Home Schooling - Education For Live

November 30, 2021

Many Working Parents Are Burned Out. Two UVA Clinicians Have Advice.

It’s a sound that can make a parent’s chest clench with anxiety: a new cough coming from a toddler’s room in the middle of the night. One small cough can portend another round of COVID testing, and days, possibly weeks, spent at home helping the child recover from whatever virus it turns out to be. Routines once again disrupted, work distractions constant, anxieties compounded after nearly two years of living this way.

In a report published in August by the American Staffing Association, 62{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of U.S. adults with children polled said their additional child care and virtual schooling responsibilities during the pandemic hurt their ability to get ahead at work. And although lockdowns are mostly a thing of the past, schools and day care centers have much more stringent rules than pre-pandemic times; many do not allow children to attend if they are displaying any symptom of illness. As common ailments such as rhinovirus, respiratory syncytial virus, and ear infections have spread among children this summer and fall, parents find themselves back where they were in 2020 – trying to balance work and parenting, with no clear end in sight.

“Working parents have been so overtaxed with work, child care/home-schooling and a lack of social support these past two years that they have been sacrificing their own self-care,” said Claudia Allen, director of the Family Stress Clinic and director of behavioral science in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Virginia.

These stressors can lead to parental burnout – an “overwhelming exhaustion related to one’s parental role, an emotional distancing from one’s children, and a sense of parental ineffectiveness,” according to Belgian researchers Moïra Mikolajczak and Isabelle Roskam, who first identified the syndrome in the 1980s – well before the pandemic. Research published last month by U.K. children’s charity Action for Children found that more than 80{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of parents there are struggling with at least one symptom of burnout due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

So what can parents do to help themselves through this difficult time? UVA Today reached out to Allen, as well as pediatrician Dr. Heather Quillian, an associate professor in UVA’s Department of Pediatrics, for answers.

Q. What are some signs/symptoms of burnout you’ve seen among working parents during the pandemic?

Allen: For many working parents, routines were completely disrupted and any free time for themselves that they did have (already scarce) was lost. Time for exercise, seeing friends, personal development, date night, etc., went right out the window. Downstream effects are negative on physical and mental health, for sure, and on marital/partner relationships.

One of the stresses of the pandemic for parents has been the pressure to create a whole new life for your kids. Some families with resources and a knack were able to do this, and they provided farm school, trips, etc. for their kids. And all of this was on Instagram, of course. The average parent not only was not able to do this, but also felt that they should. There was a lot of social comparison of how families handled the pandemic, and this left many parents feeling inadequate, even like bad parents.

Q. Are small children getting more illnesses from child care settings this year, or getting any illnesses that usually don’t show up normally in their age group?

Quillian: It may seem like kids in child care settings are getting more illnesses this year, and I do think that’s true compared to last year, but on the whole I think that the number is fairly typical in terms of what we saw pre-COVID. I think it just seems worse because last year there were relatively fewer illnesses in this age group.

I wouldn’t say that the kids are getting unusual illnesses. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) did come early this year – we saw cases over the summer which is unusual – but RSV itself is a common player during the typical cold and flu season.

In general pediatricians do not think there are harmful long-term effects for young children to get these viral infections, and in fact getting viral infections builds immunity over time, and possibly even creates some crossover protection when new infections arise. That is one reason the flu vaccine can be beneficial over the years, even when in an individual year the vaccine is not a good match for what is circulating.

Q. How can parents who need to send their children to day care help them stay healthy?

Quillian: For kids who are in child care settings, the best ways to stay healthy are to encourage good handwashing practices and, if kids are old enough, mask wearing. It is important to remember though that masks will help prevent illnesses that spread through sneezing and coughing – like COVID-19 – but they don’t help as much with illnesses spread via fomites. Fomites are objects or materials which are likely to carry infection, such as clothes, utensils and furniture. Viruses that have more spread this way, say like the virus that causes hand-foot-and-mouth disease, will not necessarily be lessened by mask-wearing – perhaps only to the extent that masks keep kids from putting their fingers in their mouths.

Q. What are some tips you can suggest to parents suffering from burnout, in terms of coping with stress and improving their mental health?

Quillian: We as pediatricians certainly understand the burden that these repeated viral infections place on parents, especially working parents who are struggling with the demands of their jobs and have a difficult time finding a contingency plan when their child is ill. These past almost two years have been really tough logistically for many families.

