Over the last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about fall and what I want it to look like.  When we started this sort-of-homeschooling journey last March, I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  We were sent home for an “early spring break” with distance learning packets to open “if we weren’t able to come back to school right away.”  But we all figured, I think, that the time at home would be short-lived.  When it became clear that it wasn’t going to be short-lived, we made the first subconscious, and then conscious, decision to check out of the kids’ school and do our own thing.  The kids both hated the Zoom sessions with their classes, which were disorganized and chaotic.  And I wasn’t motivated to force it on them, because I was already so disillusioned and checked out of their school that seeing anyone affiliated with the place was the last thing I wanted.  So we pretty much did our own thing.  We worked our way through most of the materials the school sent home and supplemented with our own enriching activities.  Throughout the spring, I didn’t really know if I was “doing it right” or if they were getting what they needed, but I figured they’d be in a new school in September – we had plans to move to a better school district over the summer – and we’d figure it out then.

This fall is going to be different.  We made our move out to a neighboring county (with world-class public schools) in June and promptly got the kids enrolled.  And then it came time to make a decision about what the fall would look like.  Our new school district advised us that everyone would be starting the year online, and may never make it back into the classroom.  If they do begin to bring kids back for in-person learning – and that’s if – it will be two days a week, with another two days a week on the computer.  And no guarantees that in-person will stay in-person; everyone could end up back home if there is a big outbreak of COVID-19.

Steve and I weighed our options and there’s really no good choice.  The way I see it, fall could look any number of ways, none of them good:

1. Elect the in-person option.  At first, I thought this would be my choice – school is still serving a dual purpose of education and child care, and two days a week is better than none.  Plus I hated the idea of little Nugget, who is a very social little dude, doing kindergarten on a computer.  (Peanut is more introverted and while she hates technology, except for TV, I think she’d be less impacted socially.)  But I would still have to deal with distance learning, their education would be disrupted when schools closed again – and I do believe that’s a when, not an if – and I didn’t feel that the school district’s plans contained enough detail about how they would keep the kids safe.
2. Elect the distance learning option.  Another bad choice.  Like I said above, I hated the idea of little Nugget doing kindergarten on a computer.  And the idea of an entire school year of trying to balance two full-time working parent schedules with full-time online school, with no help, gave me hives.  But ultimately this seemed like the safer and less disruptive choice, challenges aside.
3. Hire a teacher and pod with another family.  I like this idea, but I don’t know any retired teachers in the area, and we’re new to the school and don’t know any families, either.  This may be an option later in the year, once we get to know some of the other families in our classes, but finding these people in August felt very daunting, if not impossible.  And the idea of paying someone to educate the kids when the entire reason we moved here was for the public schools seems… frustrating.
4. Homeschool.  From an educational and social/emotional perspective, this might be the best choice.  But it’s not really doable with my work schedule – not long-term, anyway.  And I found it very stressful to be the one responsible for deciding what we were going to do every day; I know many families find it freeing, but I felt very ill-equipped to create lesson plans and make sure the kids were learning what they were supposed to be learning.  I like the idea of incorporating some homeschooling into our school year for added enrichment, but having it be the sole source of education doesn’t seem like a good choice for our family.

Basically, none of these options are good.  They are all equally terrible, in different ways.  I don’t blame the school or the school district; I do blame the federal lack of leadership for their criminally inept response that left school districts – even big, well-funded ones like ours – to grope around in the dark for solutions.  Schools in other countries have found ways to make it work, but they have had more support from their national leadership.  Ultimately, in our area of the country, both the school district and the individual families had to make decisions with incomplete information.  Not knowing what the school year would look like (cohorts? pods? how would social distancing and masking work for little kids?) I didn’t feel comfortable signing up for it.  Steve and I had a family discussion and discovered that we both felt the same way – online learning all year, while a terrible option, seemed like the safe choice.

I told Steve that I want to give the public school distance learning program a fair effort and really try to make it work – which we didn’t really do last spring.  As I mentioned above, I was terribly disillusioned with the kids’ private school, and their approach to online learning was well-intentioned but chaotic.  Those two factors combined led us to essentially check out and opt for doing our own thing.  This is different – we chose this school district, and they have had time to plan for online learning.  I am hoping that the kids will stay in this school pyramid through high school, and I want to get off on the right foot.  But I also want to continue doing our own thing.  The hardest part of our spring homeschool, for me, was the planning – I was never really sure I was going in the right direction, or that the kids were getting what they needed from me.  But with better direction from school, combined with our own enrichment activities that are not the primary source of material, I think… we could make it work?

I’ve already written too many words about this, and we are just figuring out our structure for the year, so I won’t say much more right now.  We’ve decided that instead of dividing and conquering the day – as we did last spring and all summer, working in shifts – we will divide and conquer the kids.  So Peanut will have a desk next to Steve in the family room, and Nugget will be my new “office mate” in the dining room.  The hope is that as the online learning and the technology becomes more familiar, they will settle into a routine that allows us to work while our designated kid is watching a lesson or doing an activity with classmates.  It isn’t a perfect solution (that would be a vaccine and a return to full-time in-person school) but it’s what we’ve come up with for now – and if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.

Meanwhile, I am scouting around for enrichment activities to build into the kids’ days.  I have a couple of nature-based homeschool resources and I’ve purchased some math lessons that can be taught outdoors; we haven’t put them into practice yet, so I will wait until we do and we know what’s working before writing about that.  I’m envisioning a fall semester in which the kids get their main education from the public school, but we combine it with things like “observations” at the neighborhood frog pond, dry erase math on the kitchen windows, lots of reading aloud, and teachable moments sprinkled into our family time.  At the end of the day, if they’ve learned basically what they need and we end the fall still liking each other, I’ll have done my job.

How are you preparing for another season at home?