education

'Generation Covid': Children have been hit from all sides, and they're falling fast | Ailen Arreaza, Bethany Robertson and Justin Ruben

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Jayla was a standout student in her Georgia grade school when it shut down. The school offered students laptops, but by the time her mom got a ride to school, the laptops were gone. Instead, Jayla was left with a photocopied work packet – without any of the material from her advanced classes.

But the family’s bigger problems are financial: Jayla’s mom lost her job due to the lockdown. She’s applied for job after job; so far, no luck.

It’s hard to overstate the scope of the crisis, or, more accurately, crises, facing Jayla and all the other kids living through Covid-19 – let’s call them Generation C. For millions of members of Gen C – especially children in low-income families, kids with learning challenges, and Black and brown children hampered by systematic oppression – the pandemic has meant a food security crisis, piled on top of an educational equity crisis, piled on top of a school funding crisis, piled on top of a mental health crisis. Unless Congress acts quickly to rescue Gen C, a generation of kids and, with them, our nation’s future, could be lost.

Right now, one in six US children are going to bed hungry and roughly one-third of families couldn’t pay their rent last month. This kind of deprivation causes lifelong harm. And in just a few weeks, things will get worse as extra unemployment benefits expire and eviction moratoriums lift.

Add to that the weight of anxiety, social isolation and grief, which doctors say are leading to a mental health crisis among children (this after rates of depression and suicide attempts among young adults already doubled between 2009 and 2017).

Remote learning is hard for all children, but catastrophic for some. After school went virtual, we surveyed a random sample of the 2.5 million parents in our organization, ParentsTogether. Almost 40% of low-income parents told us their kids were doing little or no school work, compared with 3.7% of parents making six figures. Meanwhile, of the kids who should be receiving special education services, 40% were getting none.

Yet remote learning will continue in some form, because of our country’s failure to control the virus – and because rather than giving schools the resources and support to reopen safely where possible, we’re allowing them to face a funding crisis without modern precedent. Instead of adding learning specialists and finding extra space to hold classes, schools are already laying off teachers.

There’s another problem: when schools closed, kids’ lives moved even more online. But the platforms they’re using aren’t designed to keep them healthy or safe. One example: reports of online sexual exploitation have doubled since February, and pedophiles are circulating a guide for how to take advantage of the pandemic.

The youngest members of Gen C face particular challenges. Right now, they’re mostly home, cut off from playmates during a crucial period in their development. And the childcare centers full of loving teachers that they miss so much? Half are likely to fail by fall. As parents are called back to work, there will increasingly be no childcare for their kids to return to.

Trauma piles upon trauma in the cruel geometry of interlocking oppressions. Because of racial bias embedded in our economic and healthcare systems, Black and Latinx children have been twice as likely to watch relatives lose jobs in the crisis and die from the virus; twice as likely to go hungry; and hit harder by the failures of remote learning as well as by childcare closures.

It is an astounding litany of harms. But we can still make a different choice. We bailed out big oil. How about we bail out our children?

Here’s what a rescue plan for Gen C could look like: we’d start by giving families ongoing support and keeping people employed so that every child has a stable home and enough to eat. We’d double down on education, pouring resources into schools to help them catch up the kids left behind by remote learning and reopen safely when it’s feasible. We’d provide emergency funding to childcare programs; guarantee paid family leave and sick leave; make sure every family has access to healthcare, including mental health; and demand tech companies implement emergency features to safeguard kids across remote learning and social media.

To be clear, we don’t just want to go back to a broken status quo – the system was already failing the kids who are suffering the most now. The good news, though, is that the steps outlined here are also stepping stones to a brighter future for all children.

But that future will remain out of reach as long as Congress and the president refuse to act at the scale of the problem. So far, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump seem perfectly content to let children starve and families flounder. To the Democrats’ credit, the Heroes Act would address some of this – but even their opening bid would allow the childcare system to collapse.

Which means we, as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends and concerned humans need to step up: write, call, petition and protest until our government acts. We can’t afford for Congress to pass a meager relief bill and then to head out on vacation. Our kids need help now.

One way or another, Gen C will never be the same. The question is whether the “C” in Gen C will refer to the crushing impact of Covid-19 and an unbridgeable chasm between kids with privilege and kids without – or whether the “C” will come to stand for transformational change, when a pandemic and an uprising shattered the world as we knew it, and we chose to rebuild by putting children first.

  • Ailen Arreaza, Bethany Robertson and Justin Ruben are the leaders of ParentsTogether, a national, parent-led organization with more than 2.5 million members

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