The Kindergarten Exodus
As the pandemic took hold, more than 1 million children did not enroll in local schools. Many of them were the most vulnerable: 5-year-olds in low-income neighborhoods.
PHILADELPHIA — On a sweltering July afternoon, Solomon Carson, 6, jumped off the stoop of his family’s tidy rowhouse in West Philadelphia, full of what his father, David, called “unspent energy.”
When a stranger asked his name, he answered brightly, but added that he couldn’t spell it. “I can help you with that,” his father said, patiently pronouncing each letter, with Solomon repeating after him.
Solomon was supposed to have learned the basics in kindergarten this past year, but his first year of formal education was anything but.
When Covid-19 closed classrooms, his parents chose not to enroll him in city schools that they already had doubts about. As they were not working, they decided to teach him at home along with his two older brothers. And they signed him up for a virtual charter school that advertised in-person tutoring — and failed to provide it. . .
Solomon is part of a vast exodus from local public schools.
As the pandemic upended life in the United States, more than one million children who had been expected to enroll in these schools did not show up, either in person or online. The missing students were concentrated in the younger grades, with the steepest drop in kindergarten — more than 340,000 students, according to government data.
Fall enrollment change by grade, 2019 to 2020
12th
11th
10th
8th
+1.1%
+0..8%
K
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
9th
+0.6%
+0.6%
–0.8%
–1.5%
–2.7%
–3.0%
–3.4%
–3.7%
–3.8%
–4.1%
–9.3%
Now, the first analysis of enrollment at 70,000 public schools across 33 states offers a detailed portrait of these kindergartners. It shows that just as the pandemic lay bare vast disparities in health care and income, it also hardened inequities in education, setting back some of the most vulnerable students before they spent even one day in a classroom.
The analysis by The New York Times in conjunction with Stanford University shows that in those 33 states, 10,000 local public schools lost at least 20 percent of their kindergartners. In 2019 and in 2018, only 4,000 or so schools experienced such steep drops.
The months of closed classrooms took a toll on nearly all students, and families of all levels of income and education scrambled to help their children make up for the gaps. . .
READ MORE > https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/covid-kindergarten-enrollment.html
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