This story is published in partnership with The Guardian.

Marissa Sladek knew her son Christopher had fallen far behind when she bought him a copy of Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild.” The movie had opened just before the pandemic, and survival-themed fiction was his favorite.

Lockdown cut him off from literacy support he’d been receiving as a special education student. During remote learning, his autism and learning disabilities left him unable to navigate email or Google Meets. By the following year, when he entered the seventh grade, Christopher was reading near a third grade level.

“He could read the words,” his mother said, “but he couldn’t comprehend them.”

Sladek asked the Hillsborough Township Public Schools in central New Jersey about compensatory education — the term for a district’s duty to make up services when it fails to provide them to students with disabilities. By Sladek’s calculation, her son had lost about 8,000 minutes of instruction. The district initially offered a fraction of that amount — 300 minutes — and according to her complaint, an official said they weren’t going to “dwell on the past.” An attorney for the district emailed to say officials don’t “believe that Christopher is entitled to any compensatory education.”

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