Parents want virtual learning options: Give it to them

OPINION:

I’m not sure whether D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser knows this or not, but it’s certainly high time for her administration and the D.C. Council to recognize an inconvenient truth: Parents are increasingly hitching their children’s educational wagons to homeschooling and virtual learning, and in some cases the pandemic is nudging them along.

In recent weeks, the Bowser administration has laid out mandate after mandate regarding the opening of the 2021-22 school year, while lawmakers effectively have kept themselves on summer hiatus.

But kids and teachers are back in school, and a slew of health, education and welfare measures are pegged for consideration next week in City Hall.

Two of the most important concerns unjustifiably remain linked to virtual learning and child-and-family services after the mayor laid out pandemic protocols for workers and students in public, charter, parochial and private schools a couple of weeks ago.

The mayoral manifesto affects all D.C. school and day care employees, as well as student-athletes and coaches who travel for games. The bottom line: If you come in constant contact with kids, get tested and vaccinated.

But here’s the hitch that needs unhitching: Parents who keep a child home because of a positive COVID-19 test or are told to quarantine a child later are investigated by the city’s child-and-family services agency for also keeping the child’s siblings home to limit spreading the coronavirus.

That’s ludicrous. That’s bad public policy.

Interest in homeschooling has been spiking since 1999, when the D.C. school choice movement was marking territory with public charter schools.

Moreover, census data shows that homeschooling began to plateau at 3% in 2012.

Today, better than 11% of school-aged children who attended public schools now are homeschooled. Of those kids: 16.1% are Black families, 12.1% are Hispanic, 9.7% are White and 8.8% are Asian.

These are trends that are staring down Democrat-controlled city halls and statehouses that don’t urge, propose and fund school choice every step of the way.

In other words, parents’ actions are exposing politicians’ and teachers unions’ shortcomings in a big way.

Democrats need to surge with the surge.

• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.