Held back

As parents realize how badly the U.S. botched the next school year, we’re furious

The happiest day in my household since the pandemic started — maybe the only truly happy one — was the Wednesday in mid-March when we found out on the New York City Department of Education website that my daughter, then in eighth grade, had been accepted at LaGuardia High School for the performing arts. I cried, she danced, we picked up a cake at the bakery and spent that night watching “Fame.”

From then until the end of the school year, we lived the life that families with school-aged children are sick of living and everyone else is sick of hearing about: a miasma of sleeplessness, squabbling, incessant interruptions and multiple simultaneous glitching Zooms. My low point came when, on a short break from an unskippable work call, I went to the kitchen to retrieve my cold, abandoned coffee and had to step over my kid, who was crying on the floor about algebra. As someone who melted down over math problems throughout my adolescence, I was sympathetic, but the most I could offer were a few words of comfort and a promise to look at the assignment with her later. (At which point I would be the one crying on the floor.)

We were, and are, incredibly lucky: None of us, and no one in our extended family, has gotten the virus. My spouse and I are able to do our jobs from home, though in one case with a significant pay cut. We have broadband access and enough functional devices to do Zoom school and work at the same time. Still, that semester of online schooling was a miserable experience that we would all give anything never to have to repeat.

Nearly five months later, though, it’s become apparent that the Trump administration’s abject negligence means we’re about to repeat it anyway. The implicit bargain of the spring was that if everyone complied with the shutdowns, the isolation, the social distancing, the working-while-parenting disasters and the rest, the government would use that time to build enough testing, tracing and public health infrastructure so that students could safely go back to school in person in the fall.

Instead, having utterly failed to contain the virus, the administration is now employing the crafty tactic of attempting to draw attention away from the pandemic — as if we could be distracted out of noticing that we can no longer safely leave our homes, we have no functioning public institutions (libraries, museums, schools), we have lost more than 139,000 American lives, and we are well on our way into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/24/remote-school-parents-rage/