The COVID-19 pandemic turned kids’ lives upside down — and parents aren’t ready to forgive the school officials, politicians, and members of the media who allowed unscientific school closures to drag on for years.
Schools across the US sent kids home and switched to remote learning in March 2020 and many didn’t start in person again until the 2022-2023 school year, resulting in an unprecedented amount of lost classroom time.
Daniel Kotzin, a father of two then-preschoolers picked up his family from San Francisco, where public schools were shut down while private schools remained open, and moved to Denver in 2021 so his son could start school in person.
“My wife, my son, my daughter and I got on a plane Sunday evening with the clothes on our back and rented an Airbnb in Denver so Oscar could attend kindergarten.”
They found a pre-school there for their daughter, Ruth, who had already been speaking both Spanish and English until a mask mandate upended her progress.
“As a result of the lockdowns and the mask policy, she had trouble learning either language instead of learning both languages,” he said.
Daniel believes strict policies in San Francisco — like a six foot distancing rule at playgrounds — permanently changed Ruth.
“My daughter is a naturally vivacious and outgoing child,” he said. “I think she has been permanently traumatized by the way people treated her during lockdowns… Several times grown-ups screamed at her that she was going to ‘kill their child’ by trying to talk to them.”
Author David Zweig doesn’t want the catastrophic policy failure that caused this lasting damage to get memory-holed. In his new book “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions,” out April 22nd, he set out to hold leaders and the media accountable.
“It’s hard to process how crazy it was that a healthy child was prevented from stepping foot in a school building for more than a year,” Zweig told The Post.
Zweig, an independent journalist based in upstate New York describes his new release as “an anatomy of [the] historic decision-making process” that led to 55 million K-12 students being shuttered at home, while schools in other countries remained open without major issue.
“The harms and hardships felt by millions of kids and adolescents from extended closures were predictable, inequitable, and, for many, with lifelong consequences,” he writes.
Anjelica, a mom of a then-junior from St. Louis, Illinois, was going through a divorce when the pandemic hit. She told The Post lockdowns made the experience “ten times worse” for her daughter, Sydney.
“The lockdowns destroyed some kids’ lives forever. We as a society are supposed to protect children, and we completely failed at not only protecting them but in turn actually damaged many of them,” she told The Post.
“In the course of six months her life had completely been turned upside down: parents divorced, prom canceled, junior year remote,” Anjelica said.
Zweig was a consistent voice of reason in mainstream media during the pandemic, breaking nuanced stories about the downsides of school closures, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates.
Since the pandemic, he observes test scores have continued to drop among students who were impacted by lockdown, and disparities between socioeconomic groups continue to grow.
“We could tell the difference between students who were in-person for 2020 through 2022 and those who were virtual,” Jonathan Hart, a high school public school teacher in rural western Kentucky, told The Post, noting “behavior, performance, and attendance were beyond abysmal,” for the remote children.
“School lockdowns and virtual school options have basically created an elite upper class and a noticeable lower class when it comes to academic performance on the ACT [college admissions test].”
A father of a 3rd grader and 5th grader when the lockdowns began, Zweig was motivated to write the book in part by his own children’s experience.
“I was inspired [to write this after] observing my kids alone in their bedrooms, just wilting away in the gray light of a Chromebook,” he recalled.
He blames the mainstream media for blindly going along with pro-lockdown narratives.
One reason for this, he believes, is because President Trump was a proponent of reopening schools.
“Whatever Trump said, there was this knee-jerk impulse amongst the left and the establishment to say the opposite,” Zweig writes.
He also says teachers’ unions stood in the way of schools reopening, despite ample evidence out of Europe that schools were safely able to reopen.
Zweig believes chronicling these mistakes is key to avoiding history repeating itself.
“I think people would be far more hesitant to flip the master switch the way they did,” he said. “There seems to be a general acknowledgement that what was done to children was cruel and unnecessary, even amongst those who advocated for it at the time.”
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