I do think things will get better; we will hopefully, by early to mid-2022, have a COVID-19 vaccine available for kids under 5. While this vaccine will not prevent the other viruses kids get, I do think it will eventually help reduce the burden of getting children tested for COVID-19 – which will make us all happy, especially the kids!

Pediatricians do understand that testing is a big burden on families, but as long as COVID is still at high transmission in the community, and cases are predominantly in the unvaccinated (with young children making up a larger portion than previously), it is still necessary to test children for COVID with each illness unless there is a very clear explanation for symptoms. And the upside is – it is working! There hasn’t been widespread COVID in our local child care centers – so the diligence is paying off. We are almost there; it’s just not time to take our foot off the gas quite yet.

Allen: One of the ways that the hard work of parenting is typically balanced is by the FUN of it. Some families have been able to capture fun during the pandemic if they had the ability to take a road trip, decamp to the countryside, or create some kind of well-supported home school. But for many families, the pandemic meant the end of neighborhood socializing, chatting with other parents at the bus stop, taking kids to a basketball game, even dinners with grandparents. Those fairly small but regular and sometimes fun interactions with other families are what help keep parents of young kids SANE. Many parents totally or largely lost this during the pandemic. While it is coming back slowly, we are certainly not there yet, and some damage has been done by this isolation.

My tips: Reclaim your self-care as soon as you reasonably can! Go back to the gym, see your friends, etc. It’s not selfish; it’s important.

If you are partnered, prioritize that relationship. Restart date night, get a sitter, go away for a day or two. Both you and your children need that relationship to be as healthy as possible.

Q. A great number of women have left the workforce during the pandemic; many more are considering it. What are your thoughts about this massive shift, and any advice for women going through it?

Allen: Regarding women leaving the workforce, I certainly get it. For many families, that may make temporary or permanent sense. But a caution: If you are considering leaving your job that you otherwise reasonably like and/or need, be careful not to be the only family member who is absorbing the extra child care. Even if your partner makes more than you, there are costs to leaving the workforce. You lose income; you lose experience; you lose social interaction. Make sure to consider both partners cutting back, for example, instead of one person entirely leaving their job. Or consider changing your job to something more flexible rather than leaving entirely. Or consider moving closer to family who could help with child care, or joining forces with another family. For women, having some work outside the home can be a buffer when things at home are hard.

Q. Are there policy changes you would suggest to help improve life for working families in this country?

Allen: Policy wise, we certainly need a national parental leave policy that can be used not only at birth, but when a child is ill, or when their school closes, etc. And universal child care before kindergarten has been shown to benefit children, families and employers. Finally, wages for child care workers need to come up considerably, as these workers are crucial to both our economy and our children’s development.

November 29, 2021

Homeschooling surges among black families

Raegan Mayfield’s 11-year-old son was doing well in his Christian private school, but Mayfield and her husband felt there were gaps in how his history classes addressed racial subjects. They supplemented his education at home, but then COVID-19 concerns and racial issues became front and center in spring 2020. “My husband and I became really protective of our son,” Mayfield said.

The couple, who live in Georgia and work from home, began looking into homeschooling options. “We wanted to keep the Biblically sound education but then also diversify his education a bit,” Mayfield said.

Finding Heritage Homeschoolers, a group for African American homeschoolers in the Atlanta area, gave Mayfield the encouragement she needed. She and her husband began homeschooling their son in fall 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove an increase in homeschooling across all demographics, but the boost was particularly large among African American families. According to Census Bureau data, the percentage of black families educating children at home grew
fivefold in six months, from 3.3 percent in April 2020 to 16.1 percent in October 2020.

Steven Duvall, director of research at the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), said that in previous years African American families homeschooled at about half the rate of white families. But more recent surveys show the black homeschooling rate is only a couple of percentage points behind that of white families. “It just shows you how diversified the homeschool movement has become,” Duvall said.

That shift began even before 2020. According to a 2015 report
by Brian Ray at the National Home Education Research Institute, the number of black homeschooling families “nearly doubled from 1999 to 2012.”

Amber O’Neal Johnston, who helped start the Heritage Homeschoolers group the Mayfields joined, said she has seen more black families involved since she started homeschooling about seven years ago, but the growth has exploded in the past two years. Heritage Homeschoolers opens registration to new families twice a year, in January and August, and in 2019 and early 2020, the group received fewer than 20 applications in each of those months. Since August 2020, though, 34 to 41 new families have applied each month registration is open.

