Step out in style this season by rocking these Spring/Summer 2021 trends straight from the runways of Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and more.

by Margherita Meda (Italy)

After a year that rocked the world in every direction, big changes are inevitable. As fashion often reflects society's everyday experiences, the Spring/Summer 2021 collections were the first shows (virtual and in-person) to offer designers' commentary on the events of 2020. As for the clothes, the old rules you knew no longer apply. Fresh trends have emerged, claiming the right to be a part of the new world order. To join this cultural revolution, check out the 15 trends you should be wearing from the Spring/Summer 2021 runways. 

---

'80s Graffiti

Chanel

Louis Vuitton

Marni

Dolce & Gabbana

No longer relegated as decoration for streetside walls, today's graffiti invades the world of fashion as a colorful boost to even the most luxe collections. From Louis Vuitton to Chanel, catwalks boasted bright colors and '80s style. 

---

Pastels

Giambattista Valli

Chanel

Alberta Ferretti

Chloé

Valentino

Givenchy

Versace

Patou

Victoria Beckham

Raf Simons

Versace

Nobody can resist the sweetness of pastel colors. For your 2021 color palette, think cheerful and optimistic. Whether you're going for something romantic like Giambattista Valli or sexy in Versace, pastels are the way to go.

---

Boyish

Acne Studios

Proenza Schouler

Ami

Givenchy

Stella McCartney

Hermès

Jacquemus

Coach

Proenza Schouler

Versace

Mugler

Tod's

The Row

Valentino

It is no longer necessary to steal from your boyfriend's wardrobe. The thin line between male and female clothing has faded. This year, experiment with sizes and shapes and create the outfit of your dreams by dipping into the menswear section for some maxi blazers, straight-legged pants, and oversized shirts.

---

Couture Skirts

Balenciaga

Dries Van Noten

Maison Margiela

Michael Kors

Givenchy

Jacquemus

Valentino

Invest in a couture skirt without being afraid to exaggerate. After all, the term "excessive" rarely applies when it comes to fashion. Why not take pleasure in a garment that breaks the boundaries of traditional style? With sequins or feathers, details are the real key to making couture work for you.

---

Fishnet

Balenciaga

Hermès

Burberry

Fendi

Rick Owens

Jil Sander

If you've turned up your nose to the fishnet trend in the past, think again. Rocking this cagey style is a game of layering and details. 

---

'90s Helmut Lang

Balenciaga

Coperni

Balenciaga

Givenchy

Raf Simons

Proenza Schouler

Givenchy

If you don't know by now, consider this your wake up call: the '90s are back. However, this season, the world of Helmut Lang—which marked an entire generation of young cosmopolitan creatives—takes the main stage as our retrospective inspiration. Take this season to reducate yourself on the brand's urban chic revolution in the pre-Internet era.

---

Cinched Waist

Chanel

Prada

Chloé

Fendi

Prada

To give traditional dresses an update, the trick is to choose the right balance between past and contemporary. Keep the lines classic, but the details modern. Cinch the waist with a chic belt to define the silhouette and get that elusive hourglass shape.

---

Minimalist

Acne Studios

Coperni

Emporio Armani

Giorgio Armani

Prada

Proenza Schouler

Sportmax

You can never go wrong with minimal. The long-coveted aesthetic returns to the catwalk playing with black and white tones. Simple and clean lines dominated the runway: the essentiality of a Proenza Schouler coat, the angelic whiteness of an Emporio Armani dress, and the transparencies of Acne Studios. Everything is possible in the name of minimalism.

---

Oversized Shoulders

Balenciaga

Balmain

Fendi

Maison Margiela

Givenchy

JW Anderson

Patou

Rick Owens

Shoulder pads are back. Though the style is a hallmark of the '80s, many don't know that they were first popularized by the military. The trend began in the '40s when they wore uniform jackets with slightly pointed shoulders. However, for today's designers, the shoulder pad fad has taken on a life of its own. They add that unexpected twist for lovers of danger and for those who like to push the parameters of today's trends.

---

Prints

Dior

Gucci

Isabel Marant

Kenzo

Miu Miu

Patou

Prada

Proenza Schouler

Valentino

Colorful, bold, and over the top: this year the prints unleash their potential to the maximum, exuding joy and gaiety. After long months (has it only been months?) spent within the walls of ours homes, this spring is the time to stand out.

---

Sequins

Chanel

Junya Watanabe

Rick Owens

Valentino

It's been too long since the last party and the excitement of wearing a shiny dress that comes with it. It's time to rejoin society and do it in style. Sequins seem to be the only answer to make up for the months spent in the comfort of our sweatpants and leggings.

