The Sunday Read: ‘The School Where the Pandemic Never Ended’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lakishia Fell-Davis is aware that at this point, in 2023, most people are treating the coronavirus pandemic as a thing of the past. For her, though, Covid still poses a real threat: Fell-Davis has Type I diabetes, putting her at higher risk of hospitalization and long-term complications from illness. As such, her experience during the pandemic has shaped how she thinks about her daily life, especially at Ninety-Fifth Street Elementary School, where she has worked on and off for more than a decade as a substitute teacher and teaching assistant. She felt much more comfortable when schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were online during the first year and a half of the pandemic and her kids, Makayla and Kevin, were attending virtually. Sure, they missed their friends, but they were shy and soft-spoken children who had never really strayed far from home. They didn’t seem to mind the arrangement. And back then, Fell-Davis’s mother, who was paralyzed on her left side after surviving stomach cancer and two strokes, could visit them with relative peace of mind despite her poor health. Fell-Davis cried when she learned that in the fall of 2021, the school district would require students and teachers to return to in-person learning. Her home — a cozy two-bedroom apartment in a calm neighborhood — had become her haven, the place where she had more control over her family’s health than she had anywhere else.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Meg Bernhardt and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.
0:15.0	This is a story about grief, which I write a lot about.
0:20.4	But it's about a particular kind of grief.
0:24.5	The grief of the world moving on from a mass trauma event when you don't feel capable of doing so yourself.
0:32.5	There's been a lot of reporting on how this moment in the pandemic is affecting people with disabilities, for example.
0:39.5	And I was curious about what the experience of moving on from COVID looks like for low-income families.
0:46.5	And in this case, a community composed predominantly of black and Latino families.
0:53.5	Through previous reporting, I became familiar with the school in South Central Los Angeles, called 95th Street Elementary School.
1:01.5	Like in other poor communities in LA, families here have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic.
1:09.5	Vaccination rates are low in parts due to government mistrust. 94% of students live in poverty.
1:20.5	And so, for the Sunday read you're about to hear, I followed this school community for more than half a year.
1:28.5	As students, teachers, and parents grappled with the pressure to return to normal, while still dealing with the physical and emotional fallout of COVID.
1:41.5	I first visited 95th Street Elementary on a sunny day last October.
1:48.5	It was the Adelaus Muertos, and the first floor hallway was filled with paper mache crafts and altars.
1:57.5	That students had made honoring their dead loved ones.
2:01.5	There was a trick or treat event where teachers set up their cars on the black top and opened up their trunks.
2:09.5	And kids would walk around in their costumes, collecting candy.
2:15.5	As I hung around talking with staff members and parents, I could see that there was just a huge sense of loss in the community.
2:25.5	One woman told me she lost her sister during the pandemic.
2:29.5	Another lost her brother to suicide, which she attributes in part to the economic stresses of COVID.
2:37.5	Others told me about grandparents dying, about losing their parents.
2:44.5	There were teachers with underlying health conditions that made them terrified of the physical realities of this virus.
	...

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