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This article is a sidebar to Comstock’s special report on education.
Teachers and students weren’t the only ones affected when schools closed across California in 2020, and children were sent home to learn instead of in the classroom.
Parents who were used to dropping their kids off from school in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon were now home with them all day, juggling their own jobs while guiding their children’s learning. And they got a firsthand look at how they were being educated.
“I think what the pandemic really did was just lift the curtain on what was taking place in the classroom and at the administration level for parents to see,” says Justin Caporusso, a Roseville father of four and owner of Caporusso Communications. “A lot of parents saw how much time was spent on classroom management, behavior and really how little time was spent on kind of overall education.”
And they didn’t like what they saw. Students being inattentive. Teachers spending more time trying to manage the squirming children with different needs and capabilities than teaching the curriculum. The younger ones had trouble with the technology. (Can you imagine teaching a kindergarten class on Zoom?) Parents became advocates for their children, storming school board meetings and demanding better for them. Some of the key things they asked for were a stronger emphasis on education and the return of extracurricular and enrichment activities.
Alisa Fong is the mother of two boys and a member of the Roseville City School District Board of Education. She remembers a surge of parental involvement during COVID, including a flood of phone calls and emails and increased viewership of online board meetings.
“A lot of parents were able to watch board meetings while they’re making dinner,” she says. “I think the pandemic really opened up that opportunity for parents to participate. We’re very involved and very engaged, and we’re very interested in the decision making process.”
As a result, parents were moved to run for school boards across the country, wanting a say in not only their child’s education but to be an advocate for all children. In California, the Republican party formed a group called Parent Revolt which pushed for getting conservative parents on school boards.
The parents were effective in their advocacy. Roseville City School District was one of the first school districts in California to return to in-person schooling in November 2020. The board gave parents a choice and not a mandate; children still had the option of learning from home if that’s what the parents wanted. When more schools reopened, more teachers were added and some classes were reduced in size to help children catch up on learning.
“I really think it’s important for parents to be involved and have a voice in their kids’ education. I wanted those decisions that are being made that are affecting my kids to be made by somebody that you know can stand in the parents shoes,” Fong says.
Some negative effects of the pandemic remain. Absenteeism skyrocketed to 35 percent in 2021-22 and came down to 25 percent in 2022-23. But that’s still high compared to the pre-pandemic level of 12 percent. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond told Comstock’s Editorial Advisory Board last September that’s an issue administrators are still working on to correct.
There was some good that came out of the pandemic for families. The U.S. Census Bureau found parents had more family dinners with their children and read to them more often. A Harvard study found that fathers felt closer to their kids during lockdown.
Caporusso doesn’t blame the teachers, saying they had to navigate state and local health mandates while trying to teach a class and sometimes dealing with angry parents.
“There are some incredible, incredible individuals out there who are educating our kids, and that’s their goal, and they’re loving on the kids and nurturing and making sure that they’re getting the education that they need,” he says, adding parents and teachers working together is beneficial to helping students.
“It’s great for parents to become involved, and there are ways to do it that are not antagonistic, and that’s the only way that this whole thing is going to work out,” he says. “When you see something that you don’t agree with or you don’t like, it’s to find a diplomatic way to approach whatever the issue is and whoever’s in charge of it, to affect real change.”
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