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At 7:30 on a crisp January morning, Lakishia Fell-Davis was at the wheel of her car, driving to Westmont, a community in the southern part of Los Angeles County. She was headed to Ninety-Fifth Street Elementary School, where she is both a substitute teacher and a parent of two students. Her daughter, Makayla, who was then 9, nibbled on a bagel; Kevin Jr., her 7-year-old son, looked out the window at the succession of strip malls, body shops and liquor stores. Surgical masks were tucked next to their seats, and disinfectant wipes sat in the central console. Glancing at her children in the rearview mirror, Fell-Davis began a prayer for her children’s safety. But she couldn’t help picturing the classrooms, the cafeteria, the schoolyard — all those kids, all those teachers, any one of them potentially carrying Covid-19 and breathing the same air as she and her children.
Fell-Davis was aware that at this point, in 2023, most people treated the pandemic as a thing of the past. For her, though, Covid still poses a real threat: Fell-Davis has Type I diabetes, putting her at higher risk of hospitalization and long-term complications from illness. As such, her experience during the pandemic has shaped how she thinks about her daily life, especially at Ninety-Fifth Street, where she has worked on and off for more than a decade as a substitute teacher and teaching assistant. A Covid diagnosis has potentially disastrous physical, emotional and financial ramifications for her family. She felt much more comfortable when schools in the Los Angeles Unified district were online during the first year and a half of the pandemic and her kids were attending virtually. Sure, they missed their friends, but Makayla and Kevin were both shy and soft-spoken children who had never really strayed far from home. They didn’t seem to mind the arrangement. And back then, Fell-Davis’s mother, who was paralyzed on her left side after surviving stomach cancer and two strokes, could visit them with relative peace of mind despite her poor health.
Her fears were confirmed in the winter of 2021, when her husband, Kevin, caught Covid. He was out of his security guard job for over a week, with only partial sick pay, plunging them into a brief period of financial stress. Credit-card bills were due, as was her husband’s life-insurance payment. The entire family got sick. “Am I going to die?” Kevin Jr. asked. The pandemic had overshadowed most of his young life and took its toll on his psyche. He would become agitated, sometimes crying, if he saw someone who wasn’t wearing a mask. Even as Fell-Davis assured him that he wouldn’t die, her bout with the virus confined her to her bedroom for three days with body aches and a fever. Horrified that his mother couldn’t get out of bed, the boy asked, instead, if she was going to die.
Fell-Davis cried when she learned that in the fall of 2021, L.A.U.S.D. would require students and teachers to return to in-person learning. Her home — a cozy two-bedroom apartment in a calm neighborhood — had become her haven, the place where she had more control over her family’s health than she had anywhere else. She was stressed about whether she might get sick, but she was also nervous about the vaccines, which the district had mandated for most employees. What was in them, she wondered, and how were they made so quickly? But she decided that she had to go back. Her husband couldn’t handle the bills himself, and while she preferred that her children learn remotely for as long as the pandemic lasted, she also wanted them to know how to carry themselves among other people. To her son, anything outside the apartment was scary. If he didn’t have a mask on in public, he’d put his shirt over his mouth, as if hiding. She didn’t want to raise him to fear the world.
As Fell-Davis turned down 96th Street, parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles walked kids to the school fence. The families at Ninety-Fifth Street Elementary were mostly Black and Latino — except, teachers like to point out, for the Russian family that enrolled a few years back. Looking once more at her children through the rearview mirror, Fell-Davis reminded them of her rules. Wash your hands. Wear your masks. Don’t share snacks.
At Ninety-Fifth Street, 94 percent of students live in poverty; many parents work essential jobs and suffer from chronic illness. The school, and other poor communities in Los Angeles, have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic. In California, where the earnings gap between high- and low-income families is among the widest in the country, the pandemic has clarified inequality’s consequences. The life expectancy for Latinos in California has decreased by approximately six years; for Black Californians, four years. In Los Angeles County, where Latinos make up nearly half the population, their overall mortality rate has increased more than any other racial or ethnic group. Among the hardest-hit areas have been East and South Los Angeles, which are home to lower-income Latino and Black families who work essential jobs, may live in multigenerational houses without room to distance and suffer higher rates of chronic illnesses like asthma and diabetes. In Westmont, 384 of every 100,000 residents have died of Covid, compared with 113 in the affluent Westside neighborhood of Brentwood, near U.C.L.A.
