As COVID forces more IL districts to e-learning, some parents choose home schooling

The back end of the spring semester was hard for Juanita Rodriguez and her son, now a rising third grader in O’Fallon 90. He has ADHD and ADD, which made remote learning a struggle.

Before the district opted for full remote learning under the guidance of the St. Clair County Health Department, Rodriguez didn’t know if her son would be able to focus in class while wearing a mask or in a new classroom set-up.

Instead, she has decided to pull her son out of the district to try home schooling this year.

“We all struggled in the house due to remote learning,” Rodriguez said. “I tried to have as much grace for his teacher as possible, because I knew she also had children in school. She was doing the exact same thing as us.”

Parents aren’t just concerned about their child’s health. Nearly all of the districts in St. Clair County have switched to remote learning for the first quarter, and all but the very smallest of districts in the metro-east region advertise the option for students to have full remote learning for the first quarter or semester.

Still, some families are turning to home schooling as a short-term solution for what’s turned out to be a long-term public health crisis.

It’s not just about health concerns

When schools closed in the spring because of COVID-19, remote learning presented hurdles for students, for parents and for teachers.

Educators had days to rework their lesson plans. Many parents were either essential workers, trying to figure out how to work from home, or struggling with unemployment. Kids had their schedules disrupted, and missed out on socializing with their classmates.

This fall, schools are searching for some semblance of normalcy, whether in the classroom or over a Zoom call.

The consensus among teachers and administrators is that remote learning in the fall will not look like remote learning in the spring: They’ve had more time to prepare and train, and teachers will be sharing new material, rather than just reviewing.

Over and over again, area superintendents and teachers unions have said they’re confident that while it won’t be like in-person learning, they can still provide a rigorous education.

Even with the kinks from the spring, many parents looking to home school reiterated that it wasn’t their student’s teacher’s fault that remote learning didn’t work for them.

“Teachers had to design the spring response in like two days. They had to take their whole everything and convert it to virtual, which is unfair to them,” said Nicci Grimm, a parent with two kids in Belleville District 118. “Kids spend a lot of their time on screens for entertainment, and I don’t want them to get their learning that way as well.”

Even before Belleville 118 announced the move to remote learning for at least the first nine weeks of the year, Grimm had concerns about sending her kids to school. She used to work in schools, and she knows how often kids show up sick.

“There are a lot of people who don’t have the choice,” she said. “They have to send their kids in with the flu or diarrhea because they’re scared they’ll lose their jobs if they take one more day off. I’m fortunate enough, at my job, that I was already working from home for a year and a half.”

Belleville 118 Superintendent Ryan Boike said the district will re-evaluate coronavirus cases in St. Clair County after three to four weeks to decide when students can be brought back.

For now, Grimm is choosing what she called a “hybrid situation” — her kids will be enrolled in the district, but Grimm will supplement the remote learning with her areas of expertise (Spanish and science) and electives, like physical education and art.

“I can’t 100% home-school because I don’t know what I’m doing,” Grimm said. “It’s scary.”

Interest is up, but it’s hard to quantify

Anecdotally, everyone from regional administrators to home-schooling support groups say more people are considering home schooling, but there’s no hard data to say how many families are pulling their children, or how that compares to other years.

Both the Madison and St. Clair County Regional Offices of Education said the number of calls about home schooling were up from last year, but not in massive quantities. In St. Clair County, Regional Superintendent Susan Sarfaty estimated her office received a dozen more calls than normal.

Families aren’t required to alert their Regional Office of Education of their decision, but the offices ask for them to so they have a record in case their old district reports them for truancy, Sarfaty said.

The Illinois State Board of Education said it receives forms from the parents and guardians who choose to submit them, but it doesn’t have comparative data or maintain a count of students being home-schooled.

Rodriguez and Grimm are two of more than 100 members in a Facebook group called COVID Homeschoolers (STL Metro East). Experienced home-schoolers help guide newcomers through conversations about different curriculum programs by subject and offer encouragement for the upcoming school year.

The metro-east has several home school co-op groups that help coordinate group activities for home-schooled students, like field trips, music lessons and even girls wrestling.

Vanessa Wahler, president of the Scott Area Military Home Educators, said there was a ton of new interest in home schooling this year, especially among families with “littles” — preschoolers, kindergarteners and the younger elementary-aged children.

“I think a lot of parents would choose to home-school, rather than continue the e-learning,” she said. “As awesome as the teachers were in coming up with a plan, no one was prepared. That’s not a slam on them.”

How long to home school?

The most important thing for parents to remember, Wahler said, is that home schooling doesn’t look like public school at home. It depends on the family’s schedule and what kind of learner you have.

Parents who are only planning on home-schooling for one year have other considerations to make, like aligning the curriculum at home with their school district’s. For middle school science, for example, a home-schooling program might include some earth science, chemistry and biology each year, whereas the district focuses on one each school year, or vice versa. Over three years, both would cover much of the same material, but in a different sequence.

“If you’re only planning to home-school for one year, at least make sure your curriculum meets or exceeds the topics and standards your school would be providing,” said Emily Smith, an experienced home-schooler and one of the administrators for the COVID Homeschoolers Facebook group. “That way your child or children can plug right back in. It’s not that our kids aren’t prepared or on par with their peers, it’s just that they might be reading different books or using different curriculum.”

The biggest concern some parents said they have with home schooling is the lack of socialization. Rodriguez said when her son thinks of school he thinks of recess, lunch time and seeing his friends.

Even for Grimm, who is keeping her kids enrolled, it’s unclear when in-person learning will be a viable option again.

“They keep saying it’s only nine weeks, and then we’ll go back to in-person,” she said. “I don’t know that I believe that.”

This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM.