Babies, toddlers and preschoolers learn primarily through play.

Social activity is critical for their social, emotional and intellectual development. During the pandemic, however, young children lost countless opportunities to play with other children.

Now, early childhood educators are trying to step into that gap.

The Mehlville School District in the St. Louis area began hosting special events last month for the youngest children in the district in an effort to promote social connections and reading.

Erin Amador, coordinator of the district's Parents as Teachers early childhood program, saw a need for young children to have more opportunities to learn how to connect with one another.

The district tried a pizza giveaway party in a park. They adopted the "Books and Bites" program, which offers families a chance to meet new people, play together and take home free books and a cooking kit to match the theme of the books. But only 10 families showed up for the first event.

Two weeks later, the district tried again. The books included stories about diverse characters and a frozen pizza to take home.

Again, about 10 families attended.

Amador said she wondered if families were ready to socialize with others or if they had the time and energy for these kinds of events. Children under 5 years old are still too young to be vaccinated for COVID-19, and some parents still feel nervous about the risks of attending in-person events.

Still, she wanted the district to try again.

Early childhood educators promoted their third event to the families they visit in their homes, and also sent home flyers through the elementary schools.

This time, 100 families showed up.

"It was amazing," Amador said. Parents told her how much they'd missed being with other families and watching their kids play together.

The district's efforts are part of a larger initiative called BeTogetherSTL. The St. Louis County Children's Service Fund awarded a $175,000 grant to the LUME Institute, a St. Louis nonprofit focused on early childhood education, to launch the program.

Steve Zwolak, CEO of LUME and executive director of the University City Children's Center, said the goal of the initiative is to create family-friendly events to promote loving parent and child interactions.

Pandemic isolation took a social and emotional toll on the youngest children and their parents, Zwolak said. Some young children returned to day care centers and preschools with more aggressive behavior and less ability to self-regulate.

"How do we learn to play together again?" he asked.

Bonding and connecting with others is a critical way to improve mental health, he said. The BeTogetherSTL program offers a mix of in-person and virtual events, including concerts, book giveaways, online parent discussion groups and a "Hanging With Mr. Z" video series. In the 8- to 10-minute videos, he tackles topics such as "helping children go from rage to assertion" and talking about difficult current events.

He hopes the programming will help strengthen families by developing these protective factors: helping parents develop their own resilience, creating more social support for families, fostering family engagement and teaching about child development.

"I absolutely see lingering effects of the pandemic every day," he said. For children, healing from the trauma of the pandemic requires developing secure attachments. Improving mental health also requires strengthening attachment and relationships.

There are lessons for other communities in Mehlville's slow start with its program. Offering multiple options in various locations and addressing parental concerns are key to increasing participation.

Amador says she saw the benefits of repeatedly trying to foster these connections in her own district.

"You could tell we had families who hadn't played together in years," she said.

She described the look of excitement on young kids' faces when they arrived at the playground filled with other children at the third "Books and Bites" event.

Some of them would hesitate and look back at their parents, unsure of whether to join, she said. After seeing a nod and smile of approval from a parent, they would race onto the playground.

"Their smiles, the energy of the whole day felt so good," Amador said.

Parents came up to her and said they had forgotten how much they missed moments like this.

"I missed talking to people at the park," they said. "I missed seeing my child play."

Culture wars make for awfully strange bedfellows.

Look no further than one of the largest school districts in Missouri: the Rockwood School District in suburban St. Louis, which serves more than 20,000 students.

Residents angered by the district's COVID-19 protocols during the height of the pandemic -- as well as those upset by efforts at diversity and inclusion, and those nursing other right-wing grievances -- backed two candidates in the recent Rockwood school board race. It's a common move across the country, aimed at wielding greater influence in local schools.

Both candidates won.

One of them now goes by Jessica Clark.

Before her recent transformation into a champion of conservative causes, she was known online as Jessica Laurent. She promoted her "sugaring" lifestyle, in which a younger person seeks a relationship with an older, wealthier individual with the expectation of gifts and financial support.

Her brand was no big secret during the campaign; all her social media content remained online. But after winning a seat on the school board, one of her first moves was to scrub her "sugar baby" lifestyle videos from the internet.

When I called to ask what prompted this move, she said, "I'm done talking about the campaign." When I said this wasn't a question about the campaign, she hung up.

Of course, nothing is ever truly erased from the internet. Another person had recorded at least one of the original videos, and it's back on YouTube.

In this video, Jessica Laurent offers a virtual four-week "Sugar Boot Camp" for prospective sugar babies. She begins her pitch charismatically: "What the (expletive) is up, ladies. So, it's me, Jessica Laurent, St. Louis' one and only sugar lifestyle coach." She informs her viewers about an upcoming not-to-be-missed Sugar Ball: "(S)ugaring can be a little scary and a little intimidating. But you're talking to the lady who walked into the first Sugar Ball single and walked out with a CEO. And six months later, happily ever after, livin' the dream."

For all the recent conservative rhetoric about "grooming," Laurent Clark's supporters were fine with her recent past, judging from their comments on a post in which she explained this unorthodox business endeavor.

