Whether students are going back to school in-person or still staring at a computer screen for hours on end depends on where they live.

Despite recent guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control on how schools can reopen safely, many districts around the state remain remote while others continue to move cautiously. Frustrated parents are wondering how and when school administrators will take the next steps in a return to normalcy. Frustrations have boiled over in some parts of the state that parents are forming groups to advocate and demand answers.

Nobody, teachers, parents, or students would argue that remote learning has been less than ideal. For the past year, it has been the “better than nothing” substitute for millions of students during the coronavirus pandemic.

As COVID-19 cases and deaths drop while vaccinations increase, many parents keep asking the same question: “when will my child go back to school?”

“Most people would agree our kids learn best when they’re in schools,” said Ron Baker, a parent to three boys in the Champaign Unit 4 School District.

Baker works in a hospital and can’t always be around to make sure his sons are paying attention to class work. His wife works from home, but juggles work responsibilities with parenting.

“We would try as often as we could to go in and check in on them while they’re doing online learning,” he said. “Some of the things we found, say out of a class of 30, two or three kids had their camera on. I’d go upstairs and my son would be listening to music, not paying attention to class.”

Baker said remote learning made sense during the early stages of the pandemic when there were many unknowns about the virus and cases soared out of control, but, he says, it’s been difficult on his kids.

“I can remember my sixth grader sitting there crying,” he said. “He wanted to come talk to us because he was too ashamed that he wasn’t able to figure out how to play some of his notes on his band instrument. There’s been a lot of different periods of frustration with the engagement.”

His son in the second grade started going back to school in person for two and a half hours a day a few weeks ago. His two sons in middle school just started with hybrid learning, half the day in school, half online. Baker said he’s frustrated the local school district hasn’t explained plans moving forward.

“I’d like to see a stronger effort of, ‘hey, we’ve done two and a half hours, it’s time to now up our game a little bit and push a little bit further,’” Baker said.

Baker’s experience has been all too common.

“It’s a roller coaster,” said Emily Erickson, a mother of two kids in the Geneva Community Unit School District 304 in the far western suburbs. “You have some days that the kids can be somewhat engaged. Other days they’re throwing tantrums.”

Geneva schools have started a different hybrid model with students in school two days a week and then online the other three days, but some parents complained the online days didn’t include instruction, just assignments they considered “busy work.”

“[The district has] no plans,” said Jean Smith, a mother of a first and third grader in Geneva. “That’s where our gripe started. It’s not that we’re a bunch of moms not getting our way because that’s an easy image that we stomp our feet when we don’t get what we want.”

Parents in Geneva have become so frustrated with the lack of clarity on what the plan is moving forward, they’ve started a group called Geneva Parents United for Students. They organize parents to pressure district officials at school board meetings to come up with a plan for getting children back in the classroom. Similar groups have started in Evanston and Champaign.

“They gave us a hybrid model,” Smith said. “We clicked on it, chose it, fine, great. Did we like it? No, but we were proud of what our district did. January 11th they up and changed our hybrid model and then they told us there were no extra plans to get our children back in school this year, let alone next year.”

The Illinoize called and emailed Geneva Community Unit School District 304 for comment but never heard back.

A spokesperson for Champaign Unit 4 Schools said it started hybrid learning in February by grade level as the area entered Phase 4 of the state’s reopening plan.

“We wanted to provide our buildings’ newest students, freshman and 6th graders, with time in the building to become adjusted to a school they may have never been in before,” said Stacey Moore, the chief communication officer for the district. “We will continue to follow guidelines from the CDC and the [Champaign-Urbana Public Health District] to guide our decisions.”

When asked whether there were any discussions about speeding up the transition to in-person learning with the acceleration of vaccinations, Moore simply said, “no”.

We reached out to the Illinois State Board of Education to find out how many school districts were back to in-person instruction, but we have not heard back.

Governor JB Pritzker has repeatedly said he was leaving decisions on returning to classrooms up to local school districts.

There have been high profile battles between schools and teachers’ unions, specifically in Chicago, about returning to in- person instruction. Some districts have surveyed parents and only a minority were willing to send their child back at this point.

Many parents fear students have fallen behind academically during the pandemic, but most we talked to just want a plan with clear metrics so they can know how far the light is at the end of the tunnel.

“That gap is a year behind,” Baker said. “Now we have to attempt to make that up in some ways and I still feel like some of our school districts are saying, ‘we realize that’s there’. We need to start being significantly more progressive and proficient in getting kids back to the spaces where we know we can teach them the best.”

Ben Garbarek

@bengarbarek ben@theillinoize.com