“It was horrible, I have never been so sick in my life,” she recalled. “I actually was sent to the hospital, because I couldn’t breathe. I can’t tell you how frightening that was – not knowing if I would be OK or how it would affect my unborn baby.”

She injected blood thinners into her pregnant belly and the baby was later born healthy. But debt piled up and didn’t go away when vaccines arrived and part-time work returned. Paying rent and other bills is a monthly struggle.

Beginning in July, Boyles can pay some of those with $300 monthly checks she’ll receive from the federal government. For the first time in U.S. history, the government all low-income and most middle-class parents a significant monthly allowance for each child, an idea that is decades old and popular in Europe, but required a .

At the center of this $120 billion social safety net — which is forecast to nearly in half but could expire after one year — is Colorado’s senior U.S. senator, a wonky and unassuming 56-year-old millionaire who pushed this idea through during a new era of big government spending and direct checks.

“I believe we are on the cusp of an amazing moment in American history,” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet told a group of mothers in early April, “when we can say that we improved the fortunes of millions and millions of children and their families, but also the country as a whole.”

Origins

When the federal government in 1997, one year after welfare reforms agreed to by President Bill Clinton and Republicans in Congress, the goal was to compel people to work rather than stay home. As a result, the $400-per-child benefit could only be deducted from taxes owed.

“There was a view … that you ought not make it available to the poorest people in the country because somehow it would disincentivize them from working,” Bennet said in an interview.

That differentiated it from , a policy preferred in much of Europe and Canada, in which the government sends parents monthly checks without any strings attached. This is known in policy parlance as “refundability.”

Because America’s child tax credit was not refundable, the poorest parents because they did not earn enough money to owe federal taxes.

Enter the Harrises, William and David, a wealthy father-son duo who began pushing the idea of a refundable credit on Capitol Hill in the 2000s. William, the father, in 1981 to advocate for anti-child-poverty programs. David, the son, is a researcher at Columbia University, where he has made the academic case for anti-poverty programs.

By 2014, the Harrises were in Bennet����ap office, pitching him on refundability.

“I can remember they were meeting in my chief of staff’s office and I walked in and that����ap when we had the conversation,” the senator recalled.

In Bennet, the Harrises would gain a champion in the Senate. On the House side, , a Connecticut Democrat who has been in Congress since 1991 and has supported refundable child tax credits since 2003.

“Killing themselves”

Bennet hails from a posh northeastern pedigree — St. Albans (“the smartest boarding school in America,” Business Insider), Wesleyan University (the alma mater of his father, grandfather and the Harrises) and Yale Law. The Washington Post his voice and that of his brother, a former editor at The New York Times, as “deep and slow, almost a perfect parody of a rich person, as if they speak only while swirling a martini.”

Bennet understands poverty the way an anthropologist understands ancient civilizations: with a detached but sincere interest, honed over decades of conversation and study. He doesn’t know what it����ap like to miss a meal or a rent payment, but he has heard the stories, especially in the three and a half years he was superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

He stood in auditoriums and told angry parents that their child’s school was closing, sat with them in their homes and listened for hours. “What they told me,” Bennet said, “is that they were working really hard — some would say they were killing themselves — but no matter what they did they couldn’t get their kids out of poverty.”

In 2017, the to create a fully refundable and monthly child tax credit of $300 for kids under the age of six and $250 for children older than six. By 2019, 38 Democratic senators supported the bill, ranging ideologically from Bernie Sanders of Vermont to Jon Tester of Montana. But it wasn’t voted on.

Bennet, meanwhile, was formulating a presidential platform, and made a refundable child tax credit the centerpiece.

“Not many people noticed that I did run for president but when I was in rooms talking to people, this is what I would talk about,” Bennet recalled. “People would say, ‘What about this or what about that’ — Medicare for All or whatever — and I would say, ‘I don’t know, but we can cut child poverty almost in half with just one change to the tax code.’ People were interested in that, I think, but many people didn’t think it could be done or that it was real.”

Bennet����ap longshot presidential hopes ended in New Hampshire on Feb. 11, 2020. A month later, the nation was staring down a pandemic and an economic cliff that would crush the lower class and leave Congress searching for solutions. DeLauro and Bennet were ready with one.

“(A)ll of a sudden it was viewed as the most elegant solution to a really serious problem we were facing,” he said.

Six main supporters

As President Joe Biden prepared to enter the White House in mid-January and introduce a massive stimulus and pandemic relief package, supporters of the child tax credit in Congress went to work lobbying the incoming administration. DeLauro calls them the CTC Six — Sens. Bennet, Sherrod Brown and Cory Booker; Reps. DeLauro, Suzan DelBene and Ritchie Torres — and they wanted their policy in the $1.9 trillion package.

According to Bennet, a former staffer who had joined the Biden administration told him the package, known as the American Rescue Plan, would include a fully refundable child tax credit but not an increase in how much money parents would get per month.

It was a partial victory and the so-called CTC Six wanted more.

“We all spent this weekend calling people in the White House and having conversations with folks about this,” Bennet recalled. He wanted refundability and an expansion, as he had proposed in his American Family Act four years before.

The senator texted Susan Rice, his friend, as well as a top Biden aide on domestic policy and the former national security advisor.

“I wrote the longest text I’ve ever sent anybody in my life. It was about the different levels of the (CTC), what it would mean to keep the whole thing intact, what the reduction in childhood poverty would look like and what the incremental cost would be of doing this,” he said. “I went to bed and I got up in the morning and discovered that the whole thing had been put in the package.”

Congress sent the package to Biden, who signed it in March, despite an absence of Republican support. It expanded the child tax credit to $3,600 per year for children under the age of six and $3,000 for older children up to age 17 — the dollar amounts Bennet introduced in 2017. Payments will begin in July but the expansion and refundability will expire after one year.

Earlier this week, his next massive spending bill, the American Families Plan, that would extend the refundable child tax credits until 2025. But the Democrats who’ve championed the policy fear it could be eliminated if power changes hands when 2025 rolls around.

“FDR never put an expiration date on Social Security for senior citizens,” Torres told reporters Tuesday. His south Bronx district is the nation’s poorest. “Why should President Biden put an expiration date on Social Security for families and children?”

The idea is gaining support from a few Republicans. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri a refundable credit of $12,000 a year for married parents Monday. But , such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have criticized refundability.

“If pulling families out of poverty were as simple as handing moms and dads a check, we would have solved poverty a long time ago,” Rubio earlier this year. “There is substantially more to lifting families out of poverty than government-provided income.”

“It helps”

Bennet has three kids and is gearing up for a third re-election race next year. He is the longest-serving senator from Colorado since Gordon Allott, who retired in 1973, and another term would make Bennet the longest-serving since Henry Teller in 1909.

Some members of the CTC Six say the policy will be their legacy. Brown, an Ohio Democrat who has worked in government since Watergate, said Tuesday it is “the highlight of my long career in government and elected office.”

When asked whether child tax credits will be his legacy, Bennet said, “There’s nothing I’ve worked on that����ap going to make more of a difference to the American people or the kids that I used to work for in Denver Public Schools.”

That includes people like , of Centennial, a scientist at a diagnostics lab. She and her husband Tim have two kids and struggle financially.

The Phinneys were skeptical when they heard the government would begin sending checks.

“We were kind of like, ‘Well, that����ap not really going to happen, is it?’ …” Whitney Phinney said, adding that they will benefit from the extra money. “… It helps relieve some of the pressure of the massive expenses that come with having kids.”

The government will cover up to $9,000 in funeral and burial expenses, including travel, for people who died of COVID-19 after Jan. 20, 2020, unless the funeral was paid for in advance. There are no income requirements or restrictions, so Coloradans of all social classes are eligible.

“It����ap a huge reimbursement,” said Kendra Briggs, CEO of in Denver. “… I got a call from one woman who had lost her husband and she was so relieved. She had lost a spouse, so half the Social Security is gone now and the couple didn’t plan for life insurance.”

Phone lines at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers the program, were overloaded April 12, the first day applications were accepted. FEMA has since hired more people to handle the roughly 20,000 to 25,000 calls it receives daily, according to the agency.

“The funeral assistance program is historic, not only in the breathtaking scope and magnitude of the program itself, but because of the historic personal losses suffered by so many of our citizens,” FEMA Deputy Director for Individual Assistance Matt Redding said.

It����ap common for FEMA to reimburse Americans for funeral expenses after a disaster, such as hurricanes and tornadoes. But since FEMA’s creation in 1979, there have never been this many deaths — about 570,000 nationwide and 6,400 in Colorado due to COVID.

About 120,000 applications were received in the first eight days of this year’s program, according to Redding.

