Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Filmmaker Natalya Murakhver has recently released her new documentary “<a href="https://15daysfilm.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">15 Days: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures</a>.”
It shows the devastating effects that remote learning had on children and families. What was the true impact of the school closures on a generation of children? How can we begin to measure it?

“Viewers will bear witness to the stories of the people who experienced the closures directly. The film was shot almost immediately following the closures. We started in 2022, so the pain was still extremely raw,” Murakhver says.

“I felt [that] we better get those stories in now, because people won’t want to talk about them in a couple of years. … As we show the film, I see people’s body language, and they shudder. It takes them back to a very dark time.”

Murakhver co-founded parent advocacy organization Restore Childhood in 2021 and played a leading role in mobilizing New York City parents to reopen public schools during the pandemic.

In the spring of 2021, she filed a lawsuit against New York City and its Department of Education, seeking a judicial order to fully reopen public schools for five days a week of in-person learning.

“People watch the film … and they realize how important it is to know the history,” she says.

<a href="https://15daysfilm.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">You can watch “15 Days” here. </a>

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Natalya Murakhver, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you so much for having me.

So I was looking at the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] scores, recently. And it seems like they’ve registered the largest drop of these scores in generations. And you’re kind of in the middle of trying to explain why. So tell us what happened.

When schools shut down and kids were locked out of their classrooms, they really lost the interest and the desire to learn. Also, the disconnect with the teachers just could not be replicated with online school. Prior to the pandemic, there had been research on learning loss and just aptitude in online versus in-person learning.

They looked at cadets at the most elite military academy in the country, West Point, and they saw the online cadets learned, achieved scores something like several standards of deviation lower than the ones that were coming in in person. So if the most elite cadets can’t achieve parity, how can third graders?

And then I started forgetting a bunch of things that I learned in school.

So hard to learn. We would go in different rooms; we called it our quarters, and we would just start learning, but it was just still like a disconnect. You could feel the disconnect.

When I was taking my Spanish classes on the computer, everything was—people just kept talking in English. Like my teacher kept talking in English, so there were like only 10 words in Spanish in my classes.

It was hard on my eyes. Like my eyes were burning. They gave us 15-minute breaks during the school day. So like, I know, I guess for me, it was to rest my eyes. But then we just got right back on Zoom.

I could turn off my camera and go into a different room. Meanwhile, the teacher’s talking and I didn’t hear a single word of what she was saying and then come back when it was ending and said, bye.

I would just feel bad. Honestly, I would just feel isolated. Like I didn’t feel right because I knew I had stuff to do, but I just didn’t feel like getting it done.

I didn’t know what to do and I just stayed in my room. I used to be like the goofy, joyful person, and it’s just like I never saw myself like that.

I missed out on friendships. I missed out on school activities.

Look back there. Pick it up and turn it around. It says, we miss our friends.

It was just so abnormal. Kids haven’t been allowed to be kids.

And so we saw this huge movement. Of course, this was during the pandemic of education online for a pretty significant amount of time for many students, even across the country, but in particular in New York. And this is where you’re from. So tell me about what exactly happened.

In March 2020, when we knew that the virus was virulent and spreading, everybody was kind of lost. There were a group of parents from the very beginning that were concerned about school closures. I was one of them. I understood normal childhood development.

Learning and development do not happen in just one dimension. And if kids were going to be locked at home away from teachers and friends, I knew even back then that that would be detrimental. Could I quantify it? No, but I knew it in my gut.

So there were parents at our elementary school that organized a committee to come in and sterilize the handrails and the doors. And I remember thinking, this is so futile. If it’s a virus, it’s probably airborne. But at the same time, I thought that we had to figure out what the risks vs. the benefits were. And it always seemed to be more beneficial for the kids to be in school.

So when they shut down in March 2020, they told us it would be for two weeks. I remember I was called to my kid’s school to pick up a packet of homework. They said, okay, bye, see you in two weeks. And I burst out into tears. Everybody said, why are you crying? We’ll be back in two weeks.

I said, no, because once these schools are closed, I’m not sure when they can reopen. Because it wasn’t just about reopening the doors. It was about regaining the trust of the people who were supposed to walk through them and the students who would walk through them and their parents. And I knew that would be very, very difficult to do. That’s interesting.

I’ve heard from another parent at the time, Bobbi Anne Cox, who was a lawyer and commercial lawyer. And she knew that it wouldn’t be two weeks. And she knew just because there was no scenario where the bureaucracy could function in a way that something would reopen in two weeks after something was initiated. That, again, fascinating. I was one of those people who thought, two weeks? Sure, it’ll be fine, right? I didn’t have that instinct at all.

Yes, that’s another dimension. But yes, the idea that you’re going to create such unmitigated fear in people about the school building, because we were told it’s so dangerous, don’t stand next to each other. As I was leaving that day with the packet of homework, I remember I was walking down the sidewalk with another parent and we were walking too close together. And she seemed to be oblivious to it, but I was like, oh my God, am I exposing myself or her to something? We’re not supposed to be walking down the sidewalk one foot apart. This was outside.

