The regional shift follows a national trend, as massive school systems throughout the country have recently debuted plans to start the school year online, defying pressure from President Trump and citing rising coronavirus cases. Some parents, let down by the announcement, nonetheless acknowledged it was the right call. But other, shaken mothers and fathers are sending angry emails to school officials, pondering pulling their children from public school, hiring private tutors if they can afford it, and — sometimes — stepping behind closed doors, away from their kids, to have a quiet cry.
“It feels,” said Fairfax County parent Tara Sanders, who is considering quitting her job to manage the education of her 5-year-old, “like it’s never going to end.”
The burden is falling especially hard on parents who cannot work from home, those with young children and families in poor financial situations that depended on schools as a source of food and stability. It is also afflicting children for whom school was a safe haven: Experts have warned that rates of child abuse, and abuse-driven deaths, will only rise the longer campuses stay closed. Even for families that suffer none of that, the key question remains: Can students really learn online?
For parents whose children suffer learning disabilities, the future looks especially bleak.
When virtual learning started, Fairfax parent Mindy Bixby said, her severely autistic son, Bobby, knew 50 words. But after a spring and summer spent sitting uncomprehending before a computer, as pixelated teachers failed to reach him, the 7-year-old’s vocabulary dropped to 25. He stopped using sentences, calling “Daddy go?” instead of “Where did Daddy go?” He started having bathroom accidents at home, which never happened before.
Mindy told herself all of this was okay, because fall was almost here. Soon, her son would be back in the classroom, learning with the assistance of a special aide. Fairfax County Public Schools had offered parents a choice between virtual and in-person learning, and Bixby had immediately picked the latter.
Then she tuned into a virtual board meeting Tuesday afternoon. Superintendent Scott Brabrand said school would be online in the fall, and the bottom dropped out of Bixby’s world.
“I’m used to society leaving us behind,” she said. “I’m used to Bobby not being able to go to birthday parties, to social events, to restaurants. But the school system has always been a place where I knew he was accepted.”
Bixby felt she was living in a new America: a country unable to contain the coronavirus, or to teach its children, especially children like Bobby.
Schools everywhere, including in the Washington region, had initially hoped to reopen their doors in the fall. That was the goal from the moment campuses nationwide shuttered unceremoniously in March: Many school officials spent the spring and summer crafting detailed plans for in-person school in the coronavirus era.
Shortly after Independence Day, Montgomery County schools walked reporters through what socially distanced classrooms could look like: desks set six feet apart, tape demarcating boundaries. Fairfax and Loudoun counties got so far as asking their hundreds of thousands of students and staffers to formally choose between the all-virtual model and a hybrid program that would have brought children to campus for at least two days a week. Fairfax also published a nine-page student safety guide that barred the use of balls and ropes on the playground.
But, as the end of July approached, school systems switched rapid-fire to all-virtual learning, citing climbing coronavirus infection rates and deaths nationwide. In arguing for his shift to online-only class, Fairfax Superintendent Scott Brabrand said America had failed to effectively fight the coronavirus.
“The numbers don’t lie,” he said.
Travis Gayles, Montgomery County’s health officer, said Tuesday at a news conference that it would be unsafe to open schools given the number of coronavirus cases in the county, particularly the number of pediatric cases. While young people are far less likely to develop serious illness from the virus, scientists still do not know how contagious they are when they are infected.
“If we were to open up right now,” Gayles said, “it creates the opportunity for transmission to happen easily and seamlessly.”
School officials are promising virtual school will be better this time around. They have spent millions on new devices for students, worked with county governments to boost Internet access and upgraded training for their teachers. Many districts — including Fairfax and D.C. Public Schools — will be mandating attendance, unlike in the spring. They are vowing to teach new material, and to grade students’ work.
Loudoun parent Melissa Taliaferro is not optimistic.
She spent the spring in a haze of horror, struggling to balance her job as a technology consultant with ensuring her five children — three high-schoolers, one sixth-grader and a fourth-grader — continued to learn. Every morning, she dragged herself out of bed extra-early so she could get some work done before her fourth-grader, who is dyslexic, awoke and sat down to virtual class.