But elsewhere in Los Angeles, and the rest of the country, most people have embraced the “return to normal” so central to the nation’s idea of Covid recovery. Before the start of the new school year, L.A.U.S.D. rolled back most of its remaining Covid protocols, doing away with mandatory masking and testing. In an interview that aired in September, President Biden declared the pandemic “over.” At the end of February, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, retired the state’s pandemic emergency declaration, and in May, the federal government is anticipated to do the same for the country at large. Earlier this year, after protracted debate and delays, conversation about California’s adding Covid-19 to its list of mandatory vaccines for schoolchildren died down.
The burden of navigating Covid’s risks now falls on the individual, and what “post-pandemic” means for one person or community, like Ninety-Fifth Street Elementary, looks wildly different than it does for others. In the United States, more than 200 people are still dying of Covid every day, and thousands are still being hospitalized for the disease. Barbara Ferrer, director of the county’s department of public health, has frequently acknowledged that inequality in experience and warned that broad rollbacks of safety measures do not signify that Covid has vanished. “For people who are at higher risk, Covid remains a potentially dangerous virus,” she says. There’s a “worrisome myth that we know is circulating, that Covid is like a cold or, you know, like the flu, and people don’t really need to worry about it. That may be true for many people. But for some people, it’s absolutely not true.”
I began visiting Ninety-Fifth Street Elementary School last fall, and found that the collective psyche of the community had shifted from crisis to a quieter grieving. By comparison, loss was acute during the pandemic’s first year. “A lot of families lost not just one or two, but four or five, six people,” says Kissten O’Brien, one of Ninety-Fifth Street’s psychiatric social workers. Teachers were de facto grief counselors for students and sometimes even parents. Many of them set learning standards aside; most classroom time was spent making sure their students were safe and stable.
More on the Coronavirus Pandemic
Los Angeles parents fell into two camps on the issue of school reopening. It was obvious that the school closures L.A.U.S.D. ordered on March 16, 2020, set students back academically and socially, and some parents protested and even tried suing the district to force reopening, while others preferred not to send their children back. The two camps often reflected socio-economic divisions: Many families, often from white, affluent neighborhoods, wanted their kids back in person, according to a parent survey the district sent out in the spring 2021 semester. But families in low-income neighborhoods, where death rates were high and vaccination rates were low, were hesitant. When students did return fully in person in the fall of 2021, the district imposed fairly strong safety precautions: Anyone entering campus had to complete a form attesting that they were not symptomatic for Covid, and all students and staff were required to wear masks and take weekly PCR tests. Laura Crespo, a fifth-grade teacher at Ninety-Fifth Street, told me that for many of her students’ apprehensive parents, even if the weekly testing did not make them feel totally comfortable, it at least prepared them to acquiesce to in-person instruction. But once students were back, the depth of their loss was palpable. That October, the hallways brimmed with photos, sugar skulls and pan dulce — Día de los Muertos offerings meant to commemorate deceased loved ones.
In February 2022, Alberto Carvalho, the former Miami-Dade school district superintendent, took the helm of L.A.U.S.D. Just after he started the job, the state retired its mask mandate. In the fall of 2022, the beginning of the current school year, L.A.U.S.D. stripped back most of its preventive measures and replaced them with the honor system, requesting that only those experiencing Covid symptoms or who reported exposures to Covid test themselves. To the consternation of some teachers and parents at Ninety-Fifth Street, gone were masks, distancing and now weekly tests. Some parents still sent their kids to school with masks and prohibited them from partaking in activities like field trips. Others, though, told me they weren’t very concerned.
In this new phase of Covid, what constituted safety was still up for debate, leading to a vague sense of disquiet among the teachers. But Crespo, who has asthma and a combination of other undiagnosed conditions that limit her respiratory capacity, felt adamant that Covid was still serious. In fact, I’d met her through a parent at another school whose campaign to make and distribute air filters across the district she had supported. Crespo was a popular campus figure who often served as an intermediary between the school administration and parents, especially Spanish speakers. She was born and raised in Central Los Angeles; her parents were Salvadorans who fled civil war. Accordingly, she was sympathetic to her students’ stories. Like most of them, she grew up poor and frequently changed homes. When she was a child in Los Angeles public schools, she felt that some of her teachers couldn’t relate to, or even understand, their students’ hunger or financial struggles. She wanted to be the kind of teacher she needed as a child, so she noticed when a student seemed morose or agitated, and she’d pull them aside to ask what was going on at home. At the beginning of the pandemic, when her students’ relatives were sick and dying, and they could hardly even log on to virtual school, it was clear that the children needed to know they were not alone.
