Fall Impact Report '21

ith our return to in person programs this past summer and then school campuses in mid August an important conversation has been brewing among us as a community regarding learning loss. While that conversation is important there’s a separate and equivalent deficit to be addressed with regard to Social and Emotional wellness. Learning is a cornerstone of youth development but it is relationships and our ability to work together that propels society forward.

In March of 2020, like all of us, children across the nation severed ties with the outside world. We left schools and clubs and built these insulated pockets of humanity; together but still divided. Unlike adults, however, the loss of contact to friends, extended family members, and mentors meant that skills we develop as children and rely on to be successful as adults were set aside. This included essential skills like emotional intelligence, relationship building, and community engagement which could not be practiced in a vacuum and have atrophied.

Suppose for a moment that you are seven years old. You’ve spent the last 18 months largely at home with older siblings. It has been a very different experience from your life as a first grader. You woke up that morning in March and the largest constant in your life, school, had shut down. The friends you had there, the teachers you loved, all of the normalcy and structure that gave you context to understand and interpret the world around you and your role in it vanished overnight. For the next year you were almost entirely reliant on your immediate family members and a school issued Chromebook for meaningful social and academic growth. You don’t do sleepovers anymore. The big family dinner every Sunday was cancelled. You don’t have the option to spend time with friends separately and then one day you are plunged back into the thick of it. You are cast from your very intimate bubble into a sea of children who are all struggling to adapt. The importance of learning loss is a large part of the story but not the whole story.

If you have kids, you have probably seen evidence of this behavior at home.

How much TV are they watching? How much time are they spending on video games? How long have they been staring at their phone. In short, the hidden cost of the pandemic extends beyond the gradebook and into the fundamental shift in how our children interact with the world in the absence of