I was a pretty rational, non-anxious person about this issue specifically. Yet, this is the kind of fear I was feeling, so what were more anxious parents feeling? So I just thought, my God, we’re entering something that’s unprecedented. I don’t know how we’re going to come back.

So you’ve made the film, 15 Days, about, well, that time, and also, you know, what happened afterward and, you know, culminating in this dramatic learning loss that I described earlier. But why is the film called 15 Days?

Because at the time Fauci held up a sign. Everybody had held up signs and said, oh, it’s just 15 days. It’s just 15 days to slow the spread. And we have this montage of the Surgeon General and Fauci and even President Trump at the time saying 15 days. So that was what we heard over and over again. And I think that was ingrained in people’s heads that 15 days lasted for up to two years in places like California. But we thought that that would bring people back, unfortunately.

Well, and in New York, it really only lasted for several months, but then it never—or it didn’t fully come back very quickly. And that actually had a profound impact as well, right?

Yes. Schools closed in mid-March 2020. They were closed and remote for the remainder of the 2020 school year. And then in the fall, to his credit, it’s probably the only good thing Bill de Blasio did: he did reopen the schools. The unions pushed hard. The UFT [United Federation of Teachers] is very powerful in New York City. That’s a branch of the American Federation of Teachers.

They wanted the strictest reopening guidelines, but Bill de Blasio was able to reopen schools on September 28, 2020, in hybrid fashion. So depending on how many kids were in a classroom and how oversubscribed the school was, some schools had a great number of kids coming back. And in those cases, those kids were probably in the classroom fewer days because they were spreading them six to eight feet apart. And not all classrooms had the space for, you know, for all the students.

My own kids went two days one week, three days the following week. Even with all those restrictions and masks and really draconian restrictions inside elementary schools, my kids rebloomed once they were around their teachers and their fellow classmates. It was dramatic. Even under the worst circumstances inside those schools, those kids needed each other like we needed to drink water.

There’s also this issue of absenteeism that happened. Basically, of course, everybody was absent from doing things online. Then there was this hybrid model. But then it turns out a lot of people just never came back, and I don’t even understand how that’s possible. Like what are these kids doing now? Do we have any idea?

Michael Pinckney, who was an athlete, was a junior at the time of the school closures, talks about this in the film. He was a thrower and he was competing outside of school because his father was prepared enough for something like this because he had gone to college on a sports scholarship and he wanted to make sure that Mikey didn’t miss out. But he talks about the fact that these kids who left and had been competing with him in high school in throwing and track and field never came back.

I think some of those kids had to stay home and take care of their younger siblings. Or some of them, I remember reading articles, had gone to work. They were told that they weren’t important. The ones who did actually show up in schools at the time were forced to mask. We had a lawsuit that we filed because of Zoom in a Room. I don’t know if you’ve heard that term, Zoom in a Room.

Many middle and high schoolers, when they did return to school in New York City public schools, and I know around the country as well, due to union contracts, the teachers were allowed to continue to teach remotely while the students were in the classrooms with their masks, looking at computers and spaced. apart. Nobody wanted to do that. That did not qualify as in-person real school. So kids dropped out; kids left. They were being made to feel like pariahs inside their own classrooms.

You know, I thought I knew about everything from the pandemic. I didn’t know until this moment about Zoom in the room. That’s a kind of Kafka-esque feel to it.

Yes, it was really tragic. I had parents reaching out to me from all around the country. First, it was, you know, mostly parents in New York because I was part of a group called Keep NYC Schools Open. We had a Facebook group. It was very bipartisan. I’m a registered Democrat, very progressive. I was fine with BLM. None of that was a wake-up call for me. I was all about racial justice. I still am. I really haven’t changed.

But parents from around New York City reached out to me and kept saying, hey, we’re looking for leadership here. There was no leadership, right? And there was no organized movement. It was just a collection of parents. Whoever was willing to do something was asked to do it. We organized the rallies. Nothing changed. We organized petitions. Nothing changed.

So I finally decided to organize a lawsuit to sue the mayor and sue New York City to reopen the schools. We had twenty plaintiffs, and we had to turn away some others. It was stories like, my child’s scores are going down, they used to be in a gifted and talented program or one of the highest achievers, they’ve lost interest in learning, all the way to a suicide attempt from one of my plaintiffs. Her son suffered thyroid throughout the entire pandemic. She’s a psychiatrist, is public, and always willing to talk about it. She’s not hiding. He unfortunately ended up taking his own life this past May. He was in college, and he never recovered. And I think he’s just one of them.

Absolutely terrible. Before we continue, tell me just a little bit about your background. You know, how, you know, I know, for example, that you’re an immigrant, even though that might not necessarily be obvious. But tell me, tell me about your background.