---

Silver

Balenciaga

Dries Van Noten

Lanvin

Burberry

Miu Miu

Isabel Marant

Paco Rabanne

Valentino

Continuing the party theme, consider silver to be your go-to color for the season. The metallic hue was all over the runways this season leaving behind a trail of magnetic fashion choices.

---

Trench Coats

Burbery

JW Anderson

Altuzarra

Coach

Ferragamo

Max Mara

Loewe

Prada

Louis Vuitton

Paco Rabanne

Victoria Beckham

Patou

The trench coat changes its skin this year with new colors, patterns, and fabrics. For those who love to experiment but remain faithful to tradition, upping your trench game with a more exaggerated silhouette or embroidered detail provides the perfect new staple pieces your closet needs.

---

Tie-dye

Dior

Tom Ford

Dries Van Noten

During quarantine, the world mobilized in the name of do-it-yourself. As a result, designers found themselves gravitating to the hippy-inspired trend as well. If you're a fan of rainbows, this is the trend for you.

---

Urban Sportswear

Celine

Louis Vuitton

Lacoste

Gucci

Prada

Miu Miu

Versace

Miu Miu

Who could have imagined that athletic apparel could be so chic? Team uniforms have become essential in the wardrobe of a true fashionista this year, especially if they come stamped with a designer label.

In a college application season like no other, students who have seen every aspect of their lives disrupted by the coronavirus are grappling with how to show their potential.

High school seniors around the U.S. are facing January and February college application deadlines without SAT and ACT entrance exam scores, community service records and resumes flush with extracurricular activities — all casualties of an era of social distancing and remote learning that has carried over from their junior year.

The pandemic has prompted colleges to make tests optional and find new ways to evaluate students, including student-athletes, like southern California high school senior Anthony Correra. The pandemic canceled his last football season, shortening the highlight tapes that he’d hoped to share with college recruiters.

“Colleges and universities don’t have the same tools that they did to evaluate students before,” said Angel Perez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC. “The experience that students are going through right now is drastically different from many others.”

For the first time, the Common Application that allows students to apply to multiple institutions at the same time added an optional space so students can explain in 250 words or less the pandemic’s impacts.

A sampling of responses provided to The Associated Press illustrate the pandemic’s academic, emotional and financial toll.

“My parents losing their jobs made it very hard financially and we struggled to get by,” a student wrote. “It was already hard before the pandemic but with the low amount of money flowing in as a result of Covid-19’s safe to say our situations got even worse.”

Others wrote of struggling to focus alongside siblings and parents in noisy households disrupted by work and school Zoom calls, or of money and technology challenges.

“We want to provide colleges with the information they need, with the goal of having students answer COVID-19 questions only once while using the rest of the application as they would have before to share their interests and perspectives beyond COVID-19,” the nonprofit Common Application said.

Correra, an all-season athlete at Grand Terrace High School in California, said he hadn’t thought much about college until recently, describing a side effect of life on what he called “quarantine time” where months and milestones pass unremarkably. He has applied to schools in the University of California and California State University systems, as well as some private colleges.

The colleges that have shown interest have been understanding because so many students are in the same situation, said his father, Mike Correra.

“It’s been kind of refreshing a little bit because I’m not as stressed as I was,” said Mike Correra, who said one coach even viewed his cellphone video from his son’s games.

Colleges have been eager to work with applicants amid concerns about enrollment declines and an alarming drop in the number of potential students, particularly low-income students, filling out financial aid documents — an indicator they may not pursue college.

Very competitive colleges, though, have had the opposite problem of trying to juggle large numbers of students who deferred acceptance last year on top of increasing applications for the coming year. Harvard College, for one, marked its most competitive early admissions cycle ever, the Harvard Crimson reported. The college invited 747 of 10,086 early applicants to join its Class of 2025, down from 895 of 6,424 applicants last year.

More than 1,600 institutions have made it optional for students to submit admissions test scores in an acknowledgement of cancelled testing sessions, Perez said. Instead, admissions officers will lean more heavily on essays, grades and the rigor of coursework, pre-pandemic extracurriculars and more than ever, the interest students show in attending.

“Usually this time of year, schools would be all over the country and the world, recruiting. … But now they’ve moved into this online space where they are seeking individual conversations, interviews, engagement with students and families,” Perez said. “So I would also say to students, raise your hand and reach out individually to an admissions counselor if you’re interested in those institutions.”

