kim zolotar – KMZ Digest

MS, mood swings and waterproof mascara

kim zolotar — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:41:43 +0000

stock.adobe.com

Waterproof mascara has become my valuable ally against MS mood swings. When my eyes begin to water out of anger or frustration, waterproof mascara keeps me from looking like a raccoon. Wearing it allows for a quicker recovery when life with MS becomes overwhelming.

The littlest things can irritate me now. Last week, just the sight of our cluttered kitchen table drove me over the edge. My husband and son ran for cover as I hurled random papers and half-filled water bottles into the trash. Although our kitchen table really looked like it belonged on an episode of Hoarders, I still hate that I got so upset over the mess.

Mood swings may be an invisible symptom of MS, but coping with them is often as challenging as living with the visible symptoms. It is helpful to know what triggers feelings of anger, frustration or sadness. Being prepared can help when it comes to handling emotions.

_{Betelgejze |Dreamstime.com}

Irritating situations trigger my mood swings. Like finding no accessible entrance to my son’s soccer game. (Soccer moms apparently do not need ramps.) Taking a few deep breaths or counting slowly to 10 sometimes helps me calm down.

It’s not just me. Dr. Barbara Giesser, clinical professor of Neurology at the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine, assured me that mood swings are common in MS. They are caused by neurological changes, the stress of living with an unpredictable illness, or a combination of these factors. She said the disease itself may damage emotional pathways of the brain, resulting in increased irritability, sadness or anger.

Charlotte *, 17, said she struggles with feelings of irritability and anger and is often upset over the smallest thing. “No one really understands what I feel like every day,” she said. “Sometimes my family says I am just being dramatic when I go to my room and close the door. Even though MS sometimes makes me feel alone, when I’m upset I just want to be by myself,” she explained. It’s a challenge getting others to understand her changing moods. She often writes in a journal and listens to relaxing music to cope with her mood swings.

Sheri * has lived with MS for 10 years. Balancing the challenges of MS with the demands of raising a family often depletes her energy. She is well aware that her mood quickly changes when she becomes fatigued. “My fuse is much shorter than it used to be and I get really moody when I’m tired,” she told me. Sheri takes a prescription medication for her fatigue, and also uses relaxation techniques to help her cope with changing moods.

Sometimes it’s a medication. Soon after starting one medication, I felt like I was being followed by a dark cloud. My whole world became gloomy. I told my doctor about my mood change and we decided to switch treatments. I was grateful when the dark cloud disappeared. But as a sleep-deprived new mom, I would have been even more grateful if the doctor had figured out how to make my son sleep through the night!

Sheri also had trouble finding a treatment that didn’t worsen her mood. She described being in a constant state of rage while taking one medication. Her anger lessened considerably after starting on something different. People with MS can react differently to different medications, so if changes in mood or behavior occur, speak up! Several MS medications list anxiety, depression and mood swings as potential side effects.

Dr. Giesser pointed out that it is important to learn whether the mood swings are related to depression, anxiety, fatigue or something else. Some people benefit from individual or family counseling, while others benefit from prescription medications. Today there are effective treatments for mood swings, depression and many other MS symptoms.

Moving can make a mood move

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Yoga, tai chi and other forms of exercise are known to help persons with MS manage mood swings. Meditation and relaxation techniques can reduce stress. Christine * heads for the pool whenever she is sad or angry. “Focusing on the movements of my body when I swim quiets my mind,” she said. Christine notices her mood has often improved after a swim. “Swimming distracts me. I usually forget about MS for a little while,” she said.

I try not to blame MS every time I get upset. My MS is not responsible for every bad mood, but it is oddly comforting to know that sometimes it’s MS that makes me freak out over a cluttered kitchen table. Taking a few deep breaths is sometimes enough to keep my tears from coming, but I still wear waterproof mascara just in case.

* People shared their stories with me, but asked for privacy. All the names have been changed.

Kim Zolotar was diagnosed in 1995. She lives in California with husband Greg and son Alex, and works as an educator and legal assistant. She is also becoming a waterproof mascara expert.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes2

kim zolotar — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:16:50 +0000

These innovators, scientists, creative thinkers and just regular people all played a pivotal role in helping me live my best life.

Ralph Braun

Wheelchair van pioneer

Ralph Braun

Ralph William Braun (December 18, 1940 – February 8, 2013) was the founder and CEO of the Braun Corporation. He is also known as the “Father of the Mobility Movement” at BraunAbility.

Braun was born and raised in Winamac, Indiana. When he was six years old, doctors diagnosed him with muscular dystrophy. He started using a wheelchair at the age of 14. At the age of 15, he created a motorized wagon with his father to help him get around. Five years later, Braun created a motorized scooter, which he called the Tri-Wheeler, using various parts from his cousin’s farm. Ralph rode the Tri-Wheeler to and from his day job as a Quality Control Manager for a nearby manufacturer. When the facility moved several miles away, he equipped an old mail carrier Jeep with hand controls and a hydraulic tailgate lift, enabling him to drive his Tri-Wheeler in and out of the vehicle unassisted.

In 1970, Dodge introduced the first full-sized, front engine van. Braun retrofitted a Dodge van with a lift and called this new invention the “Lift-A-Way” wheelchair lift. When word spread about this new invention, Braun assembled a team to help fill orders across the nation, all from his parents’ garage. As demand increased, Braun decided to quit his full-time job to focus on his part-time business.

Braun started “Save-A-Step” manufacturing in 1963 to build the first motorized scooter, made from “a lawnmower differential, four big wheelbarrow tires, two 6-volt automotive batteries, makeshift wiring and switches I got from the hardware store, a kitchen chair, and a motor from a 1957 Pontiac kid’s car that I rescued from a mortician’s trash bin”.[6] In 1966 Braun created the first wheelchair accessible vehicle, by creating a wheelchair platform lift and hand controls that were added to an old Post Office Jeep.[6] In 1970, Ralph added wheelchair platform lifts to full-sized vans. “Save-A-Step” was incorporated under a new name, The Braun Corporation, in 1972.

In 1991, Braun introduced its first wheelchair accessible minivan, based on the Dodge Caravan and called the Entervan.[7] In 1999, Braun acquired Crow River Industries, a specialized manufacturer of wheelchair platform lifts. In 2005, Braun acquired IMS of Farmington, NM, a specialized manufacturer of Toyota Sienna wheelchair accessible minivans. In 2006, the Braun Corporation adopted the brand name, BraunAbility, for its personal-use products. In 2011, the Braun Corporation acquired partial ownership in AutoAdapt, a European mobility company. In 2011, the Braun Corporation also acquired Viewpoint Mobility, a small Michigan-based company that specializes in the wheelchair accessible minivans with rear entry.

In May 2012, Braun was named a “champion of change” by U.S. President Barack Obama.

In 1991, the the Braun Entervan was introduced. It was equipped with a ramp and kneel system and removable front seats which allowed the chair user to enter the vehicle independently and drive from their wheelchair.

My disabled sports mom ride

BraunAbility makes vans that have side entry ramps, as well as models with rear entry ramps. Vans are available with powered ramps, or with manual ramps for people on a smaller budget.

Driving from my wheelchair for the past 11 years has been a godsend!

Edwin Binney & C. Harold Smith

wp:image {“id”:6477,”align”:”center”,”className”:”wp-block-image aligncenter size-full is-resized”} –>

Founders of Crayola Crayons

The company was founded as Binney & Smith Company by cousins Edwin Binney and Charles Harold Smith^[6] in New York City in 1885. Initial products were colorants for industrial use, including red iron oxide pigments used in barn paint and carbon black chemicals used for making tires black and extending their useful lifespan.^[7] Binney & Smith’s new process of creating inexpensive black colorants was entered into the chemistry industries competition at the 1900 Paris Exposition under the title “carbon gas blacks, lamp or oil blacks, ‘Peerless’ black” and earned the company a gold medal award in chemical and pharmaceutical arts.^[8][9] Also in 1900, the company added production of slate school pencils. Binney’s experimentation with industrial materials, including slate waste, cement, and talc, led to the invention of the first dustless white chalk, for which the company won a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.^[9]

^{Staonal marking crayon 1902}

Initially formed as a partnership, Binney & Smith incorporated in 1902, and in that year Binney & Smith developed and introduced the Staonal marking crayon. Then Edwin Binney, working with his wife, Alice Stead Binney, developed his own famous product line of wax crayons beginning on June 10, 1903,^[10] which it sold under the brand name Crayola. The Crayola name was coined by Alice Binney who was a former schoolteacher. It comes from craie (French for “chalk”) and ola for “oleaginous” or “oily.”^[9][11]

Tom Ross: Remember when Crayola 64 was a status symbol?

The coolest

Of course, the most sought-after status symbol at Charles R. Van Hise Elementary School was a big box of Crayola 64 crayons. I endured a couple of years with boxes of 16 colors and nervously peeled the paper off my purple crayon as other kids leered at me. They were using the in-box sharpener to ready themselves for the day’s map-coloring exercise – “Let me see now, what color should I make Bolivia?

Willis Carrier

Developed the first air conditioning

Engineer Willis Carrier took a job that would result in the invention of the first modern electrical air conditioning unit. While working for the Buffalo Forge Company in 1902, Carrier was tasked with solving a humidity problem that was causing magazine pages to wrinkle at Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in Brooklyn.

Through a series of experiments, Carrier designed a system that controlled humidity using cooling coils and secured a patent for his “Apparatus for Treating Air,” which could either humidify (by heating water) or dehumidify (by cooling water) air. As he continued testing and refining his technology, he also devised and patented an automatic control system for regulating the humidity and temperature of air in textile mills.

It wasn’t long before Carrier realized that humidity control and air conditioning could benefit many other industries, and he eventually broke off from Buffalo Forge, forming Carrier Engineering Corporation with six other engineers.

Without his invention, my life in the Inland Empire would be a lot tougher, especially in the summer.

https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning

Justin Dart, George H.W. Bush & Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)

_{^{President George H.W. Bush signs the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, surrounded by Evan Kemp, Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Justin Dart, Chair of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities; Sandra Swift Parrino, Chair of the National Council on Disability; and Rev. Harold Wilke, an ordained minister and disability advocate.}}

Americans with Disabilities Act

July 26, 1990

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA (42 U.S.C. § 12101) is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) authored what became the final bill and was its chief sponsor in the Senate. Harkin delivered part of his introduction speech in sign language, saying it was so his deaf brother could understand.

As DREDF attorney and prominent ADA activist and scholar Arlene Mayerson has aptly and eloquently written in her publication:

The History of the Americans with Disabilities Act-A Movement Perspective

“For the first time in the history of our country, or the history of the world, businesses must stop and think about access to people with disabilities. If the ADA means anything, it means that people with disabilities will no longer be out of sight and out of mind. The ADA is based on a basic presumption that people with disabilities want to work and are capable of working, want to be members of their communities and are capable of being members of their communities and that exclusion and segregation cannot be tolerated. Accommodating a person with a disability is no longer a matter of charity but instead a basic issue of civil rights.

While some in the media portray this new era as falling from the sky unannounced, the thousands of men and women in the disability rights movement know that these rights were hard fought for and are long overdue. The ADA is radical only in comparison to a shameful history of outright exclusion and segregation of people with disabilities. From a civil rights perspective the Americans with Disabilities Act is a codification of simple justice.”

Mayerson, Arlene. “The History of the Americans with Disabilities Act. A Movement Perspective.” Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, 1992.

https://dredf.org/about-us/publications/the-history-of-the-ada/

The ADA led to significant improvements in terms of access to public services, accessibility in the built environment, and societal understanding of disability.^[53]

On signing the measure, George H. W. Bush said:

“I know there may have been concerns that the ADA may be too vague or too costly, or may lead endlessly to litigation. But I want to reassure you right now that my administration and the United States Congress have carefully crafted this Act. We’ve all been determined to ensure that it gives flexibility, particularly in terms of the timetable of implementation; and we’ve been committed to containing the costs that may be incurred…. Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”

Hair straightening visionaries

Straightening irons, straighteners, or flat irons work by breaking down the positive hydrogen bonds found in the hair’s cortex, which cause hair to open, bend and become curly. Once the bonds are broken, hair is prevented from holding its original, natural form, though the hydrogen bonds can re-form if exposed to moisture.

Marcel Grateau

Early hair straightening systems relied on harsh chemicals that tended to damage the hair. In the 1870s, the French hairdresser Marcel Grateau introduced heated metal hair care implements such as hot combs to straighten hair. Madame C.J. Walker used combs with wider teeth and popularized their use together with her system of chemical scalp preparation and straightening lotions.^[3] Her mentor Annie Malone is sometimes said to have patented the hot comb.^[4] Heated metal implements slide more easily through the hair, reducing damage and dryness. Women in the 1960s sometimes used clothing irons to straighten their hair.

Ada Harris

The woman who invented the straight iron was a school teacher from Indianapolis, a woman forgotten by history. A woman named Ada Harris, looking to lose her curls. The first patent for a hair straightening iron was filed on November 3rd, 1893.

In her patent, she wrote, “My invention relates to a hair straightener whose purpose is to straighten curly hair, and is especially of service to; colored people in straightening their hair.”

Unfortunately, Harris never built an empire with her invention attempting to find investors or a company to purchase her patent. She never did anything with her patent for the hair straightener, perhaps because she didn’t have the finances to help develop her invention. But she should be recognized for the effort made to create this tool.

https://www.racked.com/2017/1/4/14014216/hair-straightener-flat-iron-inventor-ada-harris

Isaac K. Shero

In 1809 Isaac K. Shero patented the first hair straightener composed of two flat irons that are heated and pressed together.

Ceramic and electrical straighteners were introduced later, allowing adjustment of heat settings and straightener settings.

Ms. Lady Jennifer Bell Schofield was that person in1912. Big hair was big fashion with big curls in the early 1900s but Lady Schofield was obsessed with straight hair, and when she did not find the appliance she wanted to straighten her hair. She improved on the ideas of Marcel Grateau and Isaac Shero in the early 1900s to make a better straightening iron.

My defiant bangs rely on this the hair straightener almost daily.

Percy Spencer

Microwave Oven

The microwave oven was invented as an accidental by-product of war-time (World War 2) radar research using magnetrons (vacuum tubes that produce microwave radiation, a type of electromagnetic radiation that has a wavelength between 1 mm and 30 cm).

_{The Raytheon Radarange being demonstrated in 1946.
Image originally appeared on page 15 of the October 14, 1946 publication of the Press and Sun-Bulletin.}

In 1946, the engineer Dr. Percy LeBaron Spencer, who worked for the Raytheon Corporation, was working on magnetrons. One day at work, he had a candy bar in his pocket, and found that it had melted. He realized that the microwaves he was working with had caused it to melt. After experimenting, he realized that microwaves would cook foods quickly – even faster than conventional ovens that cook with heat.

Raytheon, then filed a patent on October 8, 1945 for a microwave cooking oven, eventually named the Radarange. The Raytheon Corporation produced the first commercial microwave oven in 1954; it was called the 1161 Radarange. It was large, expensive, and had a power of 1600 watts.

It wasn’t until 1967 that the first microwave oven that was both relatively affordable ($495) and reasonably sized (counter-top model) became available.

Lean Cuisine microwave entries helped me lose about thirty pounds in high school, so I am a loyal microwave user.

Helene Winterstein-Kambersky

Waterproof mascara

Austrian singer and performer Helene Winterstein Kabersky invented waterproof mascara in the 1930’s, after many attempts at developing mascara and other cosmetics that would not smear or run under hot stage lights.

Helene Winterstein-Kambersky, née Vierthaler (13 March 1900 in Vienna – 12 June 1966 in the Hinterbrühl) was a singer and inventor of the world’s first waterproof mascara.

During her numerous stage performances the stage lights repeatedly made her make-up run an left back black marks under her eyes.

This worrying situation caused her to begin work on the perfect mascara in her own kitchen.

After 2000 failed attempts the first patented waterproof mascara in the world was invented and began a new era of cosmetics designed for eyes.

After about two thousand attempts, she made the patented recipe known far beyond the borders of Austria under the name of La Bella Nussy. Winterstein-Kambersky founded a cosmetics company in 1936, which is still family-owned and produces the recipe almost unchanged.

Justus von Liebig

Powdered baby formula

In an attempt to improve the quality of manufactured baby foods, in 1867, Justus von Liebig developed the world’s first commercial infant formula, Liebig’s Soluble Food for Babies.^[120] The success of this product quickly gave rise to competitors such as Mellin’s Food, Ridge’s Food for Infants and Nestlé‘s Milk.^[121]

Gloria (Campano) Cooper & Charles Cooper

Bradley Cooper Family

Actor Bradley Cooper addresses the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan underway in the Gulf of Oman, July 13, 2009. _{^{U.S. Department of Defense Photo:VIRIN: 158823-L-FDH84-178.jpg}}

Their union produced him.

