The Telegraph: Almost 10m children may never return to school following the pandemic
“Almost 10 million children may never return to school following the coronavirus pandemic due to funding cuts and rising poverty, Save the Children has warned. A ‘hidden education emergency’ is facing the world’s poorest children as a result of Covid-19, after an estimated 1.6 billion students were out of school by early April in an effort to stop the spread of the virus…” (Roberts, 7/13).

U.N. News: ‘Don’t make schools a political football’: senior WHO official calls for data-based COVID-19 strategies
“A senior World Health Organization (WHO) official on Monday, [Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme,] called for the question of school reopenings to be included as part of comprehensive, data-driven COVID-19 public health strategies, and not a politically-driven decision-making process. … The senior official said that the topic of school reopenings has become a ‘political football,’ which is not fair on children: ‘decisions must be made on data, and an understanding of the risks. There needs to be a sustained commitment on suppressing the virus. If we can suppress it, then, schools can open safely’…” (7/13).

Washington Post: Reopened schools in Europe and Asia have largely avoided coronavirus outbreaks. They have lessons for the U.S.
“…From Belgium to Japan, schools are abandoning certain social distancing measures, such as alternate-day schedules or extra space between desks. They have decided that part-time or voluntary school attendance, supplemented by distance learning, is not enough — that full classrooms are preferable to leaving kids at home. Those experiences and conclusions may offer hopeful guidance to societies still weighing how to get students and teachers back into primary and secondary classrooms…” (Birnbaum, 7/11).