Many parents were still stressed about Covid, Crespo told me, and asked her to make sure their kids were wearing masks. She texted and called frequently to check in on their home lives or update them on campus events. Parents were grateful; almost weekly, a mother sends her child to school with homemade baleadas; others send tamales. When I was at the school, a chatty girl or two often trailed behind her as she walked campus during recess; a gaggle usually ate lunch in her classroom.
In December, Crespo brought me to her desk, which was strewn with hot-chocolate packets from the class’s winter party earlier that morning. She wanted to show me a Google form she’d had students fill out so she could get a better sense of their mental health ahead of the holiday break. Crespo herself had never much liked Christmas, because she associated the holiday with stress; growing up, she couldn’t understand why people would spend precious rent money on a dead pine tree. On the form, she asked what the fifth graders found enjoyable and difficult about the season, and six said they missed dead loved ones. Crespo started sending mental-health surveys to students at the beginning of the pandemic, and the results spoke to the immensity of suffering in their community. In total, 17 of her students had a loved one die during the pandemic’s first year.
Later that day, she learned that a student had acted up during recess, and she sat with him in the back corner of the classroom while his classmates were working independently. As they talked quietly, he revealed that his parents had died when he was young; the loss became especially haunting during the holidays. Crespo sent him to the classroom of O’Brien, the psychiatric social worker, where printouts of candles, meant to honor loved ones who had died, were stapled to a board. Scrawled children’s handwriting on some candles read “granddad,” “cousins,” “my rabbit.” O’Brien told me she noticed that children had become extremely vulnerable to emotional triggers in the wake of the pandemic. A teacher would be talking about, say, a hamburger, maybe in the context of a counting lesson, and suddenly a kid would burst into tears at the memory of someone in their life who used to cook hamburgers.
Once the student left, Crespo told the rest of the class to notify her if a peer seemed upset. “As you’re going through your day,” she said, “please remember to treat everyone with respect, to be patient with everyone. Just remember: You don’t know what somebody’s going through.” That same day, when Crespo was introducing a lesson on water and rivers to a separate class of English-language learners, a girl confided that she had lost five people to Covid. Crespo and the girl spoke in Spanish at the side of the room as classmates worked on their own. The girl unspooled a complex story, about not just the pandemic but also the violence she witnessed in Honduras before moving to Los Angeles. Crespo told me that kids came to her because they felt they had no one else to turn to.
This year, though, Crespo resolved to be more mindful of the toll all this grief — including her own — took on her. Her uncle, aunt and grandmother had all recently died, and she wanted to focus on her own mental health. She had recently taken up guitar, and liked to strum along with her brother in their apartment. “My grief is very much connected to my students’ grief,” she says. “It’s very much connected to my school community. But I’ve needed time to just let my grief be its own thing.”
The week before holiday break, the school’s principal, Manuel Nava, decided to hold the students’ winter performance outside as a precaution against rising levels of Covid, RSV and flu, and kids sang and danced to Christmas songs under a cloudy Los Angeles sky. But the next day, the faculty had its holiday luncheon inside a small auditorium. To his staff, the principal acknowledged he should be wearing a mask, though he wore one only intermittently. Sixty or so fatigued-yet-talkative staff members piled lasagna and salad onto their plates and ate at long folding tables underneath white string lights. Crespo, one of the few teachers to wear a mask, filled Tupperware with food and ducked out early. The only time she’d caught Covid was in that very auditorium last June. It was bad — she was bedridden for three weeks — but it could have been worse had she not already been taking steroids to strengthen her lungs. She sensed that district administrators considered concerns like hers inconvenient, and as she saw it, L.A.U.S.D. was more interested in academic achievement and perfect attendance than in health. She took Covid safety into her own hands by constantly wearing a KN-95 mask and encouraging students to mask as well. Crespo’s modeling seemed to work: Most times I visited, at least half of her students wore masks the entire school day.