I came here as a six-year-old. I came to New York from the Soviet Union, from Odessa, Ukraine. My parents decided to emigrate when Carter and Brezhnev had an arrangement where the Soviet Jews were allowed to leave. We had a choice. We could go to Australia, Israel, or the United States. My parents were kind of stuck; they weren’t sure because my father’s family had gone to Israel a few years before that, and his best friend had gone to New York. New York won.

We decided to come; they decided to bring me here in the winter of 1977. And that was a long process. We left; we had to get processed in Austria. Then we ended up spending close to five months in Rome while we were waiting for everything to come through. We ended up in New York. It was the time of big blizzards. I remember snow was over my head. I’d never seen anything like it, even though it was the Soviet Union; Ukraine by the Black Sea was fairly moderate and temperate.

I immediately got put in first grade. I was six-and-a-half. I remember my mother said, well, you know, should she be held back? It’s, you know, she’s going to go into a classroom where she doesn’t speak a word of English. The principal, to her credit, said, send her in. So little kids her age acquire the language very quickly. And she was right, I did. It was stressful at times. It was truly diverse. There were kids from all over New York City there. It was a Brooklyn elementary school.

But I loved it, and I thrived, and I was fluent within a year, I’d say probably even less. So I have that public school education. We were living in a tiny apartment. My father worked as a plumber in an incinerator for $4 an hour in really terrible conditions, but he never complained.

My mother commuted to Manhattan from Brooklyn. She was a bookkeeper. But they built a life for us. I was never locked in the house. I don’t know what it would have been like if everything had shut down. They couldn’t go to work; they couldn’t stay home with me. I think our future would have crumbled.

There really wasn’t the possibility to do that before, though, right? Because this online world that existed during the pandemic was kind of ready to be tested in this way. It just wasn’t something you could do even back then.

No, and actually, they wouldn’t have done it back then. Monica Gandhi, who is an AIDS researcher at UCSF [University of California, San Francisco], talks about this in the film, that even during the Spanish flu, when it was far more dangerous for children, we know now COVID, and we knew even as early as 2020, that COVID was not a great danger to children. But the Spanish flu was.

Back then, the progressive cities—New York, Philadelphia, Chicago—realized the costs to children of shutting down schools and deliberately kept those kids’ schools open because they said they’d live in squalor. They wouldn’t get fed. Teachers are mandated reporters. All of those things were important, so they wouldn’t have done that.

But yes, I think you’re right. Educational technology has been encroaching on schools for over a decade, and I think the opportunity exists to try it out, and they’ve had remarkable results for educational technology profits.

Before we continue, tell me the rest of your life. So you grew up in school. Clearly, you were fluent very quickly. I don’t think anyone would guess that you’re an immigrant. Where did your life take you?

I went to NYU [New York University]. I was very much a New Yorker. I wanted to get out of Brooklyn and be in Manhattan and work in the film industry. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but I went to NYU, majored in English, and ended up getting an internship at a production company in Manhattan and eventually moving to Los Angeles for a couple of years in my early 20s. It was the early ’90s, and O.J. Simpson was the big story, with the white Bronco being chased by police in front of my house, like right off Route 405 as I was watching it on TV. That was unsettling.

We had the huge earthquake, the Northridge earthquake, and pretty quickly I realized I wanted to be back in New York.  I’d had enough of LA in just over a year and came back and continued to work in the film industry. I worked for a producer as a story editor, looked at scripts and plays, and was always trying to figure out my place in the world. But I knew it had to do with storytelling.

Well, and then clearly you took advantage of that in making this film. You mentioned that you went to public school. And I understand that this learning loss, that these scores are actually the most depressed in the public schools in the inner city, in these sort of most disadvantaged, let’s call it, communities.

Yes, these are the kids who had the fewest resources. And in fact, even in 2020 and 2021, when we had our rallies, Mayor Eric Adams was borough president at the time. And he showed up to most of our rallies. He was one of the only elected officials who did. He talked about the fact that these kids in the inner city didn’t have access to technology. They didn’t have good wi-fi connections. They were pretty much left hanging.

Another student is now a college student, but he was a high school student at the time. Garrett Morgan, who’s in our film, talks about the fact that sports keeps kids engaged. He says, you want to know what takes a kid off the streets? A ball. You know, that takes a gun out of the kid’s hand—a ball.

And we have Coach Ron Naclerio, who’s the winningest coach in high school basketball. He’s at Cardozo High School, and he talks about what it was like. He said, I needed my kids. I’m their mentor. He doesn’t have his own children. He has always mentored generations and generations of inner-city basketball players.

And he said, they needed me, but we couldn’t see each other. We weren’t allowed to. The hoops had been removed from basketball courts outside. Even outside of the schools, they had nowhere to go. So they lost interest.

There has been so much depression and mental health issues. And then you hear about all these special counselors who are being hired. But my perception of this whole thing is this was a manufactured crisis. You knew exactly how this was going to end. It’s very difficult to rectify that now. And I don’t think talk therapy is the way to do it.

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How School Closures Irrevocably Harmed a Generation | Natalya Murakhver