There are a lot of reasons for continued irritation here. First, you phrase this as being about something that was temporary. That's partly true. But there's no

There are a lot of reasons for continued irritation here. First, you phrase this as being about something that was temporary. That's partly true. But there's no going back to 2019 -- everyone has seen remote work now, and they have opinions. Many administrators are looking at the numbers and saying, gee, if we could send kids home for X days a week, we could free up facilities and reduce costs and liabilities, and engage support staff from a wider geographical area. The missing piece here of course is that instead of kids seeing their friends and learning in a classroom, they're trapped in video chat purgatory. These effects simply do not enter the conversation unless measured into quantities that schools actually feel pressured by. Hence why test scores are an attractive subject here. Another reason is that the conversation about schools centered heavily on "well, people are dying." That's true -- people died, and continue to die. In many regions, this was used as a blank check to dismiss a lot of very serious issues in risk management. Closing the schools was not some sort of ethically-unambiguous decision. It was a substantial transfer of risk -- COVID deaths and other long-term consequences affected everyone, but the disease impact slanted VERY heavily towards older people and away from children[1]. This is a highly relevant, highly significant fact in the risk management of COVID in schools that, in my opinion, was frequently lost sight of. These closures represented a substantial generational transfer of risk from older people to younger, in which we somewhat extended life expectancy and reduced ongoing loss of health for a substantial number of older people, in exchange for severely degrading education and socialization of kids for 1-2 years. We should expect criticism of pandemic-era policies for as long as the effects remain relevant -- which will be for decades. Now, why do people WANT to take potshots at schools in the first place, if these policies have now ended in most districts? I can't speak for everyone who does so, but I can point to one thing I see a lot: we're fed up with the system. There are a LOT of people for whom this is not working. These problems existed long before COVID, but distance learning and other COVID policy has turned out to be a lightning rod because it allows a lot of families with very diverse frustrations to pinpoint a specific issue that upsets all of them. It's not JUST the distance learning -- it's the entire way districts relate to families and the manner in which they feel trapped and without a voice. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...