close to my brother. That loss, on top of what he physically saw me go through, was detrimental for him.

David Brown, principal, Hillcrest Heights Elementary, Prince George’s County, Maryland: Family vacations, going out to eat, visiting family — I think all of those things disappearing created a milieu where it was tough to manage. And when you’re in charge of leading a large group of individuals, how do you help and support them? How do you keep your teachers upbeat? Because the mental health of every adult who receives a paycheck from our county impacts the mental health and the wellness of children who are just simply here to learn. I remember there was discussion that we’ll be able to eat and enjoy ourselves come the 4th of July, and then that didn’t happen. You’re holding out hope that it’s going away, but it’s not, and [you’re] trying to remain that positive, invigorating leader that the principal has to be.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier: Graduation was a really tough time. I don’t remember enjoying it, honestly. Just collectively, it was like a year or so of the pandemic, and then also, my family was impacted a lot financially, which was stressful. I was basically helping my two younger brothers through virtual school for the whole year. I had a lot more family responsibilities, and it took a toll on me mentally. I had trouble balancing things, especially with Zoom class sessions while my brothers needed help or were playing loudly in the other room. I relied on music and audiobooks as a form of escape.

Ashiley Lee, tech and operations coordinator, Para Los Niños, a Los Angeles charter school, where last year she taught seventh-grade history: I remember being in a class full of blank screens, because we no longer required cameras on, and then after that, putting my grades in for the semester and realizing just how low they were. I was trying to brainstorm with my team: What is something, anything, we can do to encourage our students to at least get the one assignment we post a week in by the end of the semester? My kids, it was so funny, we started a joke where I would call on a student to answer a question and they wouldn’t be there — kind of a ghost in the call. And the kids would comment in the chat, “Ghostbuster! Ms. Lee caught him.”

Marguerite Roza: The hardest part was when it looked like there was no reopening school. This was November of 2020. The governor had established these metrics by which you could open schools, and as far out as the modelers had modeled, it was never going to reopen. My then-high school daughter [a cross-country runner] was getting more and more discouraged. You could just see it was really not healthy for her, just to be home all alone every day. And you, as a parent, start to feel desperate. I used to listen to press conferences constantly. You could see that there wasn’t going to be any movement. I was very worried about her. The sports season had come and gone. School was online. I think that was probably the darkest time, which coincides in Seattle with it being really dark, [at] like 3:45. 

Mariela Garcia: Hundreds and thousands of people were dying because of COVID, and I was scared. I remember I had no interactions with the outside world for — I kid you not — at least three months straight. My family just did not want to leave our home. At the time, we had to adjust to online school. I had no Wi-Fi or laptop at the time, so it was hard to be in class and even submit assignments from my phone. It was definitely a very hard time, especially when family members started to get COVID.

Toni Baker: I had two kids at the table with computers doing virtual learning and I had no idea what that meant. They told us to sign on to some Zoom that I’ve never heard of before. I’m in love with my kids, but my kids were on my last nerves during the pandemic. Those four walls just weren’t enough.

Couch sitting, watching ‘Friends’

The monotony of being stuck at home sparked new coping strategies: Cooking, at-home workouts, walking the dog — and of course . Some took long couch breaks. Others became entrepreneurs. Mariela Garcia started baking and ran a business from a local farmer’s market.

Mariela Garcia: My family actually bought the DVD set of “Friends” and we just watched “Friends” over and over and over. We’ve already seen each episode at least 10 times. We just keep it playing throughout the whole day because we don’t have any Wi-Fi or anything at home. I would not have started my business if it wasn’t for being in quarantine. I had so much more free time. I hate being that person, but the first time I ever tried my empanadas, they came out great, and I have not changed anything. 

Susan Enfield: A group of female superintendents from around the country — we refer to ourselves as “sister supes” — had a standing Sunday afternoon Zoom where we would just check in and get together. In the early months, that proved to be incredibly helpful, just remembering that we weren’t alone. Going for walks with my husband and also, frankly, allowing myself to feel pain and to grieve. I think as leaders we do need to inspire hope and let people know it’s going to be OK and be strong, but we also have to balance that strength and courage with vulnerability. There were weekends where I didn’t get off the couch. I’ve been pretty honest about that in conversations with others. I said to someone once, “If one more person says, ‘You got this,’ I’m gonna smack ‘em.” A year and a half ago, I didn’t “got this,” and people were just lying. I’m sorry, they were just lying. I don’t think we do ourselves or our colleagues or anyone any service by faking it.

Beth Lehr, assistant principal, Sahuarita High School, Sahuarita, Arizona: I do not check my email at all on the weekends.

