It's difficult to be an adult and appreciate just how devastating the COVID-19 shutdown has been and continues to be for young people.

Not only public schools, but every school--private, religious, charter, preparatory, colleges and universities--has been closed down since March. Seniors missed the last few months of their final year, with all its usual ceremonies, celebrations and closure. Kindergartners were set in front of screens to watch their teachers on Zoom. With everyone struggling to adjust to remote learning almost overnight, teachers took different approaches and students grappled with balky Chromebooks, slow or non-existent w-fi, and missing learning materials. Almost all students had left books, supplies and personal items in their desks or lockers and no one could enter the school buildings to retrieve them for weeks. Some students even had to wait to recover things like inhalers and spare pairs of glasses.

At home all day every day, kids had to figure out how to manage their time. Every family with one or both parents working was on its own when it came to monitoring their kids in remote learning and recreation, juggling work schedules, and dealing with all the other stresses that came with the lockdown, from bare grocery store shelves to reduced income. Day care centers had all been closed too, except for children of essential workers on a limited basis.

Kids may not love everything about school, but in our society, it gives them a structure and purpose equivalent to a full time job. To suddenly take this away from them leaves them as disoriented and uprooted as an adult who is unexpectedly laid off. Often, kids won't talk directly about their feelings. They worry about their families, and whether losing so much school time will mean they have to stay back a grade or flunk the SATs. They act out or have nightmares, overeat or won't eat, fight with their siblings and pester their parents, but they'll hardly ever say the truth: I'm really scared.

The worst thing about the COVID-19 shutdown is that we have no idea when it will end. We hope that schools will reopen in September, but this depends on so much that no one can control: whether there is a surge in new cases, for example, and what the CDC recommends for precautions. Parents who need to go back to work aren't sure whether they can count on their kids being in school. School itself may be so drastically different that kids will be shaken and disoriented even more when they do return, adjusting to the new rules. Wearing face masks; separated into small groups; never leaving the same classroom even for lunch, while teachers rotate room to room; losing art, music, theater, and PE; going to school on alternating schedules or days, including Saturdays; having their temperatures checked every day...it sounds like a dystopian science fiction story.

How some of these protocols will be implemented with drastically reduced numbers of staff is a Catch-22 dilemma. On June 11, Winchendon Public Schools, like many school districts in Massachusetts, terminated the contracts of 76 district staff, including all para-educators and all music and art teachers. The pandemic is a health crisis, but slowing down the pandemic has created an economic crisis. No one knows yet just what the state and town budgets will really look like, but business losses and unemployment rates forecast an unprecedented shortfall in revenue for both the state and individual communities.

Congress is trying to help, but the HEROES Act, which was passed by the House of Representatives and would send money to states, is stalled in the Senate. The Winchendon Teachers' Association is urging people to contact their legislators and ask them to pass this bill.

There are a lot of lessons we can be learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of them have to do with our values and priorities. We spend far too much on things we don't need, like a bloated Department of "Defense" (we haven't needed "defending" since the War of 1812) that vampirizes 54 percent of our tax dollars with no accountability of any kind. It's time for us to ask where our resources will do the most good--our children and their futures, or baseless, paranoid fears and obsolete prejudices?

Our kids are being shaped by their experiences and our decisions right now. Schools or warmongering? Let's make the right choice.

Inanna Arthen