Survey: 73% Of Parents May Make Professional Changes If Schools Don't Fully Reopen

As disagreements rage over reopening U.S. schools amid the coronavirus crisis, a new survey published Thursday found that the limitations of schools and daycares that have reopened or announced plans to do so are having a dramatic impact on working parents, with 73% of respondents saying they plan to make major changes in their professional lives, such as amending their schedules (44%) or looking for a different job (21%), and 15% are considering leaving the workplace altogether.

Key Facts

• According to the New York Times, 19 of the nation’s 25 largest school districts have announced they will start the upcoming academic year remotely.
• The Covid-19 Working Parents Survey, published Thursday on Care.com, asked 2,000 adults with children under the age of 15 how they have attempted to balance work and family during this unprecedented time.
• Some 66% of the respondents said juggling childcare responsibilities with work responsibilities during the pandemic has caused their productivity to suffer, and 45% agreed that this juggling act “may have caused my career advancement to suffer.”
• 64% disclosed they have experienced at least one major work failure, with work late (33%) and having to stop work early (32%) as the most common issues.
• More than half (52%) said they hide childcare concerns because they worry that their employer or colleagues won’t understand.
• It appears women have been asked to shoulder added responsibilities at home, with 57% of working women say that they’ve taken on most or all of the extra childcare duties during the pandemic, compared to just 8% of women who say their partners do more.

Key Background:
The debate over when and how to safely reopen school buildings for in-person learning remains divisive. President Trump insists that all public schools in the U.S. reopen for in-person learning this fall, however, districts that have already done so have reported disconcerting setbacks. Last week, within hours of the start of classes at a junior high school in Greenfield, Indiana, a student who attended multiple classes tested positive for the coronavirus. Over the weekend, Georgia’s largest school district announced that more than 250 employees tested positive for Covid-19 or were exposed to the virus. Earlier this week, a second-grader in Georgia tested positive on the second day of school. On Wednesday, the Mississippi State Department of Health confirmed that several people in the Corinth School District have been infected with Covid-19 and that more than 100 students in the district have been quarantined.

Tangent:
Last week, the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union in the U.S., declared they would support “safety strikes” as “a last resort” if proper safeguards were not in place to protect educators in districts reopening for in-person education.

Big Number:
60%: A Kaiser Family Foundation survey released last month found that 60% of parents prefer that schools wait to restart in-person instruction to reduce infection risk rather than (34%) open sooner so parents can work, with parents of color (76%) and Democrats (87%) overwhelmingly in favor of waiting.