If your check list has a big ole question mark near masks, tests and other Covid- related provisions, you’re not alone. This week’s Epicenter podcast focuses on a new book about all (waves hands) that everybody has lost in these last few years of the pandemic, from the perspective of our education system. Anya Kamenetz is the author of “The Stolen Year: How Covid changed children’s lives, and where we go now.” Our publisher S. Mitra Kalita caught up with her recently (the day before the New York Times review) to ask about her findings and, importantly, how families can best prepare for this coming year and continued uncertainty. 

If this is TL;DR, I think it’s important to distill the advice she has for parents on approaching this year given all that we have just been through: 

  • Acknowledge we can grow through adversity.
  • Ask questions about the pandemic and what they remember like: How did you develop? What can you do that you might not have been able to do because we had this time at home? What do you remember about the time? What do you miss about it, maybe? And what are your goals going forward?
  • Set academic goals, sure, but also social goals. Help them structure playdates or activities to meet other kids. 
  • Check in with the child’s school on the social and emotional learning approaches and how they play out in extracurricular activities. 
  • Talk to kids about communication, resolving conflicts, whether to text someone versus talking to them face to face. 
  • Ask kids what’s on their mind. Early and often. 

Edited excerpts: 

Mitra: Why did you write The Stolen Year

Anya Kamenetz: When schools shut down in March 2020 here in New York City and all over the country, I was here in my kitchen. I had my two girls, a full-time job, my husband has his full-time job. We had our downstairs neighbor, thankfully, who agreed to join our bubble, which is the answer to the question “How was I able to write “The Stolen Year?’” 

I knew based on my experience that school closures were going to be a really big deal. The reason I knew that was because I had been in New Orleans shortly after Katrina. I had reported on the kids that were displaced from their schools there. I had reported on the long-term trajectories of that displacement and all the social and emotional as well as basic needs fallout from that. I also had a longstanding interest in education in the developing world. 

What happens when school shuts down? What should we be looking for when kids don’t have access to formal school?

Mitra: What is your advice for parents to compensate for the stolen year? How should we approach this year knowing what we’ve just been through? 

Anya: Post-traumatic growth: I think it’s really important to present to our kids the possibility, not pressure, but the possibility that we can grow through adversity. Not to erase what they went through or try to stuff it away and say they should forget about it. No. We’ll talk about it, talk about what was given up, and talk about, “How did you develop? What can you do that you might not have been able to do because we had this time at home? What do you remember about the time? What do you miss about it, maybe? And what are your goals going forward?” 

A lot of kids are going to have, yes, academic goals, but also social goals. For older kids…we’re used to having a light touch and having them navigate their peer relationships, hopefully. Now they might need a little more thoughtfulness around structuring playdates or creating activities that they can do and get to know other kids. What are the social and emotional learning approaches that either the school is taking or various extracurricular settings are taking? Kids really need help. I see my kids and the kids around them struggling to navigate basic developmental things about communication, resolving conflicts, when you text someone versus talking to them face to face. Those are all things kids may have on their minds. But we can start by just asking them what’s on their minds, what their goals are, and listening to what they want.

Anya Kamenetz. Photo: Will O’Hare.

Mitra: One of the reasons we launched The Unmuted as a newsletter was because it was two weeks before school was supposed to start, and truly parents did not know whether school was going to start. That was our entry to this issue. How do you think New York City fared? 

Anya: New York stood out for its vocal commitment to keeping kids in school more so than LA, Chicago, and the other top 10. Obviously Texas and Florida were a totally different situation, politically. But in terms of a blue state, we did try to open schools. We talked a lot about opening schools. It was really, really hard.

The way that we ended up opening delayed the start of school twice and with an embattled debate between union leaders and various factions within the unions as well as parents and different parent groups. We had about a third of kids coming into school in-person and the other two-thirds electing to stay at home, and that was not a decision that was made based on the need. That was made based on parent perceptions of safety and how safety mitigation practices were observed in different types of schools. 

We can think about school buildings that didn’t have any green space of their own that were trying to close streets in order to give kids a place to sit. School buildings that may have been overcrowded before Covid, versus ones that had plenty of space. So really the inequities that we see in a big, urban system really being exacerbated and teachers were kind of tearing their hair out because, they’re like, “I was told to come back to the classroom, I’m in the classroom teaching one-third of my kids, and then I have to go home and help the other two-thirds of my kids who often are the ones who need the most help in the first place. This is not making sense in any kind of way.” 

