Covid is having a devastating impact on children

(KYMA, KECY/NBC News) - It has been almost 10 months since Covid-19 began battering families in the United States, putting parents out of work, shrouding their homes in grief and loss, and shutting children out of the schools that taught and cared for them.

It’s all taken an unthinkable toll on children — a social, emotional and academic ordeal so extreme that some advocates and experts warn its repercussions could rival those of a hurricane or other disaster.

“Recovery from Katrina wasn’t a one-year recovery. We didn’t just bring the kids back and everything fell into place. And this will be the same,” said Betheny Gross, the associate director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, who studied New Orleans schools after the 2005 hurricane and is now tracking Covid-19’s impact.

A nation of children coping with trauma, illness and disruption will need more than a vaccine to address the fallout, she said.

“I don’t think we can just start school next fall and say, ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’”

To measure the effect this year has had on children, NBC News gathered data on a range of child welfare metrics, looking at what’s changed since March when the virus closed nearly every school in the country.

The numbers aren’t all bad news — drug and alcohol use among youth, for example, appears to be down, as are juvenile arrest and incarceration rates.

But, in other areas, preliminary data points to alarming signs that kids are in trouble:

• Emergency rooms have seen a 24 percent increase in mental health-related visits from children ages 5 to 11 compared to last year. The increase among older kids is even higher — 31 percent.
• 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.

ared to last year.

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.”

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The children most affected will be those facing racial, economic and other inequities that have only become more pronounced since the pandemic began, David Hinojosa, the director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said.

They already lagged behind their peers in school, and already faced significant obstacles. And now they’ve taken the brunt of the pandemic’s pain, he said.

“I can tell you,” he said, based on studies and reports he’s reviewed, “that learning time has plummeted, that English learners are being shortchanged of the language acquisition materials and teaching that they need because it’s basically a one-size-fits-all approach, and that students with disabilities have been grossly neglected across the country.”

It’s only getting worse, he said.

“Children are frustrated. Teachers are frustrated. Civil rights advocates are frustrated and I think it’s reaching a boiling point.”