If we didn’t realize the stakes before, surely we do now.

The pandemic of 2020 has peeled back the scars encrusted by generations of inequity.

“What will you say you did . . .?” Tyra Mariani of New America asked in her keynote address to the gathering of educators at the Educational Policy Fellowship Program’s Washington Policy Seminar this week.

It was supposed to be a Capital experience, meeting colleagues in education, meeting lawmakers and policymakers, fortifying the work education leaders do.

The connections could be only virtual from scattered home-bound outposts nationwide, but the messages the speakers broadcast sounded alarms.

“The system is exposed,” said Frank Gettridge of the National Public Education Support Fund. “Education is exposed. Health care is exposed. The digital divide” is exposed.

And the education community that must respond quickly is in danger of being overwhelmed.

“You need to be thinking now,” Danica Petroshius of the Penn Hill Group said, about the pandemic’s spread of poverty, the revealed gaps, the lack of services, the stress on students’ mental health.

“They’re going to say ‘Hey schools! Solve all that!” Petroshius said. “There will be capacity problems. The economic impact will hit families hard.”

The urgency that pushes education is exacerbated, said Chike Aguh of the McChrystal Group.

“It’s being revealed how unready we are,” he said. “You don’t get that year back. You don’t get those lost months of education back.”

The access to online learning, and the nation’s difficulty in particular with helping children with learning disabilities “has been laid very bare,” Aguh said. “It’s shameful that in the country that invented the Internet, one in five don’t have access. We know it is the bedrock of education, commerce and society.”

The pandemic’s impacts, if poorly answered, will be long-lasting, shadowing another generation.

If the school community’s ability to rally voter registration and participation withers, inequity will persist.

If the school community’s ability to engage its families in filling out the U.S. Census falters, under-served and under-counted populations will suffer — disproportionately hurting the poor, people of color, immigrants . . . and children.

The effects of elections and Census counts “last a decade,” said Joseph Battistelli with the Coalition on Human Needs. “That’s a child’s lifetime.”

But teachers and principals and school staffs have a heightened obligation to inspire their families, Battistelli said.

“You are trusted messengers,” he told his audience. “They trust you. Obviously. They’re trusting you with the education of their children.”

So the challenge is to carry out these roles at a time when they are harder than we’ve known, but more important than ever.

It is time to build on new paradigms we are learning, said Lindsay Fryer of the Penn Hill Group, where more and more learning blossoms with the “teacher as coach . . . (with) parents involved.”

It’s time, said Kyle Lierman of When We All Vote, to see “a doubling-down on the equity of every family having access to high-speed internet.”

Children are relying on us, Mariani said.

“What will you say you did,” she said, “during this time when racism, misogyny, xenophobia and every other phobia is rampant?”

“What will you say you did,” she asked, displaying on her screen a gallery of children’s faces — laughing, pensive, smiling, watchful, inherently vulnerable — “for people who look like this?”

We must see new possibilities now to water a growing generation and realize together “thriving families that have the time, ability and opportunity to lead self-directed lives.”

“History will capture this time as a movement,” she said.

“Standing still is not an option.”

By Joe Robertson, LINC writer