Mitra: I was going to ask you about those inequities. Was it worse for immigrant children? Was it worse for special needs children? Who really felt the brunt of this?

Anya: That’s such a hard question to answer because everyone’s experiences were so unique. I did really try hard to call out certain kids that we don’t necessarily think as much about. Special education kids, that’s about 14% of all students in the system, and across the board, whether you’re talking about an ADHD diagnosis or you’re talking about a kid who is nonverbal, what I heard from parents was that it was very, very hard for them to engage with their learning. They weren’t getting the services that they needed. 

I also worry a lot about the kids who never got the interventions at all. One of the mothers in my book who I spent time with was living in St. Louis, and has eight children. One of her children was diagnosed with autism during the pandemic. But there was no thought of getting this daughter interventions. It wasn’t a thing in her world and she didn’t have a way to connect to those services. 

I also spent a whole chapter talking about kids that are really unseen in the margins, we have 400,000 kids in this country that are in the foster care system. We have about 40,000 kids that are in the criminal justice system. And those two groups, what they both had in common is that they didn’t see their families in person for over one year. They might be zooming with little babies. That was something people told me was really devastating. 

Mitra: Is there one grade or set of grades that seem particularly like their learning experience was stolen from them? 

Anya: It really varies across individuals. There are really serious concerns across the developmental spectrum. What research would show is that we would be really concerned about kids who are teenagers because that’s the time when they are in danger of separating from school altogether. What we’re actually seeing happening is kids drifting into paid work and sometimes caregiving for younger siblings and that is contributing to academic lower performance, not graduating, and dropping out or not going to college. And the college-going rates have had an incredible precipitous drop in the last two years, particularly in community colleges and community college freshmen. 

The other side of things: We’re really worried about the 0-5 age group. We’re worried about those early developmental years where socialization is so important. We’ve been through a decade and a half of hype about why pre-K is so important, why school readiness is so important, and how we can level the playing field through universal pre-K. Well, pre-K and kindergarten were the largest drops in enrollment over the last two years.

Those kids are now not ready, they may have missed assessments that would have gotten them into early intervention and having specialized services.

Mitra: How real is the exodus of teachers and how is that going to manifest in this upcoming year?

Anya: I actually think there’s been a lot of misreporting on this. There have been various manifestations of schools needing to fill positions and schools lowering requirements. This was way before the pandemic, especially in rural areas, especially where pay is very low. That’s an issue. But what we don’t have is evidence that there’s been turnover or people leaving the profession at higher rates despite the fact that yes, teachers are saying they’re burnt out, saying that they’re dissatisfied. But that’s just not matched with teachers actually leaving. What is happening is schools are creating new positions which they should be doing because they’re trying to use the federal money that they have, they’re trying to beef up their counseling departments, their special education departments. There are vacancies happening but a lot of the time those vacancies are going up even as the number of students is going down, because we know enrollment is going down. 

All of that said, if you’re a school and you don’t know if your kids are going to have a full-time teacher this year, or if they’re missing specialists, you might be concerned about that. It’s certainly worth having that conversation and talking about the budget and how your district can stay on track, especially if it’s one of the districts that’s been losing numbers of kids. 

Mitra: What is your advice for parents to compensate for the stolen year? How should we approach this year knowing what we’ve just been through? 

Anya: Post-traumatic growth: I think it’s really important to present to our kids the possibility, not pressure, but the possibility that we can grow through adversity. Not to erase what they went through or try to stuff it away and say they should forget about it. No. We’ll talk about it, talk about what was given up, and talk about, “How did you develop? What can you do; what you might not have been able to do because we had this time at home? What do you remember about the time? What do you miss about it, maybe? And what are your goals going forward?” 

A lot of kids are going to have, yes, academic goals, but also social goals. For older kids…we’re used to having a light touch and having them navigate their peer relationships, hopefully. Now they might need a little more thoughtfulness around structuring playdates or creating activities that they can do and get to know other kids. What are the social and emotional learning approaches that either the school is taking or various extracurricular settings are taking? Kids really need help. I see my kids and the kids around them struggling to navigate basic developmental things about communication, resolving conflicts, when you text someone versus talking to them face to face. Those are all things kids may have on their minds. But we can start by just asking them what’s on their minds, what their goals are, and listening to what they want.

Nicole Perrino is the founder of Bronxmama.com, a hyperlocal website for Bronx families where she use her influence to celebrate the beauty that the Bronx has to offer. In addition to her role at Bronxmama,...

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.