As parents of an elementary school student, we have shifted from live school, then to distance learning, and finally to Hillsboro Online Academy with a prepackaged curriculum and a dedicated teacher who checks in throughout the week. It has been a lot of transitions for us, but it hasn’t been all bad. To be honest, our daughter was struggling the last few years in school. At home, she seemed bright and engaging, but sitting all day in classrooms packed with students was was killing her enjoyment of learning.

Then the lockdown happened and everything went online. The Google classroom situation in the Spring was like a living nightmare. Everyone was talking over each other for hours and assignments were a tedious daily chore of downloading, printing, scanning and uploading. As a part-time college instructor and full-time mom of a toddler, something had to give.

Now with her non-synchronous online courses, she is really blossoming. This morning, she finished her work in about an hour and a half and her average scores are in the mid-nineties for all four of her subjects. We’re still going to have to figure out social interactions as well as art, music and P.E., but the book work is finally under control.

I feel this experience justifies our taking out of the local school where she was getting average-to-poor grades and constantly being chastised for disruptive behavior. We kept asking for alternative assignments, but she was just pushed further away from the front and kind of written off. She wasn’t bad, she was bored.