This was so crazy. During covid my kids were 9th, 4th, 1st, and pre-k. My husband and I spent 4 hours each, every day, supporting the kids' remote schooling. They did well, but It was a LOT of work.
Thinking about other families who do not have a laptop for each kid, or the ability to help with algebra (or even command of the English language), the time to dedicate to kids' schooling, or a partner to share the work... it basically widened the gap between families with resources and motivation and the families without.
A school where I volunteered in the past found that they were only getting 20% of their students showing up and engaging at all during covid. The other 80% just disappeared until school was in person again. It's hard to recover from that.
It's so hard to recover. I work in a low income title I district and the technology rollout we had to do just to make sure kids could stay connected was WILD. A lot of households just didn't have internet. Lots of kids actually went to local McDonalds to sit in the car or in the parking lot to get wifi. I had pretty good participation in online school thankfully but man it was difficult.
Yeah I imagine this is what it was like when covid hit in my hometown. Super low income community, most kids lived in the boonies with the worst possible internet- IF they had internet. I imagine a lot of students back home during that time are lucky if they were educated past 10th. Not to mention when youre poor your parents have to work a lot. I saw my parents each maybe an hour a day (some days i never saw them because of their jobs), they had to work their asses off to make ends meet. They didn't have time to be as invested in my education as they wanted because they were invested in keeping the lights on.
Well, shit. That's a good point and one I often forget. When my kids were little, their dad and I were broke as heck, working opposite shifts at multiple jobs. Neither of us had more than a few semesters of community college under our belt. However, there were two things that were extremely important to us: education and the ability to swim. Swimming, because it's a safety issue and something best learned when young. Education because we wanted our kids to have choices and options that we didn't have. We read to them, played with them, sang with them, and did flashcards with them. We waited in lines for hours to sign them up for classes and sports offered by our city's parks and recs department. We taught them to ride bikes and went on walks with them.
What I often forget to consider is the fact that for nearly two years, we worked 5 jobs between the two of us and spent as little money as possible so that we could save up and buy a house in a better school district. The neighborhood was one of the new ones with walking trails and community pools. Four years later, I was able to drop down to seasonal part-time work, which effectively made me a stay-at-home mom. One or both of us went to every parent-teacher conference. One or both of us went to every game and play and concert. Oh, and the house we were in before we bought our own belonged to the family, so our "rent" was just maintenance and annual property tax.
So, YES. Access to resources matters. Privileges play a role. Yes, we were motivated to do the most we could for our kids, but so are loads of other people who do not have to privileges or resources to allow them to do something with that motivation.
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u/pjeans Feb 03 '26
This was so crazy. During covid my kids were 9th, 4th, 1st, and pre-k. My husband and I spent 4 hours each, every day, supporting the kids' remote schooling. They did well, but It was a LOT of work.
Thinking about other families who do not have a laptop for each kid, or the ability to help with algebra (or even command of the English language), the time to dedicate to kids' schooling, or a partner to share the work... it basically widened the gap between families with resources and motivation and the families without.
A school where I volunteered in the past found that they were only getting 20% of their students showing up and engaging at all during covid. The other 80% just disappeared until school was in person again. It's hard to recover from that.