“While no amount of money can heal the loss of a loved one, this grant program can help ease the financial strain on Coloradans who’ve suffered so much from COVID-19,” U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, a Lafayette Democrat, said in a statement.

After Briggs first heard about it, her company sent a letter to past customers who had buried a loved one due to COVID. “They didn’t know about it. They were like, ‘What?’” she recalled.

“I couldn’t believe it wasn’t better advertised. Remember when everybody got the stimulus checks, how advertised that was? This is just like a secret,” Briggs said.

One customer of hers lost two people to COVID, making them eligible for $18,000. A woman whose husband died of the virus will now be able to afford a headstone, according to Briggs. But there are exceptions: One local family Briggs worked with cannot be reimbursed because they pre-planned a funeral through a trust.

More families over funerals last year due to restrictions on how many people could attend a funeral in-person, statistics from the National Funeral Directors Association . That kept costs below $9,000 for some, Briggs said, “but if you had a full burial and didn’t own (cemetery) property, you could use the full $9,000 easily.”

To receive funeral reimbursement, the person who paid for it must have a death certificate that states the death was due to COVID-19. Applicants must be a U.S. citizen or legal resident and the deceased must have died within the U.S. or an American territory. But there is no requirement the deceased be American.

Redding declined to predict how long it will take FEMA to process the hundreds of thousands of applications it expects to receive. But he stressed that family members who are still grieving loved ones should not feel hurried.

“There is no rush,” he told reporters Wednesday. “That����ap something we want folks to understand: There is absolutely no rush to apply, because there is no (time) limit.”

She worked in housekeeping at the Colorado Convention Center, one of many venues hit with cascading cancellations starting in March 2020.

“We worked from the beginning of the pandemic to exactly on my birthday, March 24th. That was the day that we all got laid off,” Roy said.

Since then, unemployment benefits and the federal stimulus payments have helped Roy “keep above water.” The Service Employees International Union Local 105 recently negotiated an agreement to keep the jobs at the convention center open through September.

The continuing rollout of vaccines could help get Roy back to the work she misses as people feel more comfortable traveling and venturing out into crowds.

But the pandemic-induced recession has thrown businesses, workers, economists and health officials plenty of curveballs over the last 13 months. Record unemployment rates and massive federal bailout efforts have happened alongside good economic news — drops in bankruptcies and foreclosures in Colorado. There has also been a major upswing in new business formation and entrepreneurship.

Once the dust settles, it’s clear what was once viewed as a possible short-term event will reshape the state and national economy in profound ways.

“Our economy isn’t healed …”

A year after 104,000 Coloradans filed unemployment claims in one record-smashing week it����ap unclear how long it will take to get to a full recovery.

Colorado lost 375,800 jobs lost in March and April last year. It has since regained 219,100 of them, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. But with more workers reentering the labor force, the state’s unemployment rate was stuck at a stubborn 6.6% in January and February, more than twice as high as it was pre-pandemic.

“Our economy isn’t healed until we’re really back to full employment,” said Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the research division at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business.

Meanwhile, new unemployment filings are still reaching levels that would have set records pre-pandemic.

New claims totals, made somewhat fuzzy by rampant fraud within the unemployment insurance system, have continued to run well above the averages seen during the Great Recession, CDLE data shows.

And that doesn’t account for additional claims filed each week for federal unemployment programs launched during the pandemic to serve gig workers, self-employed people and others not traditionally covered. Combined, the state has paid out more than $8.66 billion in unemployment support since last March.

One big concern CDLE labor economist Ryan Gedney has at this point is people who are long-term unemployed, having been out of the labor force for 27 weeks or more. CDLE data shows that as of March 27, there were more than 81,500 Coloradans filing continued claims for state support, meaning they are collecting benefits for at least two weeks. That number jumps up to more than 250,000 people if federal unemployment programs are included.

“That does make it harder to get back into the workforce when you have those long gaps in your employment history,” said Gedney.

An uncertain future for restaurants and retailers

The restaurant, hotel and retail industries have been battered by the pandemic. Combined they make up more than 15% of all jobs in the state, state and federal figures show.

Gedney said those sectors, which are important employers for low-income workers, are still question marks when it comes to recovery. Still in the thick of the public health crisis, it’s hard to even know what the full toll is when it comes to shops and restaurants that didn’t make it.

“It could take years to really, fully gauge what has happened from a closure standpoint,” Gedney said.

The Colorado Restaurant Association didn’t keep tabs on every business that closed last year, but its counterpart, the National Restaurant Association, reported last fall that one in six dining establishments across the country shut their doors in 2020, CRA spokeswoman Erin Dewey wrote in an email.

Colorado restaurants are still seeing revenues 40% lower than pre-pandemic levels. Staffing is still down by about a third, translating to 78,000 fewer jobs in the industry, according to CRA’s March membership survey.

But new restaurants are opening as well. The next few months could mean a surge of hungry, pent-up demand, especially for full-service, sit-down places, predicts Pete Newlin, CEO of Denver-based restaurant company Gastamo Group.

Gastamo operates local concepts including Park Burger and Homegrown Tap & Dough, and is getting ready to take its fast-casual chicken sandwich chain, Birdcall, multi-state this year.

In February, Newlin and partner Philippe Failyau opened Perdida, a Baja peninsula-inspired Mexican restaurant in Denver’s Washington Park neighborhood. It was the company’s first full-service concept in five years.

“When COVID hit early on I know I thought it was the end of full-service dining,” Newlin said. “But I think the rebound is faster than anyone could have imagined. People want to go spend time with each other, and they want to do it in a full-service environment.”

After laying off 65% of its staff last spring, roughly 200 people, Newlin said the company now employs 400. It aims to go from 12 restaurants to 20 by the end of 2021.

Birdcall has embraced technology, . Gastamo plans to keep embracing technology and focus on its online presence in a time when nearly every restaurant has had to embrace to-go ordering, but more technology will not come at the expense of jobs, according to Newlin.

“Tech won’t be focused on labor savings so much as how do we keep these businesses full,” he said.

On the retail side, online sales also became a point of emphasis and lifeline for the shops trying to survive. In a year when Amazon saw its net sales skyrocket 38% to $386.1 billion, according to its year-end financial report, the trend toward multi-channel selling got a healthy dose of rocket fuel.

But every trend has outliers.

At Denver vintage toys and collectibles shop, , co-owners Tony Vecchio and Dede Thompson have resisted putting their merchandise online even after being closed for three months during the pandemic and seeing sales drop 30%.

The business partners and couple have kept their business of two running by staying financially conservative. They even paid rent for the months they were closed out of their savings rather than seeking a deferment deal.

After reopening last summer, Fifty-Two 80’s, which features 6,000 toys, trading cards and other items from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, saw strong business, Vecchio said.

“I attribute our success through the pandemic to simply, this is a happy place,” Vecchio said. “It really takes people back to a simpler time, a pre-pandemic time.”

“It fell hard, fast”

When the coronavirus started spreading, not only was the U.S. oil and gas industry hit by dropping demand because of the slowing of business and travel, it also took major blows as a price war erupted between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Oil prices tumbled and then plunged below zero for the first time ever.

“It fell hard and fast, as it did for many other businesses,” said Chris Wright, CEO of Denver-based

The company’s revenues dropped 90% in the second quarter of 2020 and its first-quarter positive net income “swung to a significant net loss” in the second quarter, according to

Liberty provides hydraulic fracturing and engineering services throughout the region from Montana and North Dakota into Texas. Before the pandemic, the company had never laid off employees, even during the oil-price collapse in 2015.

That streak was broken in April 2020 when Liberty laid off nearly half of its 2,400 employees, furloughed others and cut salaries. Wright said the company has rehired several hundred workers. Revenues are increasing every month.

“The demand for energy is growing rapidly, but again, that’s off a low low,” Wright said. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen a number of local businesses in oil and gas fail.”

Like many other industries, the pandemic accelerated existing trends. Wright said the number of oil and gas jobs had been shrinking because of the industry’s increasing efficiency. The advances in fracking and other technology that made the U.S. the world’s leading oil and natural gas producer created a boom and then what Wright likened to the dot-com bust.

Heading into the pandemic, several oil and gas companies were cutting back spending and consolidating to meet investors’ demands for less debt and more cash flow.

The latest numbers available from the Colorado labor department show 19,376�� people were employed in the industry in September 2020. That’s down from 31,733 in September 2019.

Wright said employment in the industry will remain flat for the next few years and that companies will be more profitable because there are fewer companies with pared-down staffs.

Garrett Reagan, a four-year Liberty employee, was furloughed for about five months. Since going back to work, the 26-year-old who lives in Milliken said he appreciates his job as an equipment operator even more. However, he doesn’t expect the oil and gas industry to return to its pre-pandemic days. The fracking crews back on the job have fewer people.

