Too cool for school

Young people are the future. Children should be a top priority. For adults to not care about children is selfish. Families and children have a right to expect a quality education. Period. Education is supposed to provide an equal chance for all for success in life.

I had many fine, dedicated teachers when I was growing up. They were educators not just in name but in actions. Yet some of the high-ranking bureaucrats and administrators I’ve encountered who actually run our schools and school districts are positively some of the worst people I’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting. Some might think it’s a good thing that so many children were forced to take remote or online school during the pandemic, because it meant they didn’t have to be around bad administrators, but this belief misses the mark. What it really meant was that our schools weren’t doing their job.

When I say students are entitled to quality education, I mean quality. This is job number one of our schools. And they failed.

Despite some great teachers I had, the American school system overall always manages to set new lows. Whenever you think it can’t get any worse, it does. During the pandemic, it somehow did the impossible by outdoing itself. And did it ever!

There is a special place in hell for those who willfully connived to deny young people a quality education. It was absolutely inexcusable. Shame on public officials and others who let this happen.

Children are not supposed to be forced to sacrifice their well-being or their future for adults. However, using children as human shields by gutting our schools didn’t even save adults.

All of this has been lost on the self-appointed intelligentsia that now rules us. When schools were still in shambles 17 months after pandemic closures began, some nobody who claimed to be an assistant professor of epidemiology posted on Twitter:

“Genuine q for ppl more concerned about schools being closed than covid: are you aware mandatory schooling is barely a century old in this country?

“Maybe ur all grandparents had highschool, but what about ur great-grandparents?

“Yes, education is important. But it’s a pandemic!”

She thought it was fine if today’s children didn’t have an education, because children hundreds of years ago didn’t have one. School being open to all was a pioneering idea, yet she was holding up society without modern school as the standard to aspire to. However, I don’t think this was the same idiot who reportedly posted that oceans could “sneeze up Covid.”

Children have a right to attend public school. It is not a privilege but a right. School closures and other COVID restrictions violated the rights of all students but especially those with disabilities. I am particularly wary of schools discriminating on the basis of disability. The U.S. has laws like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act designed to protect disabled students. The ADA is intended to also protect the disabled in places outside of schools. Sadly, some school districts—for instance, the Campbell County Schools in Kentucky—have a long history of maliciously violating these laws. They act in bad faith. Predictably, since the pandemic, they have continued to do so. But now school districts interpret laws like IDEA and the ADA to mean the precise opposite of what was intended. They had ignored these laws for decades yet have now begun hiding behind these laws to justify their barbaric actions. They’ve had plenty of help from the ACLU. This is not the old ACLU that I supported, but rather the new ACLU—which has connived to deny education from millions of American children, especially the disabled.

To add insult to injury, a small news article appeared during the pandemic marking the 30^th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act—even as this law was being proudly violated by all types of public bodies nationwide. Now it’s as if this law never even passed.

Most experts though actually felt schools should reopen pretty quickly. An op-ed by UNICEF executive director Henrietta H. Fore in June 2020 urged a quick reopening—yet many schools waited another year or more.

After schools reopened, some tried to negate history by saying schools were never closed and that it was only school buildings that were closed. That may be the problem, because the online instruction schools offered was so bad. An equally important point is that those who made such a mess of our schools hate kids. One writer noted that officials closed schools or turned schools into prisons even after places like bars had reopened fully. They left playgrounds closed even after golf courses had reopened. They kept children’s sports closed even after crowds gathered at the Super Bowl.

Lockdownists don’t think like we do. They actually said festivals, Halloween, and Thanksgiving could be conducted using Zoom. Media outlets even pretended as if footraces could be conducted “virtually”: The Navajo Times reported on a footrace that was canceled and replaced by a “virtual” race in which runners would run “while imagining running through the given trail.” The idea that school could be entirely by Zoom wasn’t much better. Lockdown spokespeople even said proms—proms!—had to be by Zoom if they took place at all.

Sadly, many thought unquestioning compliance would lead to a pot of gold at the end of the lockdown rainbow. A school board member in Eatonville, Washington, told the News Tribune, “We are forced a lot of policies that we don’t necessarily believe in.” I don’t buy that 100 percent. Schools could have fought back if they really wanted instead of just saying they were following orders from the state. Besides, many schools imposed policies that were stricter than state orders, sometimes even enacting requirements that were specifically prohibited by the state.

A school board chairman in Crook County, Oregon, sounded more decisive: “This has got to end.” A New Jersey school superintendent later said of state mandates, “Just thinking about it makes my blood boil.”

