Considerations for Fall School Decisions

“Help! Ahhh! I can’t deal with this school decision stuff! What do you think about homeschooling?”

I’m getting almost hourly texts and emails from people asking me what I think about the school options in New York City for fall, asking me what I intend to do with my own child, and looking for educational insights. Parents are ringing their hands and pulling their hair out trying to make sense of these bits of information that emerge about the coming school year, knowing that all of the information could change at a moment’s notice. It’s currently impossible to make a good solid plan for your child which makes planners like myself nuts and causes parental anxiety.

How do I feel about sending my child to school when a deadly virus is out there and is likely set to grow and spread as we head into the fall and winter? Not good at all. However, after the very difficult remote learning experience, whilst caring for a baby, I’m amazingly willing to consider it. Each day I read a new article or post that makes me second guess where I think I stand on things. I thought it might be helpful to share the considerations as I see them and then leave it to you to make the moving target decision for your own child and family.

School Decision Considerations:

 *First off, it is absolutely a privilege to GET to make these decisions. If you are deciding between sending your child to school during COVID, home schooling, driving across the county in an RV and teaching them on the fly, part time remote learning, full time remote learning, moving to CT, or any hybrid of the above you are privileged and need to be aware that the education gap between rich kids and poor kids is about to explode impacting an entire generation of learners. So there’s that, and I wish I could say we should be solely focusing our attention there, 100 percent, but of course we do need to figure out what to do with our kids as public schools have now sent out forms to sign up for the 100 percent remote learning option. So, here are the considerations I’ve been mulling over:

1.     Parental Work Details: What are the options for your family regarding working from home? Is someone’s work schedule flexible enough to be a home-school teacher? How many parties (1 parent or both) need the kids in school in order to work and to what degree? This is likely the biggest and most obvious consideration of all. Pretty cut and dry.

2.     Your Individual Child:

a.     How did remote learning go in the spring? Why?

b.     How well does your child adapt to change? How much consistency do they need to be resilient? Would a day on- day off or a week-on and week-off be too disruptive for them? Or would the novelty actually work well for them? How does too much screen time (school or otherwise) impact your child’s behavior or emotional state? Can you build in sufficient movement/physical activity within a day and what about creating opportunities for social interaction? Can you do that during a virus resurgence?

c.     How much did it help your child to know the kids in the Zoom classroom? Would they have had the same experience had they been interacting with primarily new kids, kids they hadn’t known before?

d.     Learning Differences- how are your child’s special needs impacted here? I don’t necessarily mean if your child receives therapeutic services, although there is that too, a whole separate post which I will get to, someday, but how does your child’s individual learning profile get impacted by remote vs. in-person learning. I know some children who were anxious to speak in the classroom who benefitted from remote learning. I know many more children who struggled to sit in front of a screen all day. What are your child’s individual differences? Sensory, social/emotional, adaptive, fine motor, coping skills/regulation, academic readiness/delays, etc.

3.     The School: Do you feel that your school is doing everything they can with the information they have, and the resources they have, to meet the needs of the situation? I thought our school did an amazing job in mid-March and hit the ground running, evolving as they learned what worked and what didn’t for each grade and curricular program. We were incredibly lucky with the teachers we had, they were pros that also happened not to have kids (I actually don’t know this, I assume they didn’t because it wasn’t an issue, ever.) But they brought their A game every day! *Thank you, ladies, if you see this!

 Right now there is the added pressure on the schools to “get it right” which seems unfair since we don’t know what’s coming or isn’t coming in terms of the virus resurgence or at least to what degree. Yet we still expect it. Our school seems to be listening well to parents, sharing information, and including parents with the right professional skills in the process of decision making and planning. We’ve been impressed by the architecture piece and keeping kids safe, etc. I want to hear more from them on the psychological piece. It is my opinion that we/they are going to need more than just 1 psychologist/social worker on staff. We need a team on this. These children have experienced a collective adverse childhood experience, there is trauma here. Managing children’s complex emotions and behaviors caused by social isolation and fear should not fall squarely on the teacher’s shoulders. Without sufficient support and expert guidance these important emotional experiences may be mishandled. There needs to be a common language used, ways to approach fear of playing with others, etc. If anyone knows who is putting something like this together for our school(s) please let me know.

All of these considerations, and many others, sit before us. Each article you read about the virus, each person you speak to who knows more about the virus than you do, all the anxiety from well-meaning relatives, and hope, hope that this will all go away in the winter/spring with the distribution of a successful vaccine or cure. Lots to consider. But, I’d like to add a request, that we keep our anxiety from controlling the way we communicate with one another around these decisions. Our kids are watching and listening. We must respect each other’s choices. We need to stay supportive of one another and show appreciation to our schools and teachers whose jobs and roles in this are as difficult and impossible as our own as parents, if not more.