Advocates for the left-handed population

Dr. Bryng Bryngelson

Dr. Bryng Bryngelson, a University of Minnesota speech pathologist and a pioneer in the study of left-handedness, flatly stated that left-handers tend to be more creative and imaginative. But others credit any creativity and imagination shown by left-handers to their efforts to survive in a right-handed world.

Seattle public schools

Countless left-handers tell of developing neck and shoulder pains from from writing at one-armed right-handed desks in school.

13 years ago, a left-handed student filed a formal complaint with the administration at Bellingham’s Western Washington University saying he had been denied an equal educational opportunity because there were no left-handed desks.

It’s hard to write on these tables.
Go to memesr/memes
nightshade_1612

Seattle schools and local colleges do their best these days to rectify old wrongs.

They buy about 10 percent left-handed desks when they place new orders.

In Seattle Public Schools, they also buy left-handed scissors and left-handed pouring ladles for home-economics classes.

Bud Turner, district physical education coordinator, orders two or three left-handed softball mitts for every 15 purchased, “and the same with golf clubs.”

David Hall, an overseer of space needs for the University of Washington’s capital budget office, says that left-handed desks traditionally have been “segregated” – in the front row, back row or at the ends of rows. No longer. When new classroom seating is designed, left-handed desks are scattered randomly throughout the class.

Back in 1979, when Seattle University undertook the remodeling of its nursing building, a committee sat down to discuss the needs of the handicapped. After the usual provisions for ramps, wide doors and special lavatory equipment, someone asked, “But what about left-handers?”

Result: Seattle U bought 15 left-handed desks and 135 right-handed ones. The school’s public-information director later said it was the first time in his memory that left-handedness had been recognized as a handicap.

Dec 20, 1990

Don “Lefty” Duncan, Don Duncan

Duncan, Don https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19901220&slug=1110557

Left Out — Left-Handers Are Handicapped In This Right-Handed World, But Why? Arm Yourself With These Facts

It’s nothing big. Some of you may not even notice it. But it is SO nice to have a left-handed chair.

Inventor of soft contact lenses

Otto Wichterle

Otto Wichterle (27 October 1913 Prostějov now in the Czech Republic – 18 August 1998) was a Czech chemist known for his invention of modern soft contact lenses in the 1960s.

Czech chemist Otto Wichterle made a huge breakthrough in making the first hydrogel lenses. Together with his colleague Drahoslav Lim, they created a material that absorbed up to 40% water, which was also transparent and could be moulded into a comfortable lens shape. Fun fact: using his son’s toy construction kit, Wichterle produced the first four hydrogel lenses.

Several models of contact lenses (including sketches of the concept by Leonardo da Vinci) preceded Wicherle’s invention. I got contacts when I was 16, over thirty years ago, and they have improved my “vision” of the world immensely!

Drahoslav Lím

Drahoslav Lím (September 30, 1925, in Czechoslovakia – August 22, 2003, in San Diego, California)^[1] was a Czech chemist. He invented polyhydroxyethylmethacrylate, the synthetic material used for soft contact lenses (hydrogel).

Lím worked^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5] as a member of the team of Otto Wichterle (the inventor of soft contact lenses) and in 1955, he came up with poly(hydroethyl-acrylate), the material later used for the lenses. This work was later published in Nature^[6] and was the subject of US patents.^[7]^[8] During 1970 to 1974 he worked in Palo Alto, California, improving contact lenses materials and technology.

I’ve worn contacts since high school, so this invention has improved my vision of the world immensely!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_lens

Held Back: Inside a Lost School Year

kim zolotar — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 21:02:45 +0000

Thompson converted her daughters’ bedroom into a teaching space.

Credit:Cydni Elledge, special to ProPublica Elledge, special to ProPublica

Teacher Ashlee Thompson had a lot to worry about this year: A deadly virus. A poor district under threat by the state. And now, a new mandate for her students: Learn to read or flunk the third grade.

Editor’s note: ProPublica obtained parents’ consent to feature their children in this story.

Ashlee Thompson turned on her camera.

At the other end of the screen one morning last September was a third grader she’d never taught. To assess his reading, Thompson showed the boy a string of letters.

He made a few guesses, but seemed to only recognize the ones in his first name.

Unsettled, Thompson shifted to words that most 8-year-old children can recognize, if only by sight. She enlarged the text and held her pointer on the screen.

And

The boy’s mother sat behind him, encouraging him to read. He grimaced and shook his head. He had never learned how, he told his mother. He had transferred in from a charter school, but like many of Thompson’s students who’d been in the district for years, he was arriving in her class as though he was starting kindergarten. As his mother began to cry, Thompson turned off her camera so they wouldn’t see her own eyes glaze over with tears.

At the start of the 2020 school year, teachers across the country entered their classrooms riddled with anxiety over how much their students could possibly learn amid a pandemic, between the glitch-prone experiments with remote learning and in-person classes that could be interrupted by a single positive coronavirus test.

Thompson, at 32, had a lot more hanging over her.

The Michigan legislature had chosen this year, of all years, to enforce a strict new literacy law: Any third grader who could not read proficiently by May could flunk and be held back.

For Benton Harbor, a small, majority-Black city halfway between Chicago and Detroit, the implications were immense. As Thompson screened her 35 students that fall, she realized 19 were not at grade level. She worried that holding them back could do more harm than good, and studies supported this fear; it could bruise their confidence, lead them to act out and even decrease their odds of graduating from high school.

As if Thompson did not have enough to worry about, there was this: The existence of her entire school district hung in the balance, and with it, the very fabric of her hometown.

For the last quarter century, schools in Benton Harbor had struggled to survive as students fled for charters and majority-white districts in neighboring towns. Because a district’s funding is tied to its number of students, Benton Harbor’s budget shrank. It cut academic offerings, froze teacher pay, closed school buildings and consolidated students into crowded classrooms. As its resources eroded, so did students’ performance on tests.

Michigan had found a remedy for such ailing districts: dissolving them. It had happened eight years ago to two other majority-Black cities, Inkster and Buena Vista. Students were absorbed into surrounding districts without a guarantee they would be attending better schools. Inkster residents, who feared losing their sense of identity, scrambled to start a museum so that their children would know they had once rallied at homecoming games around the Vikings football team.

This existential threat has loomed over Benton Harbor since 2011, when former Gov. Rick Snyder began to consider whether the state should install an emergency manager to run the city’s schools, a takeover Inkster once faced before it was ultimately dissolved. In January 2017, his administration listed several of Benton Harbor’s schools among the least proficient in the state and slated them for closure. The state offered the district a temporary reprieve if it entered into a partnership agreement that mandated that the schools improve. But in May 2019, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a plan to dissolve Benton Harbor’s high school. To illustrate the dire state of education in the district, she cited the poor test scores of students in the third grade, a crucial year in which kids traditionally pivot from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

The district ran six schools: one for preschool and kindergarten, one for first through third grade, one for fourth and fifth grade, a middle school, a high school and an alternative program. Thompson feared that if the high school was dissolved, it was only a matter of time before parents stopped enrolling younger students and the entire district evaporated. What parent would want to send a child down a path that dead-ended after the eighth grade?

Thompson, a wide-eyed learner who tackled problems with an analytical mind, sent community leaders a six-page letter, complete with a color-coded data table she assembled, arguing that transferring Benton Harbor’s students outside the city wouldn’t necessarily bring them success. Proficiency is not contagious, she wrote, but comes from years of effective educational support, practice and preparation, which the lack thereof is why our students are behind.

Amid public outcry, the state backed down from threats to close the high school and began to work with the district to address its crisis. Part of the plan was new leadership, and in February 2020, the district brought on Andraé Townsel, an energetic superintendent who grew up in Detroit and had a singular mission to turn the schools around. A month later, though, the pandemic interrupted all plans, leaving the fate of the schools once again in question.

Thompson didn’t want to think about what would happen if most of her students were held back. Any failure, she worried, would be cast as theirs.

She was regarded by many Benton Harbor parents as a miracle teacher. She had attended school with some of them and lived in the community; she cared for their children like they were her own. They were not on equal footing with their peers for reasons outside of their control. It was on her to bridge the gap, one that would widen even further amid a pandemic.

“Even if I had magic,” she said, “I couldn’t do this.”

When Thompson was a third grader in Benton Harbor, her brick schoolhouse glowed burnt orange in the afternoon, with classrooms bathed in light among trimmed, green lawns. The schools were the pride of the city, one of the poorest in Michigan, depressed for decades by discriminatory housing policies and deindustrialization; as manufacturing jobs began to vanish in the 1960s and ’70s, white families fled in droves.

Benton Harbor’s Black families won a critical court ruling in 1977, after white neighborhoods drew up plans to peel off from the city and join communities with fewer Black families. These were “transparent attempts” to dismantle Benton Harbor into “separate and unequal White and Black school districts,” concluded U.S. District Judge Noel Fox. The court mandated integration between Benton Harbor and its surrounding communities through a voluntary busing plan, allowing students to choose where to attend school. Anticipating the financial impact of an exodus, the court ordered the state to pay Benton Harbor for each child who lived within its boundaries, regardless of where they chose to attend school.

For decades, funding from the desegregation case buoyed Benton Harbor and brought national recognition to its schools. Creative Arts Academy and McCord Renaissance Center, two of the magnet programs set up under the order, were named Blue Ribbon schools by the U.S. Department of Education, one of its highest academic honors.

Thompson, who attended McCord, thrived in Benton Harbor’s schools. A self-professed bookworm, she spent hours in the library reading The Baby-Sitters Club and Goosebumps books and writing in her journal. Her teachers, many of whom lived in the community, pushed her to excel, and in high school, she volunteered as a library aide, learned Spanish, French, physics, psychology and creative writing, and took advanced placement courses. “I didn’t know that kids had to struggle to attain an education because I never witnessed that growing up,” she said.

Even so, it had become common for parents to consider sending their children to schools outside the district. She was in 10th grade when her mother decided she would be better served by transferring to a nearby town. “I hated it,” Thompson said. “The teachers were all white and they didn’t have an individual interest in me. Some of the teachers, I don’t even think they even cared to get to know my name.” After a few months, she begged her mother to let her return to Benton Harbor High School, where she graduated among the top 10 students in her class.

She and many others were unaware of a radical change that was underway. Michigan’s then-governor, Republican John Engler, had pushed to end the desegregation order, citing the cost and insisting the state had done everything it was supposed to do to ensure Benton Harbor’s success. Any shortcomings in student performance, the state argued, had nothing to do with intentional segregation. In 2002, a federal judge dismissed the case. The payments were phased out by 2006, Thompson’s final year of high school.

The following school year, the district faced a $3 million shortfall, roughly the amount of money it had received annually from the state under the desegregation order. To offset the loss, the district began to cut its academic offerings, which prompted students to leave for other schools. “It was a spiral effect,” said Sheletha Bobo, the district’s assistant superintendent for business and finance from 1999 to 2011. While critics and state officials have long attributed the district’s financial troubles to mismanagement or accounting errors, administrators contended that enrollment and funding losses played a central role. The fewer students Benton Harbor had, the less money it was allocated by a state formula that distributed school funding based largely on student head count. School finance experts have argued the math shortchanges districts that serve a higher percentage of low-income and at-risk students, who are more expensive to teach.

Recognizing that it needed to increase enrollment to climb out of its financial turmoil, the district brought in Michigan native Magic Johnson for an advertising campaign. “I’m Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson,” he said in a 2010 radio spot. “[I’m] encouraging parents and students to find out why people are rediscovering Benton Harbor Area Schools. … Quality learning, every student, every day.” But even a basketball legend couldn’t bring students back. By 2011, the district’s annual budget deficit had risen to $16.4 million.

To keep its bills paid, Benton Harbor took on more than $10 million in emergency loans from the state. The weight of the debt led to even more cuts in the district, which hemorrhaged students and money. Enrollment plunged from 3,500 students in 2010 to fewer than 1,800 in 2020. More than two-thirds of the city’s children attend schools outside the district, amounting to a staggering loss of $24 million in funding each year.

The magnet programs, including Thompson’s former school, were shuttered. The cosmetology and health care tracks were cut. The high school no longer offered calculus or advanced placement courses. In 2019, for a student body of nearly 600, only one instructor was certified to teach mathematics. And that year, about half of the district’s teachers were long-term substitutes, many lacking the credentials or experience to manage classrooms sometimes crammed with 30 students or more.

Test scores declined. During the 2007-2008 school year, 64% of Benton Harbor’s third graders were deemed proficient readers, compared with 81% across Michigan. During the 2018-2019 school year, according to a different test the state had switched to using, less than 6% could read proficiently, compared with 45% across the state.

And the buildings, all constructed before 1961, bore signs of disrepair. The school where all of the district’s third graders learned, International Academy at Hull, was plagued by toxic mold. A musty smell often wafted through the hallways, and mildew rings stained ceiling tiles. For years, teachers had noted the building’s crumbling state, filing maintenance orders that were rarely filled. They trapped mice in the classrooms, and on stormy days, they caught rainwater in buckets, carefully positioned between children’s desks.

A dozen other school buildings sat abandoned, haunting the city like ghosts. Their windows were boarded up and their playground equipment was corroded. In one building, parts of the ceiling were strewn across the floor.

Thompson had never planned to be a teacher. After high school, she enrolled in Wayne State University but dropped out after her first year, given the high cost and her uncertainty about which career direction to take. She found work in a hotel and later cared for elderly patients in a residential home as a certified nursing assistant. But after the birth of her first three children, she decided to try college again. She had a natural talent for extracting lessons from ordinary moments, showing her kids how caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies and sliding magnets near metallic pipes to explain polarity. She enrolled at Western Michigan University to pursue an education degree.

For an assignment, she compared the learning outcomes of Benton Harbor’s students to those in St. Joseph, a wealthy town across the district border, where less than a third of the schoolchildren qualified for free lunch and three-quarters of its students were white. Over decades, the waterway between the towns, the St. Joseph River, has come to mark one of the most segregated school boundaries in America. In St. Joseph, more than 63% of third graders could read proficiently, compared with less than 6% in Benton Harbor, where more than 90% of students are Black and live in low-income households.

The starkness of the inequality stunned her, but it echoed the persistent national reality that students of color were demonstrating a lower proficiency in reading and math than their white counterparts, with similar gaps between students living in poverty and those who were not.

And while Benton Harbor’s schools are in high-poverty areas, and thus receive more federal funding and have higher general revenue than St. Joseph, Benton Harbor spent $1,000 less per student on basic instructional programs in 2019, in part because of its high debt load, on which the state was collecting with about 2% interest. That year, the district was $16 million in debt and spending $700 per student on annual repayments, according to the state.

Even though teachers across the river made $17,000 more, on average, Thompson started in Benton Harbor’s schools in 2018 and took over a third grade class midway through the school year. “Our students needed somebody that could help, somebody that could believe in them,” she said. In May 2019, she was certified to teach. But the following spring, just as her students were making the leap from robotically reciting words to fluent reading, the coronavirus ground the school year to a halt.

While the pandemic caught everyone off guard, disadvantaged districts were less ready to adapt to school shutdowns. Most of the students in St. Joseph had access to computers at home, in part thanks to an initiative supported by the district’s philanthropic foundation. Within about a month, 97% of elementary students were learning online. In Benton Harbor, however, more than 40% of homes lacked broadband internet access and 25% did not have a computer. Thompson and her colleagues huddled around copy machines printing out assignments and spent days tracking down families and checking on their welfare. They finished distributing laptops and tablets, the majority of which were more than six years old, by the end of the summer.

This divide was playing out across the country, as captured in a national teacher survey that spring. Teachers in majority-Black schools said 34% of the students didn’t have the necessary technology to engage in remote learning, compared with 19% of kids in schools with few Black students. The gap was even wider between poor and wealthy schools.

The pandemic also brought new urgency to the country’s quiet crisis of dilapidated school facilities. Benton Harbor administrators had more to worry about than the average district when it came to planning for in-person instruction in the fall. In addition to wrestling with social distancing requirements, they had to figure out how to safely teach kids at Hull Elementary, where, in the spring, specialists had found levels of mold so toxic that they recommended shutting down the building. The new location— a shuttered school they were cleaning out — was not yet ready, so administrators relied on portable classrooms and white wedding tents, along with a plastic tarp they put up to cordon off the remediated classrooms from the toxic wing of the school.

