By January 2021, the plan to send freshmen and seniors back to school wasn’t giving my students any real hope. One of my students summed it up perfectly: “It’s like someone’s dying of thirst and you hand them a cup of salt water because you’re like, well, it’s water.” Students would be sitting in classrooms with peers who weren’t even in their classes, still stuck on Zoom, but now with masks on. What was the point?

What students needed were relationships and support, not just a different location to continue struggling. My student suggested the plan was just a way for schools to say they offered something—only to then further blame students when they didn’t show up.

Students saw through the empty promises of “returning to normal” when nothing meaningful was actually changing. With so-called “health” measures in place, this wasn’t a good faith effort to return students to in-person learning. Like much of pandemic schooling, it left students with a well-earned distrust of our educational institutions.

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