This is a tough time for parents, children, teachers, and anyone connected to the education system. Because there’s a day of reckoning looming and it seems like there isn’t enough solid information available to help parents with the important decisions they’re facing.

No longer is it an easily made assumption that come September, the kids will go back to the classroom, and each family will go back to whatever their usual fall routine has been in the past. There are no easy assumptions and there are no tried-and-true routines for parents and families.

How do you decide whether to send your child back to school when nobody knows how that will be? Nobody can guarantee your child’s safety.

And yet, the prospect of keeping children at home for many is a huge unknown, especially if both parents have jobs and can’t work remotely. How do these pieces fit together? Will they fit together?

It’s been surreal for everyone concerned since the middle of March, when school breaks were suddenly extended, and then extended, and extended again. Trying to take the long view was well nigh impossible as everyone tried to get their bearings in a new and unfamiliar world.

With children no longer going to school, and daycare no longer available, working parents were thrown into a quandary.  Would they have to quit their jobs? Could they work from home? Could they be laid off and collect unemployment?

And what about the kids? What about their education? What about their friends and routines? All out the window. And then the window got locked.

Schools scrambled and put together some measures to offer virtual schooling which families could use or not. For everyone who was used to a school day, with familiar routines, the learning curve for kids and parents, and teachers was pretty darned steep.

For some these new ways worked well, others did alright with it, and for others it was a mess. Some just didn’t bother with it. Nothing was mandatory, nothing was certain.

By the time June hit, there was disappointment that things had not righted themselves in time to go back to school, but also relief that the attempts were over with. Summer, even with COVID, was still summer and people felt the need for a break from — well, just about everything.

But though summer days are in full swing, they won’t be for much longer. And the time for that shift is bearing down on us. Parents must decide what to do, in this situation where the danger of COVID-19 is being weighed against the desire to get back to a more “normal” life, and for many parents the need to be able to go to work.

How do you find a safe and realistic balance?

There are some options out there. Send your kids to school as before. Well, not really as before. Now there will be masks depending on a child’s age. There will be social distancing. What will that be like in a school full of kids?

For those who feel unable to take this direction, there are other options available.

– Schools will also offer virtual learning.

– You can hire a tutor.

– You can homeschool your children.

– You can combine bubbles with another family and work together.

Perhaps there are other possibilities as well. The outlook on any or all of this could change even before Labour Day. Some things will almost certainly be dropped and tweaked within the first few weeks of September. Welcome to COVID’s new frontier

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay