My It's Diane, on my mind, another school year begins in the post-pandemic era, and

though the school day looks much like it did before COVID-19 forced officials to shut

her classrooms, the lingering effects of the pandemic are becoming clear.

Lacking test scores continued staffing issues, and according to a new study, a dramatic jump

in absences. If you do the math, 6.5 million additional students missed a big chunk of school,

then likely would have before the pandemic. That's Bianca Baskas-Tones. She's an

education reporter for the associated press. She's been following the continued impact of the

pandemic on young people and schools. She joined me to share what she's learned.

Bianca, three years after schools were shut down because of COVID, how would you describe

the big picture now? I think that for the most part, inside school looks much more normal than it

did. Maybe it looks a lot like it used to for kids, in most cases, although there are a lot of

kids who aren't there. Who aren't there who aren't attending daily class, or they have left

public school completely to do homeschooling or private school, or we don't know where they are.

So we found that the year, not last year, but the previous year, there had been more than 200,000

students who have essentially gone missing from disappeared from schools. Nobody's keeping track of

whether they are in different schools or being homeschooled. Nobody knows what's happened.

So states and districts and schools do often keep track. Not all schools or districts,

rather, or states require parents to tell their district or the authorities whether they're homeschooling.

So we don't have perfect information. So for those states, we don't have information at all,

right? But when we looked at dozens of states, we found in an analysis that we did earlier this year

that when you looked at public school enrollment, when you looked at private school enrollment,

homeschooling, and compared them to the census, and how many kids should have been in that area,

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