t was March 15, 2020 when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the emergency closure of New York City’s schools amid skyrocketing coronavirus infections. (See our time capsule of what that surreal week felt like inside America’s largest school system). But I remember more vividly the chaos of Brooklyn two days prior, on Friday the 13th, when my family woke up to panicked social media posts reporting that a parent had tested positive at a school four subway stops away. It was 8 a.m. March 13 when we reversed course, unpacking our daughter’s backpack and calling the school to say she’d be staying home.

She wouldn’t return to a classroom until October.

Everything was normal last spring up until the minute it wasn’t, as the world seemed to stop on a dime and schools found themselves transitioning overnight to remote instruction. But while the great COVID pivot may have felt instantaneous, it took far longer to begin to grasp the consequences for students and families of these long-run closures.

Here at The 74, we’ve chronicled those consequences over the past 12 months via our new PANDEMIC hub (you can get our continuing updates delivered to your inbox by signing up for The 74 Newsletter). Now looking back through the seasons at which stories were most shared and widely circulated, a few obvious trends emerge about the evolving reality for students and readers’ top concerns.

Here are a dozen of the key lessons we’ve learned over the past 12 months about the students most impacted by the public health crisis.

Read the full article about key learnings from the past year by Steve Snyder at The 74.