With in-person interviews difficult, institutions including Washington University in St. Louis and Bowdoin in Maine are inviting students to send videos introducing themselves, a practice that was catching on before the pandemic. Bowdoin this year also said applicants could swap out a usual teacher evaluation with an “other” recommendation from a friend, employer or someone else with insight about their character.

But rounding up any kind of letters remotely can be challenging.

“It’s definitely preferable to be able to discuss those in person instead of emailing back and forth,” said Claire Gelillo, a high school senior in Rockville, Maryland. “One of the big things is not having the support of peers and teachers as readily available.”

Lexington, Kentucky, high school senior Gabriella Staykova had planned to visit several colleges during spring break in her junior year, but with her school shut down since March 13 she is applying for many colleges sight unseen. She crossed Barnard College in New York City off the list and has reservations about others in unfamiliar cities.

“I’m just hoping that things will clear up enough before Decision Day that I’ll be able to either tour the schools in person or that the schools will offer some sort of online alternative that’s a lot more personal than what they usually would do,” she said. “That way maybe I can make more educated guesses.”

By The Associated Press

Looking ahead to stepping out in style once again, WSJ. picks the top looks from the December fashion presentations

By Jenny Hartman and Alexander Fisher

A new type of fashion season continued to evolve this month, with designers presenting their latest collections in a wide array of formats, including short films and virtual-reality experiences. The collections were mostly pre-fall—though Dolce & Gabbana showed haute couture, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Brandon Maxwell showed their spring collections and Balenciaga showed its fall collection. Featuring clothes that will start to hit stores as winter gives way to warmer weather, these collections are a crystal ball for the future of dressing up. What will suit the highly anticipated occasion? A floor-length fringe tunic from Oscar de la Renta or a dazzling suit from Givenchy? Designers, tasked with the unprecedented challenge of making clothes in the age of coronavirus, have introduced a subdued kind of glamour: Festive details, like marabou feathers and outsize sleeves were paired with the cozy fabrics and fluid silhouettes that everyone has grown accustomed to wearing at home. Take, for example, Brandon Maxwell’s cheeky take on the three-piece suit—a bralette, jacket and pant all tailored entirely out of gray sweatshirt-style material. There will really be no excuse not to dress up in 2021, even if it’s just to run errands.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF BOTTEGA VENETTA

Brighten up the work week and weekend alike in a shrunken, strawberry pink skirt suit from Bottega Veneta.

---

PHOTO: JONAS GUSTAVSSON

A tailored look from Brandon Maxwell means never having to say goodbye to your sweats.

---

PHOTO: MÉTIERS D’ ART 2020-21, LOOK 50 COURTESY OF CHANEL

Ease back into evening wear with black velvet leggings accented with gold paillettes from Chanel.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF DIOR MEN

A look from the Dior Men’s collection achieves the dream of wearing a satin suit and slippers.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF ETRO

Etro offers a newfound freedom to wear just about anything with a pair of baggy jeans.

---

PHOTO: SEBASTIAN KIM / COURTESY OF FEAR OF GOD

Fear of God’s new suiting separates leave just enough room for a favorite sweatshirt.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF FERRAGAMO

Salvatore Ferragamo layers a long leather skirt over a casual outfit of leggings and a poplin button up.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF GIVENCHY

Givenchy’s gold lapels give bare skin a chance to glow.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF JIL SANDER

The clean lines of Jil Sander’s silhouettes make a strong case for getting back into a power suit.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF KHAITE

Keep things simple with a crisp white shirt and miniskirt from Khaite.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF MAX MARA

Wrap up in cozy monochrome layers from Max Mara.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF MCQUEEN

Creative director Sarah Burton pares back embellishment and prints to put the focus on structure and shape in this Alexander McQueen trench coat.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF OSCAR DE LA RENTA

A silk fringe dress from Oscar de la Renta strikes the right balance between red-carpet-ready and evening-at-home.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF SAINT LAURENT

Saint Laurent elevates the Zoom top with an easy floral blouse trimmed with bold marabou feathers.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF ULLA JOHNSON

A playful silhouette and graphic print meet the comfort of knits in this dress from Ulla Johnson.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF VERSACE

Sleek body-skimming dresses from Versace are as sexy as they are essential.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF BALENCIAGA

Straight out of Balenciaga’s futuristic VR video game an off-shoulder trench styled with medieval armor-style stiletto boots.

---

PHOTO: COURTESY OF DOLCE&GABBANA

Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda couture collection, entirely fatto a mano, mixes a strong shoulder and shawl lapels with a touch of exposed underpinnings.

Two new Netflix films, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Giving Voice, honor the late playwright’s rejection of white commercial restrictions.