Before starting Heritage Homeschoolers, Johnston and her husband were involved with another homeschool group. They enjoyed it, despite being the only black family there. But their daughter began to say negative things about her own skin and hair and stopped playing with her black dolls. “It’s not like anyone had been mean to her,” Johnston said. “It wasn’t like she had been somewhere where people were saying negative things about black people.”

The Johnstons never left their first homeschooling group, but they decided to look for other black homeschooling families. Soon Heritage Homeschoolers was born, and it kept growing. It now serves 94 families with 280 children.

In March 2020, Khadijah Ali-Coleman defended her doctoral dissertation on perceptions of community college preparedness among dual-enrolled African American homeschooling students. Ali-Coleman homeschooled her daughter for a while and co-founded Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars, a research group that provides virtual training for parents. In her research, Ali-Coleman identified several reasons black parents chose to homeschool, including concerns that schools aren’t properly teaching about black history and convictions that parents could better protect their child’s self-esteem at home.

Emily Powell, a representative for National Black Home Educators, said in an email that the organization has “seen incredible growth” this year. According to Powell, many new families are homeschooling due to COVID-19 restrictions, virtual learning situations, or concerns about schools teaching critical race theory.

Jasper and Deah Abbott prayed about their son’s education after his prekindergarten year ended with virtual learning in spring 2020. Deah said that four generations of her family have taught in public schools, but the Abbotts’ concerns about COVID-19 and virtual instruction convinced them to give homeschooling a try. They pulled their son out of public school in fall 2020, the weekend before he would have started kindergarten.

Deah is white and Jasper is black. In some homeschool circles, their son may be the only brown-skinned person. “He feels that—that otherness,” she said.

The family also joined Heritage Homeschoolers. Abbott thinks her son may benefit even more from the group than most children.

Johnston believes the uptick in homeschooling will continue, especially now that there are more support groups and options for single or working parents.

“Parents have had an opportunity to see their children just flourish at home,” she said. “When everyone was forced to bring the kids home, black families, in large numbers, saw how beautiful it was.”

November 28, 2021

Former California mom enjoys homeschooling here

Admittedly one to always be involved in her community, Lisa Cruz has begun a Little Free Library in her front yard.

This love of books springs from her childhood, where her parents weren’t as involved as she is today in her own kids’ lives. Rather, she says she lived with an abusive stepfather for 10 years; she and a sibling, then teenagers, were sent to foster care.

“So, my childhood wasn’t full of books,” Cruz said. “If there had been little free libraries, I would have loved it because nobody took me to the library.

It was time spent with her paternal grandmother that encouraged Cruz to love books when she was very young.

“Reading somebody’s story helps you understand yours better,” Cruz said. “When you’re a child and you read a book, it’s like going into another world. It’s not escapism… it’s a distraction from pain.”

Now Cruz, through the Little Free Library, gets to relate to other people among the community through the Lending Library.

One mother approached her through the Lending Library community about what books she should give her new foster child.

Cruz, who knows what it’s like to own only “a trash bag full of clothes,” said, “When she comes, you take her somewhere… let her pick out the books she wants. They don’t have choices in their lives for very many things. Let her control what she can.”

For the love of family

This love of books and community has served Cruz well as she homeschools her kids…. which she said will change you and your kids’ lives.

“Because not only do the kids slow down, but you do to,” she said.

The Census Bureau recently reported that the number of households homeschooling their school-aged children nearly doubled between the spring and fall of 2020, growing from 5.5 to 11.1 percent. That, in large part, was due to COVID-19, according to the Institute for Family Studies. But many families are choosing to maintain homeschooling, the report said.

For Cruz, the decision to homeschool her kids sprang from wanting to be involved in her kids’ lives.

“The main thing is I can control the influences in their lives. And that’s huge because I think the majority of problems parents are dealing with, especially with teenagers, is the negative influence of certain kids,” Cruz explained.

Homeschooling helps take out the peer pressure and comparisons many students face at school. And when Cruz and her family made the move to Shelbyville from the Los Angeles, California area, the adventure just began.

“I knew when I had kids, I was going to do it all up―the holidays, books, toys, Mommy and Me―the things I didn’t have.”

