During the 2019\u201320 school year, Ms. Logan was a 5th grade science and reading teacher at a small intermediate school serving grades 3\u20135 in rural Alabama. Before her school shut down, Ms. Logan devoted class time to talking about COVID in efforts to alleviate her students\u2019 fears. As she said:<\/p>\n
[COVID] was just becoming public knowledge not long before our school shut down, so we didn\u2019t have a lot of time go into it. But the kids were scared. They were nervous about it, and so we just talked about what it was and compared it to other diseases. Just trying to ease their fears basically last year.<\/em><\/p>\n However, Ms. Logan had limited resources for teaching about COVID, relying mainly on Google searches and daily news broadcasts. As she explained:<\/p>\n Mostly I just put in \u201cCOVID for kids\u201d or \u201cteaching COVID to kids\u201d and Googled. At the time, that\u2019s all I could do. We watched the news. I would pull the news up because it was running 24-7 back then. And that was it.<\/em><\/p>\n Ms. Logan reflected on her desire for access to age-appropriate materials and resources she could have used to teach about COVID:<\/p>\n [I wanted] something on a ten-year-old level, a fifth-grade level, that they could read and understand and learn about, but yet not fear. . . . You know, I wouldn\u2019t want them to get scared about this, but it is something that they need to know about other than what they hear around town or what they hear in their church or what they hear in their home. So something on a fifth-grade level with reading passages. Something that they could do to help them understand it better.<\/em><\/p>\n Unfortunately, after her school building closed, Ms. Logan\u2019s science instruction did not continue. Because large numbers of students did not have access to computers for virtual instruction, schooling did not resume for the remainder of the academic year.<\/p>\n\n