Children are not the face of this pandemic, however, they risk being among the victims affected by the virus and their lives are nonetheless being changed in profound ways. Children of all ages, and in all countries, are being affected, in particular by the socio-economic impacts this disease has widely caused. As families lose their sources of income due to COVID-19 and the global economy has been plunged into a recession, more households are falling into poverty. This may seem irrelevant to the topic at hand, but is an important piece of information seeing as how it has created somewhat of a snowball effect. If families all over the world are in poverty, this greatly impacts their childrens’ education. This paragraph is to give background information on the overall negative influence the pandemic has done to this generation as a whole.

Now discussing Manville, like any other school during this time, we have been taking immense precautions regarding how to run the school district as scientists are still doing extensive research to figure out more about this disease. In the US, many schools have different rules and regulations as to how they run their school, whether it’s full-time in person learning, virtual learning, or hybrid learning. In the Manville School District, students are given the choice of whether or not they would like to be in person or virtual, which isn’t the case for many other schools across the nation. Because we have these choices, it greatly influences how a child learns, compared to other fellow students who haven’t been given this option. Some children may feel that they are retaining more information by being in-person instead of virtually. Others may feel that they are behind and unmotivated and parents have even described that their childrens’ eyes have been strained and they feel no motivation to complete their work. On a more positive note however, this virus has definitely shown students that are going under virtual learning, that they need to speak up for themselves more often rather than being in a classroom with other students that do it for them. 

Overall, this pandemic has affected Manville kids in many ways; both negative and positive, and there’s no way to know how long we’ll be stuck in this situation, but it’s important that we look out for the youth of our generation and make sure that they are surrounded by a positive learning environment.