Online School During Covid-19

By Tracy Cowles

A parent who did Online School with her child for three years shares seventy positives and twenty potential concerns about online education. Basic guidelines regarding researching schools and what to look for are included. A comparison is made between Professional Online Schools, local school district online offerings, brick and mortar (traditional school) and home schooling. This book is a must for parents and caregivers trying to navigate the ever-changing educational scene during Covid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098331023

Book preview

Online School During Covid-19

© 2020 by Tracy P. Cowles

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN (Print): 978-1-09833-101-6

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-09833-102-3

Is online school a viable option for your child?

How does online school differ from homeschooling?

70 benefits of online school

20 concerns regarding online school

Is the local school district’s new online school comparable to professional online schools?

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION

CRITICAL INFORMATION FOR ALL PARENTS TO KNOW BEFORE MAKING A DECISION REGARDING ONLINE SCHOOL

HOW DOES THIS ONLINE SCHOOL THING WORK?

THINGS TO LIKE ABOUT ONLINE SCHOOL

ISSUES RELATED TO ONLINE SCHOOL

FINAL ANALYSIS

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

PROLOGUE

I wrote the bulk of this book five years ago in 2015 after my son had been cyber schooled online for three school years and then decided to go back to public school.

Today, in 2020, online schools for both elementary and high school students have grown exponentially, as has online college classes, continuing education credits for licensed professionals, and even certifications for things like child abuse reporting.

What is different today, and what has compelled me to pull this manuscript back out for publishing, is quite simply Covid-19. Public schools across the country have been closed for months. The last few months of classes have been deemed non-essential. Kids who are supposed to be getting speech, occupational, and physical therapy at school are not. Some schools have sent worksheet packets home as good enough, while others try to figure out how to do online school with kids who don’t have internet, or don’t have a computer. Schools are asking parents of students with IEPs to sign a waiver saying they won’t sue while entire school districts fumble with how to make schools fair for those that need accommodations. Standardized testing has been canceled.

The two largest teacher unions have announced that their members will strike if ordered to resume school before they feel safe. How this is to be accomplished when there is no vaccine and new outbreaks are expected is beyond me.

Meanwhile, much of the talk about reopening schools revolves around social distancing—desks need to be six feet apart and kids can’t eat together in the cafeteria. And by the way, buses for our rural students are almost certainly out. Therefore, school districts are talking about having morning vs afternoon classes (limiting hours) to divide everybody up. School districts are talking about having half of the students come Monday, Wednesday, Friday, while other students go Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. How do these solutions work for a working family?

I have been saying for ten years that online schooling is worth looking at by all families. I have been told (typically by people who have never done online school) that kids need the routine of brick and mortar school, that kids need the socialization, and suddenly, with one germ, none of that matters anymore.

If you are concerned that your child/children will not be receiving their federally mandated fair, equal, and adequate education over the next year, I implore you to consider online School. For those of you that have struggled with trying to homeschool your kids during quarantine, online schooling will make it much, much easier.

Tracy Cowles

Author

INTRODUCTION

Greetings readers! My name is Tracy Cowles, and after an exhaustive search, I was unable to find any book or article that satisfactorily described, from a parent’s point of view, what it is to Online School a child.

You are probably aware that parents have been able to homeschool their children, literally forever, in the United States. You have probably heard that over the past twenty years or so, a new method of educating children was introduced—that of keeping your child at home, like homeschooling, but having a prescribed curriculum and access to certified teachers via computer. What you may not know is that online schools are growing in popularity every year, with many parents rating these schools very highly in surveys.

How are you to know if this is a feasible method for your children if you can only find short blogs about it or negative articles written by public school teachers? Since I like to write and my youngest son was in Online School for three years, I decided to write a book describing our experience while pointing out the very best things and the very worst things we found while doing online school.

Online school is not for everyone, but it is an available option that should be considered!

This book reflects three years of online schooling my son Eli for third, fourth, and fifth grades in Pennsylvania and Ohio utilizing a professional cyber school that had been in business for a decade.

Chapter 1

CRITICAL INFORMATION FOR ALL PARENTS TO KNOW BEFORE MAKING A DECISION REGARDING ONLINE SCHOOL

For all of us, what we know is what we know. What we grew up with and what we have been exposed to determines our attitude about what is normal. In the area of education, some 98 percent of us received our primary and secondary education through either a public or private school. We are indoctrinated to believe that school is when your kid gets on a bus or is dropped off at a building and goes into a classroom where a teacher educates and manages the classroom. Those of us who home or online school refer to those types of schools as brick and mortar. When considering online schooling, it is imperative that parents understand that online school is VERY different from what you are familiar with.

