We are all schooling at home! Whether you call it crisis schooling, school at home, or homeschooling, we are all doing it under stress and abnormal conditions. Homeschoolers that were homeschoolers before the crisis went to co-ops, they visited libraries and museums, they had field trips. Students who were attending brick and mortar schools had band practice, lunch breaks, and fellow students and teachers they saw every day. None of us are “normal” right now and that alone is difficult. When you add in that a parent or both are now working from home or worse have lost a job and have the added concern of providing for the family. Are their enough devices, spare room, internet bandwidth, not to mention families with more than one student and everyone needs to be on at 9 am for class time and we have a real problem and a good picture of what we are all going through.

We are frazzled, we are worn down and we need help. We all do, whether we have been doing this for 30 years or we just started 34 days ago! I want to tell you it is going to be okay. We need to focus on what we can do, what choices we do have, and how we will be able to educate or facilitate the education of our children.

This crisis forced our hands, it took our choices away, and it landed us on an uneven playing field while the goals remained virtually unchanged. We must provide for our families, feed them, keep them clothed, upkeep the house, and now we must educate them in a very small bubble of time and space. I want to encourage you to reevaluate what you are doing right now. Is it working? Is it sustainable? Is your child getting a quality education? Whatever your answers are, we need to move forward and start making the choices for our family once again. Public school at home isn’t the only option. Traditional homeschool without the co-ops and field trips can be lonely. I challenge you to start looking for the options, the choices, and the support you need to move forward, for this school year and the next.