Not many parents knew about the mold, but a majority still insisted on a virtual option when the district surveyed them on their preferred mode of instruction for the fall. The coronavirus had surged through the county’s nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities, and reports from Detroit on the disproportionate number of deaths among African Americans had trickled into Benton Harbor, prompting many to stay home out of fear. Nationally, Black students were disproportionately more likely to have lost a parent to COVID-19 and substantially less likely to have enrolled in in-person school, even as late as April 202

Roberta Taylor wished her two third graders could learn in a classroom that year; for them, every minute of personalized instruction made a difference. Her son, Calvin, had been held back once already, in the first grade. She feared the same would happen to her daughter, Na’Kiyrah, who had finished the previous school year behind grade level. But Taylor had congestive heart failure so severe that she’d had to quit her strenuous job as a certified nursing assistant two years earlier and live on disability payments. “If I caught COVID, I might not make it out,” she said.

Tina Lash also chose virtual school. One of her three sons was asthmatic and had landed in intensive care a few years earlier. She knew a digital classroom was not an ideal learning environment for her youngest boy, Michael, whose brain ping-ponged from thought to thought. And her shifts at the local Bob Evans restaurant, where she was a manager, frequently overlapped with class hours. Her mother stopped working at Family Dollar and planned to sit with Michael to make sure he wouldn’t wander off.

Thompson, too, learned she had no choice but to teach virtually. That summer, her breathing grew labored and her chest throbbed so much she couldn’t eat. She rushed to the emergency room, where tests revealed that her own congestive heart failure, a condition she’d had for nearly a decade, had flared up. During her nine-day hospital stay, she asked her doctor whether it would be safe for her to teach in person. He adamantly counseled against it.

The month before school started, she converted her daughters’ bedroom into a third grade classroom. A shiny, plastic banner of letters lined the walls. A world map made of vibrant blue fabric dangled in front of the window. Stacks of books surrounded her, filled with tales of inspiring young protagonists: Leo the Late Bloomer. Zoey and Sassafras. Harry Potter.

Hull Elementary had assigned only Thompson to handle all virtual third graders. She tried not to panic when she got the roster; it listed 48 names. Over the last days of summer break, she split her class into two waves of students and, like a telemarketer, called dozens of parents, walking them through how to log in.

She was ready, or so she thought.

“The sound is eh eh eh, E as in elephant, E as in echo, E as in red,” Thompson said on a Wednesday morning in early March, her eyes scanning her classroom grid of 15 fidgety third graders. “I want everybody to say the sound, and if you have low background noise, you can unmute.”

Na’Kiyrah, a bubbly 8-year-old, always eager to speak even without knowing all the answers, bobbed around next to her brother Calvin. She unmuted her computer and their distorted voices echoed through the class, filling the virtual room with a static buzz.

“Na’Kiyrah, I’m going to put you on mute because it seems like you have a lot going on,” said Thompson. “You guys, if you have a place that you have absolute quiet, please go to that place.”

It had gone like this for months. Thompson’s students often forgot to mute themselves, talking over each other. Sometimes the internet wavered and they unexpectedly vanished. Sometimes their connection was so weak that their camera could not turn on, leaving Thompson to wonder if a child was actually at the other end. At times, only a handful would log in at all.

Thompson had gotten off to a rough start when, after the first day of school, 53 kids showed up on her classroom roster; by the second week, it had ballooned to 79 kids. It turned out that some parents hadn’t answered the district survey about how they wanted their children to learn.

At the same time, she was supervising the virtual education of three of her own children, including her son who was in her third grade class. One day, when she couldn’t help her 7-year-old daughter with a computer problem because she was in the middle of a lesson, her daughter grew so frustrated that she broke down in tears.

How will I get through this? Thompson had wondered, doubting not only her choice to teach virtually, but also her decision to teach at all.

After the first two weeks and Thompson’s plea to human resources for help, her principal brought in another teacher, cutting Thompson’s class size down to about 35 children; she split them into two sections, each meeting for three hours a day, four times a week. In a normal school year, they would have had at least double that time to learn.

Thompson tried to make the best of the time she had. Even when she contracted COVID-19 in March, her head pounding and body weak, she worked through most of her illness, aware that for the three days she took off, her students would have to work on assignments on their own.

During her lesson on the short sound of the letter E, she switched her screen to a slide with the name Ben printed in thick black and red letters.

Her students repeated the word in an unruly refrain. Michael, an effusive 8-year-old who often provided his classmates with updates on his morning, was the last to respond.

“Sorry,” he announced. “I was talking to my mom.”

Diagnosed with attention deficits, Michael had been suspended so frequently in second grade that he was more than a year behind on his reading. That year, his mother had tried in vain to procure a special education plan for him.

For months, Thompson worked with him one-on-one and in small groups, cultivating a close bond. He reveled in multiplication drills and superhero tales, and for his own superpower, wished he could save those who died of COVID-19.

“I want freeze breath, heat breath and healing, so I could have healed my uncle,” he said. “I wish I could heal everyone that had the virus.”

By late winter, Thompson marveled at his growth: He was paying more attention and participating frequently, and his reading was slowly improving. But she worried that wouldn’t be enough progress for him or many of her other students, especially with the retention law looming.

Passed in 2016 through the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and signed by then-Gov. Snyder, the retention law, which required third graders to be held back if they were more than a year behind in reading by May, was supposed to go into effect in 2020, but it was suspended that year due to the pandemic. Both Republicans and Democrats introduced legislation to suspend retention again in 2021, but Republicans have attempted to make the law even more aggressive by mandating that both third and fourth graders would face being held back next year. The bill has yet to be voted on by the state Senate and House.

State Sen. Ken Horn, a Republican who sponsored the latest retention requirement, said it is intended to serve as a consequence for parents who might not pay attention to their children’s academic progress without it. “They don’t want their kids to have to go through this, their teachers don’t want to have their kids to go through this, then they will double down, and they will go to work,” he said. “If there are no consequences, then parents will go on doing what they’re doing.”

Thompson has heard the argument. “Personally, I’m sick of hearing that,” she said. “That’s somebody that doesn’t understand the economic disparities … doesn’t understand poverty.” Her own mother worked nearly nonstop to support her and relied on the school system, including trained teachers, to help her achieve success. “If our communities could do this ourselves, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Contrary to Horn’s assessment, Michael’s mother, Lash, had long been involved in her children’s schooling. She also had faith in Benton Harbor’s schools, which she had graduated from about 20 years before. She still FaceTimed with her favorite teachers, who had become her mentors, and believed that with the right resources, the district would turn around. But she felt that the abbreviated school days of the past year had shortchanged her son.

After work, in the evenings, she would read with Michael before he fell asleep, and she noticed that even in late winter, his reading was stunted. He would labor over each word, and often skipped the ones he didn’t know. Her older sons had never struggled like this.

While Lash and her son were constructing his new loft bed, she sat him down and told him she had decided she wanted him to repeat the third grade. “It’s not because you’re not doing good,” she said softly. “I want you to have a fresh start … and be able to do the work.”

Michael was calm. “That’s OK, momma, whatever you think is better,” he said, and then changed the conversation to what color he could paint the walls of his room.

Parents whose children were learning virtually could opt out of testing and therefore the retention requirement. But Taylor wanted an honest assessment of how Na’Kiyrah and Calvin were doing. They had languished in the second grade. Her son accrued at least 10 suspensions, tied to behavioral problems that she believed originated when he was moved too quickly from special education to a mainstream track. Her daughter felt lost in the large class.

Taylor’s trust of Thompson ran deep — they had attended high school together and Taylor believed Thompson was her children’s best teacher yet. But this past year, her children’s attention had lagged. She tried to help them, purchasing multiplication flashcards and books and challenging them to spelling bees in the afternoons. But Taylor, who was back in college taking online courses to become a parole officer, knew she wasn’t a teacher.

In early May, before the state’s test, Taylor bought new backpacks for Na’Kiyrah and Calvin, one decorated with dinosaurs and the other with sharks. Though she could barely afford her $97 utility bill that month, she hoped the new bags would boost their academic confidence.

The morning of the exam, just before her children hopped out of her weathered Ford Expedition, she stopped them. “Make sure you take your time and understand what you read before you answer any questions,” she said.

Na’Kiyrah nodded nonchalantly, which worried Taylor.

On a sticky afternoon in late May, while Taylor and her four children were watching “Trolls,” she heard the mail truck drive by. Her son brought two letters inside and put them at his mother’s feet on the couch. One, from the state, was addressed to the parent of Na’Kiyrah.

Taylor tore it open and began to read.

We understand that this may be difficult news to hear, it said.

The more she read, the more she became consumed with how unfair it all felt, to raise the stakes for kids like this in the middle of a pandemic, when so many families like her own were stuck.

Taylor flicked off the movie and pulled Na’Kiyrah and Calvin to the dining table.

“You know what this is?” she asked Na’Kiyrah, holding up the note.

“No, what is it?”

“It’s the letter from the state saying that you are going to be held back.”

Na’Kiyrah’s eyes scrunched up in confusion. “For what?” she asked.

“I was telling you all school year long to be serious about this test,” Taylor said. “That was nothing to play with, it literally determines whether or not you go to the fourth grade.”

Her children went silent. Na’Kiyrah, with panic beginning to form in her eyes, studied her mother’s face.

“Mommy, are you mad at me?”

Taylor shook her head, relaxing her face. She wasn’t mad at her daughter. Taylor was frustrated with herself, wishing she could have done more for her children this year, despite her health limitations. She was relieved to learn that Calvin was promoted to the fourth grade, but knew that he passed “by the skin of his teeth” and feared that, if the Republican bill went through, he could face the threat of retention next school year too.

Of the 23 students in Thompson’s virtual class who took the test, five were flagged for retention. Such letters were sent to parents of 3,642 students statewide, accounting for about 5% of Michigan students who took the exam. (The state would not provide a racial or economic breakdown of those students, and neither the state nor Benton Harbor would disclose the number of third graders in the district who stand to be held back.)

“I look at the students like Na’Kiyrah and the other ones that just didn’t make it, and it breaks my heart,” said Thompson.

Despite its obstacles, Thompson views the year as a success. She witnessed growth in nearly all of her students, even though the state’s exams only measure how they compare to children across the state, many of whom have better resources.

In recent weeks, Whitmer reiterated her opposition to the strict reading law, as well as to the proposal to expand it. “Governor Whitmer has and will continue to oppose the state law that mandates retention based on reading scores,” said her spokesperson, Bobby Leddy, adding that with the pandemic, “it’s unfair to students, teachers, and parents to prevent children from taking the next steps in their education.”

Nationwide, students of color suffered a “strikingly negative impact” on their academic growth amid the crisis, with the gap continuing to grow markedly through last winter for Black and Latinx students. Those findings and others cited in this story were captured in a federal civil rights report commissioned by President Joe Biden on the impact of COVID-19 on America’s students. “The disparities in students’ experiences are stark,” the report concluded, calling the pandemic’s effects on existing racial and ethnic inequities “harsh and predictable.” “Those who went into the pandemic with the fewest opportunities are at risk of leaving with even less.”

Instead of giving Benton Harbor a break in the midst of the pandemic, state officials collected $420,000 in loan payments, with interest, from May 1, 2020, through May 1, 2021, according to the state treasury department. The department said it did not receive requests for loan assistance from the district during the pandemic. About $10 million of the debt remains.

Meanwhile, state legislators spent months sitting on $841 million in federal COVID-19-relief funds in an attempt to pressure the governor to relinquish her emergency powers to cancel sporting events and close schools when a community’s virus transmission rate went up. While some reports have suggested that Benton Harbor could receive more than $40 million in pandemic relief funds from the state and federal governments, according to district Chief Financial Officer Scott Johnson, the district had only received about $3.5 million as of June 22, money officials could use to enhance summer and online programming, prepare schools for the fall, upgrade ventilation in school buildings and address environmental issues like mold.

Whether the district will be able to pull itself out of not only the pandemic turmoil, but also the entrenched inequities of its past, only time will tell. “I want to earn our families back,” said Townsel, the superintendent, who has spent the year trying to recruit students to the district and helped secure a $3 million state grant to create new literacy programs over the next five years, which he believes could be a game changer. Whitmer has also proposed changing the state’s funding formula to provide more aid to districts with low-income or at-risk students.

But residents haven’t stopped worrying about what will happen if the turnaround plan fails and the state once again tries to dissolve its schools, like they did with Inkster and Buena Vista.

“They destroyed them — strong, rich-in-history Black districts that went through the same things that we went through,” said Reinaldo Tripplett, a district alumnus and former high school principal who sits on the school board and drives with a Benton Harbor Tigers mascot in his car. “Where we are today did not just happen overnight. Where we are today, in my opinion, had been planned a long time ago.”The Cruel Failure of Welfare Reform in the Southwest

Working with Thompson and Na’Kiyrah’s elementary school principal, Taylor was able to find a temporary reprieve for her daughter: Na’Kiyrah will enroll in summer school, which has been extended to eight weeks this year and started in late June.

At the end of the program, Na’Kiyrah will be reassessed, and if she passes, she will be able to move to the fourth grade with her brother. If she doesn’t, she’ll be forced to repeat third grade.

“I’m going to fourth grade,” Na’Kiyrah said, promising herself that she would pass at the end of summer. “This time, I’m going to know the answers.”

Annie Waldman

Annie Waldman is a reporter at ProPublica covering education.

Chivalry is not about opening doors, but protecting society’s most vulnerable from attack

kim zolotar — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 21:23:47 +0000

March 23, 2021 8.32am EDT

Author

Jennifer Wollock Professor of English, Texas A&M University

Modern society is in dispute over the value of chivalry. Chivalry originally referred to the medieval knight’s code of honor but today references a range of – usually male – behaviors, from courtesy to overprotectiveness. Some see it as the mindset of elite warriors, glorifying violence and demeaning women. Others see it as necessary and desirable to protect groups under attack.

As a historian of literature who studies chivalry, I stand with the latter group. Rather than fostering misogynistic attitudes or overprotective behaviors that insult women, chivalry has been a liberating force from ancient times onward. Across many cultures it arises to protect society’s most vulnerable.

Ancient chivalry

The earliest chivalric incident I teach appears around 2100 B.C. in “Gilgamesh,” perhaps the oldest surviving epic poem. In it, the wild man Enkidu, civilized by a woman, confronts the sexually abusive king Gilgamesh. Enkidu defeats Gilgamesh in hand-to-hand combat to end his custom of sleeping with every bride in his city on her wedding night, and wins that king’s friendship.

Jewish laws also influenced the chivalric customs of medieval leaders. Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the the Hebrew Bible, outlined laws of war around the 7th century B.C. that require protections for captive women, peace overtures to enemies and prohibitions against destroying fruit trees. It inspired the international law that nations are governed by today.

The Bible also features warrior women who emerge as chivalric figures. The prophetess Deborah, for example, accompanies an army into battle. In her visionary song she praises Jael, the lone woman who assassinates a predatory enemy general on the run. Deborah even reproaches Sisera’s mother for raising her son to plunder and enslave women as “spoils of war.”

The Middle Ages

Early medieval knights were essentially hired thugs of low social status. Their adoption of chivalry as a professional code of honor allowed some of them to achieve respect as gentlemen.

European literature soon featured knights and kings as protectors of women. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “History of the Kings of Britain” of 1138, King Arthur kills the rapist giant of Mont-Saint-Michel. A few decades later, the French poet Chrétien de Troyes portrays Sir Lancelot casting aside reputation, glory and treasured warhorses to save the kidnapped Queen Guinevere. Such popular tales of chivalry pressured aristocrats to adopt the chivalric code – to some extent.

By the later 14th and mid-15th centuries, English writers like Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Thomas Malory depict the court of King Arthur as a bastion of justice for women, well beyond the norms of that day. In their most famous works, “The Canterbury Tales” and “Le Morte d’Arthur,” respectively, they wrote about women sentencing rapist knights to death or reeducation. In Malory’s version of the story, King Arthur’s knights take an oath that decries brutality toward women and demands they both aid women and “strengthen them in their rights.”

Western chivalry rapidly became a liberating force for both men and women as knights intervened to protect civilians.

Chivalry today

As in ancient times, chivalrous medieval women themselves led armies and defended castles. One of the most famous, the peasant girl Joan of Arc, was 18 when she led her countrymen against the English and saved French independence.

Their inspiration has fired up a long series of activists who carry chivalric ideals of social justice into the present day. Suffragists in the 19th and early 20th centuries – as well as Black Lives Matter protesters today – have identified with medieval knights destroying evil customs. “We have come together as, if you will, knights at the Round Table, and our King Arthur is justice,” said a young protester in Fort Worth, Texas, after the police killing of George Floyd.

