How the “Prolonged Pajama Party” of the COVID-19 Lockdowns Harmed the Poorest Students Most

By Melissa Orrison, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

“The predictable damage to a generation of children from the closures has proven cataclysmic.” – Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from his 2022 book A Letter to Liberals.

Before March 2020, I taught dual enrollment classes to high schoolers at a two-year college in Georgia. Students took college classes and received high school and college credit at the same time. Many were able to graduate with an associate’s degree in a trade concurrent with their high school graduation. 

Then, in late March, we were sent home for “two weeks to slow the spread” and would not return for a year. My high school dual enrollment students, who ranged from 9th to 12th grades, were not checking messages for their online class. Eventually, some students logged in and continued their work, while others remained unreachable, despite attempts to contact their parents.

Only two students attended Zoom classes, and they were not engaged in the lessons. Many did not submit a single assignment after online learning began. Although they failed my college composition class, on their high school report cards they were given the grade they had in my class the day we went home – for many, A’s and B’s. The high school treated grades as a participation trophy, but they also could have been a consolation prize for the students for missing prom and graduation.

Students at the career academy, who were mostly low-income people of color, had the option to return to face-to-face classes in February 2021, but most waited until they were required to attend in August 2021, meaning they had been out of the school environment for almost a year and a half and participating inconsistently in online education.

According to the Georgia Governor’s Office of Student Achievement website, “For school years 2019–2020 and 2020–2021, various pandemic related issues resulted in a lack of data for most metrics and there was significant variation in student participation rates where data are available.”

Data in coming years will likely reflect deficits in skills across all student groups, with the losses more severe in people of color and students with disabilities. While elders sometimes lament unfairly that “kids these days” don’t measure up, there are legitimate concerns about the academic ability of kids whose education was disrupted by the COVID-19 lockdowns. 

The National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) Report Card for Mathematics revealed a five-point decline in math scores at the 4th-grade level between 2019 and 2022 and an eight-point decline for 8th-graders in the same timeframe. The lockdowns were implemented at the direction of ex-COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci, who later denied responsibility for them. Fauci even said he was not convinced the pandemic negatively impacted education. 

In early December, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a guest on entrepreneur and author Patrick Bet-David’s PBD Podcast and was asked to compare how California and Florida handled the pandemic. Kennedy said, “The management of the pandemic in our country was the worst in California. They extended the lockdowns further than anybody else. The children were worse damaged than anybody else.” He continued, “I know Governor DeSantis and I admired the way he handled COVID-19.” Kennedy explained that DeSantis consulted expert epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and medical researchers to help form his policies. “This is what we should have been doing everywhere. You want pandemic management to be transparent, you want it to be open to debate,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy’s Views on Lockdowns

Kennedy described the COVID-19 lockdowns as “a prolonged pajama party for upper-crust Americans who could afford DoorDash deliveries and Amazon shopping,” and said, ”Lockdowns provided a novel adventure in telecommuting for the laptop elites and a cushy year of remote education for their children.” But for working-class Americans, the poor, and people of color, the COVID-19 lockdowns represented a time of severe disruptions to home life, education, and work.

Speaking about the global impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on the young, Kennedy pointed out that the lockdowns “also disproportionately harmed children, increasing child labor, teenage pregnancy rates, and child marriages.” As elsewhere, in the US, public schools were closed, depriving many children of their only meal of the day. Some experienced hunger, while others gained weight from inactivity and consuming only junk food. Playgrounds and basketball courts were closed. Reports of child abuse decreased. According to Liam Connolly, citing a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, there were fewer reports of child abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic, with research suggesting the decrease may indicate abuse was missed during distance learning. Distance learning meant that students had less direct contact with the educators whom they rely upon to report abuse. 

Babies born during the pandemic are also innocent victims of the COVID-19 lockdowns. As reported by Karen D’Souza in EdSource, 

A new study by researchers at five universities found that babies born during the pandemic may have lower IQ scores than those born before it. Babies who came into the world before the coronavirus had a cognitive score hovering around 100, according to this study. But the test scores of babies born during the pandemic fell sharply, to around 78. That’s 22 points lower than what’s considered normal.

Reading skills declined substantially in elementary school children, according to a study by Ulrich Ludewig and colleagues in Frontiers in Psychology. Children born during the pandemic are at a greater risk of academic failure, and according to Kennedy, we need to act now to improve housing, health care, food, security, and education for our children.

How the Pandemic Opened the Door for Future School Closures – and How Kennedy Will Close It

The online learning necessitated by the COVID-19 lockdowns conditioned both students and teachers to submit to school closures with little notice. Schools in my community closed for virtual learning days during several thunderstorm warnings in 2022–2023. This is unfortunate and unfair. As data from the pandemic has shown, any missed face-to-face instructional time is detrimental to students.

Weather was also a factor in school closures for NYC students in January 2024, but it was not the students and staff the mayor was concerned about – it was immigrants camping nearby. Georgett Roberts and colleagues reported in the New York Post that a Brooklyn high school planned a remote learning day for its students in order to house immigrants in the school building when a storm threatened their tent encampments (which could have been moved to a stadium or conference center).

With online learning capabilities, students can be sent home at any time – for weather, for disease outbreaks, to house immigrants…. Where does it end? When will commonsense solutions prevail?

Commonsense solutions will prevail with the election of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President of the United States. Not only does Kennedy acknowledge the harmful impacts of the COVID-19 lockdowns on education and the economy, he also wouldn’t implement evidence-free policies that harm US citizens.

The ability to conduct online education can be exploited by those who want to use school buildings for other purposes, such as housing immigrants, as happened recently in New York. With Kennedy’s determination to fix the border crisis and implement a sensible and humane immigration policy, in a Kennedy administration, students will not be displaced from schools and immigrants won’t have to live in tents on the streets. 

The COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated the impact of America’s chronic disease epidemic, which has damaged the mental and physical health of Americans for years. But as Kennedy told Dr. Mark Hyman in a recent appearance on The Doctor’s Farmacy, “This is one of the key reasons I am running for president … to end this chronic disease epidemic and to restore Americans to good health.” 

Melissa Orrison is a journalist who co-presented “The Kennedy Tragedies Through a Risk Management Lens” at In2Risk 2022 in San Francisco, California. She has also worked in higher education and tourism. She lives in central Georgia with her husband, Chris, and son, Jack.