Coronavirus and Education

As the first full semester for U.S. schools during the pandemic comes to an end, education experts and parents alike are concerned about its effects on children’s academic progress. From the Mexican border to the Upper Midwest, Oregon to Virginia and on Native American reservations across the West, that anxiety is magnified in rural areas, which are far less likely to have access to high-speed or even consistent internet in a time of extensive virtual schooling.

America’s child care providers have hit a breaking point.

In a survey last summer, 86 percent said the Covid-19 pandemic had hurt their enrollment. Seventy percent said it had driven up costs. With less money coming in and more going out, just 18 percent believed they could stay open longer than a year without some kind of help.

Those numbers are just one sign of a crisis that’s been brewing ever since the pandemic began spreading across the US.

PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE Biden outlined a sweeping plan Thursday to address the country’s child care crisis.

“We are facing an acute, immediate child care crisis in America, which is exacerbating our economic crisis,” he said in a statement. “If left unaddressed, many child care providers will close – some permanently – and millions of children could go without necessary care, and millions of parents could be left to make devastating choices this winter between caring for their children and working to put food on the table.”

Typically during a recession, community college enrollment goes up as unemployed workers start looking for new skills. But that’s not happening this time around, signaling trouble for the economy and individual families going forward, particularly for lower-income students and students of color. This is part of a PBS NewsHour ongoing series, “Rethinking College.”

When state leaders announced that they would be making widespread pooled coronavirus testing available to public schools, many child care providers and after school program directors were frustrated that they were left out.

Many had been caring for children throughout the pandemic as emergency child care providers reopened before most public schools. After school programs had transformed their spaces into remote learning centers to support students who needed to log on to their virtual classrooms.

YAKIMA — A statewide strike of small child care providers proposed earlier this month remains on the table, and union leaders say it could take place in mid-January.

In mid-December, 5,400 providers in Washington began to vote on whether to take the first statewide strike in the sector, said Mary Curry, president of the SEIU 925 union chapter that represents these providers statewide.

“More than half have voted, and voted to strike,” Curry said Tuesday.

Rachel Foor’s grandparents are in their 70s, so when the pandemic hit, its stresses gave her such stomach pains that she could not eat or sleep. She worried she would infect them if she brought the coronavirus home from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she is a senior, or from Walmart, where she stocks milk and eggs to help pay tuition.

AS CONGRESS TIES THE bow on a long-awaited and contentious coronavirus relief package, superintendents, principals and educators are disappointed – though not surprised – by how little aid it includes for their efforts to reopen the country’s public school system for millions of children who have been learning remotely since the pandemic shuttered schools in March.