Her thinking underscored the complex reality at Ninety-Fifth Street and in the district at large. The school was as safe as it could be, given its limited tools to mitigate Covid. Administrators gave out masks and tests when requested, and the custodial staff continued to sanitize every day, but they didn’t have the power to mandate anything. As state and federal emergency relief funding has dwindled, L.A.U.S.D. has pulled money for Covid. Chronic absenteeism continues to plague the district, which affects funding: State dollars are tied to average daily attendance, and within L.A.U.S.D., there are sizable disparities in absenteeism between neighborhoods. During the 2021-22 school year, just over 45 percent of students were absent for at least 9 percent of the 180-day academic calendar, qualifying them as chronically absent. Carvalho said that over this school year, attendance rates across the district were slowly improving. A number of factors, including lack of safe transportation, housing instability and illnesses like the flu, affect students’ ability to get to campus, with the health and economic havoc wrought by the pandemic making attending school even more difficult. At Ninety-Fifth Street, where more than 55 percent of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year (the rate is now 44 percent), funding can take some time to come through, and approval for routine updates can be held up by red tape.
At the luncheon, Fell-Davis and her kids sat near a few other masked teachers, Kevin Jr. with a mask and Makayla without. Fell-Davis wore an exasperated look. Why, she lamented, was it so hard for her daughter to put on a mask? Like Crespo, Fell-Davis was unhappy with the lack of safety protocols at work, but she didn’t blame Ninety-Fifth Street. “I feel protected,” she told me, but at the same time she said that she felt completely vulnerable. The most teachers could do was cultivate a culture of caution. Sometimes, if Fell-Davis saw a sniffling child with tired eyes, she would ask them to put on a mask. She thought that by now, parents wouldn’t send their children to school sick, but she understood that it was difficult for families in which both parents often worked and couldn’t afford to stay home for a day. In November, when she was substituting in a fourth-grade class and checking kids’ double-digit multiplication work, a boy told her she didn’t have to wear her mask. “Covid is over,” he said. The children around him perked up and leaned in to listen, so Fell-Davis stood up and explained to the class that she had Type I diabetes. “Just because everyone says Covid is gone doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe for others,” she told them. As the kids lobbed question after question, eager to learn about their teacher’s life, she wondered about the boy’s parents. What were they telling him at home? Some days, Fell-Davis was more nervous about Covid, other days, less. Her views were rather capricious: Though she never changed her safety routine, her view on the severity of Covid’s threat often depended on her mood.
For her, this stage of Covid is as much about grappling with trauma as it is with confronting the challenges of the present. The pandemic’s emotional fallout is, to Fell-Davis, even more overwhelming than the health risk. Her mother died of septic shock in July 2021, just before Fell-Davis and her kids would return to school. Instead of returning to work at school as she had planned, she stayed home for a year; she couldn’t bear to face condolences from colleagues, and she preferred to untangle her grief in solitude. Her mother had been her moral compass, the person she turned to with all of her troubles, no matter how small. Fell-Davis fell apart. In the mornings, after dropping her kids off at school, she’d sit in her garage and weep for her mother. Sometimes she didn’t make it far from the school curb, and her husband would go out looking for her.
This past fall, after a year at home mourning and collecting unemployment to help her husband with the bills, Fell-Davis felt she was ready to return to school, but heartache still follows her. Earlier in December, she suffered a panic attack at school while she was preparing to teach a reading lesson, and an ambulance took her to a nearby hospital whose hallways were overcrowded with moaning patients — a setting that did not subdue her anxiety. In February, as she was turning down her street, she saw a parked ambulance, and her mind flashed to the ambulance that took her mother to the hospital where she eventually died. Another trigger, another day spent weeping. “I just want you to be OK,” her husband told her after her panic attack, when she was missing her mother and her anxiety was through the roof. “It’s a daily struggle,” Fell-Davis says.
By mid-March, she was feeling more comfortable with the new circumstances around Covid. But often, when we talked, the darkness of memory and stress of the present seemed to wear her down. She’d spent the past three years entirely devoted to her family, caring for their health and hearts. “I’m 41, and I need to do something that I enjoy,” Fell-Davis says. “I don’t even know what I enjoy.”
When I arrived at Ninety-Fifth Street Elementary again in late January, the hills outside Los Angeles had transformed from brown to green; white and yellow wildflowers pushed through the soil. Some of the children were antsy on that balmy Wednesday morning: Buses would soon take them to Point Fermin, an outdoor education center on the coast, for a two-night field trip focused on marine science. For many, this was the longest they’d ever been away from their parents. The parents were anxious, too; in the front office, I heard a mother worry that she hadn’t packed her child appropriate clothing. Some were stressed that their children might catch Covid, but Crespo assured them that the camp and school were taking as many precautions as possible. Everyone tested negative before the trip, and parents were comforted by the fact that she, someone who still took Covid seriously, was there to look out for their kids.
