On the one hand, I’m just living another round of the fall parenting ritual—the seasonal cold that one of my three kids brought home. 

But on the other hand, that viral downbeat sure hits differently when—like me—you’re one of . After six months of COVID-induced asthma, which was actually lung scarring, which — shucks — is perhaps a pulmonary embolism, which turned out to possibly be heart damage, but instead might be or the curse of the pharaohs or goodness knows what. We’re all just guessing now. 

Anyway boyo, lemme tell you, it doesn’t feel like a standard-issue head cold. 

I suppose, as I lay here, flattened by these twin maladies, at least I can take some succor from the fact that Or, erm, that’s how it seems, anyway. Most of you out there — most of us, I suppose — are with avoiding the virus. Masks are optional — and scarce — pretty much everywhere now, what few we had are evaporating in the face of widespread apathy, and the “your kid was exposed to COVID in school notifications” are down to just one every few weeks. Hang on, gotta reset that particular counter, my phone just rang with a new one. 

Sigh. 

This coming will likely fall somewhere between those two hands—pre-2020 normalcy and the past 2.5 years of crisis. On the normalcy side of the ledger: schools are open everywhere, and essentially all COVID mitigation measures have been driven from campuses. Insofar as we’re talking about the pandemic and schools, we’re relitigating school closure from 2020. have gotten the latest COVID booster vaccine. Why bother? The virus is last year’s story, and avoiding it feels inconvenient. 

And yet, have been above a quarter million since April, with a summer wave cresting at nearly one million new weekly cases. Note, of course, that waning public attentiveness to the pandemic has meant that we’re only administering around 15% as many weekly COVID tests as we ran at our mid-January 2022 peak. In other words, the actual case counts are assuredly much higher. 

Meanwhile, long COVID appears more and serious than we’d like to imagine. Hospitals are being by an unprecedented of respiratory infections. suggest that the U.S. is poised for yet another frustrating, deadly COVID winter. 

Many in education have avoided thinking about the potential need for reinvigorated mitigations — widespread masking, serious quarantining rules and so forth — by narrowing the field of COVID consequences. As I wrote in October 2021, when we were about six weeks into our family’s first COVID case, “When humans interpret the world, when we try to make sense of the situations before us, we’re always in danger of misunderstanding them in self-serving ways. … The key to reasoning this way — interpreting the facts so that they almost always confirm what you’d rather do anyhow — is carefully framing the terms of debate up front.”

And so now, as we muddle into another fall with lower-than-hoped vaccine and booster uptake and already overwhelmed pediatric hospital wards, too many in education focus on narrow truths like these: 1) Most kids don’t appear to get particularly ill from the virus; and 2) Virtual school will never be as effective as in-person instruction. Those are facts, and they flatter these folks’ prior convictions about what must be done next — schools must remain open, making scant-to-zero effort to reduce infections. Schools, scarred after years of trying to keep kids and staff safe in the face of sustained pressure to reopen, shorten COVID quarantine rules, and unmask their campuses, are largely unwilling to risk restoring any protections against spreading infection. 

And yes, if only those were the only facts, the pandemic truly would be over, schools’ winter 2022 path to a consequence-free embrace of a spike in pediatric respiratory infections would be crystal clear. But, naturally, the world of schools, families, children and their broader communities is vastly more complex than that deductive two-step. 

Note, for instance, that we’ve done a generally poor job of protecting children from COVID infection—, more than had been infected, . By the end of the summer, had been infected at least once. The consequences of pediatric infection remain mostly unknown, but many kids, including one of mine, aren’t lucky enough to prance through COVID infection with minor, short-term cold symptoms. 

Or, more grimly, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it in a New Yorker article last month, “By the end of February, 2022, under the age of eighteen—more than one out of every three hundred and sixty—had lost a caregiver to [COVID]. Black and Latino kids lost their caregivers at nearly twice the rate of white children.” 

I know that no one wants to think about the pandemic as a pressing health crisis anymore. Please believe that I don’t want to write this column yet again. I know that we’ve aligned our default COVID approach with our approach to mass shootings: we do nothing to stop the problem and express impotent frustration when it persists. 

But I submit to you that that sort of magical thinking will work no better now than it has throughout the pandemic. We convince ourselves that the pandemic’s health risks are nothing compared to the impacts on student learning or working caregivers’ careers. Then, naturally, we learn that refusing to mitigate against health risks actually produces ample damage to learning and careers anyway. Indeed, COVID stole a Latino father from his two children in my family’s school community several weeks ago. 

But at least masks are now optional in D.C. schools. At least COVID quarantining has become largely voluntary and on the honor system. At least we can console ourselves with the appearance of normalcy — even if propping up that mirage turns out to be unnecessarily deadly for many in our communities. 

It’s simple: if we yet again refuse to face the public health facts this winter and adopt basic mitigations like mask mandates, social distancing, an aggressive push to increase booster rates and similar … COVID will take the lives of more parents and caregivers, disproportionately low-income and/or disproportionately people of color, in communities around the country. That’s a high price to pay to allow the remainder of us to pretend ourselves into a false dawn of pre-pandemic normalcy.