“I love my job and I love the type of work I do, but my outlook on the future is that the industry is getting faster, smarter and sleeker, more automated,” Reagan said.

He was able to hold on thanks to the federal and state unemployment benefits.

“That’s really the only reason I was able to keep my house and car,” Reagan said. “I’m glad I came out on this side of it, that’s for sure.”

The ups, downs of a recession

Federal and state aid helped Reagan and others who lost jobs or had their hours cut stay afloat. The aid has also helped businesses keep their doors open and employees on the payroll.

“There’s not great evidence showing that a lot of businesses closed,” said Lewandowski.

There were a total of 8,278 bankruptcy filings in Colorado in 2020, compared to 11,039 in 2019.

Foreclosure filings also dropped significantly last year, to 2,131 from 5,611, according to the Colorado Division of Housing. The division said many financial institutions slowed or suspended processing foreclosures last year because of the pandemic. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, better known as the CARES Act, mandated that foreclosure processing be frozen for at least 60 days at the outset of the pandemic.

The secretary of state’s office reported 37,523 notices of business closures in 2020, compared to 35,014 in 2019. Although the number increased, the pace of business dissolutions was similar to that in previous years, Lewandowski said.

The reasons for drops in foreclosures, bankruptcies and increases in personal income: massive aid packages approved quickly, Lewandowski said.

The latest round of relief, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, was approved by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden on March 11. So far, Colorado has received more than $37 billion of the COVID-19 relief funds, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which tracks the distributions.

“We’ve never really talked about trillions of dollars in stimulus before,” Lewandowski said. “Now, I think the question is what����ap the cost of it? What will the long-term cost be to the rising deficit and after a year, then the rising debt?”

A record number of new businesses

Early on in the pandemic, many small businesses suffered because Americans’ hierarchy of needs was upended, according to Ken Sagendorf, the director of the Innovation Center at Regis University’s Anderson College of Business and Computing.

“Small businesses were tough because if you were selling a luxury item, there were people who couldn’t find toilet paper,” he said.

But the year also brought about a surge of new business formations.

Filings for new businesses in Colorado increased 8.9% in 2020, totaling 138,368, according to the secretary of state’s office data. On a national level, the nonpartisan Economic Innovation Group found — via U.S. Census Bureau data — that the U.S. for the first time ever last year. Total applications rose 24% over 2019.

When thousands of people found themselves laid-off, furloughed or working jobs where they didn’t feel safe, that spurred action, Sagendorf said.

“I think it brought to light people’s bravery in the space,” he said. “If you were having that moment at a job, maybe you said, ‘Now is the time to start a business. It’s never going to get better.’ ”

Dannette Hollowell wears too many hats for easy definition but the single mother of three added a new one last year: entrepreneur.

Hollowell, 37, and a jazz singer who has performed around Denver for almost two decades, lost her job with a nonprofit advocacy organization for pregnant women in October 2019.

Then in December of that year, she found out she was pregnant with her third child. After applying for government assistance to help support her family, she joined a business boot camp cohort at the Rocky Mountain MicroFinance Institute. By February 2020, her pop-up stand was a licensed LLC.

The pandemic didn’t do Hollowell and Sticky Drip any favors. The original goal was to open a brick-and-mortar location, now an idea that’s on hold. But Hollowell, working with her two daughters, Bree, 20 and Gabby, 19, by her side has served up waffles, chicken and topping and sides at about 30 events since forming the company. Her son, Vernon Ameen, was born in July and now tags along to events in a baby carrier.

Hollowell started a new full-time job in March, working with another motherhood-focused nonprofit, MotherWise Colorado. She also volunteers with hunger relief nonprofit Metro Caring where she leads the food rescue program and serves on the food governance board. She is dedicated to keeping Sticky Drip going as a financial lifeline and a legacy for her kids.

“I want to leave them something from myself. I haven’t been able to afford or have the credit to buy the house,” Hollowell said. “I knew this was a business we were familiar with, that we could run on our own.”

Shifting economic landscape

Besides accelerating changes that were already in the works in retail, restaurants and the energy sector, the pandemic has also magnified entrenched disparities in the economy, economists said.

Lewandowski said a large number of the jobs that haven’t returned tend to be lower paying and in the industries affected the most: restaurants, tourism, hotels, bars, concert and arts venues.

Strong national employment numbers from March are a reason for optimism, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the .��But the country is still down 8.4 million jobs or as many as 11 million when considering what the job growth might have been without the pandemic, she said.

“Going into this, on average we were creating about 200,000 jobs a month,” Gould said. “We still have more than 4 million people that have been unemployed for at least six months.”

The Black unemployment rate, historically about twice the rate of whites, is 9.6%, compared to 6% for white workers, Gould said. The Hispanic unemployment rate soared to nearly 19% and was even higher for Hispanic women at 20.5%. It’s now close to 8%.

“We too matter”

When many people packed up their computers, turned off the office lights and went home to work to slow the spread of the coronavirus, others kept going to those buildings day after day to keep them safe and clean. Alejandra Sanchez has worked through the pandemic at a Kaiser Permanente support services facility in Denver.

Sanchez, who has worked at the site for 16 years, said janitors who work for contract building cleaning companies haven’t always had the protective gear and cleaning supplies they needed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, her workload has increased because her building, which includes a lab where COVID-19 tests are processed, has been open longer hours, she said.

“All the Kaiser employees, they all got vaccinated. We went to our employer and asked if we could get vaccinated because we consider ourselves frontline workers as well, essential workers,” Sanchez said. “We were very disappointed we weren’t offered the vaccine right away, that we had to wait until when everyone is eligible.”

Julie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Commercial Cleaning Systems, the contractor Sanchez works for, said in an email that the company is providing extensive information in English and Spanish about vaccines and can support employees who want to be vaccinated.

“Our employees are our teammates, and we care about them as individuals. CCS ensures that our employees have what they need to do their jobs safely and effectively,” Hogan said.

In February, the Building Owners and Managers Association of Colorado and the Service Employees International Union Local 105 wrote a letter to ask Gov. Jared Polis to designate janitors, security officers and critical personnel in commercial buildings as essential workers on the vaccine distribution schedule. They said it was a matter of equity because the workers are disproportionately people of color and immigrants “and it will also bolster the economy by increasing confidence for the many tenants as they return to occupancy.”

Juan Montana, SEIU’s internal services property director, said the union and a contractor, Rocky Mountain Janitorial, are teaming up to offer vaccine clinics to employees later this week.

At the start of the pandemic, hours were reduced and employees had the choice between layoffs or sharing hours.

“Most people decided to share their hours,” Montana said. “They don’t want others to lose their jobs.”

Sanchez said she hopes the pandemic has demonstrated the importance of janitors and others who take care of commercial buildings, that “we too matter, that we too need to be respected, acknowledged and protected and valued.”

Botello, 38, lost her job of 13 years cleaning houses in Boulder the second week of March 2020, and hasn’t been able to find another job. Even as COVID restrictions lift and kids go back to school, Botello’s customers aren’t ready to have her back in their homes.

Her husband’s work hours at a car repair shop were also reduced. They had to use nearly all the money they saved for their two kids’ college expenses to pay rent and bills. They aren’t eligible for unemployment, but they were able to receive one-time assistance through an organization she’s a part of.

“It����ap really stressful. … It����ap really bad,” Botello said of their financial situation. “I think it����ap not only me. I heard from many people (that) the situation is really hard right now.”

Women in the U.S. and Colorado were unemployed during the pandemic at high rates — women of color and mothers in even higher numbers. The rate of women participating in the labor force in Colorado is 1.2 percentage points lower in February than it was in January 2020, compared with a 0.8 percentage point increase for men, according to .

Local economists say long-term problems for women in the workforce were exacerbated by the pandemic — accessibility to affordable child care; needing to stay home with children whose schools were closed; and concentration of women in service and hospitality industries that won’t recover as quickly.

Women’s advocacy groups worry if the right measures aren’t taken, decades of progress could be erased for women, which would affect the entire state.

“I do expect as schools reopen and child care centers reopen, we’ll see a rebound of women’s employment,” said Chloe East, assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver. “But I also think from what we know from the economic research, even short periods of time out of the labor force can have long-term consequences for women’s work and wages.”

The Denver Post heard from women across the state who shared their stories of layoffs, furloughs or being forced to quit their jobs because of challenges with child care or caregiving. Others said they left jobs because they felt unsafe during the pandemic, were immunocompromised or felt like they were pushed out for advocating for safer workplaces.

Their experiences spanned industries: schools, hospitals, service, entertainment and tech sectors. Many agreed that in addition to their personal financial struggles, losing women in the workforce in Colorado leads to a significant loss in perspective.

