Naturally, after 18 months of hearing many of these same people demonstrate their commitment to catching and spreading the virus — gallivanting off to holiday family reunions, trips abroad, concerts, etc. — I wasn’t convinced. But, in Washington, D.C., where I live, if you would rather not send your too-young-to-be-vaccinated kids to in-person school this fall, the city hasn’t just blocked your access to a virtual schooling option — it’s started sending . 

So we acquiesced, gritted our teeth, pretended like we felt safe and went to work selling in-person school. We told our two elementary schoolers that we were excited, met up with some of their friends for distanced-outdoor play dates, made a big show of buying school supplies … and then sent them back to campus. “Y´ÇłÜ’rąđ going to have so much fun!” we cheered. 

And they did! But only for a moment, because, something doesn’t become true just because we collectively wish it were so. amid the Delta variant surge this fall always hinged on the accuracy of a series of assumptions about the probabilities of kids catching the virus, positive cases turning into serious long-term illnesses, and/or hospitals running out of room for new patients. 

Early returns from school reopening — a , — suggest that, perhaps, forcing most kids back to school this fall wasn’t the easy slam dunk that advocates promised. Indeed, the situation in our house is a sad reminder that when y´ÇłÜ’rąđ forced to live with the assumptions baked into someone else’s fantasy world, you can still get stuck with real-world consequences. 

On the fourth day of school, a COVID-positive classmate exposed one of our kids to the virus. The school learned about the classmate’s positive test on the sixth day of school, and the class was sent home. . They worsened for a few days, then plateaued for weeks, coughing and coughing until we got scared enough to go to our doctor, only to learn that there were amid the school reopening case surge. The nearby children’s hospital was also overwhelmed, so we searched around until we found an urgent care clinic. 

“Lungs sound OK,” the harried doctor told us. “She’s just gonna have to wait this out.” 

But, by then, we had already been waiting for what seemed like an eternity. The helpless anxiety of listening to your kid cough themselves awake at night is one of the darkest flavors of parental desperation. It doesn’t improve after weeks of repetition. And it reaches particularly deep now, marinated in the exhaustion of a year and a half of juggling full-time work and child care . 

Worst of all, it confirmed our skepticism. We had been forced to run risks we didn’t want by people we didn’t trust, and wound up proven bitterly right. 

Finally, nearly a month after exposure, our kid started feeling better. The cough eased up. So we (reluctantly) prepared to send them back to school — but it was much harder to sell this time. They were scared. 

How do you gaslight a child who’s been sick for most of the first month of school because their community and its leaders put them at risk? How do you tell them that, nah, that wasn’t so bad, the pandemic is totally under control?

Just talk your kid down, folks said — they’re only apprehensive because you are.

It felt like the perfect encapsulation of the kind of selfish motivated reasoning that has made it so hard for the country to successfully confront the pandemic. When humans interpret the world, when we try to make sense of the situations before us, we’re always in danger of misunderstanding them in self-serving ways. This isn’t such a big deal when it’s an individual matter — convince yourself that your daily sodas with breakfast have nothing to do with your pants growing tighter if you must. The consequences of willing comforting beliefs for yourself instead of facing those facts will largely fall on you alone. 

But since spring 2020, the pandemic keeps hammering home the same frustrating lesson: when groups of people are unwilling to deal with challenging facts, the rest of us suffer. Take the most obvious all-time example: sure, the climate appears to be shifting, and yes, have been screaming for decades that our own behavior is putting us at risk … but wouldn’t it be more convenient to find a different explanation that doesn’t require us to change our lifestyles at all? Maybe it’s not actually caused by our frequent flying or our meat-heavy diet or our automobiles or our air conditioners. That feels easier to believe, which is almost the same as being better to believe, which, you know, the more you ruminate on it, starts to feel simply true and right. 

The key to reasoning this way — interpreting the facts so that they almost always confirm what you’d rather do anyhow — is carefully  framing the terms of debate up front. If you think about confronting climate change primarily (or even solely) in terms of how it might impact your ability to fly cheaply to Caribbean beaches every year, then sure, it’s obvious that humans should change nothing about our fossil fuel usage and anyone who thinks otherwise is an ecoterrorist. But if you expand your framing to consider how the worsening storms linked to accelerating climate change could affect the , and of your preferred Caribbean vacation paradises, the chain of reasoning comes out somewhat differently. 