Toni Baker: I had a support system. They gave us vouchers for food. They gave my kids free computers. They gave us Wi-Fi. They had these teachers — I don’t even know where they found these beautiful teachers with these loving hearts for these kids. There was a teacher who had a grandma’s touch and a mom’s heart, and she was just so warm. This is through a computer. I’ve never met this woman to this day in real life. I had the community of Oakland REACH behind me. I wouldn’t have made it without them.

David Brown: When we were in person, I had “lunch bunches” where I would eat lunch with the kids. So I went back to eating lunch virtually with the kids, and I found that really gave me a lot of positive energy. You find that you are equally, if not more, excited to see them in this virtual world than they are to see you. So it’s the, “Hey, Mr. Brown.” It’s the big smile. It’s the camera coming on. It’s the home environment. It’s the parents waving in the background. I think all of that does a good amount to lift your spirits.

‘The system itself is not changing’

Confusing guidance and vitriolic debate left many parents feeling lost. They watched helplessly as their children disengaged from learning, but also worried that their kids would get sick if they returned to school. School leaders were caught in what felt like a non-stop, high-volume war of words with unions, parents and state officials. 

Pedro Martinez, CEO, Chicago Public Schools; former superintendent, San Antonio Independent School District: Texas did not prioritize teachers [for vaccines] in the first round, but they were pushing hard and threatening districts about keeping schools open. Meanwhile, the positivity rate, I remember in San Antonio, was over 21 percent. The death rate was five times higher in my district than it was in the more affluent parts of the county. I just remember the frustration. You want these things, but yet you’re not providing vaccines to my staff, who actually want to keep the schools open. 

Michael Mulgrew: The city doctors are telling us it’s going to be nothing but a cold and the schools could remain open. The kids are going to be fine. They’re not going to get it, and we’ll create herd immunity, and we’ll be safer faster than everybody else. Literally, that’s the conversation I was having with the mayor and his doctors. Our doctors are telling us the absolute opposite. They’re saying, “Listen, children might not be getting this at this point in time, but this is a serious virus and people are going to die.” The big conflict was that first one. 

Marguerite Roza: I’m a data person. I really study the numbers, and I didn’t understand how a lot of people were driven by fear and couldn’t recognize what I was seeing. [They’re saying], “Your child could die,” and I was like, “Well, not really. The numbers here say, really, your child isn’t going to die. I promise you, driving to Grandma’s is more dangerous for your kid than this thing.” You’re having two different conversations if you’re talking about numbers and you’re talking about fear. The fear was so dominant that the numbers people probably felt, out of respect, we should step back and be quiet. I don’t want to tell somebody who’s having a panic attack, “You’re overreacting.” Looking back on it, I think that I probably kept my real views about the data quieter than I should have. I thought people were going to bounce out of it.

Mariela Garcia: We were able to pick whether to go back in person or stay online. I definitely wanted to go back. I missed my friends. I missed having class with a teacher right in front of me. My parents thought it was not a good idea. I was conflicted in making a decision, but for the good of my family, I decided to stay online for my whole senior year. That also meant no sports. I was so heartbroken because sports meant everything to me. I was unable to play my senior year. I had already claimed the captain position in my previous year playing, and I was looking forward to a great season. 

Parent power

The pandemic has dramatically changed parents’ relationships with their public schools, prompting some to seek new options and others to demand more from the schools their children attend. “I think the pandemic has created some sort of awakening in parents that we’ve not seen before,” Roza said. “I don’t think there’s any putting that genie back in the bottle.” 

Wendy Neal, executive director of My Child My Voice, a Houston-based advocacy group: I’m not saying the teachers are bad, I’m just saying that the parents were finding creative ways of being more of a teacher to their own child. Some parents were like, “Well, if you’re not going to help my child, I’m pulling my kid out of your school. Either I’m going to homeschool, go to an education pod or go to a private school.” Some of these parents really didn’t believe in charter schools either, and then all of a sudden, they’re putting their kid in a virtual charter school.

Marguerite Roza: In March of 2021, [my daughter’s school] finally got around to having their cross-country season outside, and they banned all parents from coming. They run three miles. They’re outside. It just got to the point where it was eye roll upon eye roll. A lot of parents showed up anyway, ’cause how are you going to keep parents off of a three-mile course, right? And we’re popping out of the bushes waving at each other. [It had been] a year, and we knew better. I should have marched out and said, “The evidence suggests we’re fine here,” but they were going to ban you and ban your team if you weren’t cooperating.