“I think it keeps us stuck in the same old ways,” said Jessica Kelleher, a single mother of 15-month-old twins, who was laid off from her job at the end of last year. “One thing that I’ve learned as a mother is just the insane amount of focus and creativity and efficiency that mothers, single mothers, mothers in the workforce have.”

If workplaces lose that, she added, they won’t grow, evolve or innovate, and the environment becomes stale and uncompetitive.

Colorado’s labor market stats

Colorado is lagging behind other states in its unemployment rate recovery at 6.6% vs. 6.2% nationally. Prior to the pandemic, Colorado’s rate was below the national average.

But to understand the full picture of how many Colorado women have been affected, analysts need to look beyond the unemployment rate, CU Denver Economics professor Laura Argys said. The rate of unemployment may have started to drop, but that����ap because some people who were previously unemployed have dropped out of the workforce entirely.

“One of the differences between men and women in a recession is what occupations they’re in or what industries they’re in and how the recession is affecting those things,” Argys said. “Many recessions hit male employment pretty hard.”

Shutdowns in the retail, hospitality and service industries, in which women and people of color tend to work, created much of that burden. The restaurant and hospitality sectors in November and December alone.

Although state analysts forecast that the total number of jobs in Colorado will reach pre-pandemic levels by 2022, February’s growth was slower. If that rate continues, it’ll take until 2024 to reach that mark, according to the Common Sense Institute.

Had January 2020 growth continued, Colorado would have 27,000 more women in the labor force, Common Sense Institute president and CEO Kristin Strohm said.

“Our jobs have not recovered at the same rate as other states across the nation and we’re seeing a disproportionate impact, especially on moms here,” Strohm said.��In February, Colorado ranked 28th among states in terms of current job levels year-over-year, according to a by the University of Colorado Boulder.

Mothers left the workforce at a higher rate than fathers, the Common Sense Institute report said, and women without college degrees were four times more likely to become unemployed than those with associate degrees or higher.

The pandemic also has affected women’s earning potential and set back long-term career trajectories, said Nicole Riehl, president and CEO of Executives Partnering to Invest in Children (EPIC).

She believes the solution needs to be a public and private effort — pouring in money and resources from the state and federal government, as well as normalizing caregiving as part of corporate culture and providing families with financial incentives.

Some nonprofits like 9 to 5 Colorado, which helped Botello’s family, and the Colorado Women’s Foundation established relief funds to assist with women’s bills, but say policymakers need to find more permanent solutions. Others like the Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce are working with businesses in the state to provide more mentorship and programming to help keep women in the workforce.

The solutions, however, shouldn’t create undue burdens on businesses, chamber President and CEO Kristen Blessman said.

“The economy is not going to come back until we get women back in the workforce,” she added.

There is some hope: Recent estimates from the Colorado Department of Labor and Unemployment show women ages 16 and older are back to participating in the labor force like they were in February 2019, at 62%. That had dropped to 56% last April.

CDLE senior economist Ryan Gedney cautioned there are still some women who aren’t in the workforce but might want to be, or some who are part-time instead of full-time. Plus, the numbers fluctuate from month to month. But overall, he expects more women will be able to return after vaccinations are widespread and there’s a more normal school year.

Working mothers

Child care was an issue for the 44-year-old Kelleher, who delivered her twins in December 2019 and returned in March 2020 from maternity leave to her job as a manager at a Denver-area oil and gas company. In November, her employer of six years laid her off.

“It was my worst nightmare, horrific,” Kelleher said. “It was shocking and terrifying. Just immediately scared that I was going to be trying to take care of two children on the street.”

She had to lay off her kids’ nanny, start looking for another job and scramble to figure out what to do about health insurance and unemployment benefits. She also quickly realized that she couldn’t take care of her kids alone at home on top of job searching.

So, Kelleher took a financial risk and put them in day care, with the hope that a job would come along quickly. Four months later, Kelleher was employed again, this time in the renewable energy industry.

Colorado ranks , with an annual average cost of $15,325 for full-time infant care. Already, there was a significant shortage of child care options before the pandemic, and as COVID spread and some businesses closed, the problem became even worse, Riehl said.

The organization is pushing for measures that would, among other things, make child care more affordable; create more incentives for land developers so child care centers can purchase the space they need at lower rates; help the industry pay livable wages; and change regulations for home-based child care.

Colorado’s leaders have pledged at least $5 million to $10 million for child care in a state stimulus package and expect more for that from the latest federal stimulus package (which hasn’t yet been allocated). Riehl also said policy leaders are starting to consider child care as a key aspect of the infrastructure.”

But the issue goes beyond whether child care is available. Some mothers have had to leave the workforce because of caregiving responsibilities, which advocates say also needs to be taken into consideration.

Annelicia Tenorio, 27, was furloughed in April from her job as a skincare consultant and makeup artist at The Body Shop at Denver International Airport, but returned to work in September. Less than a month later, she found out she was pregnant with her second child.

She had a rough start to the pregnancy and her doctor told her she needed to find a less hands-on position or take a break to protect herself and her baby during the pandemic.��

Tenorio tried to work through it with human resources, but ultimately, they couldn’t find a solution.

“We weren’t prepared for it,” Tenorio said of the job loss, which forced her and her husband to make some cuts and tighten their budget. “We weren’t prepared for one income.”

One of the most stressful aspects for Tenorio, however, is the uncertainty. After the baby is born, she wants to be able to work, but she’d have to figure out child care. Will it be safe? Will she be able to find a job in her career? Or will she need to take another route?

Kimberly Alderfer remembers the first time she entered a coronavirus patient����ap room last spring, the fear she had that she too would end up hooked to a ventilator and struggling to breathe, just for being there. The patient was her age, after all.

But as days went by and spring turned into summer, Alderfer’s fear transformed into exhaustion after months on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. The toll of caring for the sickest patients of the crisis, of being unable to connect with them through layers of protective gear, and of watching so many of them die, was only just beginning to show.

And by fall, as the deadly third wave of the pandemic arrived, the 28-year-old critical care nurse became angry that she would have to go through all of it again.

“You try to protect yourself by not forming as much of an emotional connection because it����ap very likely that they will not do well,” said Alderfer, a cardiac ICU nurse at UCHealth’s University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. “So I was angry. I just knew that I hadn’t processed this thing yet and I wasn’t emotionally in a strong place to go through all of it again.”

Health care workers were hailed as heroes with nightly howling when the worst pandemic in a century arrived in Colorado. But a year later, several Denver-care health care workers who spoke to The Denver Post said they feel forgotten and let down by the government and public’s response.

Health care professionals have spent a year enduring trauma — and it’s still not over. They’ve faced an unprecedented amount of death through their jobs as more than 6,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the state.

They’ve cycled through a variety of emotions: fear, uncertainty, grief, exhaustion and anger. They’ve felt isolated as their jobs marked them as potential spreaders of the newly arrived virus — a concern that they, too, struggled with as they feared making their loved ones sick. They found hope in the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines, but still some wonder how they can remain in their chosen profession after this past year.

Overall, more people are experiencing heightened anxiety, depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder during the pandemic. But mental health professionals worry that the worst is yet to come, especially for health care workers who have experienced even higher levels of stress and bore witness to the most tragic moments of the pandemic.

“There’s some concern… that the more significant mental health needs are going to kind of appear and emerge over time,” said Steve Fisher, director of outpatient expansion and special projects at the Mental Health Center of Denver, adding, “It may sneak up on them in a way that they don’t realize.”

Health care workers also��are at risk of experiencing compassion fatigue and moral injury because of their jobs. The latter occurs as their values are violated by decisions on the job that conflict with their beliefs, such as when nurses and doctors have to decide who get life-saving treatment when there is a scarcity of ventilators and other resources.

“You’re overwhelmed by the nature of your job basically, which is exposure to so much trauma that now you are starting to experience it yourself and It����ap overwhelming you,” Fisher said.

An unprecedented amount of death

Treating patients with COVID-19 is particularly challenging because medical employees have found that the coronavirus can affect the body in different ways. It can also be physically taxing as staff often turn patients on to their stomachs so they can breathe easier. And when a patient has severe enough symptoms that they are in the intensive care unit, it’s possible that could stay there for weeks with little improvement.

“It’s exhausting to come in and put 12, 13 hours into somebody and come back the next day and they’re worse or better or nothing,” said Justin Racine, a critical care nurse at Denver Health. “It seems like nothing you’re doing is helping.”

Health care workers have faced an unprecedented amount of death in their jobs as thousands of people have died in the state from the coronavirus, and some also��have lost loved ones. So far, 6,191 people have died from COVID-19 in Colorado and 547,630 people have died across the United States.

“That����ap just not comprehensible that it����ap gotten this far,” said Dr. Amy Olson, associate professor of medicine at National Jewish Health in Denver.