The pandemic era has been drenched in this kind of thinking. Folks have been constructing more convenient realities built around self-serving assumptions about what is safe. They’ve isolated potential risks out of their reasoning and focused on other priorities so that they can wind up feeling good and responsible about the choices they’ve made. Don’t like needles? Dig around a little and you can find some comforting conspiracy theory to excuse you from having to get vaccinated. Embarrassed that you missed a week of work with COVID after attending that mask-free wedding two time zones away? Just spend 15–20 minutes on a couple of the right-right wing websites and you can reassure yourself that no, you totally did enough, the masks wouldn’t have helped. 

It’s the same reasoning for school reopening. For instance, it is absolutely true that — for their social development, their emotional health, and their academic progress — in-person schooling works better, for almost every kid at almost every time, than virtual learning. But that doesn’t mean that the health dangers involved with reopening in-person schools simply evaporate. And it’s certainly no excuse for undermining efforts to lower those risks by, for example, refusing to get vaccinated or preventing schools from requiring masks on campus or forcing cautious families to send their kids back before they are eligible for the shots. 

Sure, … but that appears to be driven by schools, districts, and deciding to set family notification and quarantine rules for students. In essence, schools aren’t closing as much as before — not because in-school cases and transmission aren’t happening, but because we’ve changed our levels of precaution. Indeed, that by easing its standards, Michigan stands to define one-quarter of its school COVID outbreaks out of existence. That is, they’ll still happen, but we’re just not calling all of them outbreaks anymore. It’s the same with in-school transmission. While it’s common to read and convenient to believe that “in-school transmission is rare,” it’s also hard to be sure of this, since U.S. schools have to keep up with throughout the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, know that in the two months between schools reopening in the South in August and now (early October), there have been . That, which is assuredly an undercount, given the limited state of U..S COVID testing and reporting, is nearly one-third of the total pediatric COVID cases since March 2020 — in just two months. Convince yourself that that’s just a coincidence, that it’s somehow totally unrelated to nationwide school reopening if you must, but please look yourself in the mirror while you do it. 

Know that sending your child means you are accepting an of facing a month — — of living with a nightly jaw clench, as your child just doesn’t seem to be getting better. Know that some children do, in fact, . Know that the risks for everyone will be dramatically lower for all kids once they’re vaccinated — a possibility that appears to be just weeks away.  

And, most of all, know that shrugging and framing these possibilities out of the picture won’t make them actually go away. But hey, maybe you’ll get lucky, and they’ll just happen to someone else. Like my kid.

“This moment is what we’ve all been working for,” Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter said during an opening press ceremony at P.S. 25, a bilingual elementary school in the Bronx.

She implored families to get vaccinated so that children could safely learn throughout the pandemic and be “in the places where they’re loved by their principals, superintendents, teachers and parents — and the whole school community is wrapped around them.”

Porter was later joined by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona for a meet-and-greet with students and classroom visits at P.S. 121 Throop in the Bronx. Cardona, along with educators from across the country, was in New York this morning to host a “Coronavirus and the Classroom” town hall on the Today Show.

Thanks, for joining us at PS 121 for ! We are excited to welcome students back to school communities where they can learn and grow socially, emotionally, and academically.

— Chancellor Meisha Porter (@DOEChancellor)

One P.S. 25 parent wished she had been made aware that her child’s school would be the first stop on the DOE’s tour, feeling confronted by a swarm of press just after a night shift. Chancellor Porter and the DOE’s team went on to welcome students throughout the city’s five boroughs, including visits to a school vaccination site and soccer practice at two Queens high schools Monday afternoon.

In late August, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced all participating in “high-risk” sports are required to get one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by their first competition. Though there are not yet COVID-19 vaccine mandates for any other student group, all NYC school employees are required to get at least a first dose by Sept. 27 — staff cannot opt into weekly testing as an alternative, making it one of the country’s strictest vaccine mandates.

Last week, an arbitrator ruled that members of the with certain medical or religious exemptions must be offered non-classroom assignments while other UFT staff who refuse vaccination can either resign by Nov. 30 or be placed on unpaid leave through September 2022. The union represents most of the city’s 73,000-plus educators and other school personnel.

