As I have been pointing out in previous posts, as a country, our leftist governors' paranoid overreaction to the COVID-19 virus (most Republican governors have the common sense to have a balanced reaction and prioritize kids' being in the classroom) has been having a horrendous impact on our children and their mental health (see this example of an 11-year-old who committed suicide in front of his class on Zoom) and education. For reasons still not made known to Oregonians, our less-than-transparent Governor Brown has refused to look at the overwhelming data that shows that kids are not spreaders and are therefore safe, and the many states that have either had their kids in school all year, or, like Chicago, are going back in January and telling teachers they need to be there.

Yesterday, NBC News posted an artile titled Covid is having a devastating impact on children — and the vaccine won't fix everything, and in it, they give multiple ways that our destructive overreaction is destroying the lives of kids and families.

...preliminary data points to alarming signs that kids are in trouble:

• Food banks have been slammed with hungry families as an estimated 17 million children — many largely cut off from free school lunches — are now in danger of not having enough to eat. That’s an increase of more than 6 million hungry children compared to before the pandemic.
• Schools are struggling to teach students remotely or in classrooms in which children wear masks and sit behind plastic shields. One national testing organization reported that the average student in grades 3-8 who took a math assessment this fall scored 5 to 10 percentile points behind students who took the same test last year, with Black, Hispanic and poor students falling even further behind.
• Classrooms have been unusually empty, with quarantines and sickness affecting attendance in face-to-face schools and computer issues interfering with online instruction. Some districts report that the number of students who’ve missed at least 10 percent of classes, which studies show could lead to devastating lifelong consequences, has more than doubled.
• And an estimated 3 million vulnerable students — who are homeless, in foster care, have disabilities or are learning English — appear to not be in school at all.

...

With schools closed, many families are weathering this crisis on their own, struggling in ways that could ripple through their schools and communities for years to come, she said.

“If we fail to address this, we’re just compounding trauma. We’re compounding loss,” Duffield said. “A student who is homeless, who has a disability, who has been traumatized by the racial violence we’ve seen this year, and then to be disconnected from arguably the only universal support system is disastrous. It means higher rates of suicide. Higher rates of depression, addiction, mental illness and physical disability, particularly for young children who are growing and developing right now. They’ll face more developmental delays leading to deficits in their education as they grow.”

With schools closed, many families are weathering this crisis on their own, struggling in ways that could ripple through their schools and communities for years to come, she said.

“If we fail to address this, we’re just compounding trauma. We’re compounding loss,” Duffield said. “A student who is homeless, who has a disability, who has been traumatized by the racial violence we’ve seen this year, and then to be disconnected from arguably the only universal support system is disastrous. It means higher rates of suicide. Higher rates of depression, addiction, mental illness and physical disability, particularly for young children who are growing and developing right now. They’ll face more developmental delays leading to deficits in their education as they grow.”

... The massive displacement from school — not to mention mounting evidence that kids and their parents are increasingly experiencing depression, anxiety and trauma during the pandemic — is what has experts comparing the children of the pandemic to kids who’ve survived natural disasters.

... Before the pandemic began last spring, Mary Beth Cochran’s grandchildren were finally doing well.

The four children she took custody of five years ago — now ages 6 to 12 — had witnessed violence and drug abuse in their home, but with love and attention from their grandmother and their aunt, they were thriving in school. They had friends in their neighborhood in Canton, North Carolina.

Then Covid-19 started spreading. Cochran, 51, saw food prices spike in local stores just as the children lost weeks of access to free school meals. She couldn’t look for part-time work to supplement her disability check because she needed to supervise remote instruction. Money has been tight and her grandchildren — whose school partially reopened in October — have not done well with the turmoil.

One child, 11, became so anxious as her grades slipped, and as she’s watched her grandmother struggle to put food on the table, that she’s been pulling out her eyelashes — an old nervous habit.

Another, 6, who was recently diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, missed so much instruction when he couldn’t sit still for his online classes that his teachers are now warning he could be held back, Cochran said.

“It’s heart-wrenching,” she said. “They had come so far after all of that and then, boom, the corona hit and they weren’t able to get their education, the proper one-on-one time from their teachers or their counselors.”

Notice that over and over, the story is about the damage that jerking kids out of school is having on them in both the short terms and the long term.

And yet our egotistical Governor and our Education Department director site by idly and watch this happen, as if they don't have a care in the world. Unfortunately, our kids don't have the same luxury.