"The idea of 'sugaring' was a play on words and a brilliant way to attract the women who needed me the most," she explained on her Facebook campaign page. "They came thinking they were getting one thing, Sike! (sic)"

Sure, Jessica.

Her other social media posts included captions like "I'm yo husband's favorite so sit to (sic) basic ass down (lipstick kiss emoji)" from May 2, 2020, and a TikTok post with the hashtag "hoe is life." (Hoe is a slang term for a promiscuous person.) Senate hopeful Eric Schmitt follows her on Instagram, which also showcased her sexy lingerie photos.

Granted, Republicans may have had a different reaction if a candidate with progressive political views had the exact same road-to-empowerment personal story.

Imagine the pearl-clutching.

While her lifestyle choices and former business model may seem questionable for a school board member, some of her public statements about education are far more concerning.

In a video, she refers to the teachers union as "terrorists." Labeling members of a district's largest employee group, who are directly responsible for students' success, as terrorists shows remarkably poor judgment.

Parents of LGBTQ students were terrified by the posts and public comments she has made about them. On election day, Laurent Clark shared a meme of a "woke" Black teacher screaming at a kindergartner, "I said we gay today!"

Rockwood parent Matthew Wind said he is mostly concerned about her lack of qualifications, her brief tenure in the district and her motives for running.

As far as the sugar baby thing, he said it bothers him even if there's a lucrative market for it.

"I think it's a complete antithesis to why schools exist and what they want to do," he said. The point of an education is to acquire skills and learning that lead to an independent life. Snagging a sugar daddy or sugar mama offers the semblance of stability through complete dependence on another person, he explained.

Wind said he wants students to know: "Your worth is more than your body or your appearance or how you can make someone with money feel. Your worth can be so much more than that."

He thinks someone who recently built her brand around how to lure and profit from intimate relationships is a poor example for the district's kids.

Once upon a time, conservatives may have agreed with him.

Now, it's just a little sugar between friends.

Students applying to public universities in California are done with the ACT and SAT for good.

It's time for the rest of the country to follow suit.

Trustees at California State University decided this week to remove the standardized tests from its admissions process. CSU, the largest four-year university system in the nation, is following in the footsteps of the University of California system, which made the same decision in 2020 for its 10 campuses.

Studies have repeatedly found that high school grade-point averages are a better predictor of college success than SAT or ACT scores. Students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds who have access to pricey test prep and tutors tend to score higher on standardized tests, unsurprisingly.

Eliminating these high-stakes, high-stress tests will help level a playing field that already heavily favors the wealthiest families. The early indicators from California's experiment have found a positive impact on student diversity without lowering student achievement.

There's going to be plenty of additional data for universities to track from the past two years. During the pandemic, nearly 80% of four-year U.S. colleges and universities made submitting standardized test scores optional for applicants.

Paul Tough, author of "The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us," said this is one of the few positive educational trends to come out of the pandemic. He cites two main reasons: One, it removes a layer of stress for the kids applying to super-selective colleges; two, there is good evidence to suggest that the SAT and ACT are the most unfair qualifiers -- in an already-unfair process -- because of how income-dependent the results are.

"High school grades are less correlated with family income," he said. Colleges can consider an applicant's grades, along with the rigor of courses and the rest of the application elements, as a way to evaluate a student's potential without automatically eliminating those who test below a certain threshold. While aspects of college admissions will continue to favor those who have unearned advantages -- such as extra consideration for legacy candidates or preferential treatment for athletes in expensive, elite sports -- reforms are still possible.

"It is possible to design a system more fair to low-income kids," Tough said. Given that the mission of higher education is to increase social mobility, this should be a priority.

So far, MIT is the highest-profile institution to announce it will bring back standardized testing as part of its admissions process. In contrast, two-thirds of American universities and colleges, including every Ivy League institution, plan to remain test-optional for at least another year. Not all of them also forgo test scores for scholarships, but a significant number do.

Still, this patchwork approach defeats the larger purpose. Rather than keeping the tests optional, colleges should use the available data and drop them altogether. There are now 86 campuses that are test-blind, meaning they won't consider test scores even if students chose to submit them.

When we look at who benefits most from standardized tests, there are clear winners: the College Board, which administers the SATs, AP exams and PSATs; and ACT Inc., which runs the ACTs. The College Board, which is registered as a nonprofit, made $1.2 billion in revenue in 2020. In an essay for Forbes, journalist Susan Paterno noted the secrecy around the College Board's finances.

"Investments in hedge funds and partnerships with anonymous investors quintupled to $675 million over four years. About $162 million is in tax havens in the Caribbean and an unknown amount sits in secret accounts on the tropical island of Mauritius," Paterno wrote. The companies also benefit from multiple state contracts requiring high schoolers to take standardized exams in school -- at taxpayer expense.

The College Board and ACT Inc. insist their tests are useful predictors of students' readiness for college.

If the vast majority of colleges and universities have been able to select successful applicants for the past two years without the tests, how much value do these tests really add?

Don't let the billions in revenue at stake influence the answer.