She has lost patients to the coronavirus that she treated for years before the pandemic. One such patient, who Olson had treated for at least 10 years, had an underlying lung disease but was stable before contracting the virus. The patient became sick after moving Texas, where hospitals ran out of resources during a surge in COVID-19 cases.

“We didn’t have enough beds at that time to transfer her down,” Olson said, adding, “It’s really tough. Again, it’s not just people I just met. These are people that I have known for a really long time.”

Then, a month ago, Olson lost a close family friend who died from dementia and pneumonia. She was unable to go to his out-of-state funeral because of the pandemic and instead had to watch the service virtually.

“That was kind of icing on the cake,” Olson said. “It’s so disheartening not to be there.”

During the fall surge in cases, hospital employees said the number of patients they cared for continued to increase as more of their coworkers became sick with the coronavirus. And even when hospitalizations from the virus decline, it can be difficult as people with other conditions come in sicker after putting off care.

“You’re kind of getting hit harder by someone who is just as sick in another manner,” Racine, 28, said. “And then, the second time around there’s no ‘thank you’ signs. No hero signs.”

He described the mental exhaustion that occurs each time he enters a COVID-19 patient’s room, saying he took out a life insurance policy last spring when the pandemic began and discussed with his wife the possibility of her living elsewhere as she was pregnant. She gave birth to their daughter early, and he said he doesn’t know if it was the result of stress from the situation.

“I do my best to not take it home with me, but there’s days when that just doesn’t happen,” he said. “There’s opportunities at work for some counseling and stuff like that, but it’s difficult with the night schedule to coordinate that.”

Alderfer, who is a charge nurse, remembers losing five patients in her 24-bed intensive-care unit in a single day during the spring surge. But, she said, she is one of the fortunate ones as UCHealth brought family members into the ward to say goodbye to dying relatives.

“I was in the place a lot less often where I was the only person in the room with a dying stranger, “ she said.

Racine described a different scene, saying that when people are still positive for the coronavirus they are unable to visit with loved ones in the hospital..

“It becomes difficult to set up and arrange for some type of video chat,’ he said. “Then try to tell them that their loved one is not doing well through a computer screen is a tough ask.”

How health care workers are coping

Late last year, Olson began having trouble sleeping and started feeling anxious. She couldn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m. and would wake by 6 a.m. to get her kids ready for school at home before going into work. She struggled to focus.

“I wasn’t caring as much as I should and I was like, ‘This isn’t me,’ ” Olson said.

She thought it would get better after she took time off during the holidays, but when she returned to work she was still struggling with burnout and grief.

Mental health is still heavily stigmatized in the health care industry, and it is difficult for physicians to say they need to take time off of work, Olson said.

But, she said, that is what she had to do. Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, Olson has taken weeks off and altered her work schedule. For example, during February, she worked from home reading studies and did not directly treated patients. (Even when she’s on leave, Olson still fields phone calls from her coworkers updating her about patients, such as when they pass away.)

“Overall, yes, it has helped me,” Olson said, adding, “There are still days that are going to be rough and I’m learning how to get through those days.”

Health care workers are facing a huge amount of grief and loss, but the longevity of the pandemic means people are having a harder time finding healthy coping mechanisms, said Fisher, with the Mental Health Center of Denver.

“The way that they were able to manage is not sufficient in many cases and now they have to figure out how can they manage this new stress and create a lifestyle of wellbeing,” he said.

In December, the emotion Alderfer had stored away for nine months “leaked out” after losing someone she knew to COVID-19. She took a week off and spent the first couple days in bed, crying and journaling. Eventually, she returned cooking and walking her dog.

“I felt like I had coping mechanisms again,” Alderfer said. “For the first time in nine months, I wasn’t just shoving all of this emotion down in a box to deal with later. And since then, I’ve been trying to deal with stuff in real-time”

Her anger last spring made her uncomfortable; it was unlike her. She’s heard from other nurses who have felt the same

Alderfer doesn’t feel that way anymore. It����ap been replaced by apathy and exhaustion.

Now, before she goes to work each day, she stops in her car and tries to summon a positive attitude.

“I’m definitely been feeling burned out,” Alderfer said. “It����ap hard to even consider staying in the nursing profession after everything that we’ve gone through.”

One common theme that����ap already emerging: building out a more robust broadband network.

“If we saw anything last year, it����ap how critical broadband is,” Golden Mayor Laura Weinberg said, referring to the lifeline that digital communication became for a huge chunk of the economy during the pandemic.

The city of 20,000 on the metro area’s west flank is slated to receive nearly $4.5 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden on March 11.

Some form of municipal broadband service, among other infrastructure projects, is also on the wish list in Englewood — in line for nearly $7.5 million in federal aid.

“Voters gave the city the right to provide broadband services in 2020, but having a possible funding source to make broadband widely available may prompt the city council to investigate this opportunity further,” Englewood spokesman Chris Harguth said.

The Denver Post sampled a handful of metro area cities and counties to gauge their fiscal health after a year of revenue interruptions from government shutdowns and health restrictions. For the most part, civic leaders say it����ap too early to lay out plans for the nearly $2 billion that local governments throughout the state will receive.

One critic wonders whether the American Rescue Plan Act����ap largess — $350 billion bound for state and local governments across the country — is overkill.

State revenues nationwide were down only $2 billion in 2020 compared to the previous year largely due to surging property values, said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the nonprofit think-tank Tax Foundation. In Colorado, he said, revenues were up last year from 2019.

A survey completed in October of more than 170 cities and towns by the Colorado Municipal League revealed that while nearly half of respondents reported a drop in revenues in 2020 from the year before, more than 25% of the state’s municipalities saw revenues go up during the pandemic.

“This relatively stable fiscal environment is a strange backdrop for $350 billion in state and local relief, particularly given how much state and local governments have already received throughout the pandemic,” Walczak said.

“No pork in this for us”

Of the approximately $6 billion Colorado is getting from the American Rescue Plan Act, $4 billion is for state government, $1.1 billion for county coffers and $827 million goes to cities and towns. Half of the money gets disbursed this spring, and half next year.

The bill says the money can be used for local economic recovery purposes — including infrastructure projects; assistance to households, small businesses and nonprofits; and aid to industries decimated by the pandemic, like tourism, travel, and hospitality.

Lakewood Mayor Adam Paul said the city will likely put the $22.6 million allocated to Lakewood toward a budget that lost $18 million last year.

“This is triage,” Paul said. “There is no pork in this for us. I see it as backfill to what we lost.”

Since the city eliminated the sales tax on groceries more than a decade ago, Paul said Lakewood didn’t have the revenue cushion others had when people flooded grocery stores to stock pantries.��He said 70 positions remain vacant on Lakewood’s payroll, a result of pandemic-pinched spending by the city.

“We have to use (the Rescue Act money) for the right here, right now,” Paul said.

Aside from budget help, Paul pointed to the possibility of getting to hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure projects on the city’s long-term horizon, including $100 million for sidewalk repairs, another $100 million for stormwater improvements and a cool $80 million to revamp the intersection of Wadsworth Boulevard and 6th Avenue.

Infrastructure issues in many cities were compounded by pandemic-induced shortfalls, Colorado Municipal League Executive Director Kevin Bommer said.

“Even before the pandemic, we’ve been seeing for years that we need a way to deal with major infrastructure shortfalls, like aging water supply systems,” he said.

In Englewood, city revenues dropped by $1.3 million — or 2.6% — in 2020, Harguth said. The city has reduced sales and use tax revenue projections for 2021 by 3.7%.

But not all is dire in the southern Denver suburb.

Three out of four furlough days planned for city employees this year have been cancelled, Harguth said. And the stimulus funds coming from Washington open up new opportunities for things like “water, wastewater and broadband infrastructure,” Harguth said.

“We always welcome new revenue”

In Golden, no city employees were furloughed or laid off in 2020, according to Deputy City Manager Carly Lorentz. But the city’s revenue picture was mixed.

“Most importantly and directly COVID-related, sales taxes were down approximately $930,000,” she said. “The only revenue stream increase was $175,000 at Fossil Trace Golf Club, from green fees, cart rentals, driving range and lessons.”

Meanwhile, Adams County is due for a $100 million injection — which will help after a 2020 budget shortfall of $5 million from loss of rental income, food sales and traffic citations, county spokeswoman Christa Bruning said.

The latest round of stimulus funding could be used to continue the county’s efforts “to keep people in their homes and ensuring other housing needs are met for community members during the COVID-19 crisis,” Bruning said.

To Denver’s south, Arapahoe County will pocket nearly $130 million from the coronavirus bill. Colorado’s third-largest county did not have any COVID-related layoffs or furloughs last year, but a spokesman for the county said “we always welcome new revenue.”

