It began on February 27, 2020. That day Bothell High School in Washington — the state where the first confirmed US cases of the novel coronavirus had occurred — announced it would close down temporarily after a staffer’s relative became ill after traveling internationally, prompting fears about what we were coming to understand was Covid-19.
By March 15, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, in a tense Sunday evening press conference, told students, parents, and teachers at the nation’s largest school system that “there is no school tomorrow.”
By March 25, every public school building in the country had been closed, taking more than 50 million students out of the classroom.
And so the US began an emergency experiment, one with no precedent and no foreseeable end, in what would happen to America’s children if we took away the place where they spend, on average, over a thousand hours a year.
It can be difficult to remember now — after years of increasingly vicious political debates, after the war of epidemiologists against economists, after the mea culpas and the hysteria — that one of the few things most Americans agreed on in mid-March 2020 was this: For our children’s sake, we had to close the schools.
Read more at Vox