From city to farm

Cruz and her husband, a retired Los Angeles police officer, have five children, ranging from 16 (the twins) to 32 years old.

They also have seven dogs and a multitude of sheep, turkeys, cows, and rabbits on their 29-acre homestead in Shelbyville.

Cruz said California was a great place to live in the 80s and 90s. But after the Reagan era, she said things turned for the worse. Her LAPD husband witnessed firsthand more crime in the city, while businesses became regulated and housing expensive.

When her husband retired in 2017, they made their plans to get out of the state and buy a farm.

“There are so many people in those states who are stuck there who don’t want to bring the same sort of things to this state. They want to escape it,” Cruz said.

The family decided on the Volunteer State, bought their 1900s farm home virtually, and packed everything up. Using an old RV and two trucks, they made it to Tennessee in five days that July of 2019.

“We really pushed,” said Cruz.

Now settled into their homestead, Cruz has her home already decorated for Christmas while her two teens finish schooling for the semester.

Homeschool life

Homeschooling is an intimidating undertaking, Cruz said. But it’s doable.

“When you think about it, you as a parent are a teacher. You teach them to talk, walk, to have manners, affection, right from wrong.” You are a teacher. And it’s a God-given right to teach your kids, Cruz said.

“I’ve always tried to be involved in my kids’ schooling. And whatever community I was in, I tried to be involved.”

Her three older kids were in public school back in California and she was involved then. But Cruz soon realized she didn’t know what her kids were being taught. And when a student brought a gun to school, that was it.

“It is overwhelming and it’s not something I ever thought I needed to do because I was just trusting the school system to do what they needed to do for the kids.”

Cruz went online, talked with other moms, and studied.

“I just did it,” Cruz said. They do follow an umbrella school, which provides what the state requires as well as what requirements need to be met for college or trade schools.

Living on a farm helps, too, as “There’s more than one way to learn.” And with online resources available like never before, Cruz finds material for her kids beyond a textbook.

They also find the time to go out to church or the recreation center with friends so they can have continuing involvement in the community.

And for her kids, Cruz says she teaches them accountability for their own futures.

“I tell them ‘It’s up to you’…You find your niche…And we kind of wing it,” Cruz joked.

Where her kids were usually withdrawn after attending a regular public school day, they are now closer, and find more time to relax and de-stress from the “go-go-go.”

Now, Cruz says, “We’ve had a much better relationships.”

November 27, 2021

As Washington state public schools lost students during pandemic, home-schooled population has boomed

In the wake of pandemic school closures, school districts in Washington state saw their enrollments decline by tens of thousands of students. The statewide drop, calculated between fall 2019 and fall 2020, was among the largest in the country.

New state data from this fall shows that school systems still have not recovered their losses, leaving open questions about when — and if — these students will return.

Between October 2019 and October 2020, 39,000 fewer students enrolled in public school, about a 3.5{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} drop. The numbers weren’t distributed evenly across grades — the most pronounced losses were among younger students; the number of kindergarten students plummeted by 14{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}. By this fall, the state’s enrollment had only grown by a thousand students.

At the same time, the state’s home-schooled population has ballooned, nearly doubling in size during the first full school year of the pandemic, 2020-21. Many fled citing the uncertainty and logistical problems that public schools faced.

“The remote learning for us — it was too much,” said Allison Peterson, a mother of three who home-schooled her three children for all of last school year. With home schooling, Peterson said, the family had a lot more “flexible time.”

The drop in enrollment is bad news for public schools financially. Collectively, school districts will lose about $500 million in state funding in the next budget, according to state Superintendent Chris Reykdal. He has already signaled that he will ask state lawmakers to hold funds steady for the districts, which receive dollars based on the size of their rosters.

“I’m gonna make a real hard push here,” said Reykdal in an interview last week, explaining that the losses are small enough that it would be difficult for school districts to restructure their costs. “When it’s this sort of subtle thing, it’s the worst-case scenario.”

Districts have been tallying up the damage. Seattle is down 3,400 students since 2019. This year, the district estimates it will operate with $28 million less in funding, according to a recent Seattle School Board presentation. There is “potential” for some of those students to return during the second semester of the year now that the vaccine is available for children ages 5 through 11, the presentation said.

For the short term, money from the pandemic federal stimulus packages aimed at schools should exceed the money lost by enrollment declines in most school districts, according to an analysis from Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.

