Making the Best of the School Situation
Parents and students are doing their best in the midst of an unusual school year. Photo: Satya Nelms
“Everything is essentially fine,” Teri Lamm says. “Moment to moment, we’re fine. We’re ok. But underneath that is this terrifying grind of anxiety. How much normalcy can you create for your kids? How much should you create?”
Lamm has two sons in Wallingford-Swarthmore School District schools. A couple weeks into the school year, her younger son, a seventh grader, was having an especially difficult time on Zoom. He was feeling physically ill, suffering from migraines. Lamm told him that she would sit with him for the duration of the middle-school day: 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
“The first day that I was sitting there behind the computer, by fourth period, I was shouting at the screen,” she recalls. She was surprised by the intensity of the experience. “It’s disorienting, and there’s no variation. It’s just day after day in the same spot.”
Whether enrolled in the hybrid instructional model where students attend in-person school two days a week, or in the completely virtual Online Academy, district children and their families are struggling this year. For many, too much Zoom, not enough time with their peers, and a tremendous amount of uncertainty are causing physical hardships like Lamm’s son’s migraines. Many students are psychologically stressed and are learning less.
Struggles With Both Models
Nicholle Moore says her son, a twelfth grader at Strath Haven High School, is simultaneously bored and overwhelmed by the number of assignments he’s being given. This is not what he imagined as his last year of high school, she says. “He misses seeing his classmates and the social interaction.”
Jennifer Bloom considered her experience at the end of last year when deciding what instructional model would be best for her sons in the fall. In the spring, she found she had to re-teach most of her younger son’s lessons, because he wasn’t retaining material from virtual instruction.
Not wanting to repeat that experience, Bloom transferred him out of Swarthmore-Rutledge School to the private School in Rose Valley for second grade. There, he receives five full days of in-person instruction. “They also have a good shot at staying open for the whole school year,” she says. “I worried that SRS would get shut down in the winter.”
Keeping a first and third grader engaged in online learning was a challenge for Angie Tseng as well. She is grateful for the two full days students now spend in school, courtesy of the cohort model. She finds that her children are more excited about learning when they get to do it in person.
But even in-person school is difficult. The gap between what it used to be like and the current reality of masks, distancing, and new rules has been a lot for Tseng’s younger son to process. “There was a lot of excitement on the first day,” Tseng says of her third grader. “But then, after the novelty wore off, he didn’t want to go back.”
