Children Damaged by School Lockdowns

Another mother speaks up. In Fairfax, Virginia Jo-Anne Sears attended a school board meeting and spoke out about the problems caused by shutting down schools. Children who had been attending online or Zoom classes had fallen seriously behind academically. 

See also my post of last Saturday, Link here.

She presented evidence from a set of standardized tests, called Standards of Learning (SOL) scores. 

SOLs, known formally as Standards of Learning, are the Virginia public school standardized tests which set the standards for the commonwealth’s expectations and understanding for student learning and achievement in English, math, science, and social studies.

Sears explained:

Jo-Anne Sears told the school board statistics about the 2020-2021 SOL scores for the county, and how she wants the school board to step up and do more for students.

“Tonight I want to address the devastating learning loss we are now seeing in SOL scores from last year. Remember when you were focused on spending time renaming schools and telling parents everything was fine? Yeah, not fine. In fact, it is devastating,” Sears said to the school-board.

She presented the facts, emphasizing that the children most likely to suffer were the underprivileged and the disadvantaged:

“Here are some facts: ratings and percent’s passing on math assessments for all students went from an 86 in 2019 down to a 61 percent. Reading for all students went from 81 down to 73.  Math for ESOL student’s 58 percent down to 19. Math for economically disadvantaged students from a 71 percent down to 34. And before you attempt to claim it doesn’t matter because fewer kids took them, doesn’t cut it. When you dig into this data school by school, you will see that the affluent areas did very well. 

Whereas the title one schools did not. It’s not good enough to brush this off with excuses like you usually do.”

As it happened, other school districts in Virginia saw the same results:

Fairfax County was not the only school district to see SOL scores plummet. Other districts also saw a plunge in their SOL scores, such as Arlington County, Falls Church, Loudoun County, Manassas City, Manassas Park and Prince William County as shown by the VDOE website SOL results.

Between the teachers unions and the politicians who want to lock down the country, America has declared war on schoolchildren. The vulnerable young have suffered for the lockdowns. Strangely, it takes parents to militate for their children’s educations. Politicians and union leaders who are supposed to care about children have remained silent.