Opinion | Many Schools Aren’t Made for Kids With Learning Differences. The Pandemic Amplified That.

This would jibe with what I heard from parents of school-age children, many of whom felt that there was a delay in getting their child the appropriate diagnosis and supports. Katherine Bell, who has two daughters with learning disabilities, said that she thinks her older daughter’s dyslexia diagnosis was delayed by remote learning. Her daughter is 11, and because she was compensating so well, her learning disorder went under the radar at her New York City public school until this year. “Being remote slowed down the process of being diagnosed,” Bell said, “and slowed her down emotionally and socially in a way that’s really hard to rectify.”

Other parents said that support services for their children were harder to obtain, as providers are scarcer than they were before the pandemic. Tracy Brisson, who lives in Atlanta, has a son in kindergarten who has auditory and sensory processing disorders. The audiologist she was able to find during the pandemic who specializes in her son’s disorders is a 45-minute drive away, so she has to cut her work hours twice a week to be able to take him to his appointments.

The picture isn’t all bleak, however. Frank Urso, who has two children with autism who are 6 and 7, said that since his daughter and son have been back at in-person public school in Plainfield, Ill., they have been thriving, his son in particular. Urso said, “Like a rubber band, he snapped back — his speech, his math skills — really doing well since he’s been in school.”

But even for parents whose kids are doing well or at least better now, there is a worry that was not there before the pandemic, said Lisa Halfhill, from Spokane, Wash., who has a 6-year-old daughter who has Tourette’s syndrome. Everything feels precarious, as if the carefully constructed routines and support systems for families whose kids have special needs can fall apart at any moment.

When I spoke to Halfhill last Thursday, she said the coronavirus infection rate had declined enough in her area that the next day was her daughter’s last of having to wear a mask in school. “There’s just that fear there, of are we pulling the plug on this too early?” she said. “Are things going to go back to hellish conditions?”

“And the fear and the guilt of thinking about our kids going through that isolation again, the loss of the routine — that would be so devastating,” she added, “for our whole family.”