Just as toxic masculinity and aggressive misogyny persist, so does the original chivalric ideal of the warrior defending human life and freedom against tyranny and its thugs.

The principled medieval knight – and principled men and women of whatever rank – valued self control. They joined clerics of different faiths in opposing cruelty when law and bigotry gave victims little recourse.

Inequities and prejudices have not disappeared since the days of King Arthur. I believe men and women of today need the chivalric values of mercy, justice and humility more than ever before.

Understanding others’ feelings: what is empathy and why do we need it?

kim zolotar — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 19:25:56 +0000

January 8, 2017 2.22pm EST

Author

Pascal MolenberghsSenior Lecturer in Social Neuroscience, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Pascal Molenberghs receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award: DE130100120) and Heart Foundation (Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship: 1000458).

Partners

This is the introductory essay in our series on understanding others’ feelings. In it we will examine empathy, including what it is, whether our doctors need more of it, and when too much may not be a good thing.

Empathy is the ability to share and understand the emotions of others. It is a construct of multiple components, each of which is associated with its own brain network. There are three ways of looking at empathy. First there is affective empathy. This is the ability to share the emotions of others. People who score high on affective empathy are those who, for example, show a strong visceral reaction when watching a scary movie. They feel scared or feel others’ pain strongly within themselves when seeing others scared or in pain.

We bring the expertise of academics to the public.

Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand the emotions of others. A good example is the psychologist who understands the emotions of the client in a rational way, but does not necessarily share the emotions of the client in a visceral sense. Finally, there’s emotional regulation. This refers to the ability to regulate one’s emotions. For example, surgeons need to control their emotions when operating on a patient.

Those who show a strong visceral reaction when watching a scary movie score high on affective empathy. dogberryjr/Flickr, CC BY

Another way to understand empathy is to distinguish it from other related constructs. For example, empathy involves self-awareness, as well as distinction between the self and the other. In that sense it is different from mimicry, or imitation. Many animals might show signs of mimicry or emotional contagion to another animal in pain. But without some level of self-awareness, and distinction between the self and the other, it is not empathy in a strict sense. Empathy is also different from sympathy, which involves feeling concern for the suffering of another person and a desire to help. That said, empathy is not a unique human experience. It has been observed in many non-human primates and even rats. People often say psychopaths lack empathy but this is not always the case. In fact, psychopathy is enabled by good cognitive empathic abilities – you need to understand what your victim is feeling when you are torturing them. What psychopaths typically lack is sympathy. They know the other person is suffering but they just don’t care. Research has also shown those with psychopathic traits are often very good at regulating their emotions.

To be a good psychopath, you need to understand what your victims are feeling. Pimkie/Flickr, CC BY

Why do we need it?

Empathy is important because it helps us understand how others are feeling so we can respond appropriately to the situation. It is typically associated with social behaviour and there is lots of research showing that greater empathy leads to more helping behaviour. However, this is not always the case. Empathy can also inhibit social actions, or even lead to amoral behaviour. For example, someone who sees a car accident and is overwhelmed by emotions witnessing the victim in severe pain might be less likely to help that person. Similarly, strong empathetic feelings for members of our own family or our own social or racial group might lead to hate or aggression towards those we perceive as a threat. Think about a mother or father protecting their baby or a nationalist protecting their country. People who are good at reading others’ emotions, such as manipulators, fortune-tellers or psychics, might also use their excellent empathetic skills for their own benefit by deceiving others.

Empathy is associated with social behaviour. Jesse Orrico/Unsplash

Interestingly, people with higher psychopathic traits typically show more utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas such as the footbridge problem. In this thought experiment, people have to decide whether to push a person off a bridge to stop a train about to kill five others laying on the track. The psychopath would more often than not choose to push the person off the bridge. This is following the utilitarian philosophy that holds saving the life of five people by killing one person is a good thing. So one could argue those with psychopathic tendencies are more moral than normal people – who probably wouldn’t push the person off the bridge – as they are less influenced by emotions when making moral decisions.

How is empathy measured?

Empathy is often measured with self-report questionnaires such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) or Questionnaire for Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE). These typically ask people to indicate how much they agree with statements that measure different types of empathy. The QCAE, for instance, has statements such as, “It affects me very much when one of my friends is upset”, which is a measure of affective empathy.

If someone is affected by a friend who is upset, they score higher on affective empathy. eren {sea+prairie}/Flickr, CC BY

Cognitive empathy is determined by the QCAE by putting value on a statement such as, “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision.” Using the QCAE, we recently found people who score higher on affective empathy have more grey matter, which is a collection of different types of nerve cells, in an area of the brain called the anterior insula. This area is often involved in regulating positive and negative emotions by integrating environmental stimulants – such as seeing a car accident – with visceral and automatic bodily sensations. We also found people who score higher on cognitive empathy had more grey matter in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. This area is typically activated during more cognitive processes, such as Theory of Mind, which is the ability to attribute mental beliefs to yourself and another person. It also involves understanding that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives different from one’s own.

Can empathy be selective?

Research shows we typically feel more empathy for members of our own group, such as those from our ethnic group. For example, one study scanned the brains of Chinese and Caucasian participants while they watched videos of members of their own ethnic group in pain. They also observed people from a different ethnic group in pain.

We feel more empathy from people from our own group. Bahai.us/Flickr, CC BY

The researchers found that a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is often active when we see others in pain, was less active when participants saw members of ethnic groups different from their own in pain. Other studies have found brain areas involved in empathy are less active when watching people in pain who act unfairly. We even see activation in brain areas involved in subjective pleasure, such as the ventral striatum, when watching a rival sport team fail. Yet, we do not always feel less empathy for those who aren’t members of our own group. In our recent study, students had to give monetary rewards or painful electrical shocks to students from the same or a different university. We scanned their brain responses when this happened. Brain areas involved in rewarding others were more active when people rewarded members of their own group, but areas involved in harming others were equally active for both groups. These results correspond to observations in daily life. We generally feel happier if our own group members win something, but we’re unlikely to harm others just because they belong to a different group, culture or race. In general, ingroup bias is more about ingroup love rather than outgroup hate.

In war it might be beneficial to feel less empathy for people who you are trying to kill, especially if they are also trying to harm you. DVIDSHUB/Flickr, CC BY

Yet in some situations, it could be helpful to feel less empathy for a particular group of people. For example, in war it might be beneficial to feel less empathy for people you are trying to kill, especially if they are also trying to harm you. To investigate, we conducted another brain imaging study. We asked people to watch videos from a violent video game in which a person was shooting innocent civilians (unjustified violence) or enemy soldiers (justified violence). While watching the videos, people had to pretend they were killing real people. We found the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, typically active when people harm others, was active when people shot innocent civilians. The more guilt participants felt about shooting civilians, the greater the response in this region. However, the same area was not activated when people shot the soldier that was trying to kill them. The results provide insight into how people regulate their emotions. They also show the brain mechanisms typically implicated when harming others become less active when the violence against a particular group is seen as justified. This might provide future insights into how people become desensitised to violence or why some people feel more or less guilty about harming others. Our empathetic brain has evolved to be highly adaptive to different types of situations. Having empathy is very useful as it often helps to understand others so we can help or deceive them, but sometimes we need to be able to switch off our empathetic feelings to protect our own lives, and those of others none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important” /> Pascal Molenberghs, Senior Lecturer in Social Neuroscience, Monash University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Federal Government Gave Billions to America’s Schools for COVID-19 Relief. Where Did the Money Go?

kim zolotar — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 20:55:16 +0000

The Education Department’s limited tracking of $190 billion in pandemic support funds sent to schools has left officials in the dark about how effective the aid has been in helping students.

After the pandemic shut down schools across the country, the federal government provided about $190 billion in aid to help them reopen and respond to the effects of the pandemic. In the year and a half since millions of children were sent home, the Education Department has done only limited tracking of how the money has been spent. That has left officials in Washington largely in the dark about how effective the aid has been in helping students, especially those whose schools and communities were among the hardest hit by the pandemic.

“We’ve been in the pandemic now for nearly a year and a half,” said Anne Hyslop, the director of policy development at the education advocacy group Alliance for Excellent Education. “There is a responsibility to the public to make sure the funds are spent responsibly, but also make sure that the funding that is spent is accountable to supporting students and educators.”

Provisional annual reports submitted to the federal government by state education agencies underscored the dearth of clear, detailed data. Agencies classified how the funds were spent using six very broad categories, including technology and sanitization. According to a ProPublica analysis of more than 16,000 of the reports covering March 2020 to September 2020, just over half of the $3 billion in aid was categorized as “other,” providing no insight into how the funds were allocated.

In the absence of a centralized and detailed federal tracking system, the monitoring of relief funds flowing to the nation’s more than 13,000 school districts has largely been left to states. Some districts have been found to be spending their federal funds on projects seemingly at odds with the spirit of the aid program, such as track and field facilities and bleachers.

While such spending is not prohibited by the federal government, the stated goals of the relief program were to open schools safely to maximize in-person learning and, more broadly, to address the impact of the pandemic.

The Biden administration wants to collect more data. But its efforts have come more than a year after the previous administration began disbursing the relief funds, and some school districts have bristled at the belated push for more detailed data collection.

Hyslop said that while this may place an added burden on districts, the information is essential. “We need this data to make sure the needs are met, to make sure high-needs schools are not being shortchanged. … We have to make sure this is actually supporting students.”

The majority of the school aid was allocated from March 2020 to March 2021 and funneled through state education departments into K-12 school districts, which have until 2024 to budget the last of the funds.

Under the terms laid out by the federal government, states are responsible for developing tracking systems to ensure districts are spending the money on countering the effects of the pandemic.

The federal government has long given states considerable latitude in setting standards and curriculum. Christine Pitts, a fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said responsibility for tracking COVID-19 relief funds has similarly been delegated to the states, creating a patchwork of oversight practices. “There’s 50 states, and oftentimes in education that means there’s 50 different ways of doing the business,” said Pitts.

The federal government has started to request limited information from states on how districts have spent their funds. The department also requires spending plans from states, and those plans must be approved before the last round of funds is released.

These limited reporting requirements reflect the early, urgent days of the pandemic, when officials wanted to get money to school districts as quickly as possible.

In June 2020, as the first federal relief dollars were beginning to flow to districts, the office of inspector general of the Education Department warned in a report that the department must improve its oversight, monitoring and data collection to reduce potential fraud and waste. The OIG noted that after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Education Department was responsible for allocating $98 billion through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which led to numerous investigations into abuse and waste.

When the OIG raised concerns last year to then-Deputy Education Secretary Mick Zais, Zais said the pandemic aid legislation itself had created “enormous pressure” to distribute funds quickly, according to an OIG report.

A spokesperson for the OIG, Catherine Grant, said that while distributing pandemic aid presented its own challenges, oversight and monitoring were “longstanding” issues for the department.

Luke Jackson, a spokesperson for the Education Department, said in an emailed statement that the department was working with states and districts to collect preliminary data to “to ensure federal funds are being spent to best serve the needs of students, educators, and school communities.”

The law places few restrictions on how districts can spend the federal aid, as long as the investments are loosely connected to the effects of the pandemic. This wide latitude has enabled districts to fund projects that some education experts have deemed questionable.

In Iowa, the Creston Community School District allocated about $231,000 of its pandemic relief funds to upgrade its outdoor stadium, including an expansion of its bleachers. According to district documents, the construction is intended to provide increased space for social distancing and to make the bleachers wheelchair accessible.

Creston’s superintendent, Deron Stender, did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Last month in Pulaski County, Kentucky, the school board approved the reconstruction of its track and field facilities, allocating about $1 million in federal pandemic funding for the track replacement.

“We want to have facilities that are great for our students,” the district superintendent, Patrick Richardson, told a local paper after the project was approved. Richardson did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

“There is certainly a lot of flexibility on how the money can be used,” said Hyslop of the Alliance for Excellent Education, but said athletic investments are “not in the spirit of the law.”

The statement from Jackson, the Education Department spokesman, did not address a question from ProPublica about using relief funds for athletic projects.

In other cases, the spending priorities of school districts have drawn complaints from some parents. In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools spent more than $45 million of its early pandemic funding on ventilation systems and personal protective equipment. But some parents said that more federal aid should have been directed to services for students with special needs, who represent about 14.4% of the 178,000 students enrolled in the district.

Debra Tisler, a former special education teacher, said that her 15-year-old son, who has dyslexia, saw the 20 hours a month of specialized instruction that he received before the pandemic cut in half over the course of more than a year of virtual learning.

In January 2021, the federal education department opened up an investigation into Fairfax schools because of “disturbing reports involving the district’s provision of educational services to children with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Asked on Tuesday about the status of the Fairfax investigation, the Education Department’s press office did not have that information readily available.

“They have the ability to do it and they are choosing not to. It’s heartbreaking,” said Tisler, who has had a contentious relationship with the district. In August, her son went back to school in person.

In the first two waves of pandemic aid from the county, state and federal governments, Fairfax schools received at least $157.5 million, of which it spent $9.6 million on direct services for students with disabilities to help them catch up, according to budget documents. Helen Lloyd, a spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools, said that much of the initial coronavirus relief funds paid for “systemwide technology, school safety mitigation measures and equipment and PPE costs.” She said it is not possible to calculate the proportion of the funding that paid only for services for students with disabilities.

Lloyd did not specifically address Tisler’s concerns, citing privacy protections, but the spokesperson said that the district’s spending plan was based on extensive community input and that learning loss was found to be a priority. She added that from the third wave of pandemic aid, which passed this year, the district has allocated $46.2 million, which is being used to extend the contracts of special education teachers by 30 minutes a day, and $500,000 to counter learning loss of students with disabilities.

In Texas, the McAllen Independent School District decided to spend $4 million of its education pandemic relief funds to construct a 5-acre outdoor learning environment connected to a local nature and birding center owned by the city. Tory Guerra, whose children attend McAllen’s schools, expressed concerns that the project, which will not be completed until December 2024, is not prioritizing the urgent learning needs of children who have been directly impacted by the pandemic.

“There are so many other programs that we could invest in that we could use immediately and see benefits immediately rather than years down the road,” Guerra said. She believes that the federal aid should directly address the pressing emotional and academic wellbeing of students, many of whom have struggled to keep up in the classroom. “Half the kids won’t even get to reap the benefit because the nature center isn’t even built.”

Mark May, a spokesperson for the McAllen independent district, said the cost of the project is a small fraction of the district’s $139.5 million in aid. He said the outdoor space will provide students with resources and experiences that will bolster children’s scientific knowledge.

Some states and districts have developed their own public reporting platforms. In Georgia, the education department built a dashboard that shows how much money each district has received and the programs they have spent it on. But other states have not offered as much visibility into districts’ spending. Indiana, for example, has so far made little information public, but it is currently developing an online portal.

In the provisional federal reports that categorize how aid money is spent, some of the largest districts in the nation marked all of their aid as going to the “other” category, including Los Angeles Unified, which spent $49.5 million, and New York City’s schools, which spent $111.5

Instead of spending the aid on summer school or technology, New York City’s district, the largest in the country, used its federal funds to plug a gap in its budget, which had been cut by the state. Katie O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the district, told ProPublica that the district used the funds to cover the wages and operations of custodial workers. O’Hanlon said the district had followed state reporting requirements. J.P. O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York State Education Department, said the state is using the “other” category until the federal government provides more direction on reporting requirements.

Shannon Haber, a spokesperson for Los Angeles Unified, said the district’s reporting was submitted based on the state’s requirements. Many districts categorized their spending as “other” initially, but as the school year progressed, the spending categories diversified, said Scott Roark, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education.

Even if the information is publicly available on a local level, the lack of standardization from state to state makes it impossible to get a national picture of how the funds are being directed.

Some experts said it may be too soon to get a larger view of how the aid was spent. “There’s going to be a natural lag between a district receiving the money, spending the money and reporting up to the state,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the education advocacy group Data Quality Campaign.

But other experts say that without real-time insight into district spending, schools will not be able to shift priorities if they find certain programs are working better than others.

“There can be an opportunity to do mid-course corrections, if we find something working well or not well,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington. “We will be in a bad place if we don’t have much evidence that $200 billion didn’t move the needle.”

This past July, the federal Education Department announced plans to increase its data collection from districts in 2022, but dozens of districts and state education agencies said that more oversight could leave them overburdened.

“It will take another block of time,” said Brenda Turner, the business manager of Haskell Consolidated Independent School District in central Texas, adding that her district already filed detailed plans to the state’s education department explaining how Haskell planned to spend its aid. “They need to figure out how to pull it out of their own system to report to the federal government instead of putting it on us.”