Sonya Thomas, executive director, Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy group: You would think that a pandemic would bring about a sense of urgency. We’re talking about decades of educational inequities, and what I’m seeing is that the system itself is not changing. It has actually grown richer in money. It has grown more savvy in messaging. And it’s hurtful. I’ve got tears coming down my face now. I just had a friend who died this weekend. He couldn’t read. And I have to ask myself, “What has changed?” 

Toni Baker: When this school year came around, the COVID was just everywhere. The previous year, they did the COVID tests, they did the sanitizer, they did the masks, they did all these precautions. And when school started back the next semester, all of that went out the window. I let it slide the first two days of school, but by the third day, I’m like, “What’s going on? Where are the masks? Where is this? Where is that? We’re still in this stuff, and it’s worse now.” I had to make an executive decision as a parent. My kid’s class got exposed and I didn’t like the safety of it. I was worrying, like I had knots in my stomach. I had to remove my children from there. [My son’s] class went on quarantine for a week and then I just never took them back.

Beth Lehr: I have one teacher. This is her ninth year. She has already resigned for next year. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I dread coming to work every day.” She goes, “You know, I love the day-to-day of being in front of our kids. The second I have to open my email or grade their assignments is when I realize why I resigned.” The emails. The constant onslaught of the very vocal unhappy parents. We have some amazing families, but we don’t hear the “Thank yous” as often as we hear the “You sucks.”

Lost learning

Educators love jargon. It’s not surprising, then, that lockdown introduced new terms like “COVID slide” and “pandemic learning loss” to describe the academic fallout students experienced from months of remote learning. In June 2020, researchers at nonprofit assessment group NWEA were among the first to predict the extent of the chaos. The return to in-person learning helped. But as recently as December, from McKinsey & Co. showed that academic recovery has been uneven and gaps between Black and white students have widened. Educators also report challenges with student behavior, which many to the lack of socialization during remote learning.

Beth Lehr: The learning loss is going to be there. There’s going to be a new norm, but trying to jam more and more and more down their throats is not helping. Continuing to create these high-stakes environments and making kids feel less than because of something that was totally out of their control is not helping. Meeting kids where they are is. Why do they have to learn all these things, right? They have to learn it to be successful in the future. Great, what does that success look like? How are we redefining success, because honestly, right now, for some of these kids, success is getting out of bed and showing up.

Mariela Garcia: I’ve always struggled in math, and since it was online I feel like I wasn’t really learning as much as I could. When I got to college, I took trigonometry, and it was difficult. I had to get a tutor or stay after school. I had to study more on my own time. I had to take a test in person for the first time in two years. I struggled the first couple weeks, but once I got help and once I started studying, it’s just like riding a bike.

Ricardo Martinez: Seems like we’ve already stopped talking about it. A lot of people refuse to acknowledge it. They’re trying to change the conversation to CRT [critical race theory], anti-CRT. Let’s not worry about what’s not really happening and worry about what’s actually happening. Kids are getting more aggressive. They’ve lost social skills. We’ve lost a lot of learning, and I don’t think that the parents have been able to help because we barely know how to do what they’re asking us to do. I hope that we’re talking about learning loss until we catch back up, which should be in a few years.

Beth Lehr: [Students are experiencing an] emotional stuntedness, for lack of a better term. Freshmen are notoriously immature, but what we’re used to seeing as freshman behavior isn’t even freshman behavior. The “devious licks” stuff [a TikTok challenge that included school property damage] — that was 100 percent only freshman. Oh my God, the soap dispensers were destroyed over and over and over again. We had to replace sinks. We had to replace toilets — not because they were stolen, but because they were destroyed. The older students were super-annoyed by the freshman because then we ended up having to lock our bathrooms during lunch. We’ve also had an increase in sexual infractions — not necessarily assaults. It’s consensual, but it’s much more frequent on our campus this year. This is my seventh year as assistant principal, and this year, hands down, we have had more issues with kids getting caught in positions that high schoolers should not be in.

Hosea Born, art and robotics teacher at Hope Academy of Public Service, Hope, Arkansas: We will be talking about it as long as there is the overwhelming reliance on standardized testing. The pandemic has shown us that adaptability is key, yet we are still measuring our students on how well they can take a test. Teaching a non-tested subject has allowed me to see the flexibility and amazing ways that students learn when there isn’t a looming requirement hanging over their heads. Some of my students haven’t had an art class since the start of the pandemic, but it is key for students to be able to create, and when given the opportunity, they have jumped right back in, and to me, are exceeding all expectations. 

