September 27 Update

Ever since school shut down last March and caused a sudden shift to remote learning, the question of parent involvement in student’s schooling became a heavily discussed topic. Parenting is a difficult job during the best of circumstances and is now even harder, whether your student is attending school fully remotely or under the hybrid model. All of us parents are struggling with the question of when and how to get involved with our children’s remote learning. Since remote learning in such a large scale is still very new to the world of education, there is not a lot of data gathered on this topic. However, according to Dr. Erik Black, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Education in the University of Florida who studied virtual schooling at the high school level in 2008, there are a few things we do know about parental involvement in remote learning.

The first is an absence of parental involvement in a student’s education will likely impact his or her academic progress in a negative way, and the same is true if a parent exhibits uber helicopter parenting behaviors. The question then is, how to figure out when and how much to be involved. The answer is it all depends on the individual needs of the students and their families.

According to Dr. Black, parental involvement falls into four buckets: encouragement, modeling, reinforcement, and instruction. What he has learned is that some parental involvement, particularly in the area of encouraging students and modeling positive behaviors are good things. In other words, a parent learning Algebra and reteaching it to her child is probably not going to be as effective as the parent encouraging her student to work hard and showing him behaviors related to good study habits and emotional regulation. 

As a parent I can understand the unpleasant feelings one experiences when seeing your own children struggle. However, students will continue to encounter demands that will challenge (and at times overwhelm) them especially while we are in midst of a pandemic. I see parents’ roles in these situations are to guide them to resources where they can access help as opposed to solving the problems for them. If we continue to lean toward the latter, we will miss the opportunity to teach students the skills necessary to help them overcome the struggles they will inevitably face.

Therefore, if your students continue to have difficulty navigating their schedules, accessing remote classes, or learning the content that their teachers are teaching them, I suggest you encourage them to view setbacks as temporary events instead of seeing it as the end of the world. In addition, I suggest you model for your students the necessary skills to seek help from McCall teachers and staff. An example of those skills may be how to craft an appropriate email to teachers when asking for help. Consider this approach as opposed to you reaching out to the teachers and learning how to navigate schedules yourselves and reteaching it to you students. Both approaches may get you the same outcome, however, the latter takes away the opportunity for students to learn and practice the skill of self-advocacy.

One parent recently said to me that she has been working so hard getting her student ready for the start of school. If you ever feel this way about any aspect of school, I encourage you to ask yourself the question, “Am I working harder than my child?” If the answer is yes, then it may be time to consider where you are on the spectrum of parent involvement. It may be time for you to contact your child’s teachers or guidance counselor so we can help you figure out the level of involvement that would be appropriate for your student and your family.

September 20 Update

As many of you know, I have three children of my own, and my wife is a special education teacher in a public school district not that different than Winchester Public Schools. Therefore, we wear both hats – the parent one and the school official one. My two girls had a great start to the school year. They like being back in the school buildings and seeing their friends and teachers. Wearing masks and staying six feet away from classmates did not seem to bother them that much.

My son’s start of the school year was much rockier. He is the only middle schooler we have right now. He was already dreading this school year because during the summer he found out his buddies were either fully remote or due to the first letter of our last name he was placed in the different cohort than his other good friends.

My son said he felt lonely throughout the first day of school. He tried to do what my wife advised him to do to make new friends. However, having a mask on and being seated six feet away from other people made it hard to engage in conversations with students he did not know well. He reported that lunch was horrible because other kids seated around him knew each other and were talking over him like he was not there.

He was in tears when he came home after the second day of school. The terrible lunch experience of the first day of school became in his mind the stuff of horror movies. He was let out late the period before lunch so most seats in the cafeteria were already taken when he arrived there. He was then seated in the cafeteria annex with a few other kids who all happened to be girls. The horror movie escalated to the level of Stephen King’s The Shining because in the middle of lunch the Assistant Principal announced that the seats the students were sitting in were everyone’s assigned seats.

Tomorrow will be his third day back in school, and I suspect at the time you are reading this post, my wife and I are desperately trying to pump our son up and putting a positive spin on things so we can get him to go back to school. We will likely be telling him that sitting with girls gives him the opportunity to be that “cool kid who all the girls like” and that spending more time with kids he does not know will help him make new friends.

The fact is both my wife and I want to wave a magic wand and instantly make everything better for our son. However, as public school officials we both know why things have to be the way they are. Kids have to have assigned seats to make contact tracing possible. Kids have to be grouped into cohorts in order to create space for social distancing. Schools with large student populations cannot accommodate requests to place a student with their preferred peers because they will never be able to create any schedule or seating chart that make every one of the 1,000 students happy.

All my wife and I can do as parents is to help our son embrace a growth mindset and give him some TLC. This weekend, he got to pick his favorite meal for dinner which to the horror of my vegetarian oldest daughter were ribs from Blue Ribbons Barbecue in Arlington. He also got extra Fortnite time so he has the chance to be with his buddies even if it is online.

It is not easy to see our son be this upset, but my wife and I are working hard to remind ourselves that two days of school is a small sample size. We have to trust the work we have done as parents to teach our son how to be resilient will take effect, and he will find a way to work through this difficult situation. If none of this works after another week or so, we plan to reach out to the teachers and my son’s guidance counselor to see what support the school can offer him. I am hopeful by working with the school we will figure this out even though the solution may end up to be less than perfect.  Or better yet, with some time my son will figure out on his own how to navigate through this middle school nightmare.