A member of the school board in my city—Bellevue, Kentucky—used the same cop-out that was used in Eatonville. The district said its rules were just copying state rules—and that the rules would be lifted soon. Both statements were flat-out lies. The district doubled down on its draconian requirements even when the state rules were no longer in force—which was months after the district said the rules would be gone.

I didn’t expect much better. Regardless of the city or town, school districts are usually some of the most corrupt, dishonest, authoritarian institutions. Bellevue is no exception. A few years earlier, the district had begun requiring student athletes to take a drug test—which is an unconstitutional search. The fascism in our schools only got worse as the city became ravaged by gentrification. Again and again, the city rubber-stamped luxury housing developments that displaced working-class residents and artificially jacked up housing costs. Many subsequent actions by school officials were designed to please the nobility that moved into this housing—even though most did not have children in school. School officials catered to people who had no kids but had a bigger megaphone.

This is not the street smart America that I grew up in, or the working-class Bellevue where I’ve lived for decades. The privileged doompanics who have marauded into town have prevented the working-class residents who remain from advancing.

Bellevue schools were also the site of a bullying scandal in early 2022. When this story broke, a few people shamelessly defended the school district on a local Facebook page. Strangely, I don’t ever remember seeing these users on Facebook before. One of them offered this now-familiar battle cry to the aggrieved students: “Suck it up, buttercup.” My response to that: Check your privilege, moneybags.

I can’t justify school boards just following orders, because school boards are supposed to be the voice of the community’s families. Dr. Naomi Wolf interviewed some activists about this point.

Throughout the crisis, school districts kept using taxpayer-funded official letterhead and social media accounts to take political positions on pandemic-related legislation.

When the pandemic gained height in the U.S. in March 2020, I felt schools should be among the first places to close. More than any other place, schools seemed at the time to be vectors of contagious illness. I thought remote learning would simply replace in-person education for a few weeks at most, and everything would go back to normal by the end of the school year. However, we now know from experience that remote learning was of poor quality. You live, you learn. Yet in most parts of America, it continued for a year—or two years! An exception is Montana, which allowed schools to return on May 7 of that year. Some Montana schools returned to almost normal operation right away. A survey around that time showed that Montana also had by far the nation’s lowest percentage of people wearing masks. For months afterward, Montana also had by far the lowest per capita case count for the novel coronavirus. This reams a bazooka hole through the endless claims that tougher measures reduced COVID prevalence.

It was also shown that schools—for whatever reason—had very little COVID spread even when they were open as normal. This may be surprising, but this is a fact.

Even in 2020, it was unfair to deprive graduating seniors of their commencement experience, as ceremonies should have been considered safe by the end of the school year. Yet a high school in my area replaced its regular ceremony with a separate ceremony for each student.

When a high school graduation near Chicago was canceled in 2020, families organized a graduation ceremony independently of the school. The event was said to be almost normal.

The fact that a year or two of school was wiped out will astonish me until I go to my grave. It’s especially shocking because I spent my entire youth being lectured about how important it was to go to school—by many of the same people who went on to support closing schools over COVID. Heaven forbid anyone miss a day of school—but missing a whole year is just fine. This is a society that punished kids if they struggled in school, but now it wouldn’t let them go to school at all.

Early in the 2020-21 school year, it was reported that only about half of white children in the U.S. had access to in-person school, and this number was even lower among Hispanic children, and lower still among Black children. A school official sniffed that school closures weren’t so bad because everyone suffered equally. This statement was idiotic on several fronts. These statistics showed it wasn’t equal at all. Even if it was, children should not have had to suffer reduced quality of education. It was also estimated that only about 10 percent of public schools nationwide were operating normally. That statistic may be generous. On the other hand, the fact that these schools were running with few or no COVID protocols without any trouble whatsoever is evidence that the other 90 percent could have done so too.

In 2021, even a CDC study found racial and regional disparities in school reopenings.

As the pandemic was dragged out, not only did we learn that remote learning was of lower quality but also that the novel coronavirus rarely spread in schools. Countries with few school closures saw very little such spread. It is not clear why. I remember an episode of The Simpsons in which Monty Burns had every disease in the world, but they didn’t affect him, because they couldn’t all squeeze into his system. I wonder if that was why COVID so rarely spread in schools, where everything else seemed to spread so readily. The fact is that we simply don’t know for sure.

In addition, even in the early 2020s, some children even in the U.S. had no Internet. A photo emerged of young children in the Bay Area sitting on the parking lot of a Taco Bell just to get Internet.

