Aug. 12, 2020

Should I Send My Kids Back To School?

Our kids’ schools have sent plans. And revised them. And reversed them. Now parents have to make our own decisions. Here are the factors driving our own plans– knowing this can’t be one-solution-fits-all, and that the ‘right’ answer does not exist.

Our kids’ schools have sent plans. And revised plans. And codicils to the plans. Now it’s time to make our own decisions: if the choice is available to us, are our kids going back to classrooms this fall?

Here are the factors that are driving our own decisions– knowing that the ‘right’ answer is fundamentally non-existent, and that this calculus is by definition personal. As Adrianne La France writes for The Atlantic:

"All along, this disaster has been simultaneously wholly shared and wholly individualized, a weird dissonance in a collective tragedy that each person, each family, has to navigate with intricate specificity to their circumstances."

Amy drops some big news in this episode: her family has had coronavirus. We'll be following up with a bonus episode specifically about that later this week.


Here are links to some other writing on the topic that we discuss in this episode:

New York Times: What Back to School Might Look Like in the Age of Covid-19

Ann V. Klotz: This Is The Song That Never Ends

Claire Cain Miller for the NYT: Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling. 3 Percent of Women Agree.

Adrianne La France for The Atlantic: ‘This Push to Open Schools Is Guaranteed to Fail’

WGBH: Harvard Epidemiologist: 'Hybrid' Model For Reopening Schools Is 'Probably Among The Worst' Options

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices