The Hidden Costs of Remote Learning: How Families are Being Impacted and What the Government is Doing to Help
Last March, Newark Public Schools were forced to shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For many parents and guardians, this meant having to learn how to manage online classes, but for Maria, a mother of two, it meant having to find a way to ensure her kids had enough food to eat.
Like millions of other children across the country prior to the pandemic, her children received lunch, free of charge, at school. But since the switch to online learning, she has not received any direct food aid from the school system and is not even aware if such a program exists. She said she doesn’t know if they are sending people food. “It is sometimes hard to know what’s happening when they don’t send clear updates,” she said.
Maria has been spending an extra $50 dollars a week on groceries to substitute the food her children would normally receive at school. While to some an additional 50 dollars might not sound like much, it is a cost that is definitely felt. Maria said the extra money she is spending on groceries “adds up quickly” and could have easily gone to cover the internet and electric bills — two necessities crucial to ensuring her children are able to attend online schooling.
Even if programs exist, it can be difficult for families to access them. When I visited the Newark Public Schools website, there was information on how-to pick up meals, but the information was only directly presented in English; Maria’s first language is Spanish. Members of the Newark Board of Education did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In Newark, parents who want to receive free meals can only pick up food for their children on Mondays and Thursdays at select hours, from 7:30 am to 11:30 am a time when many parents are working. There is also a limited number of locations in which families can receive these meals, making it difficult for people who do not have access to a reliable form of transportation, like a car, to obtain the help they need.
Maria’s story is not a rare one. Since the start of the pandemic, families across the country have had to fend for themselves without any steady aid from their school systems. Almost 93 percent of households with school-age children reported some form of distance learning amassing to tens of millions of children being at home, according to a study conducted by the U.S Census. Out of those tens of millions of students, 30 million of them depend on low-cost or free food from their schools, according to NPR.
The families that have been most impacted by the lack of school resources are the same ones that have faced the most hardship during this pandemic. Most children who benefit from free food programs attend public schools and belong to families that are below 130 percent of the poverty line, according to the USDA.
Minority groups from urban areas are among those most affected by the lack of access to school-provided resources. For instance, Newark, where Maria lives, is composed mostly of African American and Latinx/Hispanic households. Just over 27 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, which is nearly three times the national nationwide average, according to the U.S Census.
The parents who require assistance from their school districts are not the parents who have the freedom to go out of their way to pick up lunches. They might have to work longer hours or not have a transportation method to reach the few locations available within their district.
The federal government has taken note of the fact that the pandemic has been hard for parents and has offered some assistance. On March 11th, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan. Included in the legislation is a child tax credit that will provide $3,600 dollars per child to cover expenses that come along with raising children, explained New Jersey Policy Perspective Analyst Vineeta Kapahi.
The child tax credit, she said, is not a new policy, but the recently enacted legislation made significant improvements. Families no longer need to meet a minimum earnings requirement to qualify for the child tax credit, said Kapahi.
Under previous policies, if a person did not earn enough to file for taxes, they were deemed ineligible even though the program was supposed to help lower-income families. The income requirements resulted in “substantial racial disparities” when it came to who was able to obtain the credit, she said. Benefits of the previous child tax credit “disproportionally accrued to White and Asian children,” despite Black and Latinx kids making up the majority of kids in poverty.
The money distributed by this program will be sure to aid millions of parents. However, the tax credit is only a one-time payment and advocates are concerned that some parents or guardians may not receive the benefit.
Maria has seen plenty of families struggle this past year and hopes that help will be implemented soon to aid families across America.
“I don’t know how I would have made it through this past year without help from my family,” she said. “Sadly, not everyone had that support when schools closed. With the vaccine, hopefully, things get back to normal and people get the help they need.”