Has Your School Had a COVID Outbreak? Is Your District Following CDC Guidelines? Help Us Report.

As the Delta variant spreads across the country, ProPublica is reporting on the health and safety of students. Tell ProPublica whether your school is following CDC guidelines and whether any students, faculty or staff have gotten sick.Name *Email *Phone numberHow would you like to help our reporting?How would you like to help our reporting? *I have a specific story or concern to share.I work in or with schools and can volunteer my expertise.Are you over 18 years old?Are you over 18 years old? *YesNoSavedSUBMITPowered by CityBase.Expand

Jeff Kao contributed research.

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Education

Annie Waldman

Annie Waldman is a reporter at ProPublica covering education.

Bianca Fortis

Bianca Fortis is an Abrams Reporting Fellow at ProPublica.

American Amnesia

kim zolotar — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 19:31:20 +0000

I happen to love “today”. Little Orphan Annie sang about tomorrow, but I’m a “today” fan. Big time. We only get it once. You see, today is one unique day in all the days that will ever be. And according to actuarial tables, I don’t have many left. I want today to be peaceful, tranquil, and filled with joy.

But you know, folks, I find this polarized, divisive country we live in to be incredibly annoying and distracting. I’m constantly amazed at the length people go to find fault, hate, and spew venom. All this poison attempts to invade my “today”, and although I’m pretty good at keeping it at bay, the constant whining noise, like tinnitus, persists.

In my humble opinion, a contributor to this social freefall is the lack of US and World History being taught in our schools. I’m talking about real, raw, call-it-like-it-was history instead of the sanitized, watered-down, politically-correct, ignore-the-Holocaust indoctrination students receive today.

Ignorance abounds. For example, I’ve watched a number of televised interviews with teenagers during which they say that only employment by a non-profit company is acceptable and moral because for-profit businesses are evil. They also reveal they have been indoctrinated into believing Socialism is the best economic system for our country. Worse, they don’t even know what it is. One young lady said, “Socialism is great for people; for instance, you and me talking together right now? We’re doing Socialism.” Good grief.

Obviously, they weren’t taught about the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, et.al. One reporter attempted to logically debate the matter and was shouted down with an incredible streak of profanity and name-calling, including “f—k the troops” by one pimply-faced, lard-ass teen. (See what I did there? I got in a “name”.) When they can’t or won’t debate because they’re either programmed sycophants or don’t understand the issues, they become vile. That’s their default mechanism.

That brings me to Donald J. Trump, for sure a polarizing figure. Half the population loves him, and the other half hates him. There is no middle ground. Whether or not you love him or hate him is of no matter to me. I simply do not care. To each his own, I say.

With that in mind, I did a bit of research on the man. He inherited his father’s real estate development business, has been married three times, and has a business degree from Wharton. Everyone pretty much knows that. I also found an old photograph of Trump (with Rosa Parks, Muhammed Ali, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton) receiving an award for service to the black community. Comments about him by the four were glowing. Hmmm. I also found a 2013 video of Hillary Clinton saying he’d make a good president. Double hmmm. I also looked into his hiring practices. From what I could determine, he’s color and gender blind when it comes to hiring and promoting.

So, when I saw a group of young people holding a sign proclaiming Trump to be a racist, I asked for an example. None of the group could come up with a specific case other than saying, “Everyone knows that! It’s a known fact!” Further, they angrily declared, since I asked such a lame and stupid question, it followed that I must be racist as well. I expected as much (sigh). It didn’t matter that I showed them a Joe Biden quote from 1977 proclaiming schools should remain segregated saying, “Allowing schools to be integrated would create a racial jungle.” Or that both he and Hillary Clinton said their mentor was Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, West Virginia Senator Robert “KKK” Byrd. Biden even delivered Byrd’s eulogy address. “Who the hell is Robert Byrd, and who cares?” one asked. My point exactly. I faced mind-numbed ignorant souls programmed by the leftist educational system. They remind me of the rightwing robots of the 1960s arising from the John Birch Society although that group was not nearly as wide spread. In the 1960s, JBS believed communists infiltrated the civil rights movement with the goal of establishing a “Soviet Negro Republic”.

I suggested they fact check (on their own) a 1994 law Biden wrote entitled “Stop and Frisk”, which many blacks blame for systematic racism today; and a statement Biden made in 2008 calling Obama the first mainstream black to be “articulate and clean”. I remember Obama rolling his eyes upon hearing that pronouncement. Will the young folks check? Probably not. Truth doesn’t fit their belief system. They are victims of learned-ignorance; that is, in spite of facts to the contrary, they choose to remain ignorant when it fits the Orwellian agenda they have been given. (2 + 2 = 5)

I turned to leave, and one reedy little guy shouted that Trump is also anti-women because of a vulgar remark he made about grabbing a specific part of a woman’s anatomy. I agreed with him that the remark was vulgar. He seemed taken aback, but looked suspicious when I suggested he use the same standard for the political party he was supporting. He wanted an example. I gave him two: 1) Ted Kennedy, the so-called lion of the Senate, driving off a bridge, and leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown. He was given probation for two months. 2) Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Chris Dodd (D-CT) picking up waitresses at the Brasserie Liberté restaurant in DC for what they called “waitress sandwiches”. Actress Carrie Fisher outed them on the Tonight Show saying they tried to pull the same stunt on her. I suggested they do their own fact checking, but they told me I was full of it because none of that ever happened. Deny, deny, deny.

Oh, well…

Since the main promoters for leftwing Socialism happen to be mostly wealthy white people who are politicians (who got wealthy by being politicians), academic know-it-alls, and insipid entertainers; let’s look at history.

The French Revolution took place from 1787 to 1799 instigated by upper middle class, wealthy elites including Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer and Jacobin Club member and Joseph Guillotine, a physician. They sought to usurp the monarchy and replace it with a Constitutional Republic similar to that of the United States.

From the beginning of the 18th Century, the population of France swelled by 44-percent leading to high unemployment and civil distress such as economic and social inequality, and high taxes. Louis XVI was popular with the people, but his Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette was an unapologetic, condescending spendthrift. The Committee of Public Safety, chaired by Robespierre, used Marie Antoinette’s behavior in part to justify the beheading of both king and queen. They also charged that she was an Austrian spy. From September 1793 to July 1794, 16,600 citizens were guillotined. The victims included aristocracy, their servants, businessmen, their families and servants; and priests and nuns; AND common people caught stealing bread and fruit to feed their families. By 1796, a total of 117,000 were either executed or died awaiting trial. As fate dictates for many revolutionaries, Robespierre was considered too ambitious by his peers, and on July 28, 1794 at the age of 36 was led to the guillotine. The final result was that Napoleon overthrew the government and declared himself emperor. Some revolution—from king to emperor.

The Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) came about when Spain’s constitutional republic, established in 1930 after ousting King Alfonso XIII, failed to solve that country’s internal problems. The war constituents were as follows: 1) those who favored the republic (Republicans), 2) communists backed by USSR, and 3) fascists backed by Italy and Germany. Germany used the conflict as a proving ground for their WWII war machine. The Fascists prevailed and installed Francisco Franco, a brutal dictator. One million lives were lost, including the clergy.

In 1917, led by V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky the Reds overthrew the Tsarist monarchy of Russia to establish the USSR—the Soviet Union. Brutal dictator Joseph Stalin became the head of State when Lenin died, and purged Lenin’s followers, including Trotsky who received the same fate as the aforementioned Maximilien Robespierre. Trotsky was found in Mexico City with an axe in his head.

History teaches us that so-called beneficial change is promoted by pitting “haves” versus “have-nots” by wealthy change agents, which results in brutal, heavy-handed dictatorships rendering the people worse off. Witness Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco, Castro, Chavez, et.al.

^{Two founding Idahoan DSA members}
^{at a big tent event in late September 2018}

Socialism is voted in then replaced (by force) with Communism. The Soviets referred to the transfer as “normalizing”. In 1957, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev accurately predicted what is happening in the US today. He said we’d be fed small bits of socialism until we wake up one day under communism without one shot being fired.

With that in mind, George Soros has been working mightily to tear down our Republic under Law of Constitution, and replace it with a socialist paradise. Most of our citizens are halfway there by referring to the US as a Democracy, a form of government that has always failed because those who scream the loudest are rewarded; the law being amended to fit. I hear the term, Democratic Socialism, a merging of two really bad ideas from people I know who have converted from liberal to extreme left-wingers. The Soviets claimed it takes a minimum of 30 years to convert neophytes to leftist zealots, which is done through the educational system by first converting ultra-liberal teachers. Results: Moral decay, demonize religion, loss of family, life-is-cheap, minorities where a father is totally absent, redistribution of money because of envy, book-burning, forced political correctness, speech censoring, et., etc.

The US ground has been fertilized with the same natural (and manufactured) elements that have toppled governments throughout history: Massive unemployment brought about in just one-year courtesy of COVID-19, a natural and manufactured phenomenon; Unbridled population surge from letting people pour across our southern boundary, most of whom have not been vaccinated; A government put in power by an electronic coup—155 million ballots counted versus 138 million registered voters, many “ballots” mysteriously showing up after 3:00am; Civil unrest and rioting led by two fascist groups, ANTIFA (what an oxymoron) and BLM both paramilitary leftist gangs; Massive debt incurred for the purpose of buying special interest groups—a democracy existing of many special interest groups all devoted to their own agenda NOT the wellbeing of the nation as a whole. Obama put the country in more debt than his 43 predecessors combined. Again, the goal being to tear down the system, and rebuild it as a socialist economy.

Finally, let’s take a look at a socialist program installed during FDR’s term in office, and despite the good intentions of that day, what has happened since. Short story: as usual self-serving politicians have betrayed the people.

Roosevelt outlined five points to the plan, which he promised would never be violated: 1. Participation is voluntary, and the SSN would never be used for identification. In fact, my card contains those words, which were removed in the 1980s. Participation is NOT voluntary. 2. One-percent from the first $1,400 would be withheld, which was the case when I was a young man. That was revised to 7.65% of the first $90,000. 3. Deductible for your income tax. In 1983, congress voted to rescind that benefit. 4. The money collected would be used ONLY to fund social security. Under LBJ congress voted to transfer the funds to the GENERAL FUND to be used for whatever they deemed necessary. 5. Social Security benefits would never be taxed as income. Under the Clinton administration congress voted to tax SS benefits with Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Sen. Joe Biden also voted “aye”.

_{President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935.[1]}

Although the changing and raiding of social security benefits was proposed and ratified under Democrats, the GOP went along as well. The whole place is a corrupt, money-grabbing machine.

And now, some want to change the government and economic system so they rile up ignorant minions to provide the lynchpin—race against race; have-nots against haves; non-believers against believers. Do not be fooled. As always, the people will be worse off. No matter the form of government, the wealthy change agents are the only ones who make good while keeping the rest of us in line with promises of tomorrow. The Democrats have been doing it to inner city minorities for years. Like Charles Barkley said, “The Democrats only care about us every four years.”

Read a little history for crying out loud! Ah, yes, tomorrow will be a brighter day just trust us. Rubbish. Me? I’m a fan of today.

Gene Myers

The psychology of roller coasters

kim zolotar — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 19:03:31 +0000

BY RICHARD STEPHENS, SENIOR LECTURER IN PSYCHOLOGY, KEELE UNIVERSITY

Can differences in brain chemistry explain the sensation seeking behaviour seen in theme parks?

Roller coasters may seem like a very modern type of entertainment – constantly getting bigger, faster and scarier thanks to advances in technology. But they actually date back to the mid-1800s. Gravity-propelled railways built to transport coal from up in the mountains down to the town in Pennsylvania, US, were hired out at weekends by fare-paying passengers riding purely for the fun of it.

Today theme parks are big business. But with queues occasionally as long as eight hours for an average ride of under two minutes – not to mention reports of riders suffering strokes, brain deformation and serious injury due to crashes – how come we put ourselves through it? What is it about roller coasters that some love so much, and is it an experience we tend to like less as we get older?

Enjoying roller coasters is linked to sensation seeking – the tendency to enjoy varied, novel and intense physical experiences such as rock climbing and parachute jumping. But what sensation do roller coasters provide that is so alluring? At first glance, it may seem to be down to the experience of speed. But the evidence for linking sensation seeking to speed is not compelling. For example, when it comes to driving at speeds above the legal limit, many people do it, not just sensation seekers.

Perhaps the draw of roller coasters is the enjoyment of the visceral sensation of fear itself, much like watching a horror movie. Physical signs of fear such as a pounding heart, faster breathing and an energy boost caused by the release of glucose are known collectively as the “fight or flight response”. We know that a roller coaster ride is likely to trigger this response thanks to researchers who measured the heart rates of riders on the double-corkscrew Coca Cola Roller in 1980s Glasgow. Heart beats per minute more than doubled from an average 70 beforehand to 153 shortly after the ride had begun. Some older riders got uncomfortably close to what would be deemed medically unsafe for their age.

In another adrenalin-boosting pastime, novice bungee jumpers not only reported increased feelings of well-being, wakefulness and euphoria just after completing a jump, they also had raised levels of endorphins in the blood, well known to produce feelings of intense pleasure. Interestingly, the higher the levels of endorphins that were present, the more euphoric the jumper reported feeling. Here, then, is clear evidence that people enjoy the sensations that accompany the fight or flight response within a non-threatening environment.

Good vs bad stress

And yet, paradoxically, these bungee jumpers also showed increased levels of the hormone cortisol, known to increase when people experience stress. How, then, can a person simultaneously experience stress and pleasure? The answer is that not all stress is bad. Eustress – from the Greek “eu”, meaning good, as in euphoria – is a positive kind of stress that people actively seek out.

We know that a roller coaster ride can be experienced as a “eustressful” experience thanks to an intriguing study carried out by two Dutch psychologists. They were interested in asthma, and specifically its relationship with stress. Having noted previous research findings that stress leads asthma sufferers to perceive their asthma symptoms as more severe, they wondered whether an opposite effect might be possible by applying eustress.

And so, in the name of science, some asthmatic student volunteers were transported to a theme park and rode a roller coaster while their respiratory function was checked. The research findings were remarkable. While lung function predictably reduced from the screaming and general upheaval, so did the feeling of shortness of breath. This suggests that thrill seekers riding roller coasters perceive the experience as stressful in a positive way.

The role of dopamine

But roller coasters are not everybody’s cup of tea. Could differences in brain chemistry explain sensation seeking behaviours? The experiment with bungee jumpers suggest that people with higher levels of endorphins feel higher levels of euphoria. But there is no evidence that resting levels of endorphins might explain sensation seeking, they are more likely a response to the thrill than a predictor of whether we enjoy it.

A recent review instead looked at the role of dopamine, another chemical messenger substance in the brain that is important in the functioning of neurological reward pathways. The review found that individuals who happen to have higher levels of dopamine also score more highly on measures of sensation seeking behaviour. While this is a correlation rather than a causation, another study found that taking a substance called haloperidol, which disrupts dopamine’s effects within the brain, led to a measurable decrease in sensation seeking behaviour.

This line of research sets out the intriguing possibility that enjoyment of intense physical experiences such as riding on roller coasters may reflect individual differences in brain chemistry. People who have higher levels of dopamine may be more prone to a number of sensation seeking behaviours, ranging from harmless roller coaster rides to taking drugs or even shoplifting.

The question as to whether roller coaster riding still appeals as we get older has not been researched directly, but a recent survey looked at how keen people of different ages were on thrill-seeking holidays such as rock climbing trips. It showed that interest in these kinds of holidays peaks in early adulthood, declining with each passing decade. This indicates that older adults are less inclined to participate in activities similar to riding roller coasters. Perhaps experiencing one’s heart rate spiking dangerously close to medically accepted risk levels is not such a draw for the over 50s.

Though hard to pin down, people enjoy roller coasters thanks to a combination of speed, conquering fear and the positive effects associated with a massive rise in physiological arousal. A roller coaster ride is a legal, generally safe and relatively cheap means of experiencing a natural high. Understandably, people have been happy to pay money in exchange for doing it for centuries, and there is no sign of any waning in the appreciation of a bit of eustress.

Richard Stephens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The psychology of roller coasters

The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers

kim zolotar — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 20:26:47 +0000

by Alec MacGillis, photography by Celeste Sloman

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Everything looks the same on either side of the Texas-New Mexico border in the great oil patch of the Permian Basin. There are the pump jacks scattered across the plains, nodding up and down with metronomic regularity. There are the brown highway signs alerting travelers to historical markers tucked away in the nearby scrub. There are the frequent memorials of another sort, to the victims of vehicle accidents. And there are the astonishingly deluxe high school football stadiums. This is, after all, the region that produced “Friday Night Lights.”

