Since early March of this year when the World Health Organization first recognized the Coronavirus as a worldwide pandemic, U.S. schools have been closing. Most of them have closed for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year. Students were instantly re-assigned from traditional classrooms to dining room tables, bedrooms and home offices across the country. Public school teachers had to quickly re-train themselves to deliver lesson plans remotely and virtually. In response to the rapid spread of the virus, many parents who were re-assigned to working from home forty hours a week, suddenly became home school teachers and school administrators in addition to their already stressful workload.
What was happening across the country was not so much a “homeschooling” experience, but more a “school at home” version of public school. Students, parents and teachers had to adapt quickly. Schools reacted by either live-streaming their actual teaching staff into the homes of students who were once in their traditional classroom or setting up some form of “pick-up” schedule for homework assignments and drop-off schedule for completed homework. At the same time, some parents elected to move their children into a “home school” situation that afforded them the opportunity to more closely select and monitor what their children would be learning at home.