Remote learning was particularly bad for students with disabilities. Depending on the nature of their disability, these students may have had a greater need for in-person instruction. Don’t be fooled by schools that later cited the ADA to justify the exact opposite stance, because it was clear long before the pandemic that they do not care at all about education of the disabled. They usually try to put on a public face of inclusion, but occasionally they let the mask slip. KDVR-TV reported in July 2020 on a telling incident involving a kindergarten teacher in Westminster, Colorado, who backed a yearlong shutdown. In a Facebook post about students with learning disabilities, he said in part, “They were retarded before Covid and will be retarded after. ... Do you really think they’ll be any different after a year of staying home with their parents? Sounds like someone doesn’t want to deal with their special needs kid.”

Many school officials simply do not care about the disabled.

The Trump administration wasn’t blameless either. When schools were first closing, Trump’s Department of Education released guidance that said that if a school district closed, it “would not be required to provide services to students with disabilities”—even though IDEA and the ADA beg to differ.

Many schools would do everything within their power to deprive children—disabled or not—of their right to an education. A Pennsylvania district decided to keep school closed until at least February 2021 after spending summer and fall not even developing a return plan. The district was praised by a former political candidate who was forced to quit her election bid after her anti-Semitic comments were exposed. She went on to declare that families should just accept that school wasn’t coming back that year and that kids should just repeat the whole year.

Predictably, at least one school district made the whole student body repeat the entire year—but it wasn’t in the U.S. The CBC and the Globe & Mail reported that all children on the Garden Hill First Nation reserve in Manitoba would be held back an entire year. However, CNN reported in February 2021 that Atlanta schools were considering something similar: mandatory summer school. Students would essentially be punished for the schools’ failures. In February 2023, Michael Bloomberg wrote an op-ed that appeared in the Wall Street Journal encouraging summer school to fight the learning loss caused by schools not doing their job. Neglect of the high school on the Garden Hill reserve during the lost year caused toxic mold to grow in the building.

An online commenter pontificated, “To be blunt the year should have been declared a do over and students ought to have been brought back in the identical class they abandoned in March 2020.” Not only would they have graduated a year late—which would have set them back until they reached retirement age—but somebody correctly replied, “Do you understand that you can’t ‘do over’ a child’s reading and language skills? Do you understand that society and economy are not Netflix shows that you can press pause on for a year?”

On another Manitoba reserve, students were required to repeat half of a school year, and high school seniors found their graduations delayed until the January after they were supposed to graduate.

Kentucky passed a law to allow students in participating school districts to repeat the year if they chose to do so—but it was believed that very few would retake the ruined year. Schools complained that this would be costly—but the schools could have avoided this expense by returning like normal, so they have nobody to blame but themselves. After this law took effect, Kentucky government and school officials—ever the incompetent tyrants—proceeded to destroy yet another year.

Political “leaders” could never get it right. They either waited too long to reopen school—or they tried to return from summer break too early. In the spring of 2020, a hapless Gavin Newsom said California might start the next school year in July instead of the usual August or September. He was one of the loudest voices for shutting down everything—including schools. If schools were so dangerous, why did he want to start the school year so early? This doublethink is further proof that the entire lockdown regime was about control, not health.

Officials never cared about overcrowding in schools before, but now they demonized anyone who didn’t demand extreme social distancing.

Colleges and universities throughout the 2020-21 school year were in essence both a pyramid scheme and a prison. Were there any American colleges that operated normally that year? There is some evidence that a community college in Montana was just about normal, but you can bet your bottom dollar that some big shot at the school tried their worst to spoil that. In the summer of 2020, some other colleges seemed to be aiming for almost a normal environment when the school year began, but of course they backtracked on that—often because some blowhards complained about it being too normal. Others never even tried, and opened in August or September based on plans they wrote way back in April or May. As with primary and secondary schools, colleges had all of summer vacation to come up with a real plan, and they did nothing. In any case, colleges committed fraud by not releasing these plans until after students had enrolled, as students did not receive the experience they paid for. By the time these plans were announced, it was often too late for students to withdraw without some form of penalty. Then again, enrollment was already down so much because of COVID and lockdown fears that it didn’t always matter.

In practice, conditions at colleges varied widely. Students at some campuses threw wild parties despite school officials’ disastrism. Yet other institutions were completely dead even after major restrictions were lifted: You could visit on a regular day of classes and see only a few students. Meanwhile, Reddit posts and Snap Map videos indicated that students were still socializing on some campuses, and it often looked just like a normal year. A Reddit user infamously lamented a large group congregating at the University of Rhode Island, for instance. But gatherings at many schools were met with campus graybeards shaking their fists. Schools even suspended some students for attending parties off campus that were completely unrelated to school. Schools often tried to identify students from photos taken at parties. Many public and private colleges and universities had rules that seemed to micromanage how students executed any errand off campus—even grocery shopping.

