No School Is Going To Stay Closed For Long

Omicron is a speed bump, but that’s all it is: A speed bump.

I can comfortably say that the worst thing my children have ever been through in their lives was virtual school. That’s a blessing, of course: That virtual schooling is the worst thing they’ve ever experienced means they are healthy and safe in other areas. But it shouldn’t distract from how truly horrible it was, for them, and of course for tens of millions of other children. The initial instinct of virtual schooling made sense, was even noble: We wanted to stop the spread, flatten the curve, do our part for our communities. When schools shut down the week of March 11, 2020, nobody complained. Everybody understood. It was a national emergency.

What we’ve learned since then is that shutting down schools may have been an even bigger national emergency. Students have fallen years behind in their studies. There has been an increase in bullying, and an even more massive increase in mental health issues for kids, and even more massive increase in childhood obesity. (The best piece ever about how virtual school was a disaster for underprivileged students was this one.) Anecdotally, I’ve never seen my two children, now in the fourth and second grades, more sluggish and depressed than when they were in virtual school; returning them to school brought the…