There could also be unintended consequences to the state holding funding at pre-pandemic enrollment levels, the analysis says.

“The movement of students may not be correlated to student poverty rates,” Marguerite Roza, an education finance professor, wrote in an email. That money “may be going out in ways that disproportionately protect some districts [which may or may not be higher poverty].”

The demographics of kids who have left (or never entered) public schools are still unclear. The state has yet to release those details. But state officials suspect many of them have stayed home.

Home-schooled students grew from 21,000 to 40,000 students between 2019 and 2020.

There isn’t a count yet available for home-schooled kids this school year, but Jen Garrison Stuber, advocacy chair for the Washington Homeschool Organization, says she expects the number to hold steady.

After school closures, parents flocked to this model for stability, Garrison Stuber said. Now it’s an appealing option for families for a wide variety of reasons. Some are afraid of sending their children back before they have received the pediatric vaccine. Others began schooling at home out of frustration with mask and vaccine mandates.

Now, many have adapted to the flow of home schooling and don’t want to shake their arrangements up again, she said.

“I used to say I would never home-school my own kids,” said Peterson, a former elementary school teacher who lives in the Northshore School District area. “That it would be too much time and too much work, that we’d get sick of each other.”

But she found that the arrangement actually allowed her kids to learn what they needed in a shorter period of time each day. They didn’t need to account for the extra minutes in the school day to take attendance or line everyone up for recess. The kids could move at their own pace.

They also took regular field trips. During a unit on farming and food, Peterson managed to persuade some local farmers to let her kids tour their facilities. Through a connection with a friend, she also had her kids Zoom with a NASA engineer to learn about space travel.

The Petersons gave their kids a choice about whether they wanted to return to in-person public school this year. Their son Jacob has been attending third grade in person since September, and their daughter, Hannah, will head back to kindergarten in January after she’s had her second dose of the vaccine.

Their oldest, 11-year-old David, will stay at home, where the pace aligns better with his learning style, Peterson said.

Though in many cases private schools opened for in-person learning earlier than public schools, these schools didn’t see the same boom between 2019 and 2020. (Data this school year hasn’t been released.) Statewide, private schools only saw an increase of about 800 students overall.

The Puget Sound region’s Catholic school system, which enrolls about 20,000 students across nearly 70 schools, saw a 6{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} increase in enrollment between 2020 and 2021, according to the Archdiocese of Seattle.

Seattle-area districts were among the last to start schooling in person, many of them under the pressure of a statewide order.

“We didn’t skip a beat. Within 72 hours, all of our schools had switched to remote learning,” said Kristin Moore, director of marketing and enrollment for the Archdiocese. “And working so close with the health department, we had a staggered start last fall.”

It was a word-of-mouth movement, Moore said. Public and private school parents would talk among themselves at sporting events, comparing school opening dates.

Like the Petersons, Amy Kelly and her family also left public schools because of challenges with remote learning. Her two sons, who used to attend Shoreline Public Schools, now attend St. Luke School, a Catholic school in Shoreline. Since enrolling, the boys have taken an interest in community service, and the welcoming parent community has been “life changing,” Kelly said. The family is now even contemplating becoming Catholic.

The growth has been great, Moore said. But “we couldn’t take everybody even if we wanted to. We want strong public schools.”

Staff reporter Monica Velez contributed reporting to this story.

November 26, 2021

They believed home was safer than school. Now some NYC parents are accused of educational neglect.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering public education. Sign up for their newsletters here: ckbe.at/newsletters.

Originally published Nov 19, 2021, 6:00am EST

There was no warning, just a knock on the door of Melissa Keaton’s Flatbush, Brooklyn, apartment.
She opened it to find a caseworker with the Administration for Children’s Services, or ACS, the New York City agency tasked with investigating suspected child neglect and abuse.

Still shaken by the sudden death of her father to COVID-19, Keaton hadn’t sent her 9-year-old daughter to school since classes started mid-September. It was now the end of October, and the caseworker explained to Keaton, a former PTA president at her daughter’s school, that someone had reported the family for educational neglect.

When New York City opened its schools this fall for in-person learning, with no option for virtual instruction, families across the five boroughs opted to keep their children home. They worried about the health of their children and vulnerable loved ones, and remained unconvinced it was safe to return to full buildings.

The city’s Department of Education promised at the beginning of the school year to be patient with families who remained scared of returning to in-person learning in what was once the U.S. epicenter of the health crisis.

