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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Voted for her, I don't blame her for the crime, which is literally up in every area in the US, both urban and rural.

I wish she opened up schools earlier for my kids. I don't actually care about learning loss in other wards. If they don't want to send their kids to school, that is their problem.[/quote]

I am the opposite. I was most bothered by the impact of closed school son high risk kids, but for self-interested reasons. I live on the Hill and crime is ridiculous right now and it is absolutely driven by kids, some as young as 12 and 13. Car jackings, armed robberies, property destruction and theft... it's a bunch of hooligan kids running around seeing what they can get away with and wanting to watch the world burn. I know two people who have had kids break into their garage/parking pad to hot wire their cars, only to vandalize them and dump them less than a mile away. It's a "victimless crime" in that their insurance pays for it and no one is injured, but stuff like that contributes to this sense of lawlessness and chaos. It's terrible.

And I absolutely think school closures played a major role in what we are seeing now. These kids had nowhere to go for a year. Even once they partially opened schools, I know for a fact that they had trouble getting a lot of these kids back in the classroom. Many never signed in for virtual school and had no really connection to school for the entire year, and some of them still don't. It's not just about "learning loss" for these kids -- they were behind well before the pandemic. It's about just kind of walking away from kids and families for an entire year and telling parents "figure it out." UMC parents did figure it out for the most part, and MC parents like me muddled through (sometimes a great personal cost -- I wound up having to go on unpaid leave for a time). But kids in unstable families who are already prone to truancy and dropping at, who are already at high risk of becoming part of the school to prison pipeline? They didn't have a chance and now they are out there making the city feel unlivable. And what will come of it? They'll get arrested, spend time in juvie, get released but now have a record, never really get back on track. The deck was stacked against them and then white liberals in this city decided the best possible thing was to close schools indefinitely. Idiots.

People talk about learning loss and the data is concerning, but what I want to see is what percentage of middle and high school kids outside of upper NW simply never returned to school. What percentage never logged in once for virtual learning. What are the truancy rates at these schools now? What about graduation rates post Covid compared to before?[/quote]

I am genuinely curious if this theory is correct, or if there is a general "F the police, F white people" feeling on the part of these kids that combines with DC's almost non-existent criminal justice system, where kids just know they can get away with it and are mad.  If the school closures did not coincide with the social justice movement, I would agree you're probably right.  But when you have a lot of disaffected young men (in any country), you have a lot of crime. [/quote]

I think it must be a combination.

One thing that is impossible to know but is worth discussing is how schools would have handled social justice issues in DC in 2020-2021 had they not been closed for Covid. I know schools talked about these issues and offered support and services to kids and families, but it just doesn't work the same virtually, and also relies on parents and kids to be logging in daily, which many, many young black kids in this city were not (whether due to lack of resources, lack of interest, lack of parental supervision, or something else). Even this year, with masking and strict Covid procedures for much of the year, I think really inhibited the ability of schools to address these issues with kids and talk about it in a way that might help.

I don't think you can blame it on any one thing, but I think to argue that school closures are wholly unrelated to the fact that many DC minors are engaging in higher levels of criminal activity than they were three years is naive. At least some of these kids would have benefitted from having regular school for that year. It would not have eliminated the problem or solved things for everyone, but if you care about these kids (or care about the communities they live in) I don't know how you can ignore the fact that they had nowhere else to go for a full year.[/quote]

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