Pedro Martinez: Last year, our district had 100,000 students who were disengaged, including seniors who would have dropped out. We got the majority of seniors to graduate. Same thing happened in San Antonio. What I heard from teachers directly was, “These kids are coming every day. These are the same students who we couldn’t get to engage in remote. They’re coming every single day.” I saw the first-quarter grades. There are still gaps, but significant improvements over the remote year, and specifically with our kids of poverty and kids of color. That gives me a lot of hope. When we have the children in our schools, they actually do perform better.

Robin Lake: I think we will grapple with [learning loss] for as long as the COVID generation is alive. We’ll be looking at the immediate impacts for probably a decade, but there are sure to be lasting effects on individuals and on the economy for many decades unless we can change the trajectory of our response. The question is how we’ll be talking about it. Will the story be that we failed this generation of children, or will it be that we pulled together and found solutions for this generation, and designed a better education system for future generations?

A ‘five-alarm crisis’ for teachers

As they looked back, some recalled moments of doubt about perservering. According to from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, more than half of teachers intend to leave the profession sooner than they originally planned. While some are dubious about “the Big Quit,” NEA President Becky Pringle called teacher burnout and staff shortages a “five-alarm crisis.”

Michael Mulgrew: I think most people in this profession thought of quitting throughout this thing. There were some really really tough times. The only way out of this is to go through it.

Susan Enfield: I don’t think I ever thought of quitting. There were moments where I thought I don’t know if I can do this, but that’s different than quitting. I never just was like, “I’m out of here,” and my was not a response to the pandemic. I’m ready for a fresh challenge and Highline is ready for a fresh leader.

Beth Lehr: I’m so torn. I’ve applied for a principal position within the district, but at the same time I’m like, “Why? Why did I just do that? What am I thinking?” I haven’t yet gotten to the point where the stuff that I dislike about my job has outweighed the stuff that I like about it, but it’s hit or miss on a daily basis. 

‘I don’t use the term normal anymore’

Like a sequel to a bad horror movie, the Omicron variant arrived just as educators and families thought they’d made it through the worst of the crisis. The sparked a spike in cases, resulting in further school closures and quarantines. But now, with increasing vaccination rates and a recent decline in positive cases, some states are lifting mask mandates. The nation’s three largest districts aren’t ready to let masks go, but some are starting to use a word they haven’t uttered in a while: hope.

Pedro Martinez: We’re now at a point where cases have been very steadily declining. Our city is now close to an over-70 percent vaccination rate. There are still gaps within my district, but I’m seeing good momentum, especially with 5- to 11-year-olds. We’re close to maybe half of our district that should be fully vaccinated within the next couple weeks. Over 90 percent of my staff are fully vaccinated. So it really gives me hope that we’re on the other side of this. There’s a chance that by springtime we could be talking about not wearing masks.

Susan Enfield: I am hopeful that in the coming weeks and months we are going to collectively adapt to a way of living, a way of working, that will feel more familiar to what we knew prior to the pandemic. I don’t use the term “normal” anymore. I think entering that phase gives me hope.

Michael Mulgrew: The buildings built after the last pandemic have these really big windows. They actually were built that way so that you could open them to keep ventilation in case there was another pandemic. That literally became part of the code for schools after the pandemic of 1918. For a period of time last year, the teachers kept opening up the windows the whole way, and it’s like 7 degrees out. So, we had to produce this video for all the teachers about how you only have to open like half the windows about 3 inches each and you’ll be fine. One of the first cold days when we got back last month, I was in a school, and one of the teachers had windows open all the way. And I’m looking at the windows, and she touched my arm and she goes, “I know I don’t have to open it that much, but my team teacher for 20 years died of COVID a year ago.” I said, “You keep that window open any way you want.”

Shawnie Bennett: I don’t think I will ever take off my mask.

Mariela Garcia: I’ve always been the type of person to talk to anybody, but it was different seeing people that I’ve never met before [at the University of Houston]. People have been socially awkward, and it’s hard to start a conversation. With my personality, I’m a happy person and I talk to anyone. So I’m going up to someone [last fall] like, “Hi, nice to meet you,” and they’re just like, “Whoa, 6 feet apart.”

Beth Lehr: It’s so hard to see the end, and it’s so overwhelming. What I’ve heard more this year from my teachers than anything is, “We thought that last year was hard. This year is 10 times harder.” We’ve had very, very low turnover. I do not foresee that being the case next year. There are kind of two camps. 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.”

‘A true hunger for doing things differently’

Two years of scrambling and false starts has offered ample opportunity to think about what has — and perhaps more to the point, what hasn’t — worked for schools. If there’s another pandemic — and scientists say there undoubtedly , and soon — will anything change?

