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Prior to the spring 2020, education in the United States looked very similar to how it had always looked … students attended brick-and-mortar schools, used technology in their classrooms and homes to supplement their learning, and relied on the support of teachers as needed or wanted. Parents, for their part, were involved in the traditional supportive roles of checking over homework, monitoring attendance, and providing encouragement as warranted, and worked to balance this role with professional and community obligations and responsibilities. The COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, and parents as well as teachers were suddenly thrust into different and less familiar roles, as teaching and learning transitioned to a virtual experience. In examining this transition, a team consisting of researchers from Florida and North Carolina sought to determine the effectiveness of the parent roles in schooling from the educator perspective. In this chapter, the findings of this study are explored and analyzed, with recommendations made for research moving forward in this area.

Millions of children face food insecurity in the United States. Schools play a major role in addressing the problem of food insecurity through the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program which provide meals to children at little to no cost. During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools abruptly closed leaving students without their primary source of nutrition. This chapter highlights responses from federal, state, and local agencies. Additionally, responses from local organizations and school districts are discussed. The researchers review a partnership built to address emergency food relief after the school closures. Data from an impact and need study conducted by the South Texas community partnership demonstrate gaps in programs which left the most vulnerable populations in severe need of assistance. This study reinforces the need for and importance of community partnerships to identify and address gaps in the current programs.

During the months leading up to and immediately following President Donald Trump’s election, the unique intersection of classroom academic freedom and teacher and students’ first amendment rights would be duly tested, as headlines reminded citizens, parents, and pundits that the reach of raw emotions and political viewpoints did not stop at the schoolhouse door. School and classroom-based events would eventually test the norms of community, the interpretation of legal precedents, the resolve of district and school leadership, and the rights or limits thereof of the teachers themselves. This analysis is grounded on case studies of eight such incidents, all of which occurred at the high school level in public school districts. These eight cases are analyzed in terms of the incidents, the teacher’s actions or speech, the consequences, the relevant legal precedents surrounding academic freedom, the parental, student, and community reaction, and the short- and long-term impacts moving forward.

This chapter provides a review of the literature regarding the challenges found in leading and delivering instruction for online teaching and learning. The chapter describes how the principal of a rural high school in eastern North Carolina and her team modified Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to provide five support levels for students to help prepare them to learn in an unconventional environment. The chapter describes a study to determine the impact of the support by reviewing school and state data. The authors review summative testing, school-made survey, and Cognia Climate Survey data to share timely results indicating student and staff wellness and school academic health. In turn, practitioners and researchers may shape current practice and future studies with as much agility, flexibility, and resilience as educators have mustered during these extraordinary times.

Educators who work in K-12 educational settings have only begun to make sense of the many consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has had for students. Months of remote teaching and learning have made one thing quite clear; the academic, physical, and mental health benefits of in-person schooling are difficult to replicate through online learning. The COVID-19 pandemic has elevated the importance of social emotional learning (SEL) as children have experienced substantial reductions in social contact with peers while attending school remotely. Given the profound impact this past year has had on children’s social emotional (SE) health, it has never been more important for educators, parents, and caregivers to support student’s SE health. While it may be tempting to put student’ SE well-being on the back burner as we scramble to make up for lost learning; we stand at a crossroad. We can radically weave SEL into the school day to ensure students continue to develop critical SE skills in a socially distanced world or we can fall back on business as usual.

According to the US Census Bureau’s biweekly Household Pulse Survey, the percentage of homeschoolers – children whose parents withdrew them from public or private schools and assumed full control of their education – grew significantly during the pandemic. The percentage of households that homeschooled at least one child increased from 5.4% at the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 to 19.5% in May of 2021. While homeschooling has long been associated with conservative, religious White families, the most significant increases during the pandemic have been among families of color and, in particular, Black households. Around 3% of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October 2020, the number had increased by more than five times – to 16%. What is driving the migration from mainstream education is difficult to parse, due in part to the dearth of research and reporting on homeschooling among families of color – both before the pandemic and as it continues to unfold. Although COVID-19 and concern for children’s health and safety acted as the impetus for many, if not most, families’ decisions, the shift from traditional schooling has also been driven by parents’ concerns about the disparities, inadequacies, and racism that run deep in public education. The nation’s ongoing reckoning with race alongside COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst for some parents of color to remove their children from mainstream education settings entirely. While do not yet know if new adopters of homeschooling will continue the practice post-pandemic or if they may delay their decision to re-enroll their children in brick-and-mortar schools, there are clear implications for students and the school districts they leave behind. This chapter explores the growth of homeschooling among Black families specifically, providing an overview and typologies, pre-pandemic trends and changes during COVID-19, a review of the literature on Black homeschooling, and concluding with implications.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on schools and schoolchildren across the globe. There is still a dearth of studies that investigate this recent phenomenon in a developing country context, and this is true of Pakistan. Much of the population in Pakistan resides in rural settings and a lack of technology and of online provision of teaching for more than one year must have had huge negative impacts on students’ learning. The school dropout rate was already high in rural settings (Geven & Hasan, 2020) and, with school closures, this will likely have increased further, and cause some schoolchildren to lose interest in going back to school. However, no current data appear to exist to corroborate this. Due to the lack of available current quantitative and qualitative data, this study seeks to explore the impact of COVID-19 on schoolchildren’s education in Pakistan by examining recently published related studies. This study employs a literature review technique that gathers data to ascertain the potential overall impact on schoolchildren during the pandemic. The findings reveal that there remains a lack of detailed studies on this important topic and that urgent attention is needed from researchers to assess the scale of the impact. In addition, the review found that many children from rural communities had little to no school engagement due to technology poverty and their families being unable to support home-schooling, either due to family and/or work constraints or a lack of prior education and/or skills. Themes that emerged were that families, especially mothers, struggled to balance both caring and home-schooling duties, pupils from private schools had a better experience than those from public school backgrounds, and many of these reported that online provisions helped students develop new skills. This study may help to improve the understanding of the impact on the lost learning of schoolchildren during the pandemic by guiding practitioners as well as policymakers.