The city of Hobbs, population just under 40,000, sits on the New Mexico side, as tight to the border as a wide receiver’s toes on a sideline catch. From the city’s eastern edge to the Texas line is barely more than two miles. From Hobbs to the Texas towns of Seminole and Denver City is a half-hour drive — next door, by the standards of the vast Southwestern plains.

In the pandemic year of 2020, though, the two sides of the state line might as well have been in different hemispheres. Texas’s response to the coronavirus was freewheeling. Most notably, it gave local school districts leeway in deciding whether to open for in-person instruction in August, and in conservative West Texas, many districts seized the opportunity to do so, for all grades, all the way up through high school. Students wore masks in the hallways and administrators did contact tracing for positive cases of coronavirus, but everything else went pretty much as usual, including sports. On Friday nights, high schools still played football, with fans in the stands.

New Mexico’s response last year was the opposite. The state, led by Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, took one of the most aggressive lockdown stances in the country, and issued stringent guidelines for school reopening, so stringent that Hobbs was allowed to bring back only a sliver of its students for in-person instruction.

For high school junior Kooper Davis, whose family lives 10 minutes west of the border, this meant no school and no football. This was a problem, because he loved both of them.

Kooper had always gotten straight A’s, despite a tendency to leave big assignments to the last minute. He charmed classmates and teachers alike with his playful ebullience. His natural high spirits had carried him through his life’s primary challenge to date, his parents’ breakup when he was a small child. He started playing organized football at age 5 and could not get enough of it. He played basketball, too, but football had his heart. When the youth minister at church once apologized for missing one of his high school games, Kooper reassured him that it was okay, that he did not depend on an audience: “I play for myself,” he said.

Kooper started heading off to quarterback camps and private training — in Atlanta, New Orleans and Tucson, among other cities — hoping to better his odds of getting to play in college, an aspiration that became more feasible as he sprouted to 6 feet, 4 inches tall, ideal for throwing over linemen, if only he could get his agility and coordination to catch up with his height. His parents encouraged him to aim for the Ivy League, but he knew its football was middling. Instead, he set his sights on Stanford, which excelled in sports and academics, and which he had visited for another football camp.

For student-athletes aspiring to play in college, junior year is key. It’s that year’s video that recruiters will look at, and that year’s grades that admissions officers will scrutinize. Kooper already had a highlight reel, and it included some nice-looking throws, but it was from his sophomore season on the junior varsity team. Junior year was everything: He would be vying for the starting QB slot on varsity and taking a fistful of Advanced Placement courses. He would, in general, be getting to enjoy the experience of being Kooper Davis, a well-liked kid in a small city where the admiration flowed even from the youngsters he helped out at church, one of whom, a 9-year-old boy, was overheard gleefully reporting to his father that Kooper Davis knew his name.

But the start of the school year arrived, and there was no school. Kooper and his classmates would take their courses at home using an online program, with barely any contact with teachers or each other. His teammates would be allowed to practice only in small pods, which left them mostly doing just weightlifting sessions and agility drills. There would be no actual games.

The hope was that all this would be temporary. That was what the kids heard from the adults in charge, and they tried to believe it.

The coronavirus pandemic has been not only a health catastrophe, but an epic failure of national government. The result of the abdication of federal leadership in 2020 was an atomization of decision-making that affected the lives and well-being of millions of people. States, and frequently individual school districts — sometimes even individual schools and sports leagues — have been forced to grapple with emerging and occasionally conflicting science that has sought to decode the mysteries of a newly discovered virus. Local governmental and educational officials — the vast majority of whom aren’t epidemiologists or experts on indoor airflow — have had to formulate policy under intense time pressure while being buffeted by impassioned constituencies on every side and facing the reality that any decision would impose costs on somebody.

One of the few aspects of this terrible pandemic to be grateful for is that it has taken a vastly lesser toll on children and young adults than its major precursor of last century, the flu pandemic of 1918-1920. That earlier pandemic’s victims tended to be in the prime of life, withmortality peaking around age 28.

The novel coronavirus, by contrast, has hit the elderly the hardest. Themedian age for COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. is about 80. Of the nearly 500,000 deaths in the U.S. analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of early March, 252 were among those 18 or younger — five hundredths of a percent of the total. The CDC has also recorded about 2,000 cases of aninflammatory syndrome that has afflicted some children after they contracted the virus, resulting in about 30 additional deaths. Doctors are still uncertain whether children who survived that syndrome will experience long-term heart issues or other health problems.

Plenty of parents continue to worry for their children’s health amid the pandemic. But the primary concern from a public health standpoint has been the role that children and young adults might play in transmitting the disease to others. A growing body of evidence suggests that younger children are the least likely to transmit the virus, but that as children grow older, their capacity for transmission approaches that of adults.

This has posed a conundrum from early in the pandemic: How much should children be prevented from doing outside the home, to keep them from contributing to community transmission of a highly contagious virus? Or to put it more broadly: How much of normal youth should they be asked to sacrifice? It has been a difficult balance to strike, on both a societal and family level.

In many parts of the country, particularly cities and towns dominated by Democrats, concerns about virus spread by children has resulted in all sorts of measures: closures of playgrounds, requirements that kids older than 2 wear masks outdoors, rigid restrictions on campus life at colleges that reopened. “We should be more careful with kids,” wrote Andy Slavitt, a Medicare and Medicaid administrator under President Barack Obama who was named senior advisor for President Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force, in a Jan. 3 tweet. “They should circulate less or will become vectors. Like mosquitos carrying a tropical disease.”

In Los Angeles, county supervisor Hilda Solis, a former Obama labor secretary, urged young people to stay home, noting the risk of them infecting older members of their households. “One of the more heartbreaking conversations that our healthcare workers share is about these last words when children apologize to their parents and grandparents for bringing COVID into their homes for getting them sick,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “And these apologies are just some of the last words that loved ones will ever hear as they die alone.”

As time has gone on, evidence has grown on one side of the equation: the harm being done to children by restricting their “circulation.” There is thewell-documented fall-off in student academic performance at schools that have shifted to virtual learning, which, copious evidence now shows, is exacerbating racial and class divides in achievement. This toll has led a growing number ofepidemiologists,pediatricians andother physicians to argue for reopening schools as broadly as possible, amidgrowing evidence that schools are not major venues for transmission of the virus.

As many of these experts have noted, the cost of restrictions on youth has gone beyond academics. The CDC found that the proportion of visits to the emergency room by adolescents between ages 12 and 17 that were mental-health-related increased 31% during the span of March to October 2020, compared with the same months in 2019.A study in the March 2021 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, of people aged 11 to 21 visiting emergency rooms found “significantly higher” rates of “suicidal ideation” during the first half of 2020 (compared to 2019), as well as higher rates of suicide attempts, though the actual number of suicides remained flat.

Doctors are concerned about possible increases in childhood obesity — no surprise with many kids housebound in stress-filled homes — while addiction experts are warning of the long-term effects of endless hours of screen time when both schoolwork and downtime stimulation are delivered digitally. (Perhaps the only indicator of youth distress that is falling — reports of child abuse and neglect, whichdropped about 40% early in the pandemic — is nonetheless worrisome because experts suspect it is the reporting that is declining, not the frequency of the abuse.)

Finally, the nationwide surge in gun violence since the start of the pandemic has included, in many cities, a sharp rise incrimes involving juveniles, including many killed or arrested during what would normally be school time. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb where school buildings have remained closed, seven teenagers were charged with murder in just the first five weeks of this year.

“An entire generation between the ages of 5 and 18 has been effectively removed from society at large,”wrote Maryland pediatrician Lavanya Sithanandam in The Washington Post. “They do not have the same ability to vote or speak out.”

It has, instead, been left largely up to parents to monitor their children for signs of declining mental health as they determine whether to allow their kids to return to college or summer camp, to have a friend over, to go to the mall.

My family was among those facing these decisions. Our sons, now 16 and 13, have had fully remote learning in their Baltimore public schools for nearly a year now. For them, the primary release from the hours staring at the laptop screen would be sports, and for us, the answer was clear: My wife and I would let them play. The boys’ respective high school and rec-league baseball seasons were canceled last spring, but their club teams were still playing through the summer and fall. This proved a godsend, a way for the boys to keep being active outdoors and around other kids, doing something they loved to do. For my older son, the baseball meant frequent traveling to tournaments out of state, in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Almost every weekend, we’d be back on near-empty highways, staying in near-empty motels, subsisting on endless takeout chicken sandwiches whenever we couldn’t find an outdoor place for a meal.

This all started before the resumption of Major League Baseball and other professional sports, and it sometimes seemed as if our tournaments were the only serious competitive sports happening in the country, a sort of speakeasy baseball. Some precautions were taken, such as umpires calling balls and strikes from behind the mound instead of behind the catcher at home plate. The boys and their parents wore their masks inside the motels; at games, the parents spread out in the bleachers or on the sidelines. The parents ran the political gamut: liberals from Baltimore, conservatives from rural towns in Pennsylvania. But there was an implicit agreement that we were fortunate that our kids could keep playing, and we wouldn’t do anything to screw it up. Those weekends remain for me some of the only redeeming moments of an awful year.

Football at the teenage level differs from baseball in a crucial respect: It is based almost entirely around high schools, without a parallel universe of clubs and tournaments. If high school teams aren’t playing football, there is no football being played.

In New Mexico, Gov. Lujan Grisham announced in July that football and soccer would be prohibited for the fall season. “No contact sports are going to be permitted this fall,” she said. “These contact sports are just too high-risk. If we do well, if we work hard, it is possible we could just be delaying them and they could be played later in the year and later into the season. Fingers crossed, and I believe in you that we can get this done.”

As the hot Southwestern summer dragged on, Kooper Davis and his teammates placed faith in that possibility. In August, they were allowed to hold practice sessions capped at nine players each — not enough for a real practice, with offense running plays against defense, but better than the July sessions, which had been capped at five players. Kooper was vying against three other players for the starting quarterback spot. His arm strength had improved in the past year, so much so that his best friend Sam Kinney, a wide receiver, jokingly complained about the passes starting to hurt. And Kooper was a great student of the quarterback position; he had “the intangibles,” his coaches said. But he knew he needed to work on his agility, which is one reason he took the practices so seriously. He was the first to come, and last to leave.

Even with fall sports canceled, the Hobbs school district, with almost 10,000 students, was still hoping to open the new school year for as much in-person instruction as possible. More than just scholastic considerations were driving this. In late April, six weeks into the spring’s pandemic lockdowns, the community had been stunned by the suicide of an 11-year-old boy, Landon Fuller, an outgoing kid who loved going to school and had, his mother said, struggled with the initial lockdowns.

New Mexico has consistently had one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country — it’s roughly twice the national average — and preliminary state statistics would later show the 2020 rate as unchanged. Nationwide, deaths by suicide in the 10-to-24 age group increased by half between 2007 and 2018, a trend that has been linked to multiple factors, from the growing availability of guns to the spread of smartphones and social media. In New Mexico, mental health experts say, the factors also include high rates of depression on Native American reservations, and rural isolation in general.

Still, the news of an 11-year-old taking his life — after riding his bike to a field near his house — had the power to shock in Hobbs. “I think the big question we all have is why, and we will never know the reason why,” his mother, Katrina Fuller, told an Albuquerque TV talk show in July. “The only thing that I was able to find was in his journal, was that he had wrote that he was going mad from staying at home all the time and that he just wanted to be able to go to school and play outside with his friends. So that was the only thing that I can imagine what was going through his head at that time.”

Hobbs is heavily conservative. Lea County, of which it is part, would vote 79% for Trump in 2020. And unlike in many other, more Democratic parts of the country, the city’s school administrators had the support of many teachers when it came to reopening: A survey in late summer found more than 70% of teachers in favor of in-person instruction. But the district’s push to reopen was rebuffed by the state education department. After initially barring any schools from reopening in August, the state released “gating criteria” for districts that wanted to resume in-person instruction in the fall. They were among the strictest in the country. They allowed only for elementary-school instruction, and required a district to stay below an average of eight new cases per day per 100,000 residents over a two-week period. For Hobbs and the rest of Lea County, population 70,000, that meant no more than five new cases per day in the whole county. (By contrast, Kentucky’s daily threshold was 25 cases per 100,000 people and Oklahoma’s was 50 cases. Hawaii, one of the states least affected by the pandemic, put its threshold at 360 cases over a 14-day period.)

Statewide in New Mexico, the restrictions resulted in zero high schools or middle schools reopening anywhere in the state. This confounded Hobbs school officials, especially because they could see open schools across the border in Texas. “We’ve got districts 30 miles away doing it safely,” associate superintendent Gene Strickland said. “I get the fear level, but we see models that show it can be done. Allow us that opportunity.”

Kooper Davis had always thrived in school. He liked his teachers, and they liked him. He had won over his ninth-grade English teacher, Jennifer Espinoza, with his willingness to engage on the works they were reading: “The Outsiders,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“He was very opinionated about why a character did this, or whatever something meant,” Espinoza said. “Even if he was wrong or going in the wrong direction, he wasn’t afraid to put his thoughts out there.” It was a great class in general, she said: “Those kids fed off each other. They would come out with amazing answers.” Kooper and Sam Kinney ribbed her about her tendency to lose her phone and took daily attendance for her. When Kooper was the only boy at Hobbs to make the Junior National Honors Society alongside 20 girls, Espinoza asked him if it felt weird. He grinned. “No, I like it!”

But Kooper hated virtual school. There were no friends to cajole, no teachers to charm. Hobbs wasn’t even holding synchronous classes online for older high schoolers. They mostly watched video lessons on their own, using an online curriculum called Edgenuity. Kooper procrastinated, as usual, but now also found it harder to focus when deadlines hit. His grades started slipping from his usual all-A’s. And these were the grades that colleges were going to be looking at.

As it was sinking in with Kooper and his classmates that school would remain remote for the rest of the fall, they got word in early October of an additional setback on the sports front. Not only would New Mexico remain one of a handful of states to bar high school sports, but practices would now be limited to just four players per coach. This meant they would mostly just be lifting weights, never mind that this often meant having many players in the weight room at a time (albeit in four-player pods), seemingly a riskier proposition than a regular practice outdoors. The football coach, Ken Stevens, could sense the morale plunging. “I seen a lot of disappointment,” he said. “Lost hope.” Some players stopped showing up. Making it especially tough, he said, was the nearby contrast. “That’s the frustration,” he said. “How come 10, 15 miles away, these kids can compete, can live a somewhat normal life?”

Kooper was despondent. “Man, this sucks,” he told his teammates. “We need to be back on the field.” He missed football so much that, on some Friday evenings, he headed across the state line to Texas to watch a game.

The schools in Denver City, population 5,000, had shut down amid the coronavirus lockdowns in the spring of 2020, but there wasn’t really any question about whether the 1,700-student district would reopen schools in the fall. The Texas Education Agency was letting districts make the decision. The Texas Classroom Teachers Association had nowhere near the sway of unions in other states. This didn’t keep many large urban districts in the state from starting the school year with remote learning. But Denver City and nearby small cities in West Texas opened schools. Students could choose a virtual option, but only a few dozen of Denver City’s 492 high school students took it. As for teachers, there was no option: Their job was in the classroom.

Denver City is a humble-looking town, with a Family Dollar and no Walmart, but oil-and-gas revenues had allowed it to build a new high school two years ago. The building has good ventilation, and enough space that it wasn’t hard to spread desks to allow for 4 to 6 feet between them, even in a class of 20 or more. Students were attending five days a week, without the hassle of hybrid schedules used in much of the country. They were required to wear masks in the hallways or while moving around a classroom, but many teachers allowed them to take their masks off at their desks, judging the spacing sufficient, though the teachers kept their own masks on. Lunch was still served in the cafeteria, but it never got crowded because many students went into town for lunch, at the McDonald’s drive-through or elsewhere.

The school did not administer coronavirus tests on its own, but if a student or teacher tested positive locally, the school conducted contact tracing to determine if any other teacher or student had been exposed to them for 15 minutes or more, unmasked, within six feet. Anyone who fit that definition had to quarantine at home, initially for two weeks, eventually only for 10 days, in line with CDC guidelines. The district, which offered daily and weekly tallies of cases on its website, determined that the vast share of transmissions seemed to be happening outside school, as research was finding to be the case in other places, too. “The weekends is where they’re getting it,” said principal Rick Martinez. “If we could have them all week, this is the best place for them to be.”