As the Delta variant surges, the city estimates that just about two thirds of New York youth over 12 are vaccinated. As a part of the DOE’s efforts to monitor and prioritize student safety, a mandatory must be completed daily by anyone entering school buildings.

The site temporarily this morning, likely due to surges in traffic across the city. Some schools turned to paper surveys to try and get students inside more quickly and alleviate crowded sidewalks, but parents and others were frustrated by the tech failure.

It’s the first day of school and I’m seeing first-hand from parents that the health questionnaire app is down! Luckily paper health screenings are being provided but this is going to add another burden to parents and students on an already fraught day.

— Gale A. Brewer (@galeabrewer)

And though Mayor de Blasio dubbed today’s return “joyous” during the press gathering at P.S. 25, for some parents, it was anything but. Discouraged by the in-person only model, loosened guidelines and vaccine ineligibility for children under 12, NYC parents threatened to strike and others have opted for alternative schools where virtual learning is still an option.

Fourth-grader Catherine Camila Estefens was one of P.S. 25’s earliest arrivals, patiently waiting for her classmates to find their line and join her along the school’s fence. A student at the bilingual school since pre-K, she is not among the thousands still seeking virtual instruction.

Estefens said she hated feeling isolated and is particularly excited to get back to in-person math.

“I’m happy because we don’t have to be in the house [any] more. I have no siblings, so I’m mostly alone,” she said.

Her peers huddled together in the schoolyard, hugging their teachers for the first time in over a year and a half. Some cried, having to face a school day without their family or at the reality of finally reuniting with friends. Here are some moments from their historic return:

All photos by Marianna McMurdock for The 74. 

Through the pandemic, schools in Republican states offered in-person learning at nearly twice the rate of those in Democratic states, according to new data, amounting to an estimated 66 additional days — or 432 hours — of face-to-face instruction for those students.

The numbers, provided to The 74 by the school calendar tracking website , deliver a cumulative view of schooling decisions throughout COVID-19 and reinforce evidence of a partisan divide long highlighted by researchers.

Averaged from September through May, states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election gave students the chance to learn in the classroom 74.5 percent of the time, compared to 37.6 percent of the time in states that voted for Joe Biden. Red states account for over 22 million K-12 learners and blue states account for over 28 million.

The full impact of that disparity remains largely unmeasured, says Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. But he suspects the effects on students could be vast.

“Time is a rough proxy for learning,” he told The 74. “So lost instructional time is likely to lead to lost learning.”

Virtual learning schemes, says Aldeman, rarely offered as much live instruction as traditional schooling models, instead trading asynchronous opportunities like worksheets and practice problems for real-time teaching. He calculated that his first-grade son, a student in Fairfax, Virginia public schools, was scheduled to receive less than half a typical school year’s worth of face time with educators in 2020-21. Other districts provided even fewer hours of real-time teaching.

“This means a lot of kids are missing out on a lot of live instruction with teachers and live interactions with their peers as well,” said Aldeman.

Using Burbio’s data, The 74 calculated the average days and hours of in-person learning in each state based on a 180-day school year and a 6.5-hour school day. Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche, with help from his data team, has been mapping out learning models across America’s top 460 districts over the past year. Very quickly, partisan trends in reopening became clear to Roche. An outsider to education policy, he opted to present Burbio’s information on a map shaded purple to avoid association with one political party or the other. Regardless, the patterns were obvious, he said.

“It started to look like an electoral map pretty intensely by the mid- to late fall,” he told The 74.

Deeper purple, representing a higher share of in-person learning, swept through the middle of the country and the Southeast, while near-white shades, meaning mostly virtual or hybrid learning, occupied the West Coast and Northeast. There were even light purple “swing state” regions, Roche noted, that had in-between rates of classroom instruction.

Burbio’s numbers reinforced academic findings, which since last summer had pointed to strong links between local support for then-President Donald Trump and the choice last fall to return students to classrooms. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Jon Valant published much-discussed findings that counties’ partisan lean was more far more predictive of its school reopening decision than were coronavirus case rates in the surrounding community — a trend he says mirrored other responses to the pandemic, beyond just education.

“This whole pandemic has broken on political lines in lots of different places, and schools are just one of them,” Valant told The 74.

