As schools plan to reopen with student rotations, parents worry about how they will manage kids and work
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools have to reduce the number of students in a class. But they have to do it with the same number of teachers to make the numbers work at some schools.
That means a rotating schedule -- kids in the classroom part-time and learning remotely from home part-time.
"We can't keep up with this, everybody is overwhelmed and everybody has their hands tied," Deb Perelman, New York writer and SmittenKitchen.com food blogger told GMA.
In a New York Times article titled, "In the COVID-19 economy, you can have a kid or a job. You can't have both" Perelman says her school district is considering sending students back only part-time -- physically attending school one out of every three weeks.
But she says that does little to help parents desperate for normal routines.
"There are people who have been able to hit the pause button on a project under the idea that September would return some level of normalcy and childcare and not having your kids there all day and now they can't and they're really afraid they're gonna have to leave the workforce," she said.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, who recently released guidelines for re-opening schools, says they too want kids physically in class, pointing to its major health, social and educational benefits.
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"We really need to be working very hard as a country, to really drive down the number of coronavirus infections and that's going to make these, the reopening of schools in the fall, much, much easier if we can do that," Spokesperson Dr. Sean O'Leary said.
But for back to school, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, since the virus looks different in different places.
"This is a national conversation but it has to be hyper local decision making because this looks different in every community, and responsiveness is what is going to save lives this year," family physician Deborah Gilboa said. "We cannot protect kids from all risk. But we're going to have to decide, week by week or month by month, is it riskier to send kids to school and have everyone's health, be in jeopardy? Or is it riskier to keep kids home and have everyone's finances and ability to pay their bills be in jeopardy? We as adults are going to have to have the resilience to be able to handle re-figuring that over and over again throughout the year."
