Seriously.
My son is the same. He started kindergarten completely comfortable with negative numbers (we just always drew the number line with both positive and negative parts) and basic algebra and only was allowed to test to enter the gifted program in third grade.
They are finally doing algebra again now that he is in fourth grade (they do math grades 3 and 4 in third grade and 5 and 6th grade math in 4th grade) but if we hadn’t set him up with a tutor a couple of years ago he’d have given up on school completely.
My younger son in 1st grade has autism (and is also gifted), to the point that he is legally supposed to have a permanent paraeducator with him at all times to help him cope with classes and physically help him if he needs help with basic tasks like holding his pencil, or realizing that he is frustrated and can’t communicate that.
Covid meant no paraeducator. Oh, they had one on the payroll, of course, but they were virtual. So the person who was supposed to help my son hold a pencil and detect he was frustrated and so on, was just a person on a zoom call.
My son lost almost a year of learning because of covid. It would have been more but we sued the school district to demand they at least put a plan in place and miraculously the day they were served with the papers, they told us “oh, we were just about to have a solution for you” and miraculously the same week, he was back in school with his para helping him with the virtual lessons.
My youngest daughter started kindergarten during covid. Everything was online. Her assignments were all in class dojo or maybe google classroom. All of the assignments had written instructions for her to follow. She was just starting Kindergarten and couldn’t exactly read well enough to follow the instructions.
All of this mean my wife and I basically spent all day as full-time teachers aides, because the kids couldn’t be left for even a few minutes by themselves. This is a difficult thing to do when also working full time.
Covid especially sucked for families with young special needs children. I think these kids were done a huge disservice.