DANIEL POLLACK-PELZNER

“Do we assimilate into American society and thereby lose our culture, or do we maintain our culture separate from the dominant cultural values?" — August Wilson TOM SWEENEY / MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE / ZUMA PRESS / ALAMY

It’s a glorious moment for devotees of the late, great playwright August Wilson, even with many theaters closed. Netflix has two new Wilson films on offer: a swift, sumptuous version of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the heartening documentary Giving Voice, about high-school students who discover the thrill and resonance of Wilson’s characters while preparing for a national monologue competition. Together, the films reflect not only on the achievement of Wilson’s Century Cycle—his 10-play chronicle of Black life in America through each decade of the 20th century—but also on his long-running battle with the conventions of white, Eurocentric drama.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom features two Black artists (in the film, Viola Davis’s eponymous blues singer, Ma, and Chadwick Boseman’s jazz trumpeter, Levee) struggling for a white-dominated music industry in 1920s Chicago to recognize their worth. Much of the play takes place in a subterranean rehearsal room where Rainey’s backup musicians swap stories, boasts, and insults as they debate the prospects of gaining approval from the white executives who control the recording studio upstairs. It was Wilson’s breakthrough play, his first to be accepted in the National Playwrights Conference, in 1982, after five previous scripts were rejected, and his first to be  produced on Broadway. Commercial theater was, however, a strange fit for a play that, as the critic Frank Rich noted, has “virtually no story.” Wilson, who wrote poetry before he turned to playwriting, drew inspiration from what he called “the four B’s”—the oral tradition of the blues, the collage art of Romare Bearden, the political engagement of Amiri Baraka, and the metaphysical explorations of Jorge Luis Borges. Wilson produced lyrical, chatty, digressive scripts, rich in African American character, history, and ritual, that didn’t slot neatly into mainstream expectations of a well-made play.

Viola Davis stars in a scene from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. (David Lee / Netflix)

Though it became a Broadway success, Ma Rainey was criticized for lacking a unified structure around a central protagonist whose rising conflict could generate the play’s action. For his next play, Fences, Wilson responded to critics by writing a recognizable, realistic arc for a tragic hero, the baseball slugger turned garbageman Troy Maxson, who could take his place alongside Willy Loman, King Lear, and Oedipus. The play won the 1987 Tony for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama, earned $12 million on Broadway, and has long been Wilson’s most widely produced work. But having proved his Aristotelian credentials, he returned to loosely structured, spiritually adventurous ensemble riffs in his subsequent plays (Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson) even as American theater tried to shoehorn him into forms that were seen as universal—which is to say, more familiar to white producers and audiences. Fences “was not the kind of play I wanted to write,” Wilson told Vanity Fair in 1989. “But all these people who are used to theater kept trying to tell me my work should be something different.”

Read: ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ and the liberating power of music

The politics of dramatic structure might appear tenuous. It’s not obvious that a director’s request, say, for Wilson to trim his characters’ monologues so that Ma Rainey would build more swiftly and clock in at under three hours (as, indeed, he was asked—and eventually agreed—to do) has a racial valence. (The new Netflix film, directed by George C. Wolfe from a script adapted by the longtime Wilson collaborator Ruben Santiago-Hudson, runs at a fleet 90 minutes.) For Wilson, however, holding space for a character’s story was an invitation for audiences to listen to the speech of ordinary Black people—rhythms that first captivated Wilson in the songs of Bessie Smith, and then in stories he’d hear elders swap in his native Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As he explained to an interviewer in 1990, “I think the long speeches are an unconscious rebellion against the notion that Blacks do not have anything important to say.” If that derailed the expectations of a well-made play, Wilson didn’t mind. In a 2003 interview, he welcomed the development of “a Black theater that is not based on Aristotle’s Poetics and European conventions,” constructing a Black aesthetic instead from sources such as the blues and Black nationalism.

At stake was a broader issue of assimilation. The fundamental question that African Americans had faced since the end of slavery, Wilson said, was: “Do we assimilate into American society and thereby lose our culture, or do we maintain our culture separate from the dominant cultural values and participate in the American society as Africans rather than as Blacks who have adopted European values?” As a playwright, Wilson dramatized this question dialectically, and his characters repeatedly learn the danger of adopting European values at the expense of their ancestral heritage. “We done sold Africa for the price of tomatoes,” the piano player mourns in Ma Rainey. “We done sold ourselves to the white man in order to be like him.” When Wilson disparaged Fences as his least favorite of his plays, despite its critical acclaim and commercial success, it was hard not to hear his resentment that the play had compelled him to adopt artistic values that weren’t his own.

