Each morning during school term, parents wave goodbye to their children with the confidence that they will be cared for while being stimulated by quality lessons and activities, delivered by competent and caring staff. With the freed hours in the day, they can get on with life’s responsibilities and become the professional, the volunteer, the keep-fit, and the leisurely adult that is their chosen routine. When schools went on lockdown, suddenly the scaffolding that kept life ticking collapsed. Without warning or choice, parents were gifted (or lumbered) with taking primary responsibility for their children’s education. What lessons have we learnt from the last few months about how schools can facilitate the role parents play in their children’s education? How can these lessons be incorporated in a post-pandemic school culture to foster a better working relationship with primary carers, offering better mutual support?

The rapid shifts in society brought on by the coronavirus pandemic open up an opportunity to understand the challenges children face in school at the system level. Parents tend to address their child’s issues “in the moment,” at a specific (and perhaps, granular) level. This makes sense: parents understand their children’s experiences in school via a limited set of data from a limited number of informants. The COVID crisis brought school into the home, and as such, gave parents a new view into their child’s school experience, a chance for parents to pause, step back, and partner with the school to explore challenges from a systems level. In order to do this, parents need to understand not only how schools work, but how the systems of schools work. A child in one system context looks different than the same child in another system.

What role should a parent play in the months of preparation that lead up to a coming of age celebration for a child?

I first started taking this question seriously after I stood on the Bimah, uttered the traditional parental blessing that freed me from “personal liability” (shepetarani mei’onsho shel zeh) for my newly dubbed “teenager” and tried my best to connect to the blessing on an emotional level. It was not easy. As much as I felt a release in that moment; the parental part of me was actually sensing a growing set of legal and moral responsibilities that I would carry for the actions of the pimpled, brace-faced teen who stood before me in his new suit and tie.

Last year at this time, I was a preschool director, busy running teacher in-service trainings, helping set up classrooms, and finalizing class lists. This year, I am likewise preparing for a new school year with one big difference: instead of running a preschool, I will be home educating, or “homeschooling,” my 7 children.
Especially in light of COVID19, many parents are turning to home education as the best option for their children, and the Jewish community is no exception.

Supplemental Jewish educators quickly pivoted to online instruction once the pandemic broke. Teachers “zoomed” into the homes of our students and thus into a direct partnership with their parents. This was a dramatic shift from before the crisis when there was often a dichotomy between home and school—school being where “Jewish” happened.

The rapid shifts in society brought on by the coronavirus pandemic open up an opportunity to understand the challenges children face in school at the system level. Parents tend to address their child’s issues “in the moment,” at a specific (and perhaps, granular) level. This makes sense: parents understand their children’s experiences in school via a limited set of data from a limited number of informants. The COVID crisis brought school into the home, and as such, gave parents a new view into their child’s school experience, a chance for parents to pause, step back, and partner with the school to explore challenges from a systems level. In order to do this, parents need to understand not only how schools work, but how the systems of schools work. A child in one system context looks different than the same child in another system.

Olivia Friedman is an innovative educational thinker who teaches at Ida Crown Jewish Academy (Skokie) and is a member of the Advisory Board of Jewish Educational Leadership. In this conversation she shares her thoughts about relationships with and engaging parents who have high school age children.

Elisa Marcus teaches Kindergarten at the Solomon Schechter of Manhattan. In this conversation with Jewish Educational Leadership she describes the culture in her school and articulates a vision of parent involvement in education alongside the relationship between parent and school/teacher.

SAR Academy in Riverdale, NY was the first Jewish day school in North America to shut down because of COVID-19. Almost immediately, a parent group partnered with the school to help coordinate what the distance learning would look like, and parents were heavily involved in planning the reopening of the school, with all the contingency plans, in Fall 2020. The parent group included a number of medical professionals, including Dr. Gita Lisker. Jewish Educational Leadership spoke with Dr. Lisker just prior to the opening of the Fall 2020 semester. Below is an edited and abridged transcript of that conversation.