Covid-19 Boosted Private School Enrollment

[bjcheung77]

The title mentioned "forever", which I don't really know if that is going to happen or not.  For the time being, parents may justify spending more on their kids education and putting them in private schools vs public schools.  Only time will tell... there was a short paragraph in regards to homeschooling though...  I wonder how "homeschooling" will work for some and may not work for others...

"While remote learning during Covid-19 was definitely better than nothing, many parents also found they couldn't handle the uncertainty about it all, or the potential for having to homeschool their kids while also trying to work."

Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertfarri...t-forever/

[dfrecore]

I'm guessing that many parents 1) realized how much better the education their kids got at a private school was, and 2) don't want to pull their kids in and out of different schools all the time. If I switched my kid to private school for a year, I'd just finish them off there (even if it was Kindergarten). I just don't want to jerk them in and out of schools if I don't have to.

As for homeschooling - I'm a former homeschooling parent, and it takes time & effort to do it well. Not everyone can do that - especially if you have to go back to work in an office and won't be home like many people were last year. Other people just don't want to. But many have realized that it's actually LESS work than dealing with public schools. I was one that realized that having your kid in school was a LOT of work! I was WAY busier once my kids went to high school than when we were homeschooling. I have loads of friends who pulled their kids out of public school for different reasons, and then had a good homeschooling experience and never looked back. So some people are going to conclude that they can just homeschool their kids, and continue on.

[Vle045]

That is interesting but doesn’t jive with what I have seen in my local area.

Yes, there were some parents who switched to private school, but it wasn’t in droves… because it doesn’t really work that way. By the time anyone knew what the public school plan was, most private schools were not taking any more new kids (They usually have a cap due to staffing and space).

The online public charter schools saw a sharp increase. Because a lot of people felt that if they had to keep kids in an online setting, they might as well go with the ones that had been doing it all along and not just throwing it together.

Ohio also got rid of a lot of the Ed Choice options. This allowed parents to send kids to private schools partially on the state’s dime. Depending on our “home school”, we could get $6,000 toward high school and I think is was $2,000 toward K-8. That is gone for families in most districts now. So that actually created a decline in private school enrollment for this coming school year as a lot of people lost a significant amount of aid.

I got a front row seat for most of this. I have been working as an Administrative Assistant in K-12 schools for almost 10 years. Both private and charter. I am a parent of a 14 year old. Most of this has impacted me as a parent and as an employee one way or another.