“The only time ACS will intervene is if there is a clear intent to keep a child from being educated, period,” schools Chancellor Meisha Porter said at a press conference shortly before the new school year began. “We want to work with our families because we recognize what families have been through.”

Now, more than two months into the school year, some parents say they have been reported for neglect. The impact of child welfare investigations on already traumatized families can be severe: charges may stay on records for decades, future job prospects can be affected, and, most alarmingly, parents could be separated from children.

Education department staff made 207 reports of educational neglect through Oct. 31, according to ACS data. The numbers tripled in the last two weeks of October, compared to the total reported during the first month of school.

Still, the overall number of reports dropped from last year, when there were 346 cases in the same time period. But some parents and advocates say this year’s numbers are cause for concern since some of the parents getting wrapped up in the child welfare system are making efforts to educate their children as they hold out for a remote option.

Options for wary families, who are disproportionately families of color, are limited. Parents can apply for medically necessary instruction, which offers few teaching hours at home or virtually — but only for children who meet certain medical conditions. They can home-school, but that removes the student from their public school and puts the onus on families to educate their children at home, without help. In New York, homeschooling also involves completing and filing a plan and quarterly reports.

Experts have stressed that children learn best in school. The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned about the dire consequences of keeping students home.

“Remote learning — which exacerbated existing educational inequities — was detrimental to the educational attainment of students of all ages and worsened the growing mental health crisis among children and adolescents,” the academy wrote.

City leaders have worked to reassure families that steps are being taken to make buildings safe. Staff must be vaccinated, masks are required for everyone, and officials said they’ve upgraded ventilation across the city’s 1,600 schools. Weekly on-campus COVID testing for unvaccinated students (the only group who is swabbed) has revealed a positivity rate of .39{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} over a seven-day average, according to city data through Nov. 17.

“Our priority is the safety of our students, and the first two months of this school year showed that our schools are the safest place for them to be during this pandemic,” said education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer.

For Keaton, whose father died alone at a hospital soon after developing a cough in April 2020, that isn’t enough. After attending virtual town halls and talking to school and district leaders, she remained unconvinced that it was safe to send her daughter back to a school building.

“Families who are grieving and traumatized should not have to go through this,” she said.

‘Caught in the crosshairs’

It’s unclear how many families are refusing to send their children to school buildings this year. But attendance has lagged in some places, and last month the chancellor recorded a round of robocalls to families urging them to send their children to class.

Tajh Sutton is a mom in Brooklyn who, through the advocacy group PRESS, Parents for Responsive Equitable Safe Schools, has been providing resources and support to families boycotting classrooms because of health concerns.

The group has been advocating for a remote option as well as legislation that would require parents to be informed of their rights if they’re ever reported to ACS. Group members have also asked for an attendance code to track families who are staying home because of safety concerns.

After receiving roughly 20 calls from parents who recently received visits from ACS caseworkers, PRESS members created toolkits to help families understand their rights when it comes to child welfare and is partnering with the advocacy group JMacForFamilies and others on a Nov. 26 workshop on the topic.

The education department last week sent new guidance to principals with specific suggestions for how to engage with families who aren’t sending their children to school because of health concerns.

The guidance calls for offering families a virtual tour of the school to see the safety measures in place, making adjustments to respond to parents’ concerns, and offering application information for the city’s medically necessary instruction program. It also notes that schools should not report families for educational neglect if there is a pending application for medically necessary instruction or homeschooling.

“A report of suspected educational neglect is not a remedy for excessive absences, and is an option of last resort,” the guidance says.

Styer, the education department spokesman, said that educators “exhaust all options to support families in making sure every student attends school safely every day,” but also that, “our staff take their responsibility as mandated reporters for child welfare very seriously.”

“One of the striking things to me about placing teachers in the role of mandated reporters is just the extreme damage and lack of trust that creates in the relationship between parents and teachers,” said Anna Arons, an acting assistant professor at New York University.”

Despite the detailed guidance, many schools appear to be responding in their own ways, according to Amy Leipziger, a senior staff attorney who deals with education issues for Queens Legal Services. The move to call ACS on families, who are “trying to do the best they can,” ends up feeling very “retaliatory” by their schools, she said.

Now you’ve got parents — and more importantly, you’ve got kids — getting caught in the crosshairs,” she said.

