Back-to-school plans stress working parents

NASHVILLE, TENN. » For generations, school has been an opportunity for American children to learn and make friends. For many parents today, though, it’s something that’s elemental in a very different way: a safe place that cares for their children while they are at work — or a necessity for them to be able to work at all.

The outbreak of the coronavirus this year, and the upending of society it has produced, have caused these views of school in American life to collide in ways that have thrown millions of parental lives into disarray. Now, President Donald Trump is demanding that schools reopen in the fall. But with the virus resurging widely, many working parents see no good options.

“I don’t have the benefit of a husband or other family members to care for my son,” says Michelle Brinson, who works full time for a Nashville nonprofit while raising her 11-year-old alone.

At 50, and with underlying health conditions, Brinson says she is “terrified” of contracting COVID-19. She is worried that if her son goes back to school, he could bring the virus home to her. “If I’m dead or on a ventilator,” she says, “what good am I to him?”

This isn’t the first time American schools have closed — or talked about it — because of an epidemic. It happened in 1918 with the so-called Spanish Flu and in the 1930s and 1950s with polio outbreaks.

But the nature of school has changed fundamentally since the 1950s, education historian Jonathan Zimmerman says. School used to teach basic skills and citizenship, but extensive schooling wasn’t necessary for many jobs.

“The whole structure of the economy changed postwar, and formal education became a prerequisite for self-sufficiency in a way it never had before,” he said. Schools have also become de facto social service agencies, providing necessities like free meals and mental health services.

That’s where the conflict lies. To ask a parent — particularly one trying to parent alone — to work full time while supervising education and daytime meals is a formula for stress and unreasonable expectations.

Rebecca Witte can attest to that. For Witte, the experience of working from home while also helping her two children wrap up kindergarten and second-grade from home is not one she wants to repeat.

As a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Corrections during a coronavirus outbreak that infected more than 900 inmates, she recalls her kids coming in screaming one day while she was being interviewed. Her husband, a school principal, shared the schooling responsibilities but was also busy helping teachers at his school shift to virtual learning.

“Trying to work, it was hard,” Witte said. “It will be interesting to see what the plan is in the fall. ... I am hopeful they won’t be home full time with me trying to teach and work.”

Before the virus, Brinson says, she “went into work every single day, and my son went to school and he had aftercare with the YMCA.” Brinson was totally unprepared when schools closed in March. She ended up taking several days off until she received permission to work from home. Now her employer is pressuring her to come back in.