Colorado’s schoolchildren may have been the most overlooked casualties of COVID-19. Not in terms of contracting the virus itself, of course; kids were the least likely to catch it, and those who did mostly weathered it well. Instead, they were crushed by society’s wide-ranging efforts to curb the pandemic. And for policy makers preoccupied with staying on top of the week-to-week COVID caseload, our children’s plight too often got pushed to the back burner.
So, it was heartening, to say the least, to hear the state announce last week that students won’t be required to wear masks in class when they return to reopened schools in the fall. The revised public health order makes sense not only practically, given young people’s negligible susceptibility to the waning virus’ more dire consequences, but also symbolically. It conveys to students they finally will be freed from the numbing isolation that has stymied them academically, physically socially, psychologically and emotionally.
The good news is overdue. A return to normal can’t come fast enough for Colorado’s kids. There’s a lot of lost ground to recover, not only with regard to their formal education and academic achievement but also in their lives in general.
When spring 2020’s hard-and-fast lockdown shuttered schools, teachers and administrators scrambled to cobble together an ad hoc online curriculum. By most accounts, it was chaos and learning was in free fall. But even after hard data made clear that COVID posed a very limited threat to kids in school, many remained marooned in remote learning. When schooling resumed online in the fall in most public school districts, lesson plans were more organized and systematic, but it still was a pale imitation of school as kids once knew it. And by the start of this past spring’s semester, many school districts including the state’s largest, in Denver, were still offering only a limited option of returning to in-person learning that amounted to remote learning at school.
It didn’t help that the unions representing a lot of the faculty and staff in the state’s larger school districts did everything in their power to keep schools closed to in-person learning. Every attempt by parents, assorted policy leaders and other stakeholders to reopen schools — to return kids to class, to interscholastic sports, to campus life — was met by union foot dragging.
Alongside the shutdown of conventional schooling, many other workaday, yet essential aspects of kids’ lives shut down, too. Movie theaters, club sports, family vacations, even shopping outings were sharply limited. Friendships were put on hold as classmates became abstractions in the digital space. School sports seasons were canceled. Amusement parks were stilled and other popular, youth-oriented business were shuttered. Rims were even taken down from backboards in local parks for a time.
Through it all, the mask order remained in effect — in some cases, incredibly, even in interscholastic sports when students trained outdoors on wide-open athletic fields. So intent were some school districts on assuring the public its kids would “stay safe” from the virus, they neglected to consider the impact of their own at-times absurd, one-size-fits-all edicts. Just as the mask had become a reassuring symbol of solidarity against a public peril for some adults, for kids it was a reminder their lives were on hold. Seemingly, indefinitely. The mask was suffocating our kids figuratively — and in some activities like basketball, almost literally.
An unprecedented declaration by Children’s Hospital Colorado in May — alerting the public to “a pediatric mental health state of emergency” for the state’s young people — came as a wakeup call.
“We’re overrun with kids attempting suicide and suffering from other forms of major mental health illness,” hospital President Jena Hausmann announced. The excruciating isolation was pushing our kids to the brink. Children had become collateral damage in our war against COVID.
“While kids did fairly well initially in the pandemic, the cumulative stress of schools (closing or adopting a hybrid model) and not being able to do the things they normally do has sort of come to a head,” Dr. Mike DiStefano, the chief medical officer for Children’s Hospital Colorado in Colorado Springs, told The Gazette at the time.
At long last, our kids are getting their lives back on track. As they do so, the rest of us must remember that the many measures we took to spare ourselves from a global pandemic can take a toll of their own. Perhaps in the next crisis, we will try to keep our priorities in better balance. Our future, after all, depends not only on our own survival but even more on the survival of our children.
This content was originally published here.