A spokesperson for ACS, Nicholas Aguilar, said that the agency’s top priority is the safety and well-being of the city’s children. “Our work is focused on ensuring families have the services and supports that they need for their children to thrive, including educational services,” he said.

Educators are considered “mandated reporters,” which means they’re obligated to report suspected abuse or neglect. Prior to COVID, educators made about a quarter of ACS reports, said Anna Arons, an acting assistant professor at the New York University law school who has studied the city’s child welfare agency.

Arons pointed out research nationwide shows reports from educators are the least likely to be substantiated.

In terms of who is being reported, Black and Latino children tend to be overrepresented. While about 60{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of the city’s children are Black and Latino, they are 90{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of those involved in investigations or placed in foster care, Arons said.

In response to the harshness of how long ACS charges stay on one’s record, a new state rule will take effect in January reducing the number of years to eight. Until then, any ACS charges could remain on someone’s record until the child turns 28.

‘Concerned for our children’s safety’

After spending last year fully remote, Viviana Echavarria’s two teenagers were excited to return to Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy and even went back-to-school shopping. But then the Bronx mom and her husband decided to keep their two high schoolers home until their 11-year-old could get vaccinated.

Still, Echavarria was stunned when her husband called late last month while she was at work, as a director of operations for a nursing home, letting her know that an ACS caseworker was at their door. He hasn’t returned to work yet to stay home with their three school-aged children and 6-month-old baby.
The caseworker was investigating allegations of educational neglect and checked the children for bruises on their bodies. Because the family includes an infant, the caseworker said she would be visiting weekly, Echavarria said.

Before the school year started, Echavarria had contacted the school to let them know her children would be home and asked for support. The principal told her that the only option was to sign up to home-school her children. The principal, in a Sept. 8 email, wrote that the education department was not providing curriculum, materials, or support.

The full-time working mom of four didn’t feel equipped to home-school and asked the city’s home-school office for help, but got no response. Though she’s been taking her children to the library on occasion, they’ve had no formal schooling yet this year.

“They’re putting you in a position where you have to choose between your kids’ health and their education,” Echavarria said. “If they think they’re helping the children, they’re making it worse. Now they’re adding fear.”

Her two older children’s geometry teachers had reached out to find out why they were missing class, and ended up giving them access to assignments in Google classroom. But when the children asked the other teachers if they could do the same, the principal clamped down, Echavarria said.

In a Sept. 24 email the principal said: “The children must come to school. We have programs and are expecting them.”

The principal declined to comment, referring questions to the education department, which didn’t address specific cases.

After getting her 11-year-old son vaccinated this week, Echavarria now plans to send all three children back to school on Thursday, hoping that will put an end to the ACS investigation. The agency, however, would not tell her whether that would close the case, she said.

“We feel like we can’t wait for the second dose. We feel like we don’t have a choice,” she said. “It still leaves us: Where do we go from here? We’re sending them to school, but we’re still being investigated.”

Home schooling wasn’t an option for Keaton either. She felt she could manage online learning after having done so for more than a year. She wasn’t prepared, however, to be her daughter’s teacher. Like Echavarria, Keaton also sent emails to school leaders asking them to provide virtual work for her daughter to complete.

“I was told no, there wasn’t any work. That was only for students who are quarantining, and there is no remote option,” she said.

With the help of the nonprofit organization Brooklyn Defenders, Keaton is now navigating the application for medically necessary home-based instruction while the ACS case looms. She has found support through a local group called Parents Supporting Parents NY. She has worried about whether the investigation will affect her ability to work in schools, as she has in the past, and wondered how long it would take to get her daughter back if they were ever separated.

“It’s rough to fathom the thought that I could end up in front of a judge who could remove my child because I want to maintain her safety and our health,” Keaton said. “I can provide a safe environment for her at home. There is no exposure.”

‘It’s policing’

Another member of PRESS, Paullette Healy has been keeping both of her children home because of health concerns while providing resources and support to families who are also boycotting schools because of health concerns. Healy knew that getting a visit from ACS was a real threat — she had been working on the toolkits for parents in that situation.

Still, the Brooklyn mom was shocked when she received a knock on her door from an ACS caseworker while in the middle of an online training session last week for her role on her local Community Education Council, which is essentially a school board for her district.

She was shaken by the visit, especially since both of her children’s schools unofficially supported her choice by allowing them access to work on Google classroom.

