I was five years old when my family left Odessa.
I do not have memories of the Soviet Union so much as I have stories, the kind that get told at kitchen tables over decades, the kind that explain why certain things matter more to certain families than to others. My father is a retired plumber. My mother is a retired bookkeeper. They brought me to America in 1977, and I grew up in New York City public schools, and am raising my children here.
What I inherited from my parents was not professional prestige or a particular kind of education. It was something simpler and more durable: an understanding, absorbed from the stories they carried out of Odessa, of what it looks like when what children are taught serves the people in power rather than the children. When institutions that claim to protect the vulnerable actually exist to serve themselves.
My parents had the experience of it. I grew up knowing the difference.
I did not expect to need that knowledge here. But six years ago, I watched it happen in New York City, and I have spent the last six years documenting it.
How This Started
In March 2020, New York City closed its public schools. Like every other parent in the city, I assumed it was temporary. They said just two weeks, just fifteen days. But the schools closed and did not reopen.
By summer 2020, the science was becoming clear. Schools were not significant vectors of COVID transmission. Multiple European countries had reopened schools without significant outbreak consequences. The American Academy of Pediatrics called in June 2020 for children to be physically present in school in the fall, stating explicitly that the benefits of in-person learning outweighed the risks and that the most vulnerable students — low-income children, children of color, children with disabilities — relied on schools most heavily for services they could not get anywhere else.
The New York City schools stayed closed.
I started making phone calls. I talked to other parents. I talked to pediatricians and epidemiologists. I read the studies. Everything pointed in the same direction: there was no scientific justification for keeping schools closed in New York, and the children who were losing the most were the children who could afford to lose the least.
In April 2021, I filed a lawsuit against Mayor Bill de Blasio to reopen New York City schools, demanding full five-day in-person instruction with teachers in every classroom. I co-organized #KeepNYCSchoolsOpen and in early 2022 I worked with an international team of scientists and pediatric, infectious disease, and ICU doctors to launch the Urgency of Normal — a toolkit and advocacy campaign that helped convince school districts across the country to end restrictions on children. I organized. I showed up at board meetings and press conferences and school gates.
In NYC schools did not resume anything resembling normalcy until the spring of 2021, when most school mandates were lifted and kids could play sports without Covid mandates.
By then, I had spent eighteen months watching elected officials and union leaders dismiss the suffering of hundreds of thousands of children while claiming to act in those children’s interests. I had watched a federal public health agency have its school reopening guidance edited by a labor union. I had watched a new administration that owed its electoral victory to that union’s political spending be unable to move against it. I had watched the press, with a handful of exceptions, treat the story as a partisan squabble rather than the largest educational catastrophe in a generation.
I decided to make a documentary. Listen to this great conversation about my story with Karol Markowicz, a fellow “Open Schools Mom” from NYC and incredible journalist, on her terrific podcast:
Three Years, Sixty Interviews
15 DAYS: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures took three years and involved nearly sixty interviews. The people who sat down with us included Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, now the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Scott Atlas. Anya Kamenetz. Martin Gurri. Ron Naclerio. Tiffany Justice. Maud Maron. Dozens of parents from across the country whose children lost years they will never get back.
The film had its world premiere on X in September 2025 and was seen by over one million people. It is now streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Google Play. It holds an 8.8 rating on IMDb and a 9/10 from Film Threat, which called it “an institutional autopsy with a pulse.”
The film documents what happened and who was responsible. The American Federation of Teachers, under President Randi Weingarten, directly edited CDC guidance on school reopening in February 2021, established through Freedom of Information requests that obtained more than 400 pages of emails between the AFT, the CDC, and the White House. Language drafted by union officials was adopted nearly verbatim into federal public health guidance. The CDC later acknowledged this level of coordination with the unions was “uncommon.”
The cost was documented in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Reading scores for 13-year-olds fell to levels last seen in 1971. Math scores fell to 1990 levels. The children who lost the most were the children in the districts where the unions were most powerful and the schools stayed closed the longest.
15 DAYS tells that story. It is the story of what happened and how.
But making the film raised questions I could not fully answer in a documentary. Every parent I sat across from, every official who had watched the science and ignored it, pointed toward the same harder question underneath the story we were telling.
Not what happened. Not how. But why, and for whom.
The Question the Film Could Not Fully Answer
When you document institutional behavior on this scale, when you watch a federal public health agency defer to a labor union’s preferences, the learning loss fall hardest on the most vulnerable children while the people making the decisions suffer no consequence, you have to ask whose interests were actually being served.
Not whose interests the institutions claimed to serve.
The answers this series documents are drawn from public records, federal filings, and the organizations’ own words and published strategies. What they show is a convergence of interests that most Americans have not yet seen laid out in full. It involves the teachers unions, the organizations they fund, the curriculum infrastructure they have built inside American public schools, and a formal partnership announced in July 2025 between the American Federation of Teachers and the World Economic Forum, an unelected Swiss organization that holds its flagship summer meetings in China and whose founder described, in his own recorded words at Harvard in 2017, his organization’s goal as penetrating the cabinets of governments worldwide.
I grew up in New York City. But the stories my parents brought from Odessa gave me a frame for recognizing this kind of institutional architecture. It does not require a single command structure. It does not require explicit coordination. It requires only that the people with power over children’s education share a set of goals and act on them consistently.
This series documents that they do.
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I did not start Restore Childhood to become an activist or a filmmaker. I started it because my children were locked out of their school and I could not get anyone in power to acknowledge what was being done to them and to millions of children across this country.
Six years later, the schools are open. The children who were in kindergarten and first and second grade when this happened are now in middle and high school, carrying losses that most of them and most of their parents do not even know how to name. The institutions responsible for those losses are not only still in place, they are now shaping what the next generation learns about their own country, partnering with foreign organizations to influence that curriculum, and building AI instruction tools designed to embed their values permanently into American classrooms.
My parents left Odessa so that their daughter could grow up somewhere that did not do this to children. I am not willing to see it happen here.
That is why I built this series. I hope you will read it, share it, and if you are able, support it.
See you this week.
Natalya
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Very interesting! It is not just the closed schools - it is the "no human teacher" teaching. I am a former teacher and decided to get recertified so I enrolled in an online course. The "video" teaching contains pictures of the text while someone with an AI sounding voice reads the book to them. The power points are exercpts from the book text also. There are probmlems without worked out answers to check my work. Gone are the teaching techniques to discuss the content before jumping into the lesson - ALL teaching and learning techniques are gone. Thanks for your work.