Most people remember where they were on March 13, 2020, when Gov. Gavin Newsom effectively shuttered California’s schools. For me, it’s a few weeks earlier standing in line to order food at a pizza joint with my wife on Feb. 20 that is burned in my memory.

I got a call that evening from one of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s top deputies in my capacity as a chief of staff in the state Senate. She gave me a heads-up that a state facility in our district was likely going to quarantine hundreds of people who had contracted COVID overseas. I had been involved in discussions about the response to COVID at the highest levels of government and was expecting some kind of action. There was something different about this conversation. I turned to my wife and said, “They’re shutting the state down and it won’t be open for years.”

My statement was less of a prediction, but more of a realization that the government had everything it needed to shut down the state – a media-hyped emergency, a risk-averse populace, weak civic institutions and a governor eager to play the role of supreme ruler buoyed by a bevy of never-ending executive orders.

As a result, our “leaders” inflicted upon our children. Unbelievable scenarios became real-life tragedies.

What do you tell a neighbor hours after arriving at the emergency room in the middle of the night with his oldest teenage son’s wrists wrapped in bloody gauze and clothes wreaking of vomit from a prescription drug overdose after realizing that his baseball career was over? Or the mother of a young child whose daughter’s verbal challenges grow worse as speech therapy is rendered useless over Zoom or with a face covered by a mask? Or a junior in high school who can’t take the PSAT to qualify for the National Merit Scholarship when the school unilaterally canceled the test because it was too hard to navigate the ever-changing lockdown procedures by an impetuous governor?

“Maybe next time?”

Except, there is no “next time” in childhood.

Our state’s nearly 9 million kids barely survived the state’s flirtation with totalitarianism. One would think that we have a legislative body commissioning a comprehensive review, reparations report or oversight committee on what we did wrong so we never do it to our posterity again.

Nope. The California Legislature is hoping that parents forget about the unnecessary pain, misery and learning loss they inflicted upon our children keeping them out of their classrooms for “two weeks to slow the curve.” We found out that California politicians are about as good at counting as two-thirds of our kids who aren’t proficient in math at grade level.

California ranks near the bottom in every academic K-12 metric when compared to the national average. And over the last three years, the California Department of Education shows that we’ve lost hundreds of thousands of students from the rolls and one-third of the public schools’ students are chronically absent.

Our children learned that when the going gets tough, the adults in charge cut and run and make the kids fend for themselves. Parents had a near-impossible task to pivot so dramatically without any preparation and be successful. Teachers’ unions were complicit in this betrayal.

We have learned that our kids need to be nurtured, not abandoned and our current educational system is incapable of protecting them. A feckless media that played palace guard is finally acknowledging these “startling” facts that were obvious to anyone with a kid sitting behind a screen all day for months on end. We’ve likely lost a generation of academically competent students and the results will be devastating economically and societally.

The only way there is going to be any serious improvement in our kids and their academics is by getting the government out of the way of parents as much as possible. For over two years, parents found a way to teach their kids how to read and speak and find faith without permission from some virtual bureaucrat. Let’s make that permanent.

Lance Christensen is vice president of education policy and government affairs at the California Policy Center.