The lost year: What the pandemic cost teenagers

Propublica ^ | 3/8/21 | Alec MacGillis

[volunbeer]

Everything looks the same on either side of the Texas-New Mexico border in the great oil patch of the Permian Basin. There are the pump jacks scattered across the plains, nodding up and down with metronomic regularity. There are the brown highway signs alerting travelers to historical markers tucked away in the nearby scrub. There are the frequent memorials of another sort, to the victims of vehicle accidents. And there are the astonishingly deluxe high school football stadiums. This is, after all, the region that produced “Friday Night Lights.”

The city of Hobbs, population just under 40,000, sits on the New Mexico side, as tight to the border as a wide receiver’s toes on a sideline catch. From the city’s eastern edge to the Texas line is barely more than two miles. From Hobbs to the Texas towns of Seminole and Denver City is a half-hour drive — next door, by the standards of the vast Southwestern plains.

In the pandemic year of 2020, though, the two sides of the state line might as well have been in different hemispheres.

[volunbeer]

Kids paid a big price and they did not need to do so.

[rlmorel]

Okay, thanks for saying so.

It wasn’t that you disagreed with even my opening, because I understand people disagree especially with things like this.

It was the verbiage and tone you used in disagreeing that I found off-putting.

[Svartalfiar]

Recently, Fuller told me, she had received an envelope in the mail from the New Mexico education department. She opened it and found a letter demanding to know why Landon had been truant from his online classes during the fall semester. The bureaucratic oversight stunned her. “He would be in school if he wasn’t dead,” she said.

[whitney69]

“Out of control government did.”

I hope you are referencing state government for the physical actions. The shutting down of the states and the woke actions have been basically in their hands, not that of the feds during the Trump parts. He made offers to them they refused so they could use the “pandemic” as a tool to further their efforts toward the garnishing of votes. And they were even willing to throw a few the largest states governors, like California, Michigan, and New York, under the bus to do it.

It is the way the libs can be in charge, get their way, and apparently be able to scam the voters.

wy69