Over the course of the fall semester, about a dozen of the 70 staff members in the Denver City school missed time for quarantine, mostly after testing positive themselves, forcing the district to find substitutes — no easy task, but not insurmountable. All of the teachers returned. There were other challenges, such as the time in August when a player on the girls volleyball team tested positive and the school made the decision to shut down the team for two weeks, just in case another player had been exposed.

Overall, though, the fall was going so relatively well that many students who had chosen the remote option at the outset decided to come back to school, to the point where only about half a dozen were still learning at home. “It’s been stressful at times,” said the district superintendent, Patrick Torres. “It’s taken a lot of time and effort, but our kids are getting instruction face to face.”

Football went forward, too. The school capped attendance at its field, and required people to register for tickets online. The team in Seminole, 20 miles south, needed to cancel some games as the result of player quarantines, but Denver City managed to get through the fall without any cancellations, though there were some weeks where the roster got thin.

Kooper Davis came across the border once with a friend to see a game in Levelland, northeast of Denver City, and another time with his father, Justin, to see a game in Seminole. Justin, who works for a company that services oil-field equipment and runs a lawn care business on the side, noticed the reaction his tall, athletic son was getting in the Seminole stands. “People looked at us, like, ‘Who is this kid and why is he not playing?’”

Kooper’s father and his stepmother Heather, who had been together since Kooper was nine, had considered transferring him to a school in Texas, as other families were doing. This would have entailed sending Kooper to live with Heather’s brother. (Kooper had limited contact with his biological mother.) They were even considering sending Kooper and Heather to Atlanta to live near one of the coaches he’d trained with. But Heather and Justin had just had newborn twins. Plus, Kooper wanted to play with his team, his friends.

His parents began to notice how much the disruption and uncertainty was wearing on their normally buoyant son. On Oct. 9, Heather went on Facebook and posted a plea for reopening. “So honestly when do we stand up for our kids?? When do we all protest and say this is enough, do we wait until our kids lose life completely?” she wrote. “So many kids are turning to the wrong things to fill a void. Sad, it’s so sad. Let’s respect the ones who wanna stay home and respect the ones who are ready to go back!!”

Two days later, the town learned of another life lost: an 18-year-old who had graduated from Hobbs High that spring took his life at a local park after receiving a medical discharge from the Navy. Kooper did not know him well, but went out to join friends who had gathered to mourn him.

The next day, a Monday evening, Kooper and his classmates held a demonstration for reopening school and school sports, one of several across the county that day. They held theirs at the high school football stadium, a hulking edifice that can seat 15,000. The students wore masks and sat spaced apart on the stands, holding signs that said “Let Us Play” and “SOS Save Our Students.” They had the tacit support of their coaches and many of their parents, some of whom had helped shoot a testimonial video that was going to be shown on the scoreboard screen. But the video wouldn’t load right, so several students went onto the field to give impromptu speeches before the 175 or so people who were gathered there.

Kooper was among the speakers, which surprised his friend Sam Kinney. “I knew he was pretty brave, but didn’t know he was that brave,” Sam said later.

At the microphone, Kooper introduced himself, then said, “I play football and basketball and those sports make up a big part of my life, and when I’m not here every day doing something with those sports, honestly, I feel really lost in life. Since I’m a junior, college is starting to cross my mind, and without this essential year of learning, I feel completely unprepared for college. I know I’ve still got another year, but time goes faster than you really think.”

He continued, “I just believe we should be here at school and we should be here playing football. It’s crazy to think that just down the road, they’re playing a football season — they’re almost done with their football season. It’s honestly ridiculous. And I’m willing to keep my teammate and classmates in line, minding whatever rules, just so I can be back here doing the stuff I love.”

Mental health experts struggle to identify a precedent for the challenge this pandemic is producing for many Americans. In prior pandemics where the technology was not available for remote work or remote schooling, lockdowns and social isolation were not as extreme and did not last as long as what we’ve lived through this past year. And the psychological stress that the pandemic has produced for so many Americans of all ages is unlike so many more acute crises that we might experience in life, said Nick Allen, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oregon. “There’s a difference between a stressor that makes your life unpleasant and intolerable and a stressor that takes away good things,” he said. “For a lot of people, the stressor that COVID represents is one that takes away good things. You can’t go to sporting events, you can’t see your friends, you can’t go to parties. It’s not necessarily that you’re experiencing abuse, though some may be. What’s happening is that we’re taking away high points in people’s lives that give them reward and meaning. That may have an effect over time. The initial response is not as difficult as something that’s stressful, but over time, the anhedonia, the loss of pleasure, is going to drive you down a lot more.”

Even before the coronavirus arrived, teen mental health was a cause for growing concern. Researchers and mental health professionals had come to the conclusion that, as David Brent, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatry professor, put it to me, “One thing that’s protective against it is connection to school and family and peers. We know that participation in sports and a connection to school can have a profound protective effect.”

That social connection has been attenuated in the parts of the country that have largely shuttered school buildings and associated activities. The closures have also inhibited young people’s striving for independence, youth mental health experts say. “A key developmental task of adolescence is autonomy-building,” said Jessica Schleider, an assistant psychology professor at Stony Brook University. “That is what teens are driven to do: to grow self-esteem and a strong sense of who they are.” With school and so much else closed off to them, and daily life mostly limited to the home, “the little bit of self-directedness they had before is gone. A lot are stuck in environments they didn’t choose. The futures they had been working toward aren’t options anymore.”

As the pandemic carried through the summer, worrisome signals started appearing across the country. In addition to the CDC reporton the rising share of visits to emergency rooms by teenagers in distress, a University of Wisconsin survey of more than 3,000 high school athletes during the summer found that more than two-thirds reported high levels of anxiety and depression, 37% higher than past studies.

For Kooper, autumn brought no relief. Every weekday morning except Wednesday, he got up at 6:30 a.m., drank a protein shake, then drove to McDonald’s for more breakfast, before arriving at school at 7 a.m. for a weightlifting session. On the way back, he’d pick up some Burger King breakfast for his two younger sisters, ages 11 and 5. The younger one would ask why he couldn’t get McDonald’s, which she preferred, on the way back, and he’d explain that traffic made it easier for him to do them in this order. Kooper would chat a bit with Heather and then shower and get to work on the computer.

There were signs that mental health was on his mind. On Oct. 16, Kooper shared a grim claim from a state representative on his Facebook account, which he seldom used: “The New Mexico Athletic Association reports there have been 8 student-athlete suicides since March 20.”

Kooper looked so alone and hunched over as he worked that Heather one day posted a picture of him online to share his struggle with others. “I know my kid isn’t the only one hurting,” she wrote. “How is this life that they are living.”

The Davises were sufficiently attuned to the mental health challenges of the pandemic that they held regular family visits with a therapist, and Kooper had gotten a couple of solo sessions as well before he and the therapist decided that was no longer necessary.

For a while, Kooper went to do some of his schoolwork at the Starbucks near the local Walmart, just to get out of the house, but then it closed down again when state restrictions tightened further. On some Tuesdays and Thursdays, he’d head to school for an afternoon session with the other quarterbacks, learning how to read defensive coverage. Some afternoons, he’d head over to the church his family belongs to, Christian Center Church, which is led by Sam’s father, Jotty Kinney, who set up a small weight room for the boys to use. On Sunday mornings, Kooper would be back at the church for his youth-group service and to help lead sessions for the younger kids. And one weekend late afternoon in November, when it was below 30 degrees out, two dozen boys went to school to play touch football, the closest they had come to having a game.

On Sunday, Dec. 6, as semester finals were getting underway for school, Kooper was at church as usual, dressed as a baby for a monthly skit he and Sam did for the little kids. Later that day, he put up another Facebook post, his first since the one in October: “With these tough times going around, I know there are many of those in need, and I want to give back to my community,” he wrote. “If any of y’all know anyone unable to leave their homes, I am willing to wait in line and pick up their groceries for them, or even run simple errands. Please pm me if you or anyone you know could use a helping hand.”

The next morning, Dec. 7, Kooper went to his Monday weightlifting session. As he left, he told Sam, in typically unabashed fashion, “Love you.” “Love you, too,” Sam responded. On the way out of the athletic building, Kooper swung by to see the basketball coach, Eddy Martinez, to tell him he thought he might be able to play with that team, too, if the schedule that the state had floated the previous week actually came to pass: a truncated football season in February, followed by a truncated basketball season. Martinez said he’d be glad to have Kooper and that he was welcome to join one of their four-person practice pods that very day. Kooper said he didn’t have his basketball shoes, but he would come the next day.

Coach Stevens got the news from the school principal that afternoon. Like others in Hobbs, he was not unprepared for such calls: There had been at least six suicide attempts by Hobbs students during the pandemic, according to district officials. But when he heard the name, Stevens was stunned. He asked, “Are you sure you got the name right?” The principal said he thought he had, but that he’d double-check with the school’s designated police officer. He called back five minutes later to say that yes, he had gotten the name right.

Jennifer Espinoza got word from fellow teachers, one of whom asked her, “Hey, did you have Connor Davis?” The name meant nothing to her, but, she asked, did they mean Kooper Davis? No, they said. “Good,” she said, “because Kooper would be out of the question.”

It had happened while Heather was at the grocery store picking up baby formula and something for dinner. At about 1 p.m., Kooper had texted Sam on Snapchat: “Love you, bro.” “Love you, too,” Sam wrote back. That was the last he heard from his friend.

The next day, Coach Stevens gathered his players and assistant coaches in the team meeting room to discuss Kooper’s death. There were counselors on hand, as well as Pastor Kinney, Sam’s dad. The adults encouraged the players to speak about what they were feeling, not to hold things in. But the players ended up just wanting to go lift weights together.

The day after that, Wednesday, a fleet of empty school buses arrived at the high school from other towns, one from as far as Clovis, 130 miles away. The buses had condolence messages painted on the windows: “We are here for you,” read the writing on the bus from Portales. “Pray for Hobbs,” said the bus from Eunice. “Artesia loves you,” said the bus from Artesia.

I reached Justin Davis on the phone that Saturday, after learning of Kooper’s death from a mother in northwestern New Mexico whose daughter had also struggled with the absence of school and sports. Justin, as I would soon learn, is a large and taciturn man, but he was eager to talk, and urged me to come to New Mexico to learn more about what Kooper and his friends had been through. He was at a loss over what he and Heather might have missed. “I had an open relationship with my son,” he said. “It’s baffling to us to figure out why he didn’t come to us.”

Suicide is ultimately an unfathomable act, but Justin said he was sure of one thing. “No doubt, if my son had been in school on Monday this wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “He would’ve had an adult standing next to him, a coach saying, ‘Kooper, quit being a dummy.’” The only way he could make sense of it, Justin said, was that “for about fifteen seconds of Kooper’s life, he let his guard down and the devil came in and convinced him of something that was wrong.” His only solace was seeing the effect the loss had on Kooper’s classmates, who were, he said, turning their lives over to God, sending letters to the governor, and generally spreading word of his son’s goodness far and wide.“I believe God needed him now,” he said.

I arrived in Hobbs two days later, just in time for the memorial inside Christian Center Church. The parking lot was jammed with oversized pickups, and the sanctuary was standing room only. The stage was dominated by balloons in black and yellow, the Hobbs High colors, and large white letters and numbers, aglow with lights, that spelled KD 10, Kooper’s jersey number. His home and away jerseys, his school backpack and a school photograph were also displayed. I found an empty space to stand in the back. There were many kids in the audience, and some were wearing raspberry-colored shirts with Kooper 10 written on them. Few people were wearing face masks.

A four-person band with two backup singers played “Another in the Fire,” a stirring song by the Australian worship band Hillsong United: “There was another in the fire/ Standing next to me/ There was another in the waters/ Holding back the seas…”

Stevens was one of several coaches and trainers who spoke via a recorded feed played on the big screen over the stage. “I have no doubt that God is not done using Kooper,” he said. “He is going to continue to use him to impact those around him, and God’s glory will shine through.”

Then the screen played a long loop of photos and videos of Kooper: wearing a Halloween costume, holding his younger sister on the beach, wearing braces, buried in sand, grinning behind Justin and Heather as they kissed at their wedding, attending a Dallas Cowboys game, singing in a school musical, holding a newspaper with his name in a sports story, sitting on a hay bale, holding the newborn twins, wearing a tux for a dance.

Heather came to the stage with Kooper’s sisters. She began by reading some lines Kooper had written in his journal, including his paraphrase of a verse of Scripture, “If your enemy is hurting give him food. If he’s thirsty, give him water,” and his interpretation of it: “No matter who it is, no matter who the person is, if they’re in need, help them. Help them. I don’t know who it is, but you need to help them.” She talked about Justin’s love for his son: “That’s his boy. Kooper’s been Justin’s rock.” She recounted all their morning chats together, after his workout sessions. “I want him to come in from football practice and tell me how practice went. I want him to tickle the babies while I go eat,” she said. “But that’s me being selfish. And I want his happiness more than I want mine.”

Pastor Kinney spoke last. “When you’d see him smile, you didn’t know what was going on under that mop of hair he had,” he said. “He was one of the most driven people I have known.” He described Kooper’s “protective loyalty,” how he once ran in from the outfield of a church softball game to confront someone who was having words with Heather. He joked about Kooper letting one of his sisters sleep in one of his shirts, his willingness to dress up as a baby during the church skit for the little kids, and how Kooper was the only one of the young people he knew who would actually call him on the phone sometimes, just to talk. “No other kid in this day and age called,” he said. “He didn’t text you or put it on Snap. He called you.”

When the service ended, people stayed on for a while to talk and hug each other. It was unnerving to watch: lots of people, few masks, no windows. The event was in gross violation of the state rules on indoor gatherings, which were supposed to be capped at 40 people, but no sheriff’s deputy was about to intervene on this day. (The mass exposure did not lead to any reported local outbreaks.)

The people of Hobbs had for months been barred from letting their kids go to school or letting them play football and soccer. And now, after the death of a boy that many of them saw as linked to those restrictions, they were effectively, saying, screw it.

I chatted with some of Kooper’s teammates, asking them how they were handling remote learning. “It’s trash,” said one, Kevin Melissa. “It’s crazy,” said another, Carter Johnson. “Everyone tells us to keep positive, but it’s been almost a year. It’s hard to be positive.”

Before the event broke up, someone encouraged all of Kooper’s classmates to get together on stage for a group photo. They eagerly did so, several dozen of them bunched together, beaming for the camera. The smiles were jarring in the context of a memorial service until one remembered the broader context: It was the first time they had all gotten to be together since March.

The next morning, I met Katrina Fuller, the mother of 11-year-old Landon, in the windswept parking lot of a strip mall. She had come to bring her teenage daughter to an outdoor kids’ workout session that had been arranged hastily a few days earlier, after the news of Kooper’s death. Despite the cold, two dozen kids, most in their early teens, had come out to the parking lot and were now doing various kickboxing exercises — spaced apart and with masks on — under the guidance of some martial arts instructors.

Katrina, a prenatal educator, had been trying for months to draw attention to the mental health needs of Hobbs’ young people. She had been writing and calling elected officials and state bureaucrats and finally, with the help of the local state senator, Gay Kernan, had gotten the state to provide some training for local teachers in recognizing youth mental health troubles.

More resources had belatedly started pouring into the state: a $10 million federal grant for school-based mental health services, plus $500,000 in CARES Act funds. The challenge was less the lack of money than the lack of people to administer it: the state education department has only a single behavorial health coordinator, Leslie Kelly, who was struck by the rising concern about youth suicide during the pandemic given that the problem had existed for years in New Mexico. “I’m glad we care about this now, but our state was high pre-pandemic,” Kelly said.

Even if New Mexico’s overall numbers were holding steady, to those in Hobbs, three youth suicides plus a half-dozen other attempts by students in a matter of months in a population of 39,000 felt like its own epidemic. Shivering in the parking lot, Fuller told me about Landon, who had “just wanted to be everyone’s friend.” He was the sort, she said, who always went over to any kid sitting by themselves on the playground. And Fuller told me about the difficult weeks of the initial lockdown in the spring, when both she and her husband were feeling the stress of a loss of income. They had tried to make things as nice as possible in those weeks, with an online birthday party for the two kids, and an Easter egg hunt. But it was still hard. “All of our moods changed,” she said. And it was so hard for someone of Landon’s age to grasp time; the six weeks of closure seemed like forever.

I asked if she thought school should have opened in the fall, and she hesitated. She took the coronavirus seriously, she said. Her grandfather recently died of COVID-19. She was heartened by the launch of the exercise class but knew the town needed to come up with more, “just to let them know that we love them and they’re so wanted and they’re not alone.” She started to cry.

