The risk assessment was done. Over and over again. I looked into this after you mentioned it last week, and virtually every article I found about masking kids in school said these are the risks, these are the benefits.
I disagree with you vehemently. I didn't have time to respond to your post last week were you spoke about how initially we were worried about distance learning, masking, etc, but it turns out the kids handled it fine and it took getting used to.
This is just not true. Affluent areas did better than poorer areas, but the info coming in now is that kids are way behind academically. College admissions are down. Attendance at schools was down. Child abuse was up. Suicides - there are conflicting reports, some say it stayed he same, some say it went up. But anecdotally, I myself know of 2 suicides of Jewish teens that were directly caused by lockdowns.
Unfortunately I'm not able to track down the source for each tidbit here, as when I'm reading /listening I'm hardly thinking that I'll need to bookmark it to post on an online debate in a few months. Some of it came from reports from left leaning places like This American Life, and the Atlantic, iinm.
Anecdotally, distance learning for people who had the means to have devices for every child and have a parent stay home, was very much a mixed bag. My daughter, for instance, had one teacher who adapted amazingly, and another who fell apart and couldn't manage the classroom at all. It was an absolute joke. Even for the one who was good, she learned virtually nothing, and it was mostly fun and games to get through the time.
And please post these studies analyzing the developmental drawbacks of masking or lack thereof. Not one single kindergarten parent, teacher, or principal I've spoken to thinks masks should be worn by kids. And for elementary, most are no longer pro masking because adults have the option to get vaccinated.
Forgive me for sounding like a libtard, but much of the pro mitigation crowd speak from positions of privalege. It's no big deal to buy boxes and boxes of masks, or have washing machines to keep washing them. It's no big deal to spare an iPad for all the kids to learn on zoom. There's a backyard to play in, they don't live in 2 bedroom apartments. The parents have jobs that can be done remotely, etc.