“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Every Labor Day, schoolchildren enjoy a long weekend off shortly after going back to school. But this year, millions of American kids never showed up to school at all… and no one knows where they are.
Worse yet, liberal politicians are demanding another round of the same policies that pushed kids to miss school.
At the very least some 230,000 U.S. children who didn’t show up at school at all, according to a study from the Associated Press. They seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.
That seems far too low, because two states account for almost all of them.
The AP study reports 150,000 missing children in Gavin Newsom’s California alone.
Add to that 60,000 in Kathy Hochul’s New York, and you’re already up to 210,000.
And the number of children that schools can’t track down keeps piling up in other states, including more than 15,000 in Georgia last year.
Tiny Connecticut paid workers to go to the houses of 8,000 children ranked as truants in 2021.
But the numbers get worse at every level.
There are 6.5 million students who are “chronically absent” from school, according to the AP study. That number doubled over the school lockdowns the government promoted in the name of fighting COVID-19.
As bad as that number is, the AP probably under-counted. The number should be almost three times as high.
The Education Trust cracked the numbers provided by the Department of Education and found there were 10 million chronically absent children in 2021—and it’s probably 16 million this year.
That is one-third of all America’s 49.4 million schoolchildren—gone, vanished.
In Minnesota, the number of kids showing up regularly fell by 15 percent—and in Minneapolis, most students skip school on a consistent basis.
At least the researchers don’t try to gaslight their readers: The AP report “found almost no missing students at all, confirming something out of the ordinary occurred during the pandemic.”
What happened was devastating learning loss, with the poorest and most disadvantaged kids falling even further behind.
“The average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading,” according to a study from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
When do the kids get all this back? They don’t.
The average student regains about 20 to 30 percent of learning loss during his first year back to school—and then never moves forward. 70 to 80 percent of the education loss lasts forever, researchers found.
They also found that the harder liberals locked you down, the worse your children did.
“Test scores declined more in places…where daily routines of families were most significantly restricted. This is true even in places where schools closed only very briefly at the start of the pandemic,” the report stated.
If they’re not catching up, what are American kids doing with their time?
“I am willing to bet a million dollars that much of our crime wave is related to those missing students who now roam the streets as predators,” wrote David Strom at HotAir.com.
They could be joining gangs and selling drugs.
They could be staring at screens all day.
They could be victims of human trafficking.
We know that human trafficking already increased 84 percent between 2011 and 2020—before millions of children were roaming the streets.
What’s happened since then? The Biden administration won’t say. The Justice Department hasn’t updated the figures since then (although the annual report is supposed to be coming next month).
No one knows, not enough care, and nobody is willing to take responsibility.
Instead of investigating the rash of missing children, Joe Biden shows signs he’s gearing up more COVID mandates—and he’s funding a study that blames child trafficking on global warming! The new, $4 million Labor Department study asks researchers to produce “increased understanding of the link between climate change and vulnerability to child labor and/or forced labor risks.”
At least this time out, Republican presidential candidates say they’ve learned their lesson—and they’re never masking up again.
Biden and his handlers just “want to restart the Covid hysteria so they can justify more lockdowns and more censorship…and trillions of dollars in payoffs to their political allies heading into the 2024 election. Does that sound familiar?” asked President Donald Trump in a video posted to social media. “These are sick people!”
“We will not comply!” said Trump.
Trump: “The left-wing lunatics are trying hard to bring back Covid lockdowns and mandates with all of their sudden fear-mongering about the new variants. They want to restart the Covid hysteria so they can justify more lockdowns and more censorship…”pic.twitter.com/kRW4nZQDo3
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) August 31, 2023
Republicans Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tim Scott also said they would oppose new lockdowns or mask mandates.
Refusing more shutdowns will keep us from adding to the problem, but who’s going to find the hundreds of thousands of our kids Biden and his buddies have abandoned, written off, and forgotten?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”