15 Days: The Real Story of America's Pandemic School Closures

Mark Johnson, a teacher from Ohio, opens an email in March 2020 that reads, "Schools are closing for two weeks." His initial confusion quickly turns to dread as "two weeks" stretch into months. The 2025 documentary "15 Days: The Real Story of America's Pandemic School Closures" chronicles one of the largest social experiments in U.S. history. Through interviews with teachers, parents, students, and policymakers, the film traces the chain of decisions made in a state of panic and examines their long-term impact on the education system and the mental health of a generation. It offers no easy answers, instead inviting viewers to judge whether this was a necessary sacrifice or a catastrophic miscalculation whose full cost is yet to be tallied.