What students do on their own time away from the school is none of the school’s damn business.

No other crisis had ever prompted such regimentation of college students’ behavior. Nothing else even comes close.

When Columbia University refused to return to in-person classes for the spring 2021 semester, over 1,100 students launched a tuition strike.

I had been very critical of schools’ reliance on athletics. That doesn’t excuse some of the actions restricting school sports during the pandemic. At several high schools in Lexington, Kentucky, each student athlete was allowed to have only five fans—and those five had to remain the same the entire season. (In 2023, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that the Lexington school district was using pepper spray to discipline students, a practice also found in Memphis.) Many schools elsewhere allowed even fewer fans—if any.

Although schools weren’t in session when they should have been, they were in session when they shouldn’t have been. Much was heard about colleges canceling spring break in the name of fighting COVID—but it wasn’t just colleges. Just weeks before spring break would have taken place, schools in Kanawha County, West Virginia, decided to have class that week—again proving it was all about control. Schools and colleges canceled spring break just to keep a tighter rein on students.

Even if you take the winter’s case counts at face value, it is absolutely clear that schools in the U.S. should have returned to practically normal operation long before the end of that school year. Canceling school and instituting arbitrary rules did not reduce winter case numbers.

WCAX-TV reported in September 2020 that the Slate Valley Unified School District in Vermont tried to police what students could do on their own time. One weekend, several students crossed the state line to Essex County, New York, for recreation. The school district then quarantined these students because Essex County was in the “red zone” on a COVID map released by Vermont. School officials sent an e-mail to families that said kids could only visit counties approved by Vermont.

Lockdownists displayed a hostility to the arts that was eerily reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Students taking classes in vocals at the University at Buffalo were not allowed to sing in the practice rooms, as officials claimed singing spread the virus. Students could only hum—like Mr. Patches of The Uncle Al Show. At Northern Kentucky University, theater students were not allowed to rehearse indoors. Incidentally, NKU was one of the worst offenders overall. It did not even attempt a normal reopening, choosing instead to waste summer break by not coming up with a real plan after being one of the nation’s first to announce draconian COVID regulations. The school then lied about when the rules would be lifted.

Many American schools suddenly reopened in earnest in the spring of 2021. In most cases, it was only because keeping them closed conflicted with the country’s official religion: standardized testing. Heaven forbid kids miss their standardized tests! Federal officials declared that students in Michigan would still be subjected to standardized testing despite having missed a year of real school.

Alaska Public Media ran a piece on how the yearbook club at an Anchorage high school compiled that year’s fine yearbook. Almost the entire year was online, and the school didn’t have a picture day before the yearbook went to press. For their yearbook portrait, most students just had a blank space or their photo from the previous year.

Also in Anchorage, when schools finally returned to in-person learning, elementary school classrooms got rid of chairs, saying chairs spread germs. Children were required to kneel all day.

As the 2020-21 school year ended, about one-third of American schools still did not have a normal schedule. Over 60 percent of New York City public school students were still learning from home full-time. That statistic doesn’t even count those who were no longer enrolled at all. A school year typically has about 1,200 hours of school, but a New York City high school student spent at most 48 hours attending school in person, with the rest being online. Furthermore, the time they spent in school was “Zoom in a room”—which meant they had to show up for class only to take remote classes through a computer screen at school. With the New York City school system’s maliciously botched handling of the pandemic, that was one case where taking online school from home sadly seems better than in-person school.

The school year was such a disaster that 41 percent of Baltimore high school students received a grade point average of less than 1. Over 700 high schoolers simply left the school system. In Puerto Rico, 24,000 students flunked, according to Newsweek. An online commenter said they knew a high school teacher in an unspecified locale who had to teach remotely, and three-fourths of her students—in an honors class, no less—simply gave up.

After the fall 2020 semester, several Oregon districts reported an increase in failing grades. One high school said 38 percent of grades were failing—compared to only eight percent previously. Many students received a zero, as they were not participating in their online classes at all. In Houston, 42 percent of students received at least one F for the first grading period. The failure rate in St. Paul, Minnesota, doubled.

