[XutvJet]

I was curious to hear everyone's experiences regarding virtual school for those with students in K through 12 . Thoughts, insight, and even venting are welcome. Please keep any politics discussion out of this and push any strong COVID opinions you may have to the side. This discussion is simply to help those having to weather virtual school.

After a lot of going back and forth, our district in a somewhat affluent area of the Kansas City metro area, has elected to go virtual, at least initially. I have a 11 y/o daughter in elementary school and a 15 y/o son in high school. They will be starting virtual school on 9/9 or about 3 weeks later than normal. COVID hit during their spring break and they got 3 weeks off. The district decided to go virtual for the remainder of the 2019/2020 school year. The student's grades could not go down, but they could increase them through home work and virtual attendance. Overall, only about 30% of the students in district participated in virtual school. Though my kids had great grades, they did virtual school everyday. They said it was pretty bad in terms of execution and network connectivity.

With school going full on virtual and required attendance this go around, I see this being a monumental disaster in our district. I don't think the district administrators, though well funded, have a clue about the load of 25,000+ students and staff will have on their network. My son, who's very tech savvy, just laughs and says "no way will this end well".

Kids that don't attend will be truant, but what if they can't get online or there's issues on the district end though they don't or can't immediately recognize it? Well, that means us the parents have to deal with it and fight for our kids. What a mess. I've already heard of accounts from other parents in virtual school that the amount of daily emails from teachers and the districts is bonkers. The emails include web links, access codes, network is down/network is back, online virtual classes crashing, issues with audio, "use this link......never mind use this one", etc. Seeing that the parents are now also teachers, they're getting emailed as if they were the teacher.

My wife is in close contact with many of the teachers are my daughters school. The teachers don't see how it's going to work because district isn't set up for this. Our teachers are working in their class rooms and presenting virtually which is a good idea IMO. However, if they get sick or even have one of 20 various symptoms noted by the district, they are being told to quarantine for two weeks, COVID positive test or not. What?! If they quarantine, they can't teach from home. How the hell is a sub going to be able to sub for so long especially if a teacher, who's not really sick (i.e., very mild symptoms) has to sit out for so long? I don't get it.

I'm thankful that I've got older and independent kids. I could not imagine having younger kids because they are going to need an adult helping them constantly as it's essentially home schooling.

Hopefully I'm just being overly crusty and it will work out better than I'm expecting.