COVID’s lost generation: NYC school kids still face devastating fallout

Ariel De La Cruz woke up, rolled over and slapped the alarm ringing on his phone.

The eighth-grader grabbed the Chromebook by his side and clicked on Google Meets. With his video switched off, he joined the class. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.

It’s 2020 and the city shut down as the coronavirus pandemic filled hospitals and morgues with the dying and the dead. Remote work became routine. Restaurants and bars closed. Schools were shuttered.

During the peak of COVID-19, this was Ariel’s daily routine. Sometimes he got up and made himself breakfast, or maybe watched some television, all while his class was running.

He was away from school, far from his friends and losing interest fast.

Ariel is naturally extroverted and outgoing. He smiles in conversation, the kind of kid who seems to be able to make friends easily. He’s earnest when he talks about how he wants to use the challenges he’s faced in his life to inspire others.

But as weeks of lockdown wore on, Ariel found himself less connected or interested in engaging. He started to turn more and more inward.

“I would sit there and just like, basically I would play games while the meetings ran and then I would just leave the meeting and during the next one, play the game again,” Ariel recalled. “I wasn’t doing much at all.”

The adults in his life could see, to some extent, what was happening. That didn’t change much for him.

Ariel lived in an apartment off Webster Ave., in the Bronx, with his mother and sister. Both were usually out or at work during school hours. His sister was so much older than him — six years — that it felt like she didn’t fully relate to him. She had graduated from high school years before he even started.

His mom would shake him awake before she left for work, trying to get him to take part in his online classes.

“I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I’m up, I’m up,’ and then I go back to sleep,” Ariel said. “Waking up on time was never, never possible.”

Ariel was far from alone.

The pandemic took a unique and devastating toll on the lives of New York City’s school children. But only now, with the terrifying grip of the disease receding, is the full extent of the damage coming into focus.

Countless young people today are still picking up the pieces from the disruption of lockdown, hybrid schooling and a continually changing reality that caught students, teachers and administrators off guard.

There was no roadmap, and many got lost along the way.

Stuck inside, cramped in small bedrooms and crowded apartments, students slipped into apathy as they were sequestered from friends their age and cut off from their typical routines. Others were thrust into hazardous conditions with new responsibilities, stepping up to earn money or care for family amid widespread economic instability.

Thousands of children lost family and friends to the virus. The sense of all-consuming loss was particularly pronounced in low-income, Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, where a disproportionate share of residents were let go from jobs, fell ill or died from COVID.

When the lockdown lifted, normalcy didn’t return. Inflation squeezed households, and evictions resumed. Federal programs helping families weather the worst of the pandemic eventually came to an end. Mental health suffered, as young people reported feelings of anxiety, depression or even contemplating suicide.

Many children are still struggling to find their way back.

Last school year, 36% of public school students were considered “chronically” absent, according to education officials. It was a slight improvement compared to the year before, but represented tens of thousands more kids out of class than before COVID hit. The dropout rate ticked upwards for the first time since the pandemic began, to 5.4% in August 2022.

The pandemic was the most serious blows to education in recent history.

“It just disrupted kids’ lives,” said Robert Balfanz, an education professor at Johns Hopkins, where he researches high school dropouts and chronic absenteeism. “And it’s not easy for them to snap back.”

“Once kids lose the system, no one is situated to go get those kids. No one is staffed and resourced with strategies to go get them — and that’s how they fall through the cracks.”

Forced to work

Money was already tight before Ashley Lopez’s mom, the lone breadwinner in their immigrant family, watched jobs vanish overnight as the shutdown took hold.

Ashley’s parents were separated, and her mom relied on housekeeping work to feed and house her children. But clients didn’t want her coming around with a deadly virus spreading.

Just weeks before the pandemic, Ashley had transferred to an alternative school in Manhattan. She had poor attendance at her former school that she chalked up to a “rebellious stage,” skipping classes to hang out with her cousin or go to the mall.

At her new school, older than her classmates in the 10th grade and struggling to relate because of the age gap, she found herself cut off from potential friends as classes moved online. Her sister, who just gave birth, stayed home with the newborn baby.

“The only one who could work,” she said, “is me.”

Ashley started picking up odd jobs in Queens and the Bronx. She worked as a street vendor with her dad, selling flowers on Mother’s Day, ice cream on the street and then in parks during the summer months, and poppers on New Year’s Eve. She shared her earnings with her mother.

She never made any sort of decision to stop attending remote classes. But Ashley didn’t really know her teachers, received few texts or calls and lost interest quickly in her coursework. Her responsibilities to her family soon crowded out the monotony of virtual school.

“I was logged into my classes. Sometimes I’d join, sometimes I wouldn’t,” Ashley said. “I felt like I didn’t know nobody, because I hadn’t been to the building much before that.”

Months passed by without her logging on, until it added up to a year. She fell off the school rosters.

“Some of us have other responsibilities,” she said, “so it made it easier for us to say this isn’t a priority right now. Our priority is finding something to eat because there weren’t many jobs during COVID. Everything was closed.”

Ashley was one of many young people who were set on entirely different paths during the pandemic. They left school to earn money and care for their families. They withdrew, sometimes not to come back, or they leaned on relationships and new coping mechanisms to manage their stress.

They did what they needed to do to get through.

Cooped up

Tashyra Hiraldo didn’t want to get COVID, but felt pent up and uncomfortably close stuck with her family in her mom’s Bronx apartment. She had always been a good student, but at 17, she was suddenly locked down with nowhere to go.

Before the pandemic hit, whenever her home life got chaotic or drama played out between friends, school provided structure and routine. She built an independent life. Outside of school, she worked odd jobs and hung out with her friends, sometimes sneaking out to drink or smoke hookah.

But during lockdown, simmering family tensions started boiling over, and she felt increasingly more frustrated and tense. With no privacy and no space, she began snapping at her three younger siblings more and butting heads with her mom and grandparents, who were sleeping in the living room.

Online school wasn’t just difficult — it felt like the least of her worries.

When she did log on to class, she was not paying attention. The list of assignments she fell behind on got longer and longer. It felt defeating, like she was never going to catch up. She stopped logging on entirely. Soon, 10th grade fizzled out.

“There was a time when I was doing online classes and I was tired,” Tashyra said. “I saw the work just piling up. So I just stopped right there. I just dropped out then.”

Feeling suffocated at home, Tashyra started going to her boyfriend’s place more frequently, where he lived with his mother. There was a little more space there — both physically and mentally. Soon she was living there.

On the day before her 18th birthday, Tashyra found out she was pregnant. It was Sept. 2, just days before the start of a new school year.

“At first I didn’t believe it, I had to get like five pregnancy tests because I didn’t think it was real,” she said.

She decided not to return to school.

Other kids would make the same decision; some would try, but fall short. As the first full school year amid the pandemic got underway that fall, a frightening picture began coming into focus for politicians, parents, teachers and school administrators about coming back from the isolation of COVID lockdowns:

Just picking up where you left off wasn’t going to happen.

This is part 1 of a 3-part series. Watch nydailynews.com in the coming days for parts 2 and 3.