Investing in our teachers is what our students need most edsource.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from edsource.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Many California parents dreaded returning to remote learning last fall, but they did it anyway, holding onto hopes of going back to campus at some point during the school year.
But for those whose children were just entering kindergarten, the decision to commit to distance learning was a far tougher choice: Wrangling a 5-year-old in front of a computer screen for several hours a day requires constant supervision, technical assistance and cajoling, an impossibility for many working parents, particularly essential workers and those juggling multiple children.
Faced with the rigors of distance learning, some kindergarten parents decided to keep their children in preschool, a safe and familiar option that allowed the in-person interaction that small children crave. Affluent parents may have also opted to send children to private schools, which often have the larger campuses and smaller class sizes that make in-person instruction safer. Low-income families may have opted out of schoolin