Column: As a challenging school year starts, success means working together

As a teacher, I completely understand parent frustrations and concerns as we head into the new school year. Even in a blended environment, many households with full-time working guardians are struggling to come up a solution for childcare that allows them to keep working and stay sane. Private teacher groups and educator planning meetings discuss this daily, as well as many many other incredibly difficult questions we face this year.

Before offering solutions, I want to first say that the only way to effectively solve this puzzle is for all major stakeholders to be involved, which means parents, schools, employers and city and state government agencies. This isn’t a problem that parents can solve alone, or teachers, or employers, or school superintendents — nor should any individual stakeholder bear the burden for everyone else. We all have to work together to make this work.

First, employers should work with parents to offer ways parents can keep their jobs and be a parent to their kids during the pandemic. Here are two suggestions for employers: alternative schedules and remote working. Not all employers can offer these, so consider another: the top value solution is childcare. Lots of parents will be in the same situation so employers could potentially have many employees who need help. Child-care benefits to employees should be a consideration in normal situations, not only during pandemics. This is where progressive employers currently live and where employment is heading in the future; get on board. There are also huge tax benefits to employers who provide childcare options or vouchers to parents.

Second, for parents, consider parenting pods. My sister has a 5- and 7-year-old and really struggled at the end of last year, so this year she has a pod. Talk with other parents in your kids’ classes and create ohanas — these are “family” groups that stay together for the whole pandemic. Parents swap childcare duties on a weekly or bi-weekly basis so one parent takes on the responsibility for four or five kids one day, another parent the next, week after week.

Again, this will need coordination between employers and guardians, but it can work. Also, this solution is definitely more suited for littles (under age 12) than teens as younger kids need socialization as much as skill-building from kindergarten through elementary school years, and they will miss that if they are sequestered at home.

The other solution that one parent I know is using is flipping the day. This requires a two-guardian household and employer/job flexibility — one parent works during the day while the other guardians, and then they flip at night. My friend and her husband are both able to work remotely so they have more flexibility than parents with jobs that require in-person, shift-specific service so this is the solution they’ve chosen.

Again, none of these solutions are ideal, but they’re viable. As a teacher, all I’ve thought about over the last three weeks are the true costs of reopening schools. Is it a child left behind? A parent losing his job? An illness or, god forbid, a death? None of those is acceptable.

I’ve struggled to make this school year fit into the model of previous years and when I finally let that expectation go, I suddenly began to see a rainbow of creative solutions.

This year won’t look like last year, but I think the model for my classroom will have many positive outcomes and will hit several new student targets that my practice has not been able to reach before — namely media literacy, self-efficacy and time-management skills.

Here’s wishing all of us a safe and healthy school year! Please share your pitfalls and successes with everyone so we can learn from each other.

Brooke Nasser is an English and news-writing teacher at Kalani High School; she also is a freelance filmmaker and journalist.