Poor Student Performance

I'm not a parent so I have no skin in the game except as a taxpayer. During the legislative session I have watched the blame game around who's responsible for the poor performance of Oregon school students, but I have never seen the probable primary reasons mentioned.

No one seems to have looked at how many Oregon school children are suffering from Long Covid (which usually results from multiple, so-called mild reinfections and which can last up to three years or longer)?

"Long COVID is common, affecting up to 10% to 20% of children with a history of COVID-19. With almost 6 million US children potentially affected, this is higher than the number of children with asthma, the most common chronic health problem in children," according to an article in JAMA Pediatrics, May 27, 2025

New data show that Long Covid looks different in children and that Long Covid symptoms can vary by age.

Every week COVID infects almost 2 million (266,000 new daily infections of whom 1 in 3 are pre-symptomatic or show no symptoms), kills 700 to 1,100, and disables 93,000 to 372,000 people just in the U.S.

But, children in Oregon (as in most of the U.S.) are sent to school without mask requirements or adequate ventilation during an ongoing pandemic of an airborne, multi-organ, serious vascular, neurological, immune-system-, eye-, and brain-damaging, randomly disabling (and disability-worsening) systemic disease.

While I'm in favor of adequately funding (on a state-wide not inequitably by district) education, not considering (or doing anything to prevent) the cognitive damage done to students in Oregon schools is dereliction of duty bordering on malfeasance (and only doesn't qualify as such because of the lack of accurate information being delivered by state and local "health" departments).