Schools Aren’t Opening. We Have to Pay Parents to Stay Home with Their Kids.
Hundred dollar bill featuring Benjamin Franklin in a mask
Let me be blunt: For most kids, schools are not opening in-person in the fall. Even if your school is one of the few that opens, there is a strong likelihood it will close again before the semester is over.
In my first medium post in this series, I recommended a “both/and” approach to planning for our upcoming school year that recognized both the life-threatening risk of Covid-19 and the needs of families who depend on schools for their very survival. I argued that schools should open for our most marginalized students and families but that they should only do so if it was possible to do so safely. We know that safe school openings would require regular, accurate, mandatory testing of all students and school personnel, masks, social distancing, frequent disinfecting, and significantly reduced numbers of students (achieved by most of them staying home). While schools cannot stop students from getting coronavirus (after all, they live in the same world as the rest of us), they could ensure it does not spread in buildings and communities by knowing who needs to quarantine as soon as possible. With these sorts of precautions in place, instead of becoming “cesspools of Covid,” schools offering in-person options for the most marginalized students and families could be at the forefront of stopping community spread. They would be able to identify infected families who might not have otherwise known they had Covid-19 and simultaneously offer much needed childcare, nutrition, and academic support to their children.
My hope was that districts might take this proposal seriously and start figuring out how to make it happen. However, in the two weeks since that article went live, it has become clear that most districts are not going to implement “both/and” plans(at least not immediately). More and more districts are announcing plans to offer only online education for all students to start the year, leaving parents asking, “What do I do with my kids?” — a question I tried to help answer for privileged parents in my second post. Unfortunately, the past two weeks have convinced me that we are not in a place to safely open schools in most places, even for marginalized students, and so we must pay parents to stay home with them.
Why is it Unsafe to Open Schools?
On July 28, I tuned in to hear Dr. Anthony Fauci speaking to the American Federation of Teachers national convention on Facebook Live about returning to school. He said schools should prioritize getting students into classrooms face-to-face, but that this would only be possible if safety measures could be put in place — a task made even more challenging by the fact that 20–40% of people infected with coronavirus have no symptoms. He listed the following conditions as important for safe in-person learning:
Low Covid-19 rates in the community;
Regular testing of all school personnel and students;
Robust contact tracing;
Mandatory mask usage of all students, starting from the moment they board the school bus; and
PPE for all educators, including masks, goggles or face shields, gloves, and “coverall” clothing that is easy to take off once the school day is over .
It’s July 29, 2020. The first schools in the nation are scheduled to open in less than a week. And the overwhelming majority of districts do not have the funding, time, support, or capacity to implement these safety measures. In fact:
Covid-19 rates are increasing across the country, rather than decreasing as most districts assumed when making their plans for the year;
While the NBA has managed to build a system to test everyone inside their “bubble” every single day until the end of the playoffs, I have seen no evidence that states or schools have the capacity to regularly test school personnel, nor has the federal government made any strides in making rapid testing widely available;
The U.S. still does not have adequate contact tracing systems — another failure of national leadership;
We have not spent the summer teaching children to wear masks, which has left educators and parents very concerned about their ability to do so for an entire school day; and
Many districts have already been doing public fundraisers for PPE donations, which raises concerns about whether or not we will actually have enough masks, goggles, gloves, and sanitizer for all students and staff.
Even more concerns have been raised by parents and educators about schools’ ventilation systems, the ability to realistically socially distance, and the ability to regularly clean classrooms, bathrooms, and buses to acceptable standards.
As I said in my first article, plans for in-person education depend on teachers willingly showing up to work during a pandemic and there is a good chance that not enough of them will do so if we don’t take their safety more seriously. Just this week, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it will support educator strikes as a last resort if districts ask teachers and staff to return without adequate safety precautions. In short, we do not have the competence, the capacity, and possibly not even the human capital, for most schools to safely reopen.
A Note about Online Education, Common Sense, and Justice
Given this reality, every school and district in the country should have a robust online education plan. Even if you aren’t using it on day one, the likelihood that you will have to use it at some point this year is almost guaranteed. Successful online learning will require much more than taking a traditional lesson plan and doing it in front of the computer. Good online teaching takes expertise and skill. All online offerings should be research-based, developmentally appropriate (Hint: It is NOT best practice to have elementary students staring at a computer screen for hours upon hours a day), and most of all, just. This means all families need computers and internet access, it means educators needed training yesterday in how to do this effectively, and it means that teachers should be designing their own lessons, rather than districts outsourcing education to for-profit companies. It also means that schools have a moral obligation to allow teachers to work from home so that they can raise their own children (who are also not going to school) and take care of their families, while helping to curb the spread of coronavirus.
Would Pods Be Safer?
It makes sense that many schools have decided not to open school buildings. But this only amplifies the problem the entire country is facing: Who is watching the children?
In response to the growing reality that most schools are not going to open in person (and that those that do are unlikely to stay open long), parents and innovative leaders have proposed “pods” as a means of addressing the national need for childcare. While I appreciate the creative and proactive spirit behind these efforts, most of the plans I have seen (even those that attempt to address issues of equity and social justice regarding access and participation) are silent on a pretty essential question: Will they be safer than the schools that are staying closed?
If parents are working and schools are not open, children will be going somewhere. And the places they will go — pods created on Facebook hosted in homes, drop-in centers organized by mayors, friends’ houses, daycares, rec centers, public libraries — are just as likely as schools to be sites for the virus to spread. In fact, they might be more likely to spread Covid-19 because there will likely be less regulation of safety measures. If it is not safe enough for us to open schools, it is also probably not safe enough for the other innovative in-person plans people are proposing to be done at any meaningful scale.