One of the joys of the high schoolers in Giving Voice encountering Wilson’s work is that they perform monologues liberated from the plots of the plays. Their interests—and the judging criteria for the competition—are characterization, language, energy, not dramatic structure. The students find their own courageous voice onstage in speeches that play like earthy arias, revealing Black experiences in richly textured, everyday language, rather than advancing a theatrical arc. As one of the students says, the rhythm of a Wilson monologue is the blues: “The only thing you have to do is hear the song.” Listening to these teenagers’ voices becomes, in some ways, a return to Ma Rainey’s art—the blues liberated from white commercial restrictions.

Aaron Guy performs in the August Wilson Monologue Competition in Giving Voice. (Netflix)

Through interviews with artists such as Viola Davis and Denzel Washington (who produced Netflix’s Ma Rainey after directing and starring alongside Davis in a 2016 film of Fences), the documentary also insists on the universality of Wilson’s writing, putting him alongside Shakespeare as a poet of human experience. “August belongs to everybody,” the actor Stephen McKinley Henderson tells us. “Everybody that’s got a mother, father, sister, brother—this speaks to you.” It’s an inspiring message, but it appears slightly at odds with Wilson’s own professed aesthetics of a theater by and for Black artists. In a controversial 1996 speech, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” Wilson opposed the so-called color-blind casting of Shakespeare plays and other classics, arguing that it reinforces white drama as the norm into which artists of other identities have to fit: “The idea of color-blind casting is the same idea of assimilation that Black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years.”

Although Wilson was attacked as a separatist, his point was that Black theater has just as much power to lay claim to universality as the works of any other tradition. “I write about the Black experience in America,” he explained, “and contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities. I am surprised when people come up to me and say, ‘Well, Fences is universal.’ Of course it is! They say that as though the universals existed outside of Black life. It was Romare Bearden, the artist, who when asked about his work said, ‘I try to explore in terms of the life that I know best the things which are common to all culture.’ And I thought, Ah-hah! That is also what I aspire to do.” Wilson accomplished his goal by expanding both the range of human experiences that could count as universal and the range of dramatic forms that could portray those experiences.

Read: Chadwick Boseman gave us something we had not had before

In Giving Voice, we see the finalists in the competition each receive a hardcover box set containing all 10 plays in the Century Cycle—the canonization of Wilson in print. I like to think of some of the students opening the cycle’s final play, Radio Golf, which Wilson completed just before his death in 2005. The volume has a wry introduction by the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who relishes a moment in the play when a real-estate developer, planning to gentrify a historic Pittsburgh neighborhood, readies a $10,000 check to reimburse a longtime resident whose house will soon be torn down. “I have something for you,” the developer says. “It ain’t no bread pudding, is it?” Old Joe replies. “I was just thinking about some bread pudding. You like bread pudding? My mother used to make bread pudding. She made the best bread pudding. She didn’t do it too often but when she did she used to make a great big old pan last two or three days. It ain’t no bread pudding, is it?”

As Parks points out, this little riff—almost a song in the cadence of its longing repetitions—knocks both the play’s momentum and the redevelopment project off course. A reverie about bread pudding doesn’t belong in a well-made play, any more than Old Joe’s house belongs in the new neighborhood, but Wilson makes room for both. “The bread pudding is saying, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a history here and it doesn’t fit in with you guys’ stuff,’” Wilson once told Parks. “The bread pudding is not part of the traditional structure of the play, but it’s part of the structure of this particular community backed up against change.” If Denzel Washington ends up producing the complete Century Cycle, as he’s previously announced, I hope bread pudding makes the cut.

“We’re going to almost need a New Deal for an entire generation of kids to give them the opportunity to catch up,” one advocate said.

By Erin Einhorn

It has been almost 10 months since Covid-19 began battering families in the United States, putting parents out of work, shrouding their homes in grief and loss, and shutting children out of the schools that taught and cared for them.

It’s all taken an unthinkable toll on children — a social, emotional and academic ordeal so extreme that some advocates and experts warn its repercussions could rival those of a hurricane or other disaster.

“Recovery from Katrina wasn’t a one-year recovery. We didn’t just bring the kids back and everything fell into place. And this will be the same,” said Betheny Gross, the associate director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, who studied New Orleans schools after the 2005 hurricane and is now tracking Covid-19’s impact.

A nation of children coping with trauma, illness and disruption will need more than a vaccine to address the fallout, she said.

“I don’t think we can just start school next fall and say, ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’”

To measure the effect this year has had on children, NBC News gathered data on a range of child welfare metrics, looking at what’s changed since March when the virus closed nearly every school in the country.

