COVID’s lost generation: Isolation, anxiety present challenges to NYC school kids

The pandemic was still raging in the fall of 2020 when the city’s public schools launched a slow and painful reopening process that would take a full year to unfold. Hybrid classes, distancing, masks and testing were all part of a new regimen, aimed at recouping some normalcy.

But while the debate swirled around how to keep kids and teachers safe, a dramatic shift occurred.

Isolation and the shutdown had weakened social muscles and frayed the delicate fabric that allows a place like New York to function. Expectations were shattered as kids re-entered classrooms filled with uncertainty and anxiety about what their new world would look like.

They were still coming to terms with loss and the ways the pandemic had upended their lives. Many had lost their handle on learning and academics. Others had moved on from school with new responsibilities to work and to their families.

And many had simply lost the will to go to school.

Comfortable at home

As his friends headed back to school, Carlos Carrasquillo preferred staying home.

In fact, if given the option, he’d rather stay in bed. Group settings had become a source of fear, and one of the only times he ventured outside was to the supermarket first thing in the morning, before his neighbors woke up. When he did, he wore his mask, long after most kids his age had shed theirs.

“I got accustomed to being at home,” said Carlos. “Home is, you know, home. You’re most comfortable there.”

Carlos had never been the most outgoing kid in school. But in middle school, his friend, JJ pulled him out of his solitude and dragged him to hang out after class. He befriended teammates through sports and was popular with girls. He even attended a few school dances, if begrudgingly.

But as the pandemic interrupted the daily routine of going to school, it also swept away chances to socialize with his classmates.

In 2021, Carlos tried going back to his middle school in person, but quickly discovered how much kids his age had changed. They were different. Disrespectful. Teachers had to ask them to quiet down at least three times until they did. The staffers, the supposed authorities in the room, seemed scared to tell the kids how to behave.

One day, a sink was unceremoniously removed from a school bathroom as part of a TikTok challenge. As someone who already struggled with the social dynamics of school, Carlos found the chaos too much.

Carlos, who would later be diagnosed with social anxiety and agoraphobia, gave online school another try but needed more support than a remote teacher could provide.

At 16, he transferred to a high school in midtown Manhattan, where the classes were too large and his classmates were experimenting with marijuana and vaping. Some “think they are gang members,” as he explained it via text.

“It feels like they do their best to exclude you,” he said, “making me want to stay home even more because I knew at least there I’m seen, heard and comfortable.”

Two months in, Carlos was eating less and refusing to go to school. Some days his asthma was acting up, or he had an eye infection. But most of the time, he just couldn’t summon up the will to go. His deteriorating condition prompted a meeting with his teachers about his disabilities.

But help for Carlos was slow. He needed more evaluations, according to his school — but none were scheduled. The wait stretched on for so long that the family had to enlist a special education advocate. When the tests finally started, Carlos had to sit tight about a month between each evaluation, six in total. No meeting was scheduled until the late spring.

By the end of the last school year, Carlos had racked up more than 120 absences.

Absences persist

As children emerged from the isolation of lockdown, a grim reality became clear: Cut off from friends and the rhythms of adolescent life, many came back anxious, depressed or angry.

Their habits broken, many students couldn’t cope with school anymore or didn’t see the value of trying. They felt socially awkward, academically behind and unsure of how to interact with their peers or where their relationships stood after months apart.

“COVID… has become part of their generational identity,” said Ioana Literat, a Columbia Teachers College professor who studies how young people express themselves online. “They are the generation that lived through this unprecedented event.”

The number of city schoolchildren who were chronically absent from school peaked during the 2021-22 school year, with more than 4 in 10 children missing portions of their education, roughly 50 percent higher than before the pandemic.

In total, more than 352,900 young people would lose enough classroom time that school year to be considered chronically missing from school. Another close to 7,100 students who started high school in 2016 would drop out before summer ended that pandemic-era school year.

Some teens’ mental health declined and anxieties about the world intensified. Without the consistency of school, kids fell behind on critical services or just lost track of what they were learning in their classes.

Others were cut off from the activities that kept them interested in school, like afterschool sports, interactions with friends or favorite teachers. Students’ priorities also shifted — working to feed their families became more important than having fun after school.

They were back to their daily routines — but far from back to normal.

Slipping away

The back-and-forth, fit and starts, hybrid school model made Ariel De La Cruz feel jerked around. He had just started at a new high school in the South Bronx, and had trouble keeping the days straight, often forgetting which days he attended in person and which he stayed home.

He just wasn’t all that interested in his classes — so he slowly stopped going.

His parents warned him that mornings spent sleeping in and skipping school could add up to failed classes — or worse.

But Ariel had trouble focusing on school, even when he really tried. He decided to make an effort to physically go to school, knowing that realistically, that was the only time he’d do his school work.

To make things even more stressful, he started at a completely new high school, Alfred E. Smith High School. Aside from the usual new-school jitters and COVID-induced social anxiety, Ariel was also worried about a gang rivalry between kids who lived in his neighborhood and the neighborhood in which the school was located.

He felt on edge, guarded and unsafe.

“I had to make sure certain people did not know where I was from or else my life could be at threat or at risk,” he said. “… To come back from school and then just be in the middle of a gang rivalry between where I live and where my school is, it was hard. Because I was a socially awkward kid when I came back to school, for real, I was socially awkward. I didn’t know anybody at first.”

By the time freshman year was over, he had made some friends and gotten more comfortable — but he also started getting into more trouble. He was skipping school again and getting into fights. Ariel eventually was cutting more classes than he attended, spending his days hanging out with friends and heading downtown.

His grades dropped and stayed down, to the point where he got cut from the basketball team, one real bright spot in his life.

Halfway through the school year, Ariel landed upstate, at his aunt’s house in Cortland, New York.

There, school administrators told him he had fallen further behind in credits than he realized, setting him a whole year back.

“I looked at my mom and my mom was like, ‘We tried to tell you. We tried to tell you,’” Ariel said, shaking his head.

For some kids, by the time school reopened, the year away had already knocked them off their paths. There was no easy way back.

“It was just too much”

When it came time to go back to school, Tashyra Hiraldo’s mind was on her pregnancy. She hated the idea of her peers and teachers seeing her growing belly and looking at her differently, but knew after hearing her heartbeat for the first time that she wanted to have the baby.

“I didn’t want to go [to school] because I was so scared of COVID,” she said, “and then problems with the teachers, the students — it was just too much.”

Tashyra felt alone and judged, even by family members. Her bosses at her job at Little Caesars kept asking her to take on more responsibilities that she was not comfortable doing while pregnant, but she didn’t want to tell her boss and coworkers.

“I just couldn’t handle it,” she said. “I fell into a little bit of depression, but I picked myself back up, ’cause I knew I had a reason to keep going.”

She bounced in between her mom’s place and her boyfriend’s for some time, until she gave birth at age 18 to her daughter, Melanie, in May 2021.

Tashyra didn’t feel right at either place and decided to go out on her own. She applied for food stamps and a housing voucher to get some more independence, but the process took a long time. She soon landed in the homeless shelter system.

The Brooklyn shelter where she was placed was far from any family or friends in the Bronx. While there, she felt isolated and closely watched. She sometimes took Melanie on walks, to nearby parks and to museums.

“But most of the time, I was always home,” she said. “… I didn’t really want to go outside or have interaction with people.”

School was the last thing on Tashyra’s mind. Like many young people in New York after the pandemic, she had new, more pressing priorities.

The promise of education paving a path to a brighter future had faded.

This is part 2 of a 3-part series.