Friday, March 25, 2022

New Data Confirms COVID School Rules Were a Disaster; Report: Students Thrived at Non-Lockdown Schools During Pandemic, and other C-Virus related stories

Christopher Sadowski
New data confirms COVID school rules were a disaster:
Yet more evidence has come to light showing that our COVID school shutdowns and hybrid learning were an unmitigated disaster.
Analytics firm Renaissance Learning’s analysis of nationwide K-12 test scores shows that students are hurting. Almost 40% of students in New York and across America fell below benchmarks in math for the 2021-2022 school year. Half fell below benchmarks in reading.
A quarter of those below the math benchmark scored badly enough to need intervention; an eighth, to need “urgent” intervention. In reading, a third of below-benchmark kids needs intervention, and more than one in six needs urgent intervention.
And those numbers represent a decline across both subjects, state and nationwide, over the previous year — so the trend here is also bad.
For younger students, the picture is even uglier: Half of entering first-graders this year were reading below expectations, vs. 28% pre-pandemic. --->READ MORE HERE
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Report: Students Thrived at Non-Lockdown Schools During Pandemic:
While schools across the country decided to lockdown, imposing draconian “virtual learning” and mask mandates on children, some school districts found success in keeping a student’s life “as normal as possible.”
In the fall of 2020, when coronavirus protocols were in full force, Colorado’s Lewis-Palmer District 38 in the suburbs of Colorado Springs decided to go against the grain, according to the Washington Post.
They maintained full-time, in-person, mask-optional elementary school and hybrid-style middle and high school. Students with special education needs, however, were in-person every weekday. Extracurriculars like the band program and football team were brought back, too, with participating students not required to socially distance themselves.
“We didn’t just exist through the pandemic,” school district communications director Mark Belcher said. “We made progress through the pandemic.”
Lewis-Palmer, a school district serving about 6,600 students, saw no child hospitalizations from the virus and only two district employees who both had indefinite contract tracing results.
The school district also maintained its place in the 80th percentile in English and math nationally.
The heavy-handed coronavirus protocols on children at school have proven to be an educational and mental health disaster and one that could have been completely avoidable if decision-makers had chosen to heed the warnings of pediatricians early on.
Indeed, in the middle of 2020, the American Academy of Pediatrics urged school officials to open schools for in-person learning, warning of spiking depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation among children. --->READ MORE HERE
Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

Airlines ask Biden to end mask and testing requirements

CDC says BA.2 variant is slowly taking over but not making people sicker

USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates

WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates

YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates

NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest

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