The numbers aren’t all bad news — drug and alcohol use among youth, for example, appears to be down, as are juvenile arrest and incarceration rates.

But, in other areas, preliminary data points to alarming signs that kids are in trouble:

• Emergency rooms have seen a 24 percent increase in mental health-related visits from children ages 5 to 11 compared to last year. The increase among older kids is even higher — 31 percent.

• Food banks have been slammed with hungry families as an estimated 17 million children — many largely cut off from free school lunches — are now in danger of not having enough to eat. That’s an increase of more than 6 million hungry children compared to before the pandemic.

• Schools are struggling to teach students remotely or in classrooms in which children wear masks and sit behind plastic shields. One national testing organization reported that the average student in grades 3-8 who took a math assessment this fall scored 5 to 10 percentile points behind students who took the same test last year, with Black, Hispanic and poor students falling even further behind.

• Classrooms have been unusually empty, with quarantines and sickness affecting attendance in face-to-face schools and computer issues interfering with online instruction. Some districts report that the number of students who’ve missed at least 10 percent of classes, which studies show could lead to devastating lifelong consequences, has more than doubled.

• And an estimated 3 million vulnerable students — who are homeless, in foster care, have disabilities or are learning English — appear to not be in school at all.

Vehicles wait their turn to collect groceries from the San Antonio Food Bank in Texas on April 17.Adrees Latif / Reuters file

It all adds up to a brewing catastrophe, said Barbara Duffield, who runs SchoolHouse Connection, which advocates for homeless children and recently found that, even as more families are at risk of losing their homes to eviction or foreclosure, schools are providing support services to an estimated 420,000 fewer homeless students compared to last year.

With schools closed, many families are weathering this crisis on their own, struggling in ways that could ripple through their schools and communities for years to come, she said.

“If we fail to address this, we’re just compounding trauma. We’re compounding loss,” Duffield said. “A student who is homeless, who has a disability, who has been traumatized by the racial violence we’ve seen this year, and then to be disconnected from arguably the only universal support system is disastrous. It means higher rates of suicide. Higher rates of depression, addiction, mental illness and physical disability, particularly for young children who are growing and developing right now. They’ll face more developmental delays leading to deficits in their education as they grow.”

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

The children most affected will be those facing racial, economic and other inequities that have only become more pronounced since the pandemic began, David Hinojosa, the director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said.

They already lagged behind their peers in school, and already faced significant obstacles. And now they’ve taken the brunt of the pandemic’s pain, he said.

“I can tell you,” he said, based on studies and reports he’s reviewed, “that learning time has plummeted, that English learners are being shortchanged of the language acquisition materials and teaching that they need because it’s basically a one-size-fits-all approach, and that students with disabilities have been grossly neglected across the country.”

It’s only getting worse, he said.

“Children are frustrated. Teachers are frustrated. Civil rights advocates are frustrated and I think it’s reaching a boiling point.”

Falling behind in math

Students in grades 3-8 who took a math test this fall scored lower in a national percentile ranking compared to last year.

The massive displacement from school — not to mention mounting evidence that kids and their parents are increasingly experiencing depression, anxiety and trauma during the pandemic — is what has experts comparing the children of the pandemic to kids who’ve survived natural disasters.

And, as with such catastrophes, the nation will need a powerful, comprehensive response, said Billy Shore, the executive director of Share Our Strength, an organization that works to end hunger.

“We’re going to almost need a New Deal for an entire generation of kids to give them the opportunity to catch up,” he said.

As of now, he added, “we don’t even know what we’re going to be dealing with.”

Children wait to enter P.S. 7 in Queens, N.Y., as public pre-K and elementary schools return to in-person learning on Dec. 8.Anthony Behar / Sipa USA via AP file

‘It’s heart-wrenching’

Before the pandemic began last spring, Mary Beth Cochran’s grandchildren were finally doing well.

The four children she took custody of five years ago — now ages 6 to 12 — had witnessed violence and drug abuse in their home, but with love and attention from their grandmother and their aunt, they were thriving in school. They had friends in their neighborhood in Canton, North Carolina.

Then Covid-19 started spreading. Cochran, 51, saw food prices spike in local stores just as the children lost weeks of access to free school meals. She couldn’t look for part-time work to supplement her disability check because she needed to supervise remote instruction. Money has been tight and her grandchildren — whose school partially reopened in October — have not done well with the turmoil.

One child, 11, became so anxious as her grades slipped, and as she’s watched her grandmother struggle to put food on the table, that she’s been pulling out her eyelashes — an old nervous habit.