With so much money being splashed across the country and looser guidelines for spending it than the first round of coronavirus stimulus, Bommer with the Colorado Municipal League said he understands concerns about possible misspending, saying as much in a newsletter to local government leaders last week.

“While there are many in the municipal family that see this aid as a lifeline, we also know there are some municipalities that have not seen steep revenue declines… (who) have deep concerns about the federal deficit and inflation,” he wrote.

That makes it all the more critical, Bommer told The Post, that cities and towns are transparent about how they spend what they receive.

“It����ap incumbent on them to be very up front,” he said. “To keep with the intent of the legislation — which is to recover the economy and put people back to work.”

Around 94,000 industry workers — a third of the state’s restaurant workforce — lost their jobs over the course of the next 12 months, according to the Colorado Restaurant Association, though those numbers are starting to rebound in 2021.

With restaurants continuing to reopen, expand seating capacities and serve alcohol (and food) later into the night, more workers are back on the front lines of the lingering COVID-19 pandemic. They’re also next in line, as of mid-March, to be vaccinated.

We caught up with a handful of hospitality professionals, from baristas to chefs and managers, to find out how they’re doing a year after one of the worst days in restaurant history.

Some had one foot out the industry’s door, others had stepped away entirely, and still there were those who looked forward not only to their current restaurant work but to opening their own food businesses in the future.

We feature their first-person thoughts and stories here, gathered over the start of 2021 and edited and condensed for print.

Coleman Sisk

Barista, bartender and more at Hudson Hill

I’ve worked in restaurants and bars since high school, from McDonald’s to Morimoto. Both my parents worked and actually met in the industry here in Colorado, so in a way, restaurants can feel like a home for me. When the shut-downs first happened last spring, I found myself in a better financial situation than my peers at other bars and restaurants, and I have Hudson Hill’s owner Jake (Soffes) to thank for that. He did a lot of research, applied for a lot of grants and even wrote checks for the hours to be lost in that pay period. I went on unemployment but returned to work for take-out drinks just a month later. I was grateful for the work.

There are times I get discouraged when the amount of extra effort that goes into serving someone today gets overlooked. I think the pandemic created a divide between staff and guests: when one party shows up to the restaurant to pay their bills and the other for recreation.��(But) it����ap more than just the exchange of goods, we need to keep each other safe.

Annie Sage-Clontz

Former server at Coperta and Beast + Bottle, recently hired at a tech startup

(My partner) suffered a major seizure (last) February and received an epilepsy diagnosis
shortly after we both lost our serving jobs with the mandated shutdowns. He was later
permanently laid off, and I declined a return to my serving position because I couldn’t risk
bringing COVID home to him.

I don’t want to overly romanticize restaurant work … the organizational wizardry, expert communication skills, and emotional labor it takes to be an excellent server is rarely valued, and the role is stigmatized to the point that I’ve been asked what I want to be when I grow up while pushing 30, working as a lead server and kitchen expeditor at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago. An employer-sponsored retirement plan has never been available to me, despite working for some of the top chefs in the nation. I didn’t have the option to elect a health benefit plan until 2015 outside of the short-lived health plans I received from a hotel and country club over a decade ago, and I never saw a single paid sick day until 2018. I’ve deferred the ideas of homeownership and family planning while going to school during the day and working late into the nights, unable to significantly save for the future — all while I waited to graduate as a post-traditional student and find “a big girl job,” as if the restaurant career I had been cultivating with all my heart and soul wasn’t good enough. Because by the standards of most, it wasn’t.

I’m looking forward to my transition into the tech startup world. The position … provides excellent benefits that will allow me to take care of my household in a way I’ve never experienced before. I’d like to point out that while I’ve had experiences with programming and learning new technologies within my Geography degree program, I largely referred to restaurant anecdotes (when applying for jobs) to describe transferrable skills and qualifications. Restaurant work is valuable across the board, and my hope is that we can begin to shift public perception to accept that fact outside of the glorification of celebrity chefs, bartenders, and sommeliers.

Zach Farnsworth

Cook and former kitchen manager at Joy Hill

I’ve been making pizza for 15 years. I started at Joy Hill last March, came in, helped them open and then two weeks later we were shut down. It was really, really hard at first. There were four of us working 70-, 80-hour weeks, and that kind of continued through the summer as we started to add people back on (to the schedule). I had some friends who were unemployed who would say, “You’re lucky you haven’t had a day off.” And I would think, “You’re lucky you get a break.”

I asked to step down (from a kitchen management position) to free up days and spend time on my own thing. I was planning to open my (pizza) shop last fall. Now I’m just trying to take it slow and looking for pop-up locations. Nobody’s trying to bounce around jobs now. But there’s (a handful) of shops in the area that are competitive, and I think there’s room for twice that. I love pizza, it’s my passion, and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Beth Hardin

General manager at Streets Denver

(Restaurant workers) can’t work from home and are in constant, close contact with (the) unmasked public; likely have sub-par to zero health insurance, no benefits; and if they don’t work, they don’t get paid. (We) are regularly getting yelled at and assaulted by the same public who begged for bars and restaurants to be open. Our industry is in the death throes with more and more establishments closing regularly. People can’t afford not to work because they’ve exhausted unemployment or can’t get the government to give them their money, and when they do work, it’s for a fraction of what they made before.

Ask how many people in this industry know someone who has died or (died by) suicide during this pandemic. It’s taking a financial, physical, professional and mental toll (that’s) overlooked — the added stress of regulations and increased financial strain, plus the isolation and loss of the support systems we all have built. . Between that and the financial hardships of COVID, our business has had some rough times.

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Maggie Maxwell

Currently unemployed, soon-to-be general manager at a new Denver restaurant

I’ve had latent anxiety about working indoors since the worst day ever on March 16, 2020. At the beginning, I was freaked out about being indoors with my coworkers while we were take-out only. We were all flying blind. As we learned more, unfortunately it didn’t make me feel any better. I’ve not dined indoors since last year, personally. I have a hard time squaring the expectation that someone else should serve me when I’m scared to do the same for them. It seems unfair.

I’m at a bit of a crossroads, as I think many of us are. I’d always thought that if you knew how to serve, cook or bartend, your employability was indestructible; you could support yourself anywhere in the world. COVID proved that notion wrong for sure.

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“Quarantine” reflects a time when Arlo’s grades suffered, as he struggled to stay engaged with online school and connect with his teachers virtually. It harkens back to the baseball and lacrosse seasons he missed out on playing. It reminds him of all the high-fives and hugs he couldn’t share with friends and classmates for fear of spreading a deadly virus.

These little luxuries play a big role in Arlo’s life, but he didn’t realize that until the pandemic interrupted his seventh-grade year and took them away.

“I think I took my being able to learn in those social situations for granted,” he said. “That connection piece, without it, learning started becoming harder and harder.”

In the year since COVID-19 shuttered Colorado schools, students have had to adapt to the new and ever-evolving demands of education during a global pandemic, and it����ap often come at a price. Inconsistencies in learning format, whether because of quarantines due to possible virus exposure or because of district decisions, have cost kids valuable instructional time with their teachers. And many say their mental health is suffering because of isolation from their peers.

As districts work to address learning gaps caused by the pandemic, parents say the biggest thing their kids lost to the pandemic were the social relationships they typically build while in school. Though the long-term impacts of the pandemic on students’ academic and mental well-being are yet to be understood, neither is going to be a quick fix.

“You can’t just sit a student down and say we’re going to catch you all up in the next two weeks and all of the sudden everything as it happened is gone,” said Katy Anthes, Colorado’s education commissioner. “It really will be a methodical recovery plan that will span multiple months and into future years.”

Addressing academic slides

Schools are just beginning to roll out summer plans to help students catch up academically. At Westminster Public Schools, for example, students have to work with educators on individual goals.

But to know how best to serve student needs, schools need to know where they’ve fallen behind. Education advocates argue that’s why it’s crucial to host Colorado Measures Academic Success, or CMAS, standardized testing this year. However, a bill in the Colorado legislature aims to limit CMAS to one subject per grade.

Rico Munn, superintendent of Aurora Public Schools, is among those against standardized testing. Like many districts, Aurora administers formative exams three times a year, which give teachers better insight into individual students’ strengths and areas for improvement in real-time. According to that data, Aurora’s roughly 38,000 kids are holding ground in reading and losing ground in math, Munn said.

“The biggest challenges we see are in the transition grades. So whenever you see students transition — typically from fifth to sixth and eighth to ninth — those are where we are seeing across multiple measurements really the largest impacts,” he said. “Typically, you think of second to third grade as an academic transition, even though you’re not changing schools, because of the change in reading to learn versus learning to read. We’re certainly seeing challenges there.”

