[emidln]

My wife is a stay at home parent and taught my daughter for the last 3 months of the school year last year. My daughter (then in the 4th grade) was attending a private school in the Chicago suburbs. The transition was decent, with her school already having a 1:1 laptop program and Google Classroom integration into her curriculum. The only change was that 4th graders didn't take their chromebooks home, but when school was abruptly closed, the laptops came with. All of her subjects had asynchronous work pages or chapter questions, asynchronous reading, asynchronous projects, and then synchronous instruction, synchronous classmate discussion/talk/project time, and synchronous project presentations. My daughter's grades improved slightly, likely from the additional focus given the lack of classroom distractions at home. My wife was available to answer immediate questions while I was working from home in most subjects, although I helped out when additional perspectives were needed to learn the material (my wife and I had very different education experiences, so our methods tend to be divergent).

This year we had the option of a similar remote program for the first semester or in-person, with the commitment lasting until the grading period is over. We're very fortunate to have one parent who can easily dedicate time during the day and a program conducive to remote learning. I can only imagine the sleepless schedules that would be involved in a less structured online program or with both parents working.

The major reason for not moving to home schooling this year is to guarantee our place at the private school for 6th/7th/8th grade without a significant donation to get back in. It is sorta unfortunate to pay extra to home school our kid, but we enjoy the community in-person when that was available. We're lucky we're in a position to be able to choose this.