Another, 6, who was recently diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, missed so much instruction when he couldn’t sit still for his online classes that his teachers are now warning he could be held back, Cochran said.

“It’s heart-wrenching,” she said. “They had come so far after all of that and then, boom, the corona hit and they weren’t able to get their education, the proper one-on-one time from their teachers or their counselors.”

Mary Beth Cochran says her grandchildren have struggled emotionally and academically. She's had difficulty putting food on the table. Courtesy of Mary Beth Cochran

In Detroit, Vanessa Burch, 62, is raising her grandnieces and nephews — five children, ages 4 to 14, who came to her with special needs due to fetal alcohol syndrome and a history of trauma. The children, who lost two siblings to accidental deaths before their mother lost parental rights five years ago, all struggle in school, she said, but the extra attention and services they were getting before the pandemic had helped them make progress.

Now, with their classes online, those services have largely ended and the family is grieving the loss of three relatives who died in the past year, including one whom Burch suspects had Covid-19. New grief has compounded the old, she said, leading to screaming outbursts from the younger children, and signs of sadness in the older ones, who now sometimes struggle to get out of bed.

It’s left Burch unsure about their future.

“Will they be able to function as adults?” she asked. “Will they be able to take charge of their own lives and do what needs to be done?”

She’d asked these painful questions before, she said, but “this just puts a whole new depth around it. Now it’s like, what is going to happen? Will they ever catch up?”

In Easton, California, Pricila Herrera’s family is now dealing with illness on top of other challenges. She, her husband and two of her three children recently came down with Covid-19, and have been coughing and exhausted.

Their oldest daughter, 17, who’s still healthy, has shouldered the weight of caring for her family, another burden on a teen who’s already had to help her younger siblings, who are 9 and 15, navigate their online classes since her parents don’t speak English.

The girl is overwhelmed, Herrera, 45, said of her oldest, speaking in Spanish. “She cooks and takes care of us since we are all sick. She has to do all of this in addition to the online school.”

The family has spent much of the year sitting in a car, parked in front of businesses or their school in rural Fresno County in search of Wi-Fi to connect to online classes. But the children worry about assignments they can’t turn in on time because they can’t get online. And Herrera — an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who left her job as a farmworker when the pandemic began so she could stay home with her children — worries that the pay her husband brings home from his job as a mechanic isn’t enough for the family to make ends meet.

“Now that we’re sick, it will be worse,” she said. “My husband will be out of work for at least two weeks, so it’s less money for us.”

‘An ongoing traumatic event’

As the end of 2020 approaches, it remains very difficult to measure the true impact of an ongoing pandemic. Most public health and child welfare metrics tracked by federal agencies won’t include 2020 data until next year or later. And when that data is available, it could be flawed given the number of children who are out of touch with their schools and who aren’t seeing doctors because their families lost health insurance or are delaying treatment due to fears about the virus.

But there’s little doubt that children are reeling from this difficult year.

“Nobody has gotten hit with the mental health side of the pandemic worse than kids,” said Paul Gionfriddo, the president and CEO of Mental Health America, an organization that supports people with mental illness. “This is an ongoing traumatic event that kids have faced without the perspective of, say, 65-year-olds, who have lived through other kinds of trauma in their lives and have some perspective.”

Gionfriddo’s organization has seen about 10,000 people take its online depression and anxiety screening every day this year, twice as many as past years, he said, with the biggest spike among children between the ages of 11 and 17. The youngest group is also the most likely to report frequent recent thoughts of suicide or hurting themselves, he said.

Having dangerous thoughts like these doesn’t mean someone will act on them, Doreen Marshall, a vice president at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said. She notes that the high rate of youth reporting mental health challenges could reflect that parents are closely monitoring their children’s mental health and acting to help them.

“It’s always a good indicator when more people are reaching out for help,” she said.

But Gionfriddo worries that a generation of children will be living with the consequences of this year for the rest of their lives.

“We know that trauma builds on trauma,” Gionfriddo said. “Once people have experienced trauma, they are far more likely to have mental health effects later on, sometimes right away, sometimes decades later, and we know that repeated traumas can exacerbate and make that worse.”

That’s why Immaculate Ferreria is so worried about her youngest daughter, 13, who’s been wracked with anxiety during the pandemic, and her son, Quhaar, 16, who’s shown signs of depression as he’s holed up in his room in Sumner, Washington, unable to play football or see his friends and teammates. Quhaar’s grades are slipping in a year that will be crucial for his college applications and the canceled football season endangers the prospect of an athletic scholarship.