Enrollment seemed to drop in proportion to how fascist a school district was. Even between the 2020-21 school year and 2021-22, enrollment in the broken New York City public school system declined from about 900,000 to about 600,000. Even the Los Angeles Times reported that Los Angeles schools lost over 27,000 students. According to WBEZ radio, Chicago lost 10,000. Enrollment in Boston schools fell below 50,000 for the first time in recent memory. Fairfax County, Virginia—which had attracted families because its schools had a good reputation—lost 10,000, about five percent of its enrollment. (Fairfax County schools did not deserve their good reputation, as the district had a history of covering up scandals to avoid embarrassment.) Elementary schools in Portland, Oregon, lost 11 percent. The Burlington Free Press reported that even in Vermont, enrollment fell by about five percent. Homeschooling in Vermont doubled. Even rural districts in states with fewer restrictions weren’t immune. In Iowa’s tiny Westwood district, enrollment fell by five percent in two years. The Virginia Mercury said homeschooling increased 40 percent in Virginia, fueled by families ranging “from the religious right to the humanist left” angry about school closures and mask mandates. There were two counties in Virginia where almost one in five students were homeschooled. On the other hand, homeschooling is difficult—perhaps impossible—for many families, because of parents’ work schedules. However, our public officials sure didn’t think about that before suddenly requiring children to attend school from home for as long as two years. That forced many parents to quit work, which led their families to financial ruin.

It was especially rough on working women. Lockdowns in general cost working women dearly, and the costs will follow them into retirement. In May 2021, Newsweek reported that the average working woman in the U.S. could lose $600,000 over a lifetime because of lockdowns. Many missed out on promotions or lost their seniority at work. Lockdowns set back the fight for gender equality in the workplace. Now school closures meant lockdowns weren’t the only threat to the finances of working women, as many had to stay home to take care of their kids.

Schools in Santa Fe, New Mexico, lost a significant percentage of students to homeschooling—costing the district much funding. The district then urged passage of a bill to fund schools based on their enrollment numbers before the pandemic—thereby gaming the system by budgeting for students who were no longer enrolled.

By one account, 60 districts in New Jersey that still locked out students in the 2021-22 school year received a total of over $1.12 billion in taxpayer-funded bailouts.

By the fall of 2020, about 16 percent of Black families in the U.S. homeschooled their children—nearly a fivefold increase.

A story from Hawaii showed that many college freshman in 2020-21 found remote learning to be so weak that they dropped out. All of their college plans were derailed.

Despite crashing enrollment, Los Angeles schools received billions of dollars in extra federal aid—the most money the district had ever received.

Many students who left did not return even after the schools were open as normal. PBS reported in 2022 that families all over America were continuing homeschooling even after most restrictions went away. People had learned that schools could not be trusted.

A May 2022 piece in the New York Times reported that Georgetown University’s Dr. Marguerite Roza said American public schools were suffering a “seismic hit” from declining enrollment caused by COVID disastrism.

In my district, the high school lost so many students that—after many remaining students got injured—it had to cancel the remainder of its football season in late 2022. The school was a football powerhouse not long before. Unfortunately, many Facebook commenters took the wrong lesson from the cancellation. Instead of urging the firing and punishment of officials who had shut down schools earlier, they dug in by demanding the school merge with another school. The school’s total enrollment had fallen to only 203, despite being in an urban area.

In early 2023, the high school in neighboring Newport, Kentucky, had to cancel its whole baseball season because enrollment had declined so much.

A high school in Marlin, Texas, found that out of 33 seniors who were supposed to graduate in 2023, only five met the graduation requirements. To add insult to injury, those who were ineligible were not informed of this until just days before they were supposed to graduate. Something similar happened in New Bern, North Carolina.

Even across regions that seem to have differing political views, the revolving door that lifts up those who push bad polices spins freely—allowing them to fail upward, if you will. Those who were most prominent in gutting our schools received promotions, accolades, and even monetary awards, while coalitions of families spanning the whole political spectrum that fought to reopen schools were ridiculed as bumbling weirdos. Only in clown world can people be portrayed as uneducated for supporting getting kids back in school in a reasonable time frame. It’s amazing that anyone thought that abolishing school was an enlightened position.

Very few other countries closed schools nearly as long as the U.S. did. Sweden only briefly closed schools for students who were at least 16 and never closed schools for younger kids. Schools in Denmark reopened in April 2020. Nicaragua reopened schools right after spring break—reportedly with no restrictions. Many countries that closed schools longer had an education system that adapted better to such a situation. American schools didn’t bother planning ahead like schools in other countries did. In India, however, many children had to cross an electric fence to reach an area with a wi-fi signal. America though isn’t free of bad wi-fi coverage. Some American schools that canceled in-person classes also had to do without remote school, because of poor coverage especially in rural areas. Even in areas with better coverage, some districts didn’t even use Zoom and instead did everything via e-mail.