Differences in reopening across Republican and Democratic states were most pronounced in late fall and early winter, also coinciding with the most deadly surge in coronavirus cases. In February through the end of the current school year, the gap began to tighten, with near-universal progress toward higher rates of in-person learning. Democratic states, which had more ground to make up, saw accelerated gains.

Valant attributes much of the break toward reopening starting in February to having a new president in the White House.

“The Biden administration signaled very early on that … it wanted to get students back into schools in person as quickly as it was safe to do so,” he said. “It turned down the temperature a little bit on the politics of school reopening.”

Growing availability of coronavirus vaccines also undoubtedly played into returning students to classrooms, the Brookings researcher noted. “I think [COVID-19 shots] put a lot of minds at ease.”

Toward the end of winter and into the spring, Roche, who scrupulously reads updates from superintendents across the country, noticed a trend. Districts were announcing plans to return in person, spurred by mandates from state governors, education commissioners and directors of health.

“It was almost immediate,” Roche remembers. New Mexico was a prime example, he said, in response to state officials changing their stance.

In many cases, however, the rhetoric could be hard to decode. Nearly every district nationwide maintained that it was committed to face-to-face learning as soon as it was safe to do so, said Roche, but the definitions of safety varied.

In Oregon, Marc Siegel, communications director for the Oregon Department of Education, said community transmission rates were the determining factor in school reopenings. “In areas with little or no spread, schools could operate very close to pre-[pandemic] conditions. In areas where that was not possible, we made sure the guidance covered best practices for distance learning,” he wrote to The 74 in an email. Oregon, however, ranked among the lowest nationwide both in rates of in-person learning and .

Florida, on the other hand, took “bold steps” to reopen schools in the fall, spokeswoman Cheryl Etters told The 74. Schools enforced precautions to maintain student safety, she noted, and many offered virtual options. Yet some schools , despite statewide infection rates .

Thanks to the superheated climate surrounding reopening, “districts, it could be argued, were making wrong decisions in both directions,” observed Georgetown’s Aldeman.

Bucking the trend, Rhode Island, a Biden-voting state with a Democratic governor, made a strong push to reopen schools.

“It was very clear from early on that the question was not if we reopened our schools but how,” Rhode Island Department of Education spokeswoman Emily Crowell wrote to The 74, attributing much of that effort to guidance from state leadership, such as then-Gov. Gina Raimondo, who was an outspoken advocate for in-person learning from the outset of the academic year and now serves as Biden’s commerce secretary.

In Georgia, a Biden-voting state with Republican leadership that returned students to classrooms more quickly than many others, moves toward in-person learning reflected community priorities, said education department spokeswoman Meghan Frick.

“Our focus was not on politics but on listening to constituents — parents, educators, students, communities,” she explained over email.

Ryan Brown, chief communications officer for the South Carolina Department of Education, was candid about the role politics played in his state’s reopening plans.

“It’s a very Republican state, that certainly played into it,” Brown told The 74. But while the push for in-person learning was most prominent among conservative lawmakers, many Democratic officials also voiced support.

“Everyone saw the benefit [of in-person school],” he said. “The majority of students learn well when they are face-to-face with a high-quality teacher.”

But in South Carolina, like practically every other state in the nation, reopening classrooms didn’t guarantee that students actually returned. School leaders made calls and knocked on doors, Brown said, “almost begging [students] to come back.”

According to the most recent federal data, which dates back to March, , with elevated rates for Black, Hispanic and Asian youth. The share of middle schoolers sticking in online options was even higher, at 40 percent overall. Many families, especially families of color, have .

The nuance of family decision making is not reflected in the Burbio data, which communicates the percentage of students whose schools offer them the opportunity to opt into in-person models. The Burbio numbers also reflect certain assumptions, such as that hybrid learning models represent half as much classroom learning as traditional models, though some schemes offered more and others offered less. In addition, some districts cut their “traditional” learning schedule to just four days, but were still counted as fully in-person.

With millions of students nationwide having not stepped foot inside a classroom since the dawn of the pandemic, Aldeman, who has studied past learning disruptions and recovery from events like natural disasters, says the onus now falls on school districts to help get young people back to speed.

“A lot of kids are going to need some additional time than normal going forward,” he said. It’s about “identifying which students are struggling and targeting resources for that.”