“I just don't want that talent to go to waste and I don’t know how to motivate him during this pandemic,” Ferreria said.

Adding to their difficulty, the family’s two-bedroom, one-bathroom house is now jammed with people after Ferreria, 49, learned that her 7-year-old granddaughter had become homeless during the pandemic and was living in a car with her mother. The child, her mother and the mother’s boyfriend, who were evicted from their home, moved in with Ferreria and her children.

Ferreria's oldest daughter, Yanava, 19, is also home, displaced from Howard University, where she’s a sophomore, so the house is crammed with four students who need to connect to online classes.

“It’s a whole challenge,” said Quhaar, an 11th grader. “Everyone’s trying to use the Wi-Fi so the Wi-Fi’s slow, which makes school difficult and that also isolates me in my room even more.”

He worries about the future, he said. “It’s frightening. It really is.”

Immaculate Ferreria with her children and granddaughter. Quhaar, 16, at right, says the pandemic's impact on his future is "frightening." Courtesy of Immaculate Ferreria

‘There will be lasting consequences’

At Manatee Elementary school in Bradenton, Florida, principal Tami VanOverbeke is already putting the pieces in place to help her 560 students recover from the effects of the pandemic — but it won’t be easy, she said.

Most of her students are poor enough to qualify for a free lunch and many are the children of immigrants who don’t speak English. When school first closed in the spring, she estimated only about a third of her students managed to connect with online instruction and the number who came every day and completed assignments was just a fraction of that, maybe 5 percent, she said.

Her school reopened to students in the summer, but parents can change their minds daily about whether their children attend in person or online. That means teachers are never sure what to expect and students are a long way from the stability they need.

“School for many of our children is the safest place,” VanOverbeke said. “You’re loved. You’re fed. You’re cared for. And that went away.”

A sign welcomes students returning to in-person learning at Rover Elementary School in Tempe, Ariz., on Aug. 17.Cheney Orr / Reuters file

Manatee has seen its rate of chronic absence, meaning children who’ve missed a dangerous number of school days, more than triple to 11 percent, she said.

That’s a common — and alarming — trend that schools are reporting across the country, Hedy Chang, who runs Attendance Works, an organization that helps schools boost attendance, said. Before the pandemic, 8 million U.S. students — or 1 in 7 — were already chronically absent, often a sign of difficulties at home.

“Even starting with chronic absence in kindergarten, they will not be reading on grade level by the end of third grade,” she said, citing research on likely outcomes. “They will be failing their middle school classes and dropping out of high school.”

Outcomes could be even worse for the so-called “ghost students” who appear to have dropped off school rosters entirely, said Hailly Korman, a senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, which published an analysis called “Missing in the Margins.”

Some of those children could be in private schools or have parents who are home-schooling them, she said, but many are likely just sitting at home or, if they’re old enough, working or caring for younger siblings.

“School closed some day in mid-March and that was the last time they talked to a teacher,” Korman said. “They never picked up a laptop, never logged into distance learning. They don’t have a phone that anybody answers.”

VanOverbeke’s school is luckier than most because it partners with community organizations that offer health care, tutoring and other services to students and their families on the school campus. But even here, she says, her students — most of whom are academically behind where they’d be in a typical year — face a long road before things return to normal.

“There will be lasting consequences,” she said.

The solution, said Hinojosa, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, is not to put more on schools “and expecting them to make miracles” with the budgets they’ve had in the past. “That’s just so vastly insufficient.”

Alexa Callander teaches a second grade class virtually at Rover Elementary School in Tempe, Ariz., on Aug. 17.Cheney Orr / Reuters file

Alexa Callander teaches a second grade class virtually at Rover Elementary School in Tempe, Ariz., on Aug. 17.Cheney Orr / Reuters file

What’s needed, said Miriam Rollin, a director at the National Center for Youth Law, an organization that advocates for marginalized children, is a “massive mobilization” of community leaders, elected officials, educators and parents to help children — especially the most marginalized, who’ve been affected most deeply by the pandemic — get back on track.

“This has been an unprecedented moment of hardship for so many Americans and the response needs to be on par with the level of hardship,” she said. She is calling for, among other things, a nationwide tutoring corps, an increased focus on how trauma affects learning, a sweeping effort to connect every home to the internet, and a major shift to community schools — programs like the one at Manatee Elementary where families can get social services in the same place where their children learn.

With initiatives like that, she said, the nation might even end up in a better place than it was.

“We have an opportunity here,” she said. “If we have the leadership and the intentionality and the resources to make solutions happen, this crisis could actually help transform our schools.”

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.