Despite all the defeat and pain in the 2020-21 school year, some students made it to spring on a happy note—even if it had to be done in a clandestine fashion. When a high school in Las Cruces, New Mexico, canceled prom, students organized a “secret prom.” About 100 to 150 showed up. Needless to say, the wearing of masks was not by any means universal—as it was a prom, after all. Of course, this event didn’t sit well with the school once it learned it had taken place. The school punished the entire student body by returning to remote schooling. It also threatened to bar students who went to this prom from attending graduation—even though the prom was not at school, nor was it sponsored by the school, so it was none of the school’s business. State officials also threatened criminal penalties against the students. Yet the DJ for the prom praised the event.

On the other hand, numerous senior proms banned dancing.

On road trips in late 2020 and early 2021, I noticed that in rural parts of Colorado and West Virginia, schools seemed to be operating normally, as we happened to drive past schools or groups of kids happily skipping home from school. But this was surely the exception nationwide. Beaches and national parks were often full of families with children on days when kids would normally be in school. This meant that many families had pretty much given up on the school year, so the kids just didn’t go to school at all.

Around March 2020, I read an article that darkly warned that the next 12 to 18 months would be a lost era in which America’s young people would not only miss school but also be confined to their home all the while. Many kids split the difference and only complied with the part about missing school. They took a mulligan and sat out a year of school—much like how when I was only three months into my sophomore year of high school, my principal told me I was going to fail the whole year, so I spent the rest of the year goofing off. One mental health professional said that, except for having to delay their education, most of these kids managed to hold up decently, as they used their year away from school to play with friends like normal. Closing school for a year was a bad situation, but at least they were able to make the best of it. But those who lived like terrified recluses and followed all the pandemic protocols didn’t fare as well and suffered a host of mental health problems.

Some students who missed school actually got to visit places like museums with their parents, so they didn’t completely miss out on learning experiences—even if none of it counted for school credit. When they did return to school, their knowledge level was actually two or three years ahead of those who had been forced to take Zoom classes.

There is hope at least for most of those whose social lives were unrestrained by lockdown culture. But that’s no comfort for those who weren’t so lucky. Even lucky ones found their educational plans held up for a year or two. Making the best of this situation still is not enough, as many vital services such as lunches are provided at schools.

In most of America, the 2021-22 school year began on the same sour note that filled the previous year. School and government officials again shattered their promises of a normal school environment—and showed no shame in it. They were proud of it. It was actually worse then, because fewer schools were offering a remote option, so more students were forced to be in this prison-like environment. In many districts, young children were forced to eat lunch in complete silence—all six feet apart, facing the same direction. One parent said that New York City schools required children to sit on hard concrete floors at lunch—echoing the Anchorage situation in which chairs were said to spread viruses. In Bedford, Massachusetts, middle school lunch spaces—both indoors and outdoors—abolished tables. In Sudbury, Massachusetts, middle school students were sent a survey on whether they wanted to eat on a floor mat, a bucket, or a chair—with their food on their lap. An elementary school in Seattle required children to eat lunch outside on a towel in pouring rain. A kindergarten class in Portland, Oregon, had to eat outside when it was 40 degrees Fahrenheit and sit on buckets instead of chairs. Newsweek rejected the charge that this was child abuse, because other schools were doing it too. In other words, it’s not considered child abuse if it happens often enough. A photo showed that kindergartners in Elmhurst, Illinois, had to eat outside when the temperature was in the twenties. That was while only half of students were allowed to attend school in person at one time. After the photo appeared, school officials threatened to sue whoever took the photo. Schools in Oceanside, New York, made students eat lunch off the floor. President Biden’s insufferable White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki defended abuse like this—even though it would have resulted in a child abuse investigation before 2020. After this occurred, a Twitter commenter said the Democrats’ slogan should be “Actually, it’s kinda fun to eat on the floor.”

In Washington, D.C., affluent parents who had just moved into town demanded that an elementary school make children eat outside in cold weather.

In October 2021, children in Davis, California, were forced to eat outside in the rain. This is confirmed by a message to parents from the school district, which said schoolchildren “are required to eat outside at this time due to COVID restrictions” and told parents to pack rain gear. By that time, bars and casinos in California had long since reopened.

Outdoor school is great during fine weather. Unfortunately, that does not describe much of the United States for more than a few months each year.

WLS-TV reported that Chicago schools identified over 100,000 students who were at risk of not even showing up for school in the 2021-22 school year. That represented 30 percent of the city’s students.

An Episcopal school in Atlanta began making students eat lunch in complete silence and surrounded by partitions so they could not see each other. When a parent complained about this on Twitter in December 2021, the school called her and demanded she remove the complaint.

In late 2021, even some elementary schools were requiring children to quarantine if they so much as left their state.

Many schools ripped up their carpeting, apparently thinking carpets spread germs more easily than hard floors.

