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FantasticSams.com As college students grapple with the decision to go back, local
parents with younger students must decide whether to send their
elementary to middle school-aged children back to school.

“So, my first option is to send them back to school. My second
option is to do an online program. And my third option is to just
homeschool them,” says Kari Harris, a mother of two who lives in
Northern Virginia.

Harris’s son has asthma, placing him in the high-risk category for
contracting COVID-19. With this on her mind, the decision to send
her children back has been a difficult one.

“I’m concerned about keeping the kids safe and making sure
he doesn’t get sick, which there’s really no way to completely
take that risk away. So, that has me hesitant about sending him
back. At least when he’s at home, I can control the risk as much
as possible,” she says.

Falls Church resident Heather Pressler Barnett says that for her
child, who is also in a high-risk category, the school district’s deci-
sion to have low-risk children attend school while high-risk children
participate in “tele-education” is exclusionary.

“The kids that aren’t healthy enough to be at school, they have to
stay at home or they should stay home. And so therefore, they aren’t
allowed to be at school,” she says.

“And I get the pressure from my son ... ‘Well, all my friends are
going back to school and everyone’s at school, I want to be there.’
Well, no, your medical condition is going to hold you back, and we’re
going to have to have you at home instead,” she says.

The trouble with online learning
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For other parents, the struggles of schooling came when online edu-
cation was introduced. Parents assumed the role of educator or
co-educator in their child’s schooling, a role they had to juggle with
work, parenting and other responsibilities. For Potomac resident
Marisa Tvardek Safa, online learning also took away her daughter’s
excitement and enjoyment towards school.

“And as a kindergartener, I think that asking them to sit in front of
a computer on a Zoom call is probably not the best way to deal with
such little children trying to learn,” she says. “So, she had a lot of
anxiety. She didn’t want to attend. She started to not like learning.”
For Barnett, there were disconnects in her son’s online learning.

“We discovered, with like only two weeks left to the school year,
that there’s a whole section of material that we were not aware of
was on [the school’s website]. And so he had to try to do six weeks
of material in two weeks, and that was a little stressful. It’s like
no one gave us a tutorial on it, the kids were kind of left to do it
themselves.” she says. T
With reporting from Adora Brown, PJ Feinstein and Joy Saha
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