Barnini Chakraborty writes for the Washington Examiner about an interesting education development.
The plan was Hoerschelman would go back to teaching, but the family ran into trouble finding daycare so she decided to stay home and give her daughters the individualized instruction a traditional learning environment lacked.
“I never thought I would homeschool,” the mother of four young girls told the Washington Examiner. “My mom worked all when I was growing up, and I thought I would always do that. If you would have asked me 10 years ago, I would have never thought I would be doing this, but there was a shift in my heart.”
Johanna Duffy used to teach in Florida but called it quits after her son Malcolm started first grade.
“It was when [COVID-19] was getting really bad. We pulled him out, and it was the best thing we ever did,” she told the Washington Examiner. Duffy thought homeschooling would be a temporary fix but said she plans to stick with it.
Kristen Rhodes, a former public school special education teacher who lives near the Georgia-Florida border, told The Atlantic she decided not to put her 5-year-old son in kindergarten because she worried about him wearing a mask all day.
Similar to Rhodes, Duffy, and Hoerschelman, more and more public school teachers are choosing to homeschool.
In fact, the pandemic has created an opportunity for all types of families who would have never otherwise considered homeschooling. Desperate parents stuck at home scrambled to keep their children on track. The general lack of coordination in public schools, coupled with inconsistent guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on safety and masks, pushed hundreds of thousands of parents to roll up their sleeves and give homeschooling a try.
Like the Carter family in Midlothian, Virginia, some liked it so much they vowed to leave the public education system for good.