One of the issues related to online school is that there is more turnover than in public and private schools. In general, every year, each online school has a certain percentage of children that are enrolled and then disenrolled within the first three weeks, six weeks, or nine weeks of school. Online school detractors point to this as a failure of online schools. I do not see it that way at all. What I have seen is that parents do not do enough research and do not read the fine print while they are enrolling their child. They sometimes have no idea what they have signed up for. ALL of this information is presented to the parent on the schools’ website and during the enrollment process, but because we see school in a certain way, many parents seem to not understand how this is going to work. In addition, many parents sign their kids up for online school after a blowup with the public school. The parent may already be frazzled, knowing they are required by law to have their child in school, so they do the online sign-up without spending enough time thinking the situation through.

The reality is that your child will log into their school’s website on their first day and find a checklist of Things to do. As they click on the things on that list, they will be directed to watch a video, or read certain pages of their textbooks, or do problems 1–27 on a certain page in the math book. There is no teacher involved for most of the day. Your child does, in fact, have at least one certified teacher assigned to them (In Eli’s case for fifth grade, he had three teachers). That teacher will provide live lessons at scheduled times during the day or week. For instance, your child may have a math class scheduled Monday through Thursday from 10:00 to 10:45 and a language arts class scheduled from 1 to 2 on Tuesday and Thursday. At those times, your child will log into their teacher’s classroom and engage with her and other students. In Eli’s three-year online career, he was scheduled for an average of seven hours per week directly with the teacher. The rest of the time, he was on his own with me, his Learning Coach.

Some of you may want to put this book down right now and forget all about considering online school. I can’t blame you, but I’m going to ask you to continue on. Choosing an online school for your children means thinking outside of the box, reconsidering things that you feel you know, and taking responsibility for your child’s education. Quite frankly, if you are reading this book, you must already have a desire to do things differently. If you haven’t seen it yet, online schooling is very similar to homeschooling but with some added bonuses.

I have several friends who homeschool (one homeschools all SIX of her kids), and through my work at Next Step Therapy, I have had the opportunity to work with many families who homeschool. Homeschooling involves the parent, for the most part, choosing the curriculum for their students (there are entire lines available for purchase online), setting up lesson plans, and actively teaching during the school day. Online schooling, in my opinion, takes the best of homeschooling and adds the benefits of having your curriculum provided for you, the lessons already pre-planned, and a certified teacher to grade the student’s work. In addition, you have a professional on hand to deal with any difficult subject matter, like sixth-grade math. From my perspective, online school takes away any doubt that your child is learning and progressing at the same rate as their peers while still allowing you an enormous amount of control over how and what your children learn.

Having said all of that, online school requires that a learning coach be assigned to the child. Many people feel that they can’t do online school because they work a job outside of the home. That is simply not true. There is no law that says that the learning coach must be a biological parent, and there is no law that says that school can only be done between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. In reality, while most of the children I have come across were being supervised primarily by their moms, I have seen dads, grandparents, and even aunts who supervised a child’s online education. In one case, I met a woman who had retired as a public school teacher, put two of her grandchildren through their last three years of high school online, and then hired herself out to a two-professionals family to be their children’s learning coach. While most of us can’t afford to hire a teacher in-home, there are an endless number of possibilities for supervising and teaching your child through online schools. In some households, mom does the bulk of the school work during the day, but dad hits the math lesson after dinner. Choices, choices, choices! Many teenagers doing online school don’t even start their work until noon. While this might strike you as weird and lazy (Because everybody needs to be up and at ’em by 8 a.m., right? Except, what about the people who work night shifts?), in the real world, science has shown that teenagers have a natural sleep pattern shift that avails itself to being wide awake at midnight.

In my opinion, online schools basically say this: It does not take a certified teacher with a master’s degree to tell a child to read four pages of a history book and answer three questions at the end of the chapter. I agree. Ninety percent of what an elementary school child does during the school day (reading out of textbooks, answering questions from the book, practicing math problems, practicing handwriting, writing a paragraph, researching for a report, practicing spelling words) is easily handled by your average adult. A teacher is needed to explain difficult concepts (math, rules of the English language that don’t make a lot of sense, understanding how to thoroughly answer an essay question) and to grade/critique work turned in with suggestions on how to improve. While public school teachers may disagree, it has been my experience that the majority of their job is classroom management—keeping children on task, ensuring safety, dealing with behavioral issues, and housekeeping jobs like keeping attendance. The average elementary school teacher only lectures or explains for short periods during the day. The rest of the time is spent at their desk or walking around overseeing what the children are working on. In online school, the classroom management portion is removed from the teachers’ job description, and therefore the teachers are able to spend