Replacing in-person class with Zoom created disciplinary problems when students came back in person. The Oregonian reported that the Reynolds School District in Oregon was plagued by so many fights and other acts of misbehavior in its middle school that it closed the school for three weeks. The district replaced in-person school with—you guessed it—more online school.

A story from Vermont said the extreme tyranny in schools created severe disciplinary problems. A photo revealed an elementary school classroom in shambles. Schools responded by making psychiatric diagnoses as an excuse to oppress students even more.

In late 2021, New York City schools barred fully vaccinated high school athletes from championship tournaments because there were unvaccinated students from other schools playing.

Just before the spring 2022 semester, Princeton University announced that students would be barred from traveling outside the county and a neighboring township until February. Of course, that rule did not apply to sports teams. Yale University issued a ukase saying students would not be permitted to visit any local businesses whatsoever except for curbside pickup at restaurants. That was despite the fact that Yale not only required students to be vaccinated but also receive the booster shot.

Public and private universities were canceling classes in 2022 even though they had received millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded relief funds to open in-person. Yale got $5.2 million and went remote anyway.

The policies themselves were bad enough, but the historical negationism was breathtaking. In late 2021, Gavin Newsom had the nerve to declare, “California outperformed the nation in keeping our kids safely back in in-person instruction.” Newsom was straight-up lying, as most parts of California were among the last to return, and some schools never saw a single day of in-person schooling in an entire school year.

That came a year after Newsom began receiving criticism from fellow Democrats for his prolonged school closures. State Rep. Patrick O’Donnell lamented, “Some kids get to go and some don’t. That’s not what California stands for.”

Alex Gutentag—an Oakland public school teacher, union representative, and left-leaning lockdown critic—wrote an article in February 2022 about how Oakland school officials continued to target the city’s families. She noted that online schooling had fueled gun violence. One parent said schools in nearby Berkeley were allowing unvaccinated students to be bullied.

As early as June 2020, the BBC reported that child psychologists wrote an open letter to British education officials saying lockdowns and school closures in Britain were creating mental health risks for children. Yet most American schools weren’t back to normal even in 2022—in a few cases even 2023.

As late as May 2023, New York City schools reported that 56 percent of high school seniors were chronically absent.

You don’t get a second shot at high school, college, or even first grade. Young children do not get a redo of their most crucial years for development. The monsters who stole these experiences should not be forgiven. Yet they’ve shown no remorse or shame.

Although schools in the United States had some of the worst pandemic responses of any large nation, the dictatorship in France was worse than many parts of America. Worse yet, at the height of the crisis, France practically outlawed homeschooling—forcing families to be subjected to bad schools. Homeschooling had been legal in France since 1882. The right-wing government of Greece later pulled a similar stunt, threatening to jail parents who kept their children out of school because of totalitarian COVID protocols.

New York City stopped processing homeschooling applications—blaming COVID. Other American school districts also placed obstacles in the path of homeschooling families.

NPR reported that while college enrollment in the United States dropped in the 2020-21 school year because of COVID calamitism, the trend continued the following school year. Freshman enrollment at community colleges was down by over 20 percent.

Uganda had one of the longest nationwide school closures in the world—at 83 weeks. Few families in Uganda had access to remote schooling. When the country finally announced it would reopen schools, it was found that 30 percent of students would not be returning, as many had been forced into early marriage or child labor. Some were girls sold into sex slavery.

Bangladesh closed schools for 18 months. When schools reopened, few students returned. In parts of India, schools were closed for 20 months—surpassing even Uganda. The Philippines was one of few countries to rival Uganda and India.

For 21,000 schoolchildren who lived in mainland China but were enrolled in nearby Hong Kong schools, the closure was longer than any of the above—lasting three years.

Mexico’s education system was said to have adapted better to long-term closures, but even Mexico was far from safe. Most schools were closed for 17 months. KJZZ radio reported that only seven percent of schoolchildren in the state of Sonora returned to in-person class when it reopened. Over half of schools in Sonora did not even reopen then, largely because the buildings fell into disrepair when they were closed.

An online post indicated that an unspecified university in Central America did not return to in-person schooling until the start of 2023. A Reddit commenter in Australia who had started college in 2019 wrote, “Got a year of normal university but the rest was ruined.” In America and elsewhere, many students had four years of high school or college, yet not a single year was normal from start to finish. That is beyond outrageous.

While Eric Feigl-Ding demanded the closure of American schools, he hypocritically moved his family to Austria because schools weren’t closed there at the time.

In October 2022, a report by the United States Department of Education revealed that math scores declined in every state since the start of the pandemic. Declines in fourth grade math scores were steepest in Delaware, D.C., Maryland, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia—six places where schools were closed or rendered inoperable the most. Yet a diarist on Daily Kos falsely claimed there was no correlation between ruined schools and declines in test scores, despite what was in plain sight.

