EDITORIAL: After a lost year of school, parents deserve more power to choose what's best
May 13—Parenting is about choices. It starts at birth and never stops. Formula or breast milk? Disposable diapers or cloth? Screen time, daycare, junk food, bed times. It's exhausting but necessary.
You would think that it would stop when a child is old enough for school, but it isn't as easy as dropping them off at kindergarten and walking away from decisions. In a lot of ways, the choices mushroom at that point.
You can be the parent who cares about homework and test scores to the exclusion of other activities. You can be the parent that worries about social interaction. You can be the sports dad, the homeroom mom, the decision-maker, the disciplinarian.
But all of those choices come down to doing what is best for your kid and your family.
So how do you do that after a year in a pandemic? How does that work as students are facing the second end-of-school season under less than optimum conditions?
Many kids haven't been in a classroom since March 2020. Others have had what they were doing and where they were doing it change on a sometimes weekly, or even daily, basis based on the number of positive covid-19 cases in their school or community. And even in school, there has been confusion and inconsistency.
What has all of this done to the education these children have received? Is a seventh grade science score for 2020-21 at all comparable to the same score in 2019? Is it fair to a third grader who hasn't spent a full year in a classroom since first grade to move them on to fourth grade and expect them to perform accordingly?
These are the choices parents are facing. A Pennsylvania Senate bill is putting an option on the table, giving parents the chance to decide if their kids should be promoted or held back.
"Given the circumstances, it makes sense to give parents a stronger say in whether their kids should advance to the next grade level or repeat a grade to make up for learning loss during the pandemic," Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, R-Centre County, said in a news release Wednesday.
It does. It also makes sense to make this decision sooner rather than later as school districts have little time to plan for twice as many graduates in the Class of 2022.
The Senate unanimously approved the bill Wednesday and sent it to the House of Representatives. Considering the House passed a similar bill in 2020 that died in the Senate, one would expect it to receive favorable consideration there.
But will the state be prepared to support schools that suddenly need double the fifth grade classrooms? Packing rooms tighter in a still-
unresolved pandemic hardly seems like a good idea. Will the state step up to help districts solve the problems these decisions create — or will this reasonable option become another unfunded mandate?
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