“All those Google docs, all those instructions — ‘click this video, read this paragraph’ — when you’re dyslexic and you can’t read, none of those instructions are helpful,” Taliaferro said. “Every single lesson, everything that had to be done, I walked him through it.”
As she tutored her youngest child, popping back and forth between his computer and the work she was supposed to be doing, the rest of her offspring scattered through the house. Taliaferro felt powerless to ensure they were following their lessons, and her husband was busy running the small business he owns.
Loudoun’s pivot to all-virtual schooling didn’t shock Taliaferro or her children, she said. The whole family had already given up hope, after watching other school systems change course. But that doesn’t mean she has a plan for the fall.
“What am I going to do now?” she said. “I have no idea. I have no idea.”
Unlike Taliaferro, Sanders, the mother of the Fairfax 5-year-old, was stunned by her school system’s reversal. She recently moved to Oakton in part because of the reputation of Fairfax schools, often ranked as one of the premier systems in the nation.
She was pleased when Fairfax offered an option for two days of in-person instruction. Her bright and social 5-year-old daughter, Olivia, would be so glad to see her friends.
Now, Sanders is working through a grim calculus: Can the family afford to send Olivia to private school? No, not even on the combined income of her and her husband, a graphic designer. By how much can Sanders cut her hours to take care of Olivia? Will she need to quit her job, and could the family, already on a tight budget, survive that?
“We will have to scale back on a lot of things,” she said. “It would be hard to pay rent. [We’d] go back to shopping at Aldi. No trips anywhere.”
The pandemic-fueled collapse of the child-care system has been especially devastating for women. Like many mothers, Sanders doesn’t want to leave her workplace, a consulting firm in Fairfax where she’s worked for more than a decade and loves her job. But Olivia’s education, she said, is more important.
In Montgomery County, Kimberly Kelly is also making career sacrifices to assist her son, a sixth-grader who has attention-deficit disorder. Before the virus, Sadiq Muhammed worked with a classroom assistant who kept him on task. But at home, the 11-year-old struggles to steer clear of distractions such as the television and computer games.
“It’s horrible and I hate it,” Sadiq said of online learning. “It’s just really hard for me to focus.”
Kelly has done all she can to fill the gap: She took a leave from her job as a project manager for a nonprofit to supervise Sadiq this spring, and she’s planning to help him this fall, too. Still, she worries it won’t be enough, and that her son will fall behind.
Another Montgomery parent, Tammy Clark, said she also knows distance learning is less rigorous than in-person instruction. Her oldest, a rising high school senior, missed his SAT exam last academic year. And she wonders if her youngest learned enough eighth-grade geometry to succeed in high school math this fall.
But Clark said she understands why the county is going remote, and likely would not have felt safe sending her children back to school anyway. She said she found some bright spots in online education during the spring: Her children learned how to take the initiative, reaching out to teachers when they needed help.
“There’s only so much in my control,” Clark said. “We have to just sit back and remind ourselves that it is not unique to us, it is not unique to Montgomery County, it’s universal.”
Bixby, meanwhile, sometimes finds herself staring at the speech machine her son uses to communicate, in addition to talking.
In February, just before schools shuttered, Bobby hit a major milestone: Responding well to guidance from Fairfax teachers, he began using the machine to tell his mother about his day at school. Although a ritual most parents take for granted, it was a revelation to Bixby, who previously had to ask his teachers for information.
In the first weeks of the shutdown, Bobby kept using the device to query his mother why school was closed. He pressed buttons that listed the names of his friends, then a button that said “not in music” — a reference to Bobby’s favorite class.
“Hima not in music,” he’d say. “Paloma not in music.” Bixby looked at her son and told him no, none of them were in music class. But she promised they would be again, one day.
“And then, all of a sudden,” Bixby said, “he stopped asking about music. He just stopped doing that entirely.”