Skip to main content

School Options

I have a couple of friends whose have kids in middle school getting ready to transition to high school. The timing of the pandemic relative to the child's age and engagement at school has led to different outcomes for them and other parents like them. My friends are able to work from home for the most part and their kids are generally doing better than they were before given the increased focus from parents. Neither has decided to go the home-schooling route but they are definitely augmenting the learning at home much more than before. It is no surprise than parents have come to see that they have options other than public school

.. a dramatic pandemic increase in work-from-home employment has endured up to the present, accounting for a persistent 30 percent of workdays, despite the efforts of corporate leaders to encourage a broader return to offices. These flexible work arrangements, coupled with the push of high housing costs in many cities, likely contributed to the demographic realignment reshaping school enrollment.

If it turns out that moving to a lower cost home in a neighborhood with a worse school district allows a family to get by with lower income, chances are they might do that, scale back on the career of atleast one parent so they can homeschool the kids. This would be a win-win situation for the family. More time with kids, better education for them and a saner schedule for the whole family. If one or both parents now have the choice of remote or hybrid work then even better. It turns out that all those things are now options for many people and they would be foolish not to take advantage of it. That leads to enrollment rolls this article talks about

The financial implications of enrollment loss have already begun to pressure districts to discuss school closures as well as teacher layoffs. Adapting to this new normal in a way that preserves community engagement and limits further learning disruptions to students will compound the already difficult task of addressing the pandemic’s direct impact on student learning and engagement.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...