Originally Posted by
Kestrel
Anything less that a full-time school day for the elementary school is going to cause enough job problems to bankrupt half the families we know. We are a low income school - last I checked, something like 67% free/reduced lunch. Asking those families to have a parent stay home - or asking their employer to work with some kind of rotating schedule - or asking low-income families to pay for childcare - is too great a burden.
It's still a big ask for families of more middle-class means. A few weeks back there were a bunch of headlines about WFH being "the way of the future" for white-color office workers, but that's not really the case. I have a friend who works in marketing for a small health-care advocacy company and she is supposed to go back into the office next month. And my company: we have a few offices in the U.S. and some scattered around the world. In April, the talk was no one was going back anytime soon -- maybe not until deep into the fall. And now I'm hearing that some offices abroad and a couple in the U.S. are reopening in the next couple of weeks. They say that no one has to go back unless they want to, but who knows what the word will be in three months.
There is talk that my country/district will institute some sort of virtual learning academy for parents who don't fell safe sending their kids back. There's definitely support for it on my FB mom groups, but to Kindra's point, it's a very vocal minority. A lot of those women are more affluent and seem to be SAHPs, which is not representative of the district as a whole.
DS will be attending school, even if DH and I are still working from home in late August. Distance learning proved to be a challenge for him and he needs to be evaluated for his IEP as soon as the school doors open. Our state released some school guidelines a couple of weeks ago. The section on masks said they were highly, highly encouraged, especially for middle and high school students, but were not a requirement for students. But again, things can change.
DS: Raising heck since 12/09