The decline is unsustainable. We’re in uncharted territory.
I was thinking about this mom I used to know today because I happened to be driving down her street.
Our kids attended pre-school together for a while. We got to know each other a little bit because every day we would arrive at the back door of the school at pickup. She and another mom and I usually hung around after school and let the kids play on the playground.
I had recently quit my job to finish my first book. I was planning to start a business when it was finished. So my schedule allowed for that.
The moms and the kids got to know each other. We were building community, investing time in getting to know each other. We would talk. This one mom, she was visually impaired. She couldn’t read real well. Couldn’t really use a computer. Sometimes she would ask for help filling out a school form. But she was faithful about bringing her daughter to school and she was a sweetheart. She had attended the school herself as a child, she told me and lived just a few blocks away.
Then one day, without warning, I never saw her again. The school closed for covid and did not open again until very late the following year. A full year later, when the school reopened, my son only returned for a few days before I yanked him for another school that was offering 5 day a week in person instruction (I was lucky to be able to find). (The school we had been attending was only offering kids two days a week in person learning, which meant me paying $700 a month to put my son — who’d missed a year of school — in daycare three days a week where he would “learn” on Zoom. It was truly the dumbest and most insulting thing in the world. The daycare teachers weren’t immune to covid! In fact they were offered vaccines later than K-12 teachers.)