Catching Up on 2020-21: Weirdest School Year Ever

The last year has been a whirlwind, to say the least.  The kids had a dozen different iterations of school.  We went on three big trips and bought a cabin.  The kids started new activities and had birthdays that I forgot to write about.  I took over the school PTO and started a photography job.  And now Karl and I are back to our honeymoon villa in St. John, futilely trying to recall the details of what we did and where we went 16 years ago, and realizing there is some value to documenting our lives in detail.  Karl says he has no desire to keep a journal but is really pleased when I do it.

So I'm going to make like Jimmy Buffet and take a weekend just to try and recall the whole year.  Hold on to your seats as we cover all of 2020-2021.  

The kids' school shut down on March 13, 2020.  At the time, like most people, we assumed the shutdown would be a few weeks.  But by mid-August, we were still waiting with considerable anxiety for our school district to announce how, or if, our kids would be going to school.  The kids had enjoyed a relatively carefree 1980's style summer of running around outdoors with their friends.  Meanwhile, Karl and I fretted endlessly about what we should do about enrollment.  Distance learning had been an unmitigated disaster.  We easily concluded we would not subject them to that for a whole year.  If our district went virtual, we would send Heidi back to her Montessori with Fritz and homeschool the older two.  The smart money was on our school board implementing some kind of hybrid plan but they were very non-committal.  

Our school board finally announced tentative plans at the end of August.  Twenty incompetence points awarded for failing to produce a tentative plan in June and an actual plan in August.  

Kindergarten would go to school four days a week: M-T-Th-F.  Older kids would go two days a week, with our half of the alphabet on Th-F.  Not ideal, but good enough to give it a try.

Then they delayed the start of the school year until mid-September while the teachers figured out how to teach one set of kids on zoom and the other set at school.  10 more incompetence points awarded for failing to speak to your teachers before announcing the plan.  

So our school year began with one kid in school five half days per week; one kid in four full days per week; and two on zoom M-T and at school Th-F.  Asynchronous Wednesday was a weekly reminder of how shitty the spring was.  This schedule was chaotic but worked. . . okay.  I was constantly afraid I'd send the wrong kid to the wrong place on the wrong day, but we didn't lose anyone, and half-time actually seemed like a decent way to re-train feral students into an educational setting.  The kids hated the distancing requirements, because it meant they each only had a couple of friends they could work with, and they couldn't do what they wanted at recess.  They hauled thousand-pound backpacks to school and back every day because the school wanted them to have their materials in case we had to pivot quickly to virtual.  But it was. . . okay.   

That lasted two months.  And then everyone in Edina, including us, got COVID (that's another post!).  As in March, the kids left on a Friday and didn't go back.  We still had to do materials pickup despite hauling those f*ing backpacks for two months.  Ten more incompetence points awarded to school admin!  And then they told us they needed two full weeks off to create the virtual plan.  I'm sorry, what?  You didn't have a plan for this?!?!  Twenty more points!  

Virtual school finally went live after the Thanksgiving break (effectively three weeks off).  The aggregated zoom calendar was insane.  These definitely garnered the most Facebook comments I've gotten in the last several years.

Virtual was once again an unmitigated disaster for Heidi and Henry.  For Heidi, because virtual kindergarten is an affront to child development and pedagogy and all that is good in this world.  Her teacher was phenomenal and tried so hard, bless her heart, but it just doesn't work.  Especially not for a child with nuclear levels of anxiety.  And for Henry, because his teacher was an absolute bumbling incompetent.  She wasn't the greatest to begin with, and this was not a challenge that suited her skill set, even if she had tried.  Which she didