Andrea Maltese laughs as she remembers the build up to the pandemic. At the time, she just wanted to get it over with, and was sure it wouldn’t last long.
“We’re practicing on bringing the iPads home, they had this system set up in school. And I was just sort of thinking, ‘OK, let’s call it now. Let’s just start shutting down, get ahead of this, and it’ll probably just be a couple weeks, things will return to normal,'” she said.
Her two elementary age kids didn’t seem worried. She wasn’t either, until everything changed.
“So I remember we were sitting at the dinner table, when all the devices started going off. Everybody’s phone ringing, to say – it was just like it usually does on a snow day. But it was that we weren’t coming back to school the next day,” she said.
She was nervous to tell her kids they wouldn’t go back to school, but they didn’t seem to mind too much.
In the fall, her kids would continue online learning. They had the resources to do it, and she knew other families might need to send their kids to school.
Maltese is part of a group of parents in Bloomington who kept their children online this school year. And while other parents in well-resourced households similarly did not want to clog up classrooms by sending their kids back in-person, the decision wasn’t clear for all of them.
Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe almost sent her first grader back. But when she got details, she wasn’t convinced – despite preparations she made over summer.
“We were waiting on the district to send the information and waiting to hear what this was going to look like, and when we got it, the class sizes were going to be pretty large. And they were still going to be going back and forth and using the cafeteria. And I just, I didn’t feel super confident about that,” she said.
It hasn’t been easy; heightened tension at home, lack of social time, and finding engaging materials not all based on a screen has been tough. Godby Ingalsbe says she’s not sure they’ve figured out a routine, and it’s been a year.
But families see more than just challenges.
Erika Lee’s son doesn’t want to go back to school in-person, and she sees why. He’s used games and technology to customize his work – he made a video game for an environmental project that normally would have been created using cardboard and other craft materials. His mental health needs have changed too, and he likes not waking up early for school.
Overall, she said, it’s been a mixed bag.
“He’s gotten so much more sleep. He was in therapy for anxiety and was being bullied during recess, and that’s all gone away, right? He’s had other issues; he’s depressed sometimes, he’s anxious, he doesn’t always want to do what he’s supposed to do – and clearly time management issues are gonna continue to haunt us – but he has become more independent,” she said.
Source：https://www.wfyi.org/