Christopher Nellum, executive director, Education Trust West: I think we now appreciate mental health in a different way. The past two years have been traumatic. We have been scared, sick, overworked, unemployed. We have missed vital human connection and even lost loved ones. We have witnessed a surge in racially motivated hate crimes and a national reckoning over police brutality toward Black and brown Americans. It’s OK to be struggling to feel OK in the face of all of that. It’s OK to talk about it. And we all deserve access to the resources we need to address it. 

Sonya Thomas: Parent engagement is not what we want. When you engage us, what you’re doing is bringing your own agenda and you’re saying, “This is what we’re going to do, so get with the program.” That’s what engagement means, right? “I’m bringing something to you, this is what you’re gonna get and you gotta just walk in line with it.” I think what they’re learning is that we’re not going anywhere and we want parent partnership. We don’t want to be engaged. Throw that in the trash. That has never gotten anything for our children. What we want is true partnership. We want school districts to partner with us, intentionally take our feedback and use it. That builds trust. It’s not a talking point or a PR move. 

Dale Chu: If anything, we’ve learned what doesn’t work. For example, asynchronous learning [without live teaching ] — homework, study hall — stunk. We also learned that huge doses of it left millions of students isolated from their peers, the toll from which we’re just starting to come to grips with.

Robin Lake: I hear a true hunger for doing things differently. People are saying, “You know, the way we ask teachers to teach alone in a classroom, trying to be expert in all things and serve vastly different needs, is crazy.” I believe there is a powerful confluence of parents, educators and civic leaders who know things have to change and are determined to make that happen.

Michael Mulgrew: We never said [remote learning] was going to be the be-all-and-end-all. It was always a way for us to keep in contact, to keep our students engaged. Through the end of that [2019-20] school year, it really was more of a lifeline between teachers and students and their families. We thought it should have been more of a centralized process, but [the department] figured it’s better off to just let every teacher do their own thing. The majority of students really do regress in a remote setting. There was a small percentage of students who actually thrived in remote, so that says there’s something there we have to look at. If there’s a subset of children who were not doing well when they were going to school — and there’s all sorts of different reasons for that — who all of a sudden did really well in a remote setting, we have to look at this going into the future.

Marguerite Roza: We have seen districts jump in and be nimble in a way that we never thought districts could be nimble before. People always say, “You know, turning a district around is like turning an aircraft carrier.” I’m like, an aircraft carrier turns around in a day. Why is everybody using that as something that’s slow? I was in the military. [From 1988 to 1992, Roza served at the Navy Nuclear Power School in Orlando.] Aircraft carriers are pretty maneuverable. There are thousands and thousands of people on an aircraft carrier, and that thing could spin around and change direction with the wind. I do think that we had thought districts couldn’t adjust, and many of them did.

Beth Lehr: I’ve had a lot of teachers really rethink their philosophies — some of my most dyed-in-the-wool [teachers]. This has truly opened their eyes when they’ve seen the disparities. Not everybody’s home looks the same. When we first started doing all of the remote, we had a lot of really serious conversations about requiring cameras to be on or not. A lot of our teachers were like, well, “Why wouldn’t the camera be on?” They never took into account that there might be 10 people in a two-bedroom house. There might be somebody being slapped, hit, cut, whatever while they’re there. They might be embarrassed because they’re doing your class from their car in the McDonald’s parking lot.

‘So long and so short’

Seven hundred days have flown by for some and painfully dragged on for others. For many, it’s been a bit of both. 

Michael Mulgrew: It feels like 7,000 days.

Laurie Corizzo, counselor, Ridge Ranch School, Paramus, New Jersey: This whole pandemic, the virus, the water cooler conversations are never-ending. If someone isn’t discussing a vaccine, a booster, the virus, who has it, who had it, who passed, it seems that conversations are stagnant. My point is, it encompasses every single aspect of our lives. It is as if there were some sort of imaginary force field that prevents any semblance of any other conversation to happen anywhere on the planet. In a word, it is quite exhausting.

Christopher Nellum: I hope that 700 days in, we are seeing our education systems for what they are and what they have been for a long, long time: profoundly inequitable.

Susan Enfield: I didn’t know that 700 days could both seem so long and so short simultaneously. I think the last couple of years have felt like a lifetime in and of themselves, and yet, at the same time, it feels like it’s gone by in a flash.

Marguerite Roza: I mean, wow — what a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Normally, we would say a 1 percent change in enrollment from one year to the next is earth-shattering to finance. We’re seeing 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 percent enrollment shifts in some districts. And some of those are large districts. Those kinds of things are going to change the structure of education forever.

Lead Image: Rippowam Middle School principal Matthew Laskowski looks on from a socially distanced cafeteria in September 2020 in Stamford, Connecticut. (John Moore / Getty Images)