Also that month, the Courier-Journal released a series of articles with the headline “Kentucky is stuck in an early literacy crisis. What it can do to change course.” Unfortunately, there was little if any introspection. The Courier-Journal was owned by the Gannett syndicate, which cheered even the stiffest COVID restrictions—rules that contributed to this literacy crisis.

WCPO-TV reported that Ohio was poised to pass a bill to drop a requirement that third graders pass a reading test—because officials realized that very few could pass it after they were forced to miss so much school. This test was already flawed, as it had punished children who had reading disabilities.

It was later found that homeschooled students scored “significantly higher” on college readiness tests than students of public, private, and charter schools.

A 2023 article repeated what most of us had learned in 2020: Students of lower economic levels shouldered more of the burden for prolonged school closures, since they had less reliable online service and less adequate study space.

Don’t think that online school freed young people from the “zero tolerance” frenzy that for decades had prescribed extreme disciplinary consequences for minor breaches of school rules—sometimes for things that previously weren’t violations at all. When “virtual” school began, students’ own homes began to be treated as school property. KTVI-TV reported that in Columbia, Illinois, a 12-year-old student was suspended because a pellet gun was visible in his bedroom when he took online classes. The school also called police. A 12-year-old in Colorado Springs was punished because a toy gun was visible on camera at his home. In Golden, Colorado, an 11-year-old was suspended over a similar incident.

WDSU-TV reported that there were two incidents in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, in which school officials recommended expulsion of students because a BB gun was visible when they took online classes.

Some folks have no interest in school sports, but sports were a lifesaver for some young people—and it was taken away. In heavily locked down regions, the only contact that young people were allowed to have with anyone outside their immediate family was Zoom school, as these areas shut down school sports and other extracurricular activities. WMTW-TV reported that a 16-year-old in Brunswick, Maine, committed suicide after shutdowns canceled real school. He had been accepted for the school football team, but he left the team when the school replaced it with flag football. A top high school football player in Glenbrook, Illinois, died in an apparent suicide just months before graduation. ProPublica reported on a suicide in New Mexico. The student athlete in that case lived only a few miles from districts in Texas where schools were operating almost normally. A coach on the New Mexico side of the state line said, “How come 10, 15 miles away, these kids can compete, can live a somewhat normal life?” It was as if viruses care about a state line.

Texas wasn’t completely safe though. Schools had been gutted enough in much of the state that homeschooling increased fivefold.

The ProPublica piece on New Mexico’s sorry situation said a survey showed more than 70 percent of teachers in Hobbs wanted to return to in-person schooling. Yet the state refused to allow it.

A high school freshman in Maryland also committed suicide. An 11-year-old in Carlsbad, California, attempted suicide.

The city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit against the local school district over its refusal to reopen. The city pointed to a high rate of suicide attempts. Yet there were no other known instances of a city or county suing a local school district over COVID-era closures. The school district announced it might have in-person schooling for the last day of the school year only—and only for high school seniors. This was just so it could claim that it wasn’t fully remote and qualify for $12 million in reopening funds from the state. Even then, most seniors wouldn’t be going to the school that they would have otherwise attended.

In May 2023, city records showed that nobody in San Francisco under the age of 21 had ever died of COVID. Yet schools were closed for over a year, and playgrounds were closed for 10 months—for nothing.

A Chalkbeat analysis said high school graduation rates dipped in many states after the first full school year of pandemic-inspired fascism—gutting progress that had been made in educational achievement.

In February 2023, Illinois State. Sen Willie Preston raised alarm as 55 schools in Chicago reported that either no students—not a single one—were proficient in math, or none were proficient in reading. The Democrat urged the city to examine its failed COVID policies. However, it was years too late.

In March, a federal court ruled that a class action lawsuit against the University of Delaware arising from its shutdown could proceed. The university used the ridiculous argument that it didn’t owe the students anything because some of them were enrolled on scholarships.

In June, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled in favor of University of Kentucky students who sought refunds over COVID limits in the spring of 2020. An attorney for the students said he would move forward with similar suits against other Kentucky universities.

Believe it or not, a few schools in New South Wales issued new closures in May 2023—after the WHO said the COVID emergency was over. Imagine closing schools over COVID in May 2023. One of the closures was due to just one case, as the school posted that a “member of our school community has recently tested positive.”

Now it’s been years since the pandemic started. Many American schools only recently returned to normal, and students who have treated the era as an extended summer vacation are sure to emerge better off. It beats Zoom class or prison-like schools. Things were that bad.