In Denver Public Schools, a quarter of students in kindergarten through third grade are reading significantly below grade level, mid-year literacy assessments found, up from 22% at the beginning of the school year.

Similarly, Jeffco Public Schools students in third through seventh grade experienced lower median growth in reading between the fall and winter compared to the previous year, according to formative testing results. Performance gaps were more pronounced among English language learners in most grades.

During a Feb. 23 board meeting, Chief Academic Officer Matt Flores attributed those results to kids having fewer opportunities to read aloud and with their teachers in a classroom during the fall.

Summer programming must account for not only academics, but also students’ social-emotional needs, Munn said.

“That could include everything from summer school opportunities to extended tutoring,” he said. “We’re also thinking about some of the executive functioning supports they may need. You have kids who have perhaps spent a year looking at a screen and not talking to other kids. All those things are on the table.”

In an effort to offer students more flexibility, Denver Public Schools issued “incomplete” grades this year in lieu of failing grades at the secondary level. As of Feb. 2, 29% of seniors and 32% of juniors in the district had received at least one incomplete grade.

That not only gives kids more time to meet the demands of their courses, but also ensures staff focus on helping students learn critical content, said Tamara Acevedo, deputy superintendent of academics. DPS is considering the policy change for future years because of the benefits, she added.

Challenging learning formats

For parents like Nathan and Melissa Kimball, the only way to catch their students up was to get them back in school.

The Colorado Springs couple originally enrolled their three kids��in remote learning for the fall due to fears about the virus. But playing the roles of kindergarten, second- and third-grade teacher simultaneously proved too much, Melissa said.

Remotely, the kids, two of whom have ADHD, missed out on real-time feedback on classwork, which often led to frustration and fits. And because the couple’s kindergartener hadn’t spent time in school with a licensed teacher, it was difficult to tell if she was picking up skills at an appropriate pace. The kids switched back to in-person learning in October.

“It definitely took a toll on the family,” Melissa said of virtual school. “I wouldn’t call the experience a success. I don’t think our children would either.”

Online learning also proved a challenge for Angela Romero’s family, given they didn’t have internet access at their Commerce City home.

During spring and fall 2020, her three children walked or got a ride to the local Boys and Girls Club, where they could connect and receive support from the staff. Her oldest son, Mario, and daughter, Maria, thrived working independently, but when her youngest, Evan, began struggling in math, Romero started to worry.

“He asked me for a math tutor, but I told him at this point I can’t afford it,” said Romero, who has since moved to a house with an internet connection.

Evan went back in-person once Adams City Middle School reopened. In late February, he was back at home in quarantine after someone in his cohort tested positive for COVID-19.

Social isolation takes a toll

Arlo, the Centennial teenager, said he’s likely learned less than he would in a normal year, but at no fault of his teachers. With limited class time and frequent disruptions caused by COVID-19, educators have slimmed down lessons to cover the most essential content and skills.

Still, Arlo’s grateful to have switched back to hybrid in-person learning after starting the year online. One of his favorite classes is guitar because of the communal feeling he gets playing alongside his classmates.

“I love in-school guitar very much because it����ap physically playing with other people, which is part of that thing I think we’re missing out on — being able to do a physical activity with other people,” he said. “Guitar has filled that gap as best it can.”

Arlo is not alone. When Aurora Public Schools recently surveyed about 10,800 students in fifth through 12th grade, now compared to before the pandemic, up from 28% and 34%, respectively.

That����ap one reason Sarah Martin, Arlo’s mom, would rather he spend his summer playing sports or music than attending summer school, even if he’s behind.

Erie resident Clark Burton agrees. In February, when Burton asked his son who he would choose to be his Valentine, the answer surprised him.

“Koleson, our kindergartener, said, ‘I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know anybody.’ It was heartbreaking, but so true,” Burton said. “In an elementary classroom, the interaction with classmates would be ongoing. In the online environment, the teachers can’t really allow for that because it would clog everything up.”

“Return to normal” shouldn’t be goal

While the pandemic’s long-term impacts on student well-being remain to be seen, Sona Dimidjian, professor and director of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, believes much of it will be determined by how we address these concerns in the immediate future.

The goal should not be a “return to normal,” she said, instead suggesting schools leverage what they’ve learned about the role mental health plays in students’ ability to thrive academically and infusing social-emotional support into every school day.

“Acting as though we can fragment a young person into their capacity for cognitive learning, their emotions and their relationships is counter to everything we know and often that����ap how systems are organized, in these fragmented ways,” Dimidjian said, adding it����ap essential to listen to and work with students on solutions.

“We can use that learning to help create more supportive and more just systems that can help to both mitigate potential long-term effects of the pandemic, as well as build and create structures that are more supportive for what students and young people have needed all along,” she said.

Though students lost much to COVID-19, parents and educators stopped short of calling the year a wash, as kids were forced to learn new skills they may not have otherwise. Burton’s 9-year-old, Quinton, learned a lot in the way of digital citizenship communicating with teachers over email and online chats.

As a high school social studies teacher, Burton also watched students get a crash course in independent study, learning self-motivation, the importance of deadlines and other skills they might not have acquired until college when the stakes are higher.

Though the school year was dominated by connecting digitally, all parents interviewed for this story said forced time together strengthened the sibling bonds between their kids.

“We have learned new ways to connect and new ways to support each other. Our students will carry that with them,” said Anthes, the state education commissioner. “Out of challenge comes more resilience.”

She was expecting her first child, living in her own place with her husband not too far from her parents, who’d bought a house in Aurora and chased the American Dream after arriving in the United States as refugees more than a decade earlier.

But during the pandemic, Twin’s life cracked, broke and contracted, reforming into something harder, smaller and less hopeful. Sometimes she can’t breathe, and she’s not always sure if the pain in her chest is grief or the lingering grasp of the coronavirus.

Coloradans have faced layer upon layer of grief since the start of the pandemic, at an unprecedented intensity and without access to many of the traditional methods of coping. Small griefs, like missing a vacation or a graduation, are mixed in with life-shaking events, like the death of a loved one or a lost job.

Colorado confirmed the state’s first death due to COVID-19 on March 13, 2020, and in the year since, more than 6,000 lives have been cut short by the virus. A cascade of loss spilled across the state, hitting Black and Hispanic families — disproportionately affected by the coronavirus — particularly hard.

The stress and uncertainty of the last year tested people’s resilience and left many just plain worn out.

“As new grief comes, they’re often feeling overwhelmed, unable to fully respond emotionally because they’re so exhausted,” said Amy Wachholtz, director of clinical health psychology at University of Colorado Denver. “Even to the point where I’ve heard from some patients, ‘I feel like I should cry but I don’t have anything left.’”

For Twin, the problems started early in the pandemic. She got sick with COVID-19 in March 2020, while she was pregnant, and had to undergo an emergency cesarean��section. Her mother got sick, too, and died, and her grief-filled father struggled without his wife.

“He cut off everyone. He’s not talking to anyone anymore. He’s working seven days a week, not eating, not sleeping properly,” Twin said.

She, her husband and their son moved back into her parents’ home two months ago. Now, Twin cooks for her father, cares for the house and for her son, and works two days a week at a grocery store. Their home country, Myanmar, is undergoing a coup, and her family members there are in harm’s way, in and out of contact but calling when they can.

A bright future is harder to imagine now, Twin said in February, weary.

“I have to say, to be honest, I don’t know what is going to happen next,” she said. “I am such an unlucky person.”

Avenues to express grief

Pandemic grief is not confined only to those who got sick or experienced a loved one’s death, Wachholtz said, it����ap also there in the steady drip of disappointment, the missed milestones and lost friendships, the frustration and isolation that����ap hit everyone to some degree since authorities announced the first cases of the coronavirus in Colorado on March 5, 2020.

Back then, the state locked down and while it was stressful, there was still a sense that it would be over soon and life would return to normal, Wachholtz said.

“And then that became, ‘Well maybe not yet,'” she said, “so I think over the long haul, a lot of those grief and daily stressors have started building, and that����ap made it harder and harder for people to deal with new grief when it comes.”

Some people feel guilty for grieving over a lost vacation, a missed graduation or opportunity — thinking, perhaps, that others have it much worse — but those griefs are valid, Wachholtz said, and should be acknowledged and dealt with.

The question is how to deal with it. Many of the traditional avenues for grieving, from funerals to memorials to hugging a friend are off-limits during the pandemic, and for some, not having access to those rituals has delayed the grieving experience and stalled important closure.

When prominent Wray community member Robert “Bob” Hansen, 92, died from complications after surgery on March 26, 2020, his family decided to put off the funeral until they could invite the community to join in the remembrance, said his grandson, Kyle Hansen.

