The coronavirus pandemic means a crisis for California families, with no schools to send their kids to as they’re forced to teach their children at home and via Zoom.
With COVID-19 delivering a body blow to the state budget, schools are bracing for deep spending cuts that could mean more uncertainty this fall.
The digital divide is well-documented, and it’s clear that there are many students who have fallen off the map and are not learning at all because they just don’t have the resources. Just as an example, in Oakland, the public schools loaned out 18,000 Chromebooks to kids who didn’t have a computer at home, but there are still 5,000 more families who need one but didn’t get one.
For more on the impact of the coronavirus on families and kids and education, we talked to Dr. Elisha Smith Arrillaga, executive director of The Education Trust-West, a non-profit based in Oakland. She is also the co-chair of the Closing the Achievement Gap Initiative for State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
What should the schools be bracing for in Thursday’s state budget unveiling?
We know that in the midst of this crisis California is now left with an unprecedented $54 billion deficit and we know that in tomorrow’s budget that a lot of those cuts will definitely impact education.
What are you hearing about how families are coping with at-home learning?
We learned from two recent polls of California parents of children. We polled parents of children that were in K-12 and parents of children that were under the age of six. There were three big things that came across. One is that families are concerned about their personal finances. Secondly, their food security and also their children’s academics. One of the biggest findings is that 80% of K-12 parents reported a higher-than-usual level of stress, of course due to school closures.
Was there a breakdown among those parents based on the students’ ages?
What we did find is that 50% of children six years old and under reported being impacted by unemployment or temporary loss of work and what also we found, one of the most staggering findings, is that 41% of parents with children who are six years old and younger were skipping or reducing meals for themselves and 19% were skipping or reducing their children’s meals.
Are people taking advantage of schools that are providing lunches during this crisis?
Schools have really been taking on the mammoth effort of providing meals and we know that Governor (Gavin) Newsom announced last week that the state of California had received approval for the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer Program, which we know is a much safer mechanism for families to get the food that they need by being able to use that pandemic EBT card virtually from their own homes instead of having to go to school sites in order to access food.
Is this crisis exposing the digital divide and how deep it is?
We knew that California faced a huge digital divide before and we know that this crisis is really just exacerbating the inequities that were already there. Especially in terms of the budget, we are really advocating that Gov. Newsom’s budget prioritize focusing on racial equity, closing the digital divide and protecting education funding.
What should families be doing to prepare for a changing environment in schools?
One of the things we’ve really been advocating for is a lot of communication between both families and schools. Some of the most innovative things we’ve seen have come from partnerships between families in the school community and educators themselves. Really working together to think about some creative solutions like looping, but for smaller groups or if students are brought together how to do that in ways that both respect labor agreements but also to get students what they need in terms of the social/emotional support and the educational support to catch up.
