Parents say virtual classes add stress, expenses

By Dave Taylor

When Hancock County schools announced they would follow Governor Andy Beshear’s recommendation to offer only virtual classes until September 28, that brought new troubles to some local parents who were counting on sending their kids to school.
Crystal Hall, of Lewisport, had been preparing to send her daughter JayLee Johnson, to second grade at North Hancock Elementary School, but the delay of in-person classes means not only will her child stay home, but Hall, a single mother, won’t earn an income.
“I work in the school system, but I’m not on the payroll and the annual salary or whatever, so when we’re not in school, I don’t have an income,” she said. Hall has been a substitute cafeteria worker for going on three years, but even though she works nearly every day at the school and often all day, when the schools closed, so did her work. That means she will be at home for her daughter, which is a mixed blessing.
“I will have her, that’s not the problem, as far as what I’m going to do with her,” she said. “It’s more of the how am I going to get her to do her work because she won’t listen to me… “I can teach someone else’s kid and they’d listen to me, but not my own.”

While Hall won’t earn an income because the schools are closed, she will be getting paid through unemployment, which has actually been a pay increase. “Honestly the unemployment has been very nice to me,” she said. “I’m doing better than I probably have ever done in my life… And there’s nothing to do so I can’t spend it.”
But, she said, she’d rather be at work.

“This whole pandemic is not good for me. I need to be around people, I need to have my routine,” she said. “I will absolutely stop the unemployment when the opportunity for my job comes.”
While there are plenty of question marks about what’s coming, Hall said she trusts the district to make the right decisions. “I think that they’re handling it to the best of their ability,” she said. “I think their goal is just to teach what they have to teach and be available to the kids and it’ll work out.”

For Shiree Wheatley the lack of in-person classes will mean more work at home for her, and more expenses through paying a babysitter while she works full-time and her husband Bill, a truck driver, is out of town all week.
“My thought was what am I, the working mother, supposed to do?” Wheatley said about when she heard the announcement. “It comes down to I’ll have the expense of paying a babysitter during the school year, or part of it I suppose… It’s no burden, it’s just an extra expense.”

Her son Caiden Dixon will be going into the second grade at North, but the babysitter who’s been watching her son over the summer will now have to continue to watch him and help ensure that he does his work.
“She has no problem in helping me tackle some of his work,” she said. “I don’t expect her to do all of his work during the day. It’s also something I can tackle when I get home from work.”

Wheatley said she knows that the district wasn’t given much of a choice in whether to hold in-person classes or not.
“I understand our district doing the recommendation because they’ll lose funding if not doing the recommended,” she said. “I see both sides, but at the same time I’m a mother and that’s what comes first, and it’s going to just make it harder on us.”
dave.hancockclarion
@gmail.com