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U.S.|What We’ve Learned About School Closures for the Next Pandemic
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/us/school-closures-future-pandemic.html
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Over the course of 20 days in March 2020, 55 million American children stopped going to school as Covid-19 swept the United States.
What was impossible to anticipate then was that millions of those students would not return to classrooms full-time until September 2021, a year and a half later.
Those children and teenagers, often in public schools in Democratic areas, remained online at home while private schools, child-care centers, public schools in conservative regions, office buildings, bars, restaurants, sports arenas and theaters sputtered back toward normalcy.
Five years on, the devastating impact of the pandemic on children and adolescents is widely acknowledged across the political spectrum. School closures were not the only reason the pandemic was hard on children, but research shows that the longer schools stayed closed, the farther behind students fell.
What would happen if another health crisis came along — a pressing concern, as cases of measles and bird flu emerge? In the face of a new unknown pathogen, how would school leaders and lawmakers make decisions?
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