They were in the middle of district testing, with more on the way. It was an especially trying time, even for Ninety-Fifth Street teachers, who were accustomed to working through the educational challenges associated with poverty. Everyone was exhausted: The pandemic had left kids struggling to perform at grade level. Zaira Valadez, a second-grade teacher, told me that many of her students were stuck at kindergarten math levels. “There’s so much push to have these kids just have good grades, we forget all that trauma they have gone through, everything we have gone through,” she said. With double-digit subtraction, she has tried every trick in the book — breaking numbers into tens and ones, drawing visuals of the numbers so students can cross them out — but nothing works. Some rely on their fingers, which is difficult, because they can’t subtract from any number greater than 10. They become frustrated, she becomes frustrated and they start over.
“I get to the point where I’ve almost wanted to cry,” Valadez said. “Am I doing something wrong?” Crespo said her students were making gains, but they were sick of testing, and still struggling emotionally. “A lot of these tests aren’t made by me,” she said. “They’re made by people who are not in my classroom.” She was trying to keep up with district demands, but if the pandemic taught her anything about teaching at Ninety-Fifth Street, it was that students needed to take it slow. The trip gave Crespo and the kids a welcome reprieve from district testing.
Before the buses arrived at the school, I sat in Crespo’s classroom as students ate prepacked cereal, provided through L.A.U.S.D.’s free-breakfast program. The walls were decorated to look like a lush woodland. Marigolds and vines wrapped around an archway, a fake willow tree branched out by her desk and green wallpaper created a backdrop to the class library. As I spent time with her, it seemed as if Crespo had boundless energy. She was also a United Teachers Los Angeles union representative, had recently completed a master’s in science education and was tasked with writing a new science curriculum for fifth graders. But privately, she was feeling depleted from doing all the extra work, attending to her students’ emotional needs and constantly worrying about her health. Most days, when Crespo returned from school, she didn’t leave the house.
She was worn down by the accumulation of stress and grief — grief for herself and for her students. “It’s similar to a lot of inequality, where I’m going to keep working toward making sure that all the students get what they need, that they’re treated fairly.” Crespo said of Covid. “I can only do what I can do. No one is going to come in and give our students everything that we need.” Covid inequality was a structural issue like poverty in the school, a problem that no individual could hope to tackle alone. The constant anxiety was grating to the spirit, and she was feeling absent in her own life outside school. “I’m starting to get desensitized,” she said. “There’s only so much worrying I can do.”
Yet, she couldn’t stop herself from worrying — there was so much to occupy her attention. When I talked to her in mid-March, a few weeks after California retired its pandemic-emergency declaration, Crespo and thousands of other teachers walked out of school for three days in solidarity with striking cafeteria workers, custodians and bus drivers, among other low-wage workers seeking a new contract. These workers, most of whom are part time employees, were the district’s lowest-paid, on average earning $25,000 annually. (Last month, their union won a new contract that ensures a new average of $33,000 by 2024.)
On the bus, Crespo and the kids rode south for 20 minutes, out of Westmont and toward San Pedro. After they arrived, the kids spread across the campus, binoculars in hand, for their first assignment: identifying aspects of the environment that were similar to, and different from, their own neighborhood. They giggled and zoomed in on their friends’ faces, and looked at the snow on the mountains and a ladybug on a blade of grass. This is good, Crespo thought. It had been a long time since any of them had been able to do something like this, to run around unburdened, if only for a few days. It was yet another experience — that of simply being a child — that the pandemic had taken from them. On the second day of the field trip, after a visit to a salt marsh, the kids trudged up a hill, complaining, in the way that homesick children do, about being thirsty and tired, asking Crespo when the hill would end. At the top, they stopped and looked with awe. Before this trip, many kids had never seen the ocean. They stared at the light on the water, the immensity of the view. Crespo and the kids fell quiet, taking it all in.
Meg Bernhard is a writer from California. Her essay “Water or Sky?” on shared grief was anthologized in “The Best American Travel Writing 2021.” Her book for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series is set to be published this summer.
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