Reports of child abuse are skyrocketing. Naomi Schaefer Riley writes:
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that, once again, the nation’s largest public school system would close, in response to spiking Covid-19 infections—throwing hundreds of thousands of children back into remote-learning environments. The human cost of school closures on children cannot be overstated. According to a new report from JAMA Network Open, the American Medical Association’s monthly open-access medical journal, “a total of 24.2 million children aged 5 to 11 attended public schools that were closed during the pandemic, losing a median of 54 days of instruction.” The report also declares that “missed instruction during 2020 could be associated with an estimated 5.53 million years of life lost. This loss in life expectancy was likely to be greater than would have been observed if leaving primary schools open had led to an expansion of the first wave of the pandemic.”
These are not the only concerns. The dramatic drop in reports of child abuse and neglect—more than 50 percent in New York City this spring—is largely the result of teachers not seeing students in person or communicating with them at all in many cases. Teachers account for about a quarter of reports to children’s services; the lack of in-person schooling means that more kids are left in dangerous situations for longer.
What little teachers see via class Zoom meetings is deeply concerning. A few days ago I spoke with M., a first-grade teacher at a Title I elementary school in Northern California. About 97 percent of the kids in her school receive free or reduced-price lunch. They are mostly Hispanic, with some African-American students as well. School has been completely remote since the spring, and there is no sign that it will return to in-person this school year.
[Naomi Schaefer Riley, "The Child-Neglect Pandemic," November 19]