“He loved not just his family but his community,” he said. “He’d bend over backwards to do stuff for the community. He loved giving back, helping and seeing the community develop as a whole. It was an important part of his life and so it was an important part of us.”

When he died, the family imagined a month or two delay for the funeral, perhaps having a service during the spring. That turned into summer, then fall. They still haven’t held the funeral — a longer delay than anyone expected.

“It����ap been hard,” Hansen said. “In my personal case, I’ve had four other grandparents pass away, and with all of them you were able to have that sense of closure with the funeral. We haven’t really been able to process that with Grandpa.”

In the absence of that kind of communal mourning, there are other ways to process grief that can help people cope, Wachholtz said, like exercising, taking a break from work or watching a dumb movie and laughing about it. What helps will be different for each person, she said, but it’s important to take those steps.

Remembering what we’ve lost

With most large-scale public events forbidden during the pandemic, there have been fewer mass memorials for the more than 530,000 people who have died from the virus in this country than in the past.

Some in Denver sought to fill that gap by creating such memorials. Artists Stella Yu and Samy Lee pasted the photos of people who died from coronavirus on a wall outside RedLine Contemporary Art Center on Arapahoe Street in Denver, gluing the portraits to the surface with a big bristled brush and temporary wheat paste.

“Wall pasting is a process that is very cathartic,” Lee said. “You’re posting this picture next to someone. With these photos, all these people are together. They’re not isolated. And you kind of rub it to the wall, rub over their faces. When I did it, I felt really honored.”

The exhibit was up between September and November, and anyone could come and add a picture of their loved one, she said.

“We were so isolated, we needed to see faces, we needed a public space where people could come and post these images,” she said.

A family in Greenwood Village created a more permanent memorial in the digital world — Megan Shoflick and her daughter, Samantha Shoflick, launched , an online memorial site for victims of COVID, in January.

“During the original quarantine, my mom and I would go on walks and we were discussing that it was so sad how so many people were passing away from such a scary virus,” Samantha, 17, said. “We talked about how people weren’t able to properly memorialize someone who had passed away. That����ap how the idea was born.”

The website lets anyone create a profile — a picture, obituary and other information — for coronavirus victims and post that profile publicly for free. The Shoflicks won’t make any money off the site, they said, and are working to get the word out about it. They intend the website to be permanent.

Maria Rita Castrogiovanni, who lives in New York, decided to memorialize her father on Covituary after she learned about the site from a relative, she said, in part because she doesn’t want his life to get lost in the growing death toll.

“I just feel like I need to spread the word about how good a man he was,” she said of her father, Calogero Castrogiovanni, 58, who died in April 2020. “These are real people. It����ap not just a number. This is a man who had a family and friends.”

She paused, and cried.

But both are grappling with the disease’s effects months after they got sick.

A year after the first cases of the new coronavirus were confirmed in Colorado, patients and the medical community still are dealing with quite a few unknowns about “long COVID,” including what causes some — but not all — of those infected by the virus to suffer for months and whether those patients can expect to fully recover.

Beatty, a clinical social worker at Children’s Hospital Colorado and a member of the Denver Bandits women’s pro football team, said she got sick in mid-March last year and missed about four weeks of work while she dealt with fever, muscle aches, fatigue and trouble breathing.

Most of the symptoms went away, but the exhaustion lingered.

“I feel like I’m going to bed at 8 o’clock every night just to be able to get up and function,” she said.

For Cardona, a Denver resident who is unable to work because of neuropathy caused by Type 2 diabetes, the problem is lingering breathing issues and “brain farts,” as he called the times when he can’t find a word or loses his train of thought.

He was sick enough to spend a few days in an intensive-care unit in December, but avoided going on a ventilator, which can cause more extreme lung and cognitive issues.

“This stuff is serious. Life or death,” he said. “I would never wish this on anybody.”

Symptoms reported by COVID-19 survivors vary widely, and can include:

• Fatigue
• “Brain fog”
• Depression and other mood disorders
• Chest pain
• Shortness of breath
• Fast heart rate
• Low oxygen levels
• Trouble sleeping
• Joint or muscle pain
• Rashes
• Hair or tooth loss

Some of those symptoms could be caused by damage to small blood vessels, while others may be a result of the body attacking its own tissues, said Dr. Christian Sandrock, a professor at University of California Davis who specializes in respiratory diseases.

It’s likely that patients lumped together as “long-haulers” may be dealing with different underlying issues, and that some people’s symptoms come from multiple causes, he said.

It’s not clear what the odds are that COVID-19 patients will develop lasting symptoms, with estimates , depending on how sick the patients had been, and the time frame the researchers examined. No one knows why some patients develop long-term symptoms, though some centers treating long-haulers find a disproportionate number are female.

“Knowing that you’re not alone”

Beatty said she’d never been the type to get sick, not even with the flu. After dealing with the symptoms for months, she went for a series of tests at National Jewish Health, which found her heart was sometimes adding an extra beat — a condition that wasn’t severe enough to rule out exercise, but meant she’d have to be cautious with increasing her activity.

She said it helped to hear that her symptoms were real and other people were dealing with the same thing, even though doctors didn’t have a solution.

“I think I had myself convinced that maybe this is some sort of psychological impact,” she said. “Knowing that you’re not alone is something I wish I had heard a little bit sooner.”

Dr. Sarah Jolley, a pulmonologist and one of the leaders of UCHealth’s post-COVID clinic, said they initially expected to almost exclusively treat people who had been in an intensive-care unit for an extended period, but about 40% of their current patients weren’t sick enough to be hospitalized.

It’s not unusual for ICU patients to need extensive physical therapy and mental health treatment, but seeing prolonged symptoms in generally healthy people with relatively mild symptoms of the virus is new, she said.

“We typically expect young people, particularly young previously healthy��people, to recover from viruses pretty quickly,” she said. “We’ve seen prolonged symptoms from other respiratory viruses, but not to this extent.”

Patients come in with different mixes of symptoms, and may see multiple specialists, Jolley said. There’s no one treatment for post-COVID syndrome, but medications and other treatments like physical therapy can help with specific symptoms, she said.

Dr. Raphael Sung, a cardiac electrophysiologist at National Jewish Health, said the battery of tests they give post-COVID patients finds a clear underlying cause, such as scarring in the lungs, in about 90% of cases. In the remaining cases, it’s not clear what’s happening, but the patients’ symptoms are real and need to be treated, he said.

Without knowing the underlying cause, physicians have to rely on their clinical judgment about which medications and therapies will be best for a particular patient’s symptoms, Sung said. They’re collecting data to improve their recommendations in the short term, and hopefully to find clues to the root problems over time, he said.

Both Sung and Jolley said they generally see improvement over time, but it can be months or longer before patients feel better.

“It would exhaust me”

Other viruses can cause symptoms that linger long after the initial infection, but the phenomenon hasn’t always been taken seriously.

Jolene Cassel, a nurse practitioner based in Englewood,��said the first doctor she saw attributed her post-COVID symptoms to anxiety, but she knew that wasn’t right. She advised people dealing with continuing symptoms to keep looking for answers, even if the first doctor they see dismisses what they’re feeling.

“You know something’s wrong, but you’re being told by the medical people everything’s back to normal,” she said. “You’re the best measure of whether this is normal or not normal.”

Cassel had started to feel better about two weeks after getting the virus in April, but her symptoms got worse after a case of shingles in July. Her heart rate sped up for no clear reason until she got dizzy, and she needed a nap to get through a workday. She was 42 and healthy, and previously had��run half-marathons, but felt exhausted and sick after taking her dog on a slow walk.

“My normal routine — getting up, showering, drying my hair — would be the hardest thing I would do all day,” she said. “It would exhaust me.”

Sung, who sees patients with heart rhythm issues, said the most common reason COVID-19 survivors come to him is a heartbeat that’s faster than the person’s activity level would dictate. It’s normal for your heart rate to speed up with vigorous exercise, but some people feel their hearts racing after something as simple as standing up, he said.

Many underlying issues can cause a fast heart rate, including weak muscle tissue in the heart, a blood clot in the lungs, or a problem with the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the body’s involuntary functions, Sung said.

One theory is that antibodies against the body’s own tissues could be causing problems with the autonomic nervous system, but that doesn’t mean that suppressing the immune system is the right answer, he said. It’s possible those antibodies are involved in a cascade of other events in the body, rather than directly attacking the person’s tissues.

Tests over the next few months showed no damage to Cassel’s lungs or heart tissue, but confirmed she was dealing with problems in the autonomic nervous system. After trying several medications, she found some relief from a heart failure drug.

She said she can still feel her heart rate speeding up when she stands up, but it’s not enough to make her dizzy, and she has enough energy to see patients again.

“It’s slowly but surely improving,” she said.