Arkansas is creating a tutoring corps. Montana will provide more training for teachers working with American Indian students. And Wyoming wants to focus on supporting teachers who serve English learners.

Those are among the ways states are spending their portion of from President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, according the U.S. Department of Education posted on Monday. Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia met the June 7 deadline, but 23 states are still finalizing theirs, giving parents and advocates more time to weigh in on how they want states to direct the funds.

In April, states received $81 billion of the K-12 funds. States won’t receive their slice of the remaining $41 billion until their plans are approved, but the hold up shouldn’t affect districts’ initiatives to help students recover from pandemic-related learning loss, experts said.

“Because states already have the lion’s share — two-thirds — of the … funds and are allocating them to districts this summer, states and districts should be able to implement activities in the fall, whether they formally submit their plan now or later,” said Anne Hyslop, the director of policy development at the Alliance for Excellent Education.

In a statement, the department said it is posting the documents online now so families, educators and community organizations can follow how officials plan to spend this once-in-a-generation influx of federal funds for education. While 90 percent of the funds are being distributed to districts, states still have a combined $12 billion to address learning loss and continue preparing schools for fully reopening in the fall. With several plans still outstanding, some experts say the extra time means states can gather more input from the community on how to best respond to students’ needs.

The extra time “could ultimately improve the quality and sustainability of the plans,” Hyslop said.

She said she’ll be interested to see whether states decide to create competitive grant programs, which, she said, could be an effective way to distribute the funds and focus on the needs of “students who’ve been most affected by the pandemic’s disruptions.”

But some will have a better grasp on whether or not students are off track. States that were able to test more students in-person this spring will have more reliable data.

“Because school doors were open for in-person instruction, we had a high participation rate for our statewide assessment. I’m anxious to dig into the data to learn more,” said Wyoming Superintendent Jillian Balow. “Rather than focusing on why students are behind, we have a rare opportunity to address it with federal funds and a keen focus on closing gaps, especially in literacy.”

States had to set aside 5 percent of their allotment to help students catch up, 1 percent for afterschool programs and 1 percent for summer learning and enrichment programs. New Mexico will join with local municipalities to offer for middle and high school students, and New Jersey is issuing grants for summer learning academies to focus on subject areas affected by school closures, such as the arts and STEM.

Most states, according to the department, are using a portion of the funds to address students’ social and emotional health. from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms teens, especially girls, have struggled with mental health issues since the beginning of the pandemic. Among adolescents, the proportion of emergency room visits related to mental health issues increased 31 percent between 2019 and 2020. And between February and March this year, suspected suicide attempts among girls had increased by half, compared to the same time period in 2019.

Oklahoma plans to spend $35 million to hire more counselors and other mental health professionals, and the District of Columbia plans to expand its on-site behavioral health system to increase students’ access to clinical services.

That was one of several requests the D.C. Charter Alliance made in of budget recommendations in February. The pandemic has created instability in finances, employment, housing and food, said Shannon Hodge, executive director of the Alliance. “And we know that those instabilities will affect students’ mental health and their readiness to learn. One of the easiest ways to improve access to mental health care for students is to make services available at school.”

‘Turning up the volume’

Six states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Mississippi, Nevada and Wisconsin — don’t expect to submit plans until August or September. Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director for advocacy and governance at AASA, The School Superintendents Association, said while the wait doesn’t stop district’s efforts, it “does make it trickier.”

“Being in a state that submitted their plans will make it easier for [districts] to move forward in a timely manner while knowing the state expectations [and] commitments,” she said.

Dan Gordon, senior legal and policy advisor with EducationCounsel, added the delay could complicate matters if states communicate “a key policy priority” once school starts.

“Some of those might be great ideas, but waiting too long to share them could make it hard for districts to thoughtfully incorporate them into their own plans,” he said.

The delay, however, also gives parents and education advocates more time to influence officials’ decisions on where to direct the funds.

“Students will likely return to our school system in the fall with a host of needs that require additional training and supports for educators,” said Feliza Ortiz-Licon, chief policy and advocacy officer at Latinos for Education, a national advocacy organization.

California, where she used to be a state board member, is among those not submitting a draft until August. She said she hopes the state uses the extra time to get more input from the community and focus on increasing educator diversity. “The teacher shortage has been exacerbated by the pandemic and California needs to consider new and innovative ways to attract and retain talent,” she said.

Minnesota is expected to turn in its plan by June 30th.

Khulia Pringle, the coordinator of family engagement and advocacy for the Minnesota Parent Union is concerned that because Gov. Tim Walz announced his in January, long before the American Rescue Plan passed, he won’t incorporate parent feedback now.

She’s organizing a virtual town hall for later this month, arguing that Black, Hispanic and other minority parents — especially those whose children have disabilities — have not been well represented on a committee that is advising the state.

“We’re turning up the volume now,” she said. “We’re trying to engage them, but they’re not trying to engage us.”

Ashleigh Norris, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Education, said officials are currently gathering public comments and are “committed to authentic engagement.”