She said she had started hearing from many other families around the country whose kids were struggling, including a mother who’d discovered her 6-year-old’s plans for how to end her own life. “These are kids without mental health issues, with good families, kids that are loved,” she said. Definitive explanations were, of course, impossible to come by. “I’ve heard it all,” Fuller said. “I’ve blamed myself.”

She had done a lot of reading on youth suicide since Landon’s death, and had learned that rates were especially high in indigenous communities, like the Aboriginal community of Australia. In reading that, she had drawn a connection to American children who were being forced into a whole different way of life during the pandemic. “The theory is they’re reacting to modern society,” she said of the Aboriginal children. “Well, we’re introducing them to a new society here, and they’re rejecting it.”

Recently, Fuller told me, she had received an envelope in the mail from the New Mexico education department. She opened it and found a letter demanding to know why Landon had been truant from his online classes during the fall semester. The bureaucratic oversight stunned her. “He would be in school if he wasn’t dead,” she said.

After my meeting with Fuller, I went back to the church. Sam was lifting weights with another friend in the small workout room that his father had set up. After I chatted with Sam, I walked with his father back to his office. He told me that he had been running through his last interactions with Kooper, over and over, searching for a warning sign, to no avail. All he knew was that Kooper had been upset about the closures. “When you put most of your things into achieving scholastic, and achieving athletic, and those things aren’t available to you, your whole life, every goal you wanted to achieve is being taken away from you,” he said.

Kinney said he and the Hobbs school superintendent had been talking a few days earlier about the need to get kids back in school. “Like Texas, we have to learn to live with it,” he said. “You know, marginalizing our teens for other people that are high-risk, what do you pick? You know? Because, I mean, we’re losing them. Not only that, we’re losing years of their educational development.”

Kinney said his brother-in-law, also a pastor, had become seriously ill with coronavirus, and he did not doubt its danger. But, he said, the current generation of kids “are the people that are going to be running our country one day. We’re losing their leadership. They’re going to be taking care of us one day, and this is how we’re treating them?” He noted that one student at the October protest had carried a sign that read, “I’m able to vote in your next election.”

“They’ll remember these times,” he said.

That night, I went to meet with Kooper’s father and stepmother at their house, which sits out on the edge of town, near a small cattle farm. Meals cooked by friends covered the island in the kitchen. Justin and Heather told me how much comfort they were taking in the outpouring over Kooper, especially among his classmates.

But they said they were thinking of all the other kids in another way, too. If normally lighthearted Kooper, despite a loving family and natural gifts, had been struggling so much, what about all the others? How much distress was invisible to parents? “He was a kid who had everything, and this is where we’re at,” said Justin. “What’s going on with those other kids?”

On my final day in Hobbs, I made the short drive across the Texas border to Denver City. It was startling to pull into the high school parking lot and see dozens of teenagers strolling out of the school building, wearing masks and carrying backpacks, on their way to lunch. Even more startling was hearing from school administrators about how well the football season had gone — the Denver City team made it to the second round of the playoffs — and about the great event of the night prior: the holiday band concert. To avoid dense crowds, the band had held three performances, with several hundred people attending each. In the large band hall, the band director showed me the dots he had taped on the floor to keep the 70-odd musicians spaced 7.5 feet apart even as they marched, and the cloth covers that one student’s grandmother had made, decorated with the school’s mustang logo, to go over the tubas, to keep them from emitting moisture. It was hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity, the determination to try to make things work, even now. “Whatever it takes,” said Rick Martinez, the principal.

After being in Denver City, things seemed emptier than ever at the Hobbs high school complex — in normal times, the center of communal life in Hobbs. I was there to meet with Coach Stevens, who had also been wracking his mind trying to think of clues he hadn’t picked up from Kooper. He could think of nothing, other than the fact that he had noticed that one of Kooper’s grades had slipped below his norm. But he also knew how adolescents had the natural tendency to magnify troubles. “I fear for all the kids,” he said. “One thing that maybe our decision makers don’t remember is that when you’re in high school or you’re a kid, thinking you’re the only one dealing with something. That’s what you think when you’re 16: Nobody is dealing with what I’m dealing with.” Not to mention, he said, that the closures have simply given kids too many empty hours. “They’ve got so much time on their hands,” he said. “I don’t care how good a kid you are, if you have so much time on your hands, you’re going to find mischief.”

He told me how dearly he hoped the state stuck to its plan for a football season, truncated though it was. “My biggest fear is, you pull the rug on these kids,” he said. “All we’ve been doing is trying to sell hope and belief to these kids that it’s going to happen, but at some point, they’re going to quit believing in you.”

My last visit in Hobbs was to the home of Jennifer Espinoza, Kooper’s favorite teacher. When I entered her bungalow, Espinoza, a friendly woman in her 40s, said that I should feel welcome to take my mask off, because she had already been through a serious case of COVID-19, several weeks earlier. This startled me, but not nearly as much as what she told me next: that soon after her own illness, her partner of 18 years, Abe, had died of what had strongly resembled COVID-19, though his initial test had come back negative. He had been away from Hobbs at the time, working an oil-field job in Odessa, Texas, and a co-worker he had shared a truck with later tested positive. Abe died on Nov. 30, at 49, before she could see him.

And then Kooper had died, a week later. It had been a terrible month, and it had left her uncertain about the best course for the Hobbs schools and sports teams. As the school year started, she had been among the majority of teachers who were willing to return to classrooms. This had only been confirmed for her as she saw how poorly the remote learning was going: not only did most students leave their cameras off, some wouldn’t even turn on their microphones. “I can’t see them, I can’t even hear them,” she said. “They didn’t want to talk.”

But then she herself had gotten the virus — she wasn’t sure where — and its severity had hit home, even before her partner’s death. She had swung the other way on reopening. Now Kooper’s death was making her reconsider again. “If it would prevent another Kooper, then definitely, yes,” she said. “We just have to weigh the good and the bad. Do we fear everyone coming back and possibly getting COVID, or do we fear losing another student more?”

In late January, Gov. Lujan Grisham would announce that schools could reopen for all ages on Feb. 8, but at maximum 50% capacity, which meant only a couple of days per week, and under the condition that they would close if cases rose again. Sports could start a few weeks after that, with masks and without fans. Nationwide, meanwhile, President Biden’s push to reopen schools was explicitly leaving out high schools, leaving millions of teenagers with the likelihood of remote learning through the end of the school year.

In the same week as Lujan Grisham announced her reopening plan, I made another check of the coronavirus toll in Hobbs’ Lea County. The county had suffered 112 deaths attributed to COVID-19, which worked out to a per capita rate slightly lower than that in the three Texas counties abutting Lea. New Mexico as a whole had lost 3,145 people, two-hundredths of a percentage point higher than Texas in per capita terms. The overall per-capita case numbers in Lea County were slightly higher than the three counties across the border, while the case numbers in Texas were slightly higher than in New Mexico.

Numerous factors had affected these outcomes, needless to say. The states had taken very different approaches with regard to their young people, but ended up in almost identical places as far as their coronavirus tolls.

Other tolls would be harder to assess, in a year of so much damage done, in so many ways. “There’s too much hurt,” Espinoza said as I headed out of her house after our conversation. “There always seems like there’s something new to cry about.”

A ‘daunting, dark and difficult’ time: How a Brooklyn school moved forward after losing its leader to COVID

kim zolotar — Fri, 07 May 2021 20:09:01 +0000

Alex Zimmerman, Chalkbeat New York

Mar 12, 2021 7:30am EST

High school student Etienne Musole remembered one of his first interactions with principal Dez-Ann Romain. She asked point blank whether he wanted to graduate. It was a high stakes question at a place like Brooklyn Democracy Academy, an alternative high school in Brownsville serving students who have struggled at traditional schools and are at risk of dropping out.

After the 19-year-old Musole said yes, Romain never let up. “Every day she sees you from that point on, she’s going to be on you,” Musole said.

For many students at the school, Romain was the first educator they felt they could trust, and she deployed a mix of support and tough love. One former student said she counseled him after he broke down in tears over a failed Regents exit exam and let him walk at graduation anyway. (He eventually passed the exam.) Sometimes, she challenged basketball players to pushups if they were goofing around in the hallway instead of heading to class, Musole said.

But just days after city officials shuttered school buildings citywide in March due to surging coronavirus infections, Brooklyn Democracy Academy suffered a devastating blow: Romain was dead. At age 36, she was the first known New York City education department employee to die after contracting the virus.

Her death drew national headlines, as relatively little was known at the time about the coronavirus or who was most at risk. It also plunged a small alternative high school into a series of head-spinning challenges: How to give students and staff space to grieve when they were not physically together. How to quickly transition to virtual learning without the school’s instructional leader. How to keep students, who often struggle with absenteeism in normal times, from slipping through the cracks.

Even more pressing: Brooklyn Democracy Academy had no assistant principal at the time, making it unclear who would step in to help answer these urgent questions. If Romain was the glue holding the school together, it was easy to imagine it could fall apart without her.

“Everything was so uncertain, and I didn’t have any answers,” said social studies teacher Dexter Hannibal. “It was just really scary.” He learned about Romain’s death from a hospital bed during his own debilitating fight with the virus.

In the days leading up to Romain’s death and after students were sent home, teachers were still asked to report to their buildings to prepare for remote instruction, a move that generated pushback from educators across the city. Around the time of Romain’s passing, the principal of another school that shares the building was also hospitalized, though the education department didn’t confirm at the time whether she had the coronavirus

Despite the fear that was coursing through the city, Brooklyn Democracy Academy was perhaps better situated than many schools to weather the crisis. As an alternative “transfer” program that serves students who are older and off track from graduating, the small and close-knit school already prized deep relationships with students to keep them engaged enough to graduate. A small group of “advocate counselors,” for instance, are specifically charged with doing everything from calling students to make sure they come to school to offering support if students are struggling with a crisis of their own.

While some schools may have scrambled to figure out how to keep tabs on students, that wasn’t the case at Brooklyn Democracy Academy. “When we went to remote, it was kind of picking up with what we normally do,” said Lashawn Doyle, the school’s community coordinator and basketball coach.

The immediate responsibility for charting the school’s path forward fell to Yesenia Peralta, an education department administrator who helped oversee transfer schools. She offered to be “the person on call” and then ended up stepping in when Romain became seriously ill.

Her first order of business last spring was making sure the community had space to process, including a vigil, “grieving circles,” and access to counselors, who were also made available to parents. She was especially concerned about her staff’s mental health because she knew if they weren’t emotionally prepared, it would be difficult for them to help students process everything that was happening. Most of all, she didn’t want to “dismantle anything” at the school.

“The students didn’t know me,” she said. “Having that friendly face was the most important thing in that moment.”

In spite of the crisis, she felt compelled to stay on as the school’s interim principal — and has continued in that role this school year.

“We were in a place in a city at that moment that was just so daunting, so dark, and so difficult, and I wanted to do the right thing,” she said. “This community had lost their leader — someone they really loved and respected — and they had gotten to know me, and I didn’t want to abandon them.

It wasn’t just the death of Romain that worried the school’s staff. Students and their families were also dealing with the toll of the virus, which has killed nearly 30,000 city residents. About 80% of Brooklyn Democracy Academy’s students are Black and 17% are Hispanic, populations that have been disproportionately impacted during the pandemic. More than 80% of the school’s students come from low-income families, and some students took on part-time jobs to help make ends meet, teachers said.

At the same time, the crisis disrupted some of the ways the school typically keeps students engaged. Due to uncertainty about how the virus was spreading, counselors eased up on home visits for the next several months, visits that were often used to re-engage students who were having attendance problems. The school’s Adidas-sponsored basketball team, a big draw for some students, was on hold. And staffers also grappled with how to keep college or career planning on the front burner since that’s a crucial piece of keeping students motivated to graduate.

Counselors “were very worried about picking up a phone to talk to a student about applying to college when on the other end was a kid crying because their grandmother died,” said Lucinda Mendez, the director of transfer schools at New Visions for Public Schools, a non-profit that has partnered with Brooklyn Democracy Academy.

But even if imperfect, staffers found workarounds. New Visions supported virtual career events and worked with counselors to continue forging college and career plans while remaining sensitive to students’ emotional needs. The organization helped consolidate the school’s management of student data, including attendance, engagement with digital schoolwork, and even whether students had reliable internet access — information that is often scattered in different places. Each morning, advocate counselors made phone calls to check on students’ academic or mental health needs.

“Our students are used to: If they have an issue, they can just walk into anybody’s office and talk to them,” said Sheena Rue, a program director at the Mission Society, the community organization that provides the school’s advocate counselors. “We had to adjust,” she added, noting that her team relied on everything from video calls to social media to connect with students.

Inside virtual classrooms, teachers also worked to maintain a sense of normalcy, creating space during class to meaningfully connect with students. Peralta has emphasized the importance of deescalating students’ stress levels and developing plans to turn their negative emotions into more positive ones, hopefully inspiring them to complete their work.

“Before I start any lesson, the first five minutes is down time,” said Hannibal, the social studies teacher. “I have a couple of kids who are big anime watchers, so before I start [I’ll ask]: ‘did you watch that new ‘Attack on Titan’ episode? If you can talk about what they enjoy, some other stuff starts to come out.”

If Hannibal gets the sense that a student is overwhelmed, he might adjust their assignments to take some of the pressure off. He noted the school’s constant communication led them to discover one student’s mother was in hospice after a surgery and was not allowed to return home due to the virus — and the student was missing a functional remote learning device.

“We delivered a new computer to him,” Hannibal said. “We’re checking in with him every single day.”

Since the shutdown last spring, teachers across the city have been wrestling with how to shift their lessons into an online environment. That challenge is particularly acute for Shawn Dawkins, who teaches popular hydroponics and aquaponics courses, since the classes involve lots of hands-on work tending to tanks of lettuce, basil, cilantro, and tilapia. The lab got a big boost under Romain, who helped secure funding from the borough president to expand it, an effort to promote urban agriculture and supply fresh produce to the surrounding community.

After the pandemic forced the school building to shut down in March, and canceled plans for a farmers market supplied by the hydroponic garden, Dawkins asked Peralta if he could continue returning to the building once a week to keep the plants and fish alive — a request she granted.

Dawkins uses the lab in some of his remote lessons and even created a backup hydroponic setup at his home in case he was unable to get into the campus for an extended period. The school is now planning to send small hydroponics kits to student’s homes, including seeds of basil, swiss chard and kale.

“That’s not going to make up for the lack of normalcy,” Dawkins said, referring to his efforts to keep the school’s hydroponics lab going. “But maybe that will give a little tiny bit of it.”

New York City high schools opened in October, but shut down less than two months later when rising coronavirus rates triggered a systemwide shutdown. Officials are planning to reopen high schools later this month, though the vast majority of students opted to learn exclusively from home.

There are signs that the city is turning a corner, as vaccine distribution is expanding and Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised a “full” reopening in the fall. But Brooklyn Democracy Academy also faces headwinds.
The school graduated 87 students last spring, almost half of its student population, as some students felt motivated to honor Romain’s legacy by finishing their coursework. Additionally, state officials canceled exit exams that often trip students up.

Meanwhile, far fewer students appeared to be switching into alternative schools. Brooklyn Democracy Academy’s enrollment plummeted by 31% this school year to 122 students, the fourth largest drop of any school in the city, and far higher than the 4% citywide decline, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. Transfer schools, and other campuses in Brownsville, have seen some of the biggest drops across the five boroughs.

Officials said the drop in enrollment at transfer schools could be connected to policies that have given students more time to complete their coursework in their current schools, reducing the need to transfer to schools like Brooklyn Democracy Academy to catch up. Some students may have obligations to care for relatives or pick up jobs to support their families, taking them away from school altogether during the pandemic.

Officials said they expect enrollment to rebound as the pandemic subsides, but the losses could have big implications in the short term, as funding is tied to enrollment and schools can be asked to return funds mid-year. (An education department spokesperson did not answer questions about whether the city is clawing back money from the school’s budget.)

For his part, Musole, the Brooklyn Democracy Academy student, said he’s excited to get back in the building and was overjoyed that his basketball team will be allowed to play this spring and defend last year’s championship season.

He’s aiming to graduate in June, though because the season was postponed, he is nervous about losing out on some opportunities to be noticed by college basketball programs. Yet like some other students, Romain is still echoing in his mind, coaxing him across the finish line.

“I got to finish strong because when she first spoke to me we agreed on one thing: ‘You’re graduating,’” Musole said. “She’s not going to be there to see me do it, but I still gotta get it done.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/3/12/22326063/dez-ann-romain-brooklyn-democracy-academy-principal-death-coronavirus-anniv