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On July 30, the Anchorage School District, or ASD, notified parents the COVID-19 risk level was too high to reopen schools for the first quarter of the 2020-2021 school year. ASD states that it is prioritizing school and community safety.
Parents with kids in ASD schools also prioritize the safety of our schools and communities. But, as a result of ASD’s decision, thousands of us unexpectedly have become home-schooling parents right before school is scheduled to begin, even if, among other things, we missed the open period for the home-school lotteries or don’t have the skills or resources to effectively educate our children.
We are unable to adequately serve as our kids’ teachers because:
• We work full-time during the day;
• We are unemployed and looking for work;
• We have kids with unique or special needs;
• We are teachers who have to provide digital instruction to other ASD students during the day; or
• We do not understand the complexity of the material our children are learning.
Our reality as parents is that all ASD local schools have become “home-schools,” even though they’re not designated as such by the district. After being notified of ASD’s closure for the first quarter, some of us tried to enroll in Alaska home-school options, but they are not accepting students or have long wait lists. Others of us didn’t pursue home-school enrollment, but there remains a significant burden on all of us to educate our kids for these reasons:
• ASD hasn’t established standards for a minimum number of hours ASD teachers are expected to provide online teaching;
• We received remarkably disparate — and often inadequate — support and interaction from ASD teachers last quarter;
• We haven’t seen a plan for how ASD will assess our students’ learning progress — which is absolutely unacceptable when Alaska has one of the lowest testing proficiency scores in the nation and we are increasingly concerned our kids are stagnating or regressing academically; and
• ASD engagement metrics showed an average of 25% of our students in 6th-12th grade didn’t submit their online schoolwork last quarter, which means parents are critical to ensuring online learning is completed and submitted.
We refuse to be complicit in what amounts to the educational neglect of our children. We don’t believe we have to choose to either keep our schools and communities safe or to effectively educate children. We can partner with ASD in achieving both objectives, if we have adequate resources to do so.
We did not ask for financial assistance last spring. We all understood the emergency situation ASD faced. ASD has had 5 months to develop a solution, however. If the solution is for children to learn at home, then the solution must involve resourcing parents to do the job. We aren’t trained to be teachers. We did not choose home schooling for a reason. We have been forced into home schooling and we are expected to do the same work as home-school parents in Alaska home-school partnerships, but we haven’t been given the student allotment they receive. It’s not fair to our children.
As local schools have unexpectedly been converted into “home-school hubs,” placing the greater burden of teaching on parents, we are petitioning ASD to provide us the home-school stipend amount for each of our ASD-enrolled students: $2,000 per elementary student and $2,400 per high school student. We believe these funds can come from the more than $100 million non-instructional operational expenses not being used to run school buildings that currently are shut down. This will help us to provide the educational resources we need, such as: special needs providers; tutors or assistants; and supplemental or substitutional educational materials.
We have started a petition at http://chng.it/kLYDgV2r. We are not requesting government handouts without accountability. This stipend would follow the same processes and procedures already in place for those parents in home-school programs: ASD parents would submit receipts or invoices for reimbursements for authorized expenses, up to the total of the stipend. Not all families would need the full stipend, or the stipend at all. But those families who need supplemental assistance would have access to it.
We cannot, we will not, fail our children.
Kelly Tshibaka is a mother of five students in the Anchorage School District. These views are personal and do not reflect her official position as Commissioner of the Department of Administration.
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