The damage wrought to American education by the COVID-19 pandemic beggars description, and so we are reduced to metaphor: Schools have been hit by an earthquake, a hurricane, a war. There is a need for disaster relief for children who have lost precious time in school and are traumatized by the effects of COVID-19 on their families and society as a whole.

To enter adulthood with the skills they need, students will need extra time to recover the time lost to closures and quarantining. Educators, parents and policymakers need to start thinking about temporarily lengthening school days, weeks and years, perhaps even adding grade levels. Every district and state should initiate a learning recovery task force or the equivalent, representing a wide variety of stakeholders and centering on culturally responsive pedagogy and policies. And districts must begin planning now for how they will boldly address the learning disparities that COVID has wrought. It cannot wait until the summer of 2021.

School districts are like aircraft carriers: They turn slowly. A relatively simple idea like extending the school year from 180 to 200 days is a massive undertaking, bureaucratically speaking. Teacher contracts must be renegotiated, facility leases dealt with, insurance policies updated. The degree of difficulty is even higher because districts are going to already be occupied reckoning with potential budget cuts, teacher retirements and other operational challenges.

Recovery efforts, then, will require all-hands-on-deck engagement, including and beyond the expansion of learning time. Retired teachers should be encouraged to come back into service without hurting their retirement packages. Mental health supports will need to be made widely available, as will tutoring opportunities. AmeriCorps could create a corps specifically to supplement the work done by teachers; the nonprofit organization Neighborhood Villages has shown what this can look like by piloting a new AmeriCorps partnership, the Boston Children’s Relief Initiative, for bolstering early childhood education and afterschool program staff. Getting our nation’s children the learning recovery they need can and should be a bipartisan, communitywide rallying cry in the years to come.

Read the full article about learning recovery by Elliot Haspel and Maggie Thornton at The 74.