This leaves us with only one answer to the question of who can safely watch the children: parents. And we MUST pay them to do so.
Why Must We Pay Parents to Stay Home with their Children?
Raising children, supervising them all day long, helping them understand academic concepts, making sure they’ve eaten, making sure they are learning to interact in ways that are kind and just, attending to their emotional, physical, and psychological health, is a FULL. TIME. JOB.
It is not possible to do this essential job while also working another job, whether outside the home or from home. If it were possible to do these two jobs at the exact same time, many of us would have already been doing it and saving a lot of money on childcare and a lot of headaches about who will pick up the children from school. Parents of all economic backgrounds, teachers included, work to feed and house their children and further their careers. We’ve been able to do this because schools and teachers are by far the number one childcare providers in America, for all of us. If our schools are no longer able to provide this service, and Covid-19 is not under control enough for any other institution to do so safely, the majority of parents will need to stop working, or greatly reduce their workload, to fill the gap. We will have no other choice.
If we are asking parents to stop working, work less, work differently, and sacrifice their own careers and dreams (hopefully temporarily) so that they can raise and educate the children we all rely on for the future of our country and planet, our nation should pay them. Parents will still need to feed their families, pay their rent and mortgage, meet their material needs, and maybe even buy a few things to keep the economy afloat. This idea is one that should appeal to both the progressives among us as well as conservatives who care about “family values.” After all, what is more important in this time of crisis than taking care of our children?
If we cannot figure out how to pay parents so that they can keep their children home and help save us from even more mass death, we will instead see untold homelessness and hunger, even among those of us who identified as “middle-class”; mental health, addiction, and suicide crises unlike any we have ever experienced; and more extreme gaps in academic achievement and opportunity that punish students who are already most marginalized. I do not know how we can sustain ourselves as a country if we do not pay parents to stay home with their children and guarantee they have healthcare while doing so. I see no other realistic option.
How Could We Pay Parents?
How could we logistically pay parents to stay home? First, as you might have figured out, I am not an expert in public finance or policy. The people who should be developing plans for how to do this are those who have expertise in this area. It does seem that there is probably room for this to happen not only at the federal level but also potentially at the state level and maybe even at the level of employers. Some examples I’ve heard smart people suggest include:
Ensuring Families have Enough Money to Survive
Provide monthly cash payments to families with children, much like we provide to the families of children in foster care
Expand federal unemployment benefits
Expand Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
Tap (and tax) profitable corporations (I’m looking at you Amazon), charitable foundations, and others who have the money to help
Ensuring Families have Jobs to Return To
Pass the HEROES Act, which expands the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) and the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to allow for paid sick leave for coronavirus related issues and for parents to take leave to care for their children
Expand and extend FMLA so benefits last longer and apply to more employees
Pass the Paycheck Guarantee Act
Encourage employers to allow workers to take extended leaves of absence
Ensuring Families have Healthcare
Expand Medicaid and Medicare benefits
Allow children and adults who voluntarily leave work to care for children to enroll in Medicaid or Medicare
Create work share programs that allow employees to work significantly less while qualifying for underemployment benefits and maintaining health insurance
Ensuring Our Efforts Support Gender Equity
Provide incentives for men to take leave instead of women in cases where two people are raising children across gender
Provide incentives for dual income households to split the leave instead of only one person taking it
Provide single-parent households with larger amounts of money than dual income households
The shuttering of school buildings also means we need to extend and expand robust unemployment insurance for the many school staff (and other employees in our country) who will be laid off — bus drivers, cafeteria workers, perhaps even secretaries and paraprofessionals — for the duration of this crisis. The debate currently happening in DC about whether or not to allow laid off workers to continue receiving $600 a week in addition to their state unemployment benefits is not a political one, it is a moral one. If people must stay home to curb the spread of the virus, it is our moral obligation to pay them enough to live on until the virus is under control.
Who Can Make This Happen?
YOU. You should be advocating for this. Yes, YOU, the person reading this essay right now. There is no one coming to save us. There is no powerful group planning to make any of this happen other than us: the people, parents, and workers who are looking around and seeing that the options we have been given thus far are not acceptable. Every single one of us needs to be lobbying leaders at the federal and state and local levels to make this happen. It won’t happen any other way. One place to start: Tell your Senators to pass the HEROES Act. A second thing you can do is share this article, or others like it, widely! Get everyone you know talking about the need to pay parents so we can shift the national dialogue about what we do next. As I said in my second essay in this series, “we should be marching in the streets (with masks, proper distancing, and testing)!”
I said in my first essay that all of our choices will be horrible and hard, which is true of this option as well. While some parents might be excited about the idea of staying home with their kids, many others will feel deep sadness and anger (or are perhaps still in denial) about the failure of our leaders. Many of us may be pissed off that we are being given no choice but to give up our careers (at least for a time) and resentful we will have to become full-time stay-at-home parents when we never wanted to be. This probably also means that some doctors, nurses, teachers, mail carriers and other essential workers will not be available to do that important work because they too will be busy doing another essential job: raising their own school-aged children. It will not be pleasant for a lot of people (myself included), but y’all…ISSAPANDEMIC!!! There are no pleasant options here, just those that keep our families, our kids, our teachers, and — we hope — our country alive, and those that do not.
*Originally published on Medium
- Written by Shayla R. Griffin, Ph.D., co-founder of Justice Leaders Collaborative