Healy refused to let the caseworker inside, nor did she provide the requested pictures of her children’s asthma medications, her husband’s medications, and their smoke alarms.

Healy had applied on Sept. 1 for medically necessary instruction for her children, citing asthma and anxiety as reasons to keep them home. She never heard back, and just last week learned from one of her children’s schools that school officials could not find her application.

Some parents and legal advocates told Chalkbeat that applications for medically necessary instruction are taking about four weeks to process. Roughly 500 children are enrolled in medically necessary instruction, with about 750 having submitted applications this year so far, according to education department data as of Nov. 9.

Healy worries she’ll likely have to spend the next year working to get the ACS investigation off her record for background checks.

Even though Healy understands how to navigate the system, the visit has her family on edge.

“It’s harassment. It’s surveillance. It’s policing… It’s so stressful,” said Healy. “My child has been having trouble sleeping since the ACS visit: nightmares about being taken away from her home.

Arons, the NYU researcher, said that during the shutdown and its aftermath in New York City, sharp drops in the number of reports made, cases heard, and families separated has not led to increased risk to children as measured in a variety of ways, from youth fatalities to emergency room usage. Her findings are detailed in a forth-coming paper.

She hopes the fallout from these neglect complaints can be an open conversation about the role of agencies like ACS moving forward.

“I think there’s much more appetite and willingness to engage around the idea of do we need this level of surveillance? And do we need teachers to be in this role,” she said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/11/19/22790130/nyc-parents-acs-educational-neglect-covid-concerns-remote-schooling

November 25, 2021

Councils in England report 34{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} rise in elective home education | Education

Councils in England have identified a “rapid surge” in the number of parents choosing to take their children out of school to teach them at home, with a 34{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} jump in pupils being electively home educated on last year’s figures.

The number of families choosing to home educate has been increasing in recent years, but the pandemic appears to have accelerated the trend, with health fears related to Covid the most common reason given by parents, followed by concerns about their child’s anxiety or mental health problems.

A survey by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ACDS) estimated that the cumulative number of children and young people being electively home educated (EHE) across 152 local authorities at some point during the 2020-21 academic year was 115,542 – a 34{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} increase on 2019-20 totals.

The ADCS said numbers had fluctuated over the year with significant “churn” as high numbers of children and young people both returned to school and were removed from school amid the pandemic uncertainty.

The report warned however that many of the EHE notifications received since September 2021 had been for families with multiple layers of vulnerability where elective home education “does not seem the most appropriate route for the children concerned”.

This year’s total marks the biggest year on year increase since the survey began six years ago and according to the ADCS almost half (49.8{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}) of the 2020-21 EHE cohort made the shift during the 2020-21 academic year.

In the five years before the pandemic, the EHE population was growing by about 20{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} each year. This year the largest reported EHE cohort in a single local authority was 3,121, the mean average across all 126 authorities that took part in the survey was 534 and key stage 3 – for pupils aged 11-14 – was selected most often as having the highest number of EHE children.

Gail Tolley, the chair of the ADCS educational achievement policy committee, said local authorities had a duty to ensure that children being educated at home were safe and receiving a good education, but they currently lacked the necessary powers to do so.

“We are therefore calling on government to establish a mandatory register of all electively home educated children with a fully funded duty on the local authority to visit the child, at a minimum annually, to assess the suitability of the education provided. We can only support children’s education and safeguard the children who are known to us.”

The ADCS is awaiting the outcome of a Department for Education (DfE) consultation in 2019 that proposed new duties on local authorities including a national register of all EHE children and young people and a duty for local authorities to support parents who educated their child at home.

A DfE spokesperson said the government remained committed to introducing a register and added: “We support parents who want to educate their children at home. However, now more than ever, it is absolutely vital that any decision to home educate is made with the child’s best interests at the forefront of parents’ minds.”

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of National Association of Head Teachers, echoed calls for an official register of home educated children and said: “The government must find out the reasons behind so many more families choosing home education. The concern is that many appear to have chosen home education because they have lost faith in the government’s approach to school safety during the pandemic.”

Anntoinette Bramble, the chair of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, added: “Disruption to school education due to the pandemic has accelerated already rising numbers of parents and carers choosing to home education their children. The government should bring forward its plans to introduce a register for all home educators to ensure that adequate safeguarding measures are in place.”

Suggest a Correction