School’s Out Forever

Three years of hard data on school closures presents a grim picture of thousands of students who left school in 2020 and never returned.

Photo by Yustinus Tjiuwanda on Unsplash.

“The pandemic missing: The kids who didn’t go back to school,” reported Bianca Vazquez Toness and Sharon Lurye for the Associated Press on February 9, 2023, beginning with the pandemic-era tale of student Kailani Taylor-Cribb.

“She’d be a senior right now, preparing for graduation in a few months, probably leading her school’s modern dance troupe and taking art classes,” explained Toness and Lurye. “Instead, Kailani Taylor-Cribb hasn’t taken a single class in what used to be her high school since the height of the coronavirus pandemic. She vanished from Cambridge, Massachusetts’ public school roll in 2021 and has been, from an administrative standpoint, unaccounted for since then.”

Kailani Taylor-Cribb’s story of being left behind by COVID-19 public school closures is, sadly, not an anomaly. The Associated Press report is, perhaps, the most exhaustive and well-researched effort thus far to explore some of the worst consequences of the devastating long-term public school closures that crippled some districts across the U.S. well into 2023.

And beyond.

“Hundreds of thousands of students who have dropped off public school rolls since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic are…