Israel resumes school closures
Jerusalem’s Leyada High School Monday became Israel’s first school to resume remote learning due to “rising COVID-19 cases.”
School administrators notified parents of 12th grade students Sunday that classes will now be conducted over Zoom due to several COVID-19 infections among students. The school tried to justify its decision by claiming that If those infections spread to the faculty the entire school will be forced to shut down.
"Although it is clear that we cannot prevent the spread of the virus in the school, we would like to delay the spread in order to better protect the teachers, whose infection will lead to the shutdown of the entire school,” wrote administrators, according to Maariv. “Therefore, the 12th grade will switch to remote learning tomorrow.”
The decision comes as Israel grapples with a dangerous mental health crisis among adolescents largely attributed to pandemic restrictions such as school closures. Last month Ichilov Medical Center opened the Hofim Center, a treatment center for emotionally distressed teens designed to deal with the crisis wrought by virtual learning and isolation.
“Both here in Israel and abroad there is a very significant increase in mental health difficulties and distress for young people, especially for those ages 12–18 who were hardest hit [emotionally] by COVID because they were disconnected from all their social ties — friends, classmates, and teachers,” said Hofim Center Director Dr. Reut Gilad. “They were isolated at home and lost their usual routines and frameworks. And in some cases being at home all the time worsened preexisting tensions within the family.”
Studies performed as early as 2021 concluded that strictly virtual learning is significantly detrimental to children’s mental health, while others found that in-person learning did not contribute to overall transmission risks. Even the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which determined remote learning to be helpful in reducing the spread of COVID-19, was forced to admit that this benefit was outweighed by the emotional and mental damage.
“The negative physical, mental and educational impacts of proactive school closures on children, as well as the economic impact on society more broadly, would likely outweigh the benefits,” wrote the ECDC in 2020.
Such findings were later vindicated. Milwaukee County’s Medical Examiner cited remote learning as a factor in 60% of suicides among children ages 12–17.
The damage caused by school closures is also expected to cost children significant losses in lifetime earnings, found a Hoover Institute study.
“The pandemic has had devastating effects in many areas, but none are as potentially severe as those on education,” the study’s authors wrote. “There is overwhelming evidence that students in school during the closure period and during the subsequent adjustments to the pandemic are achieving at significantly lower levels than would have been expected without the pandemic.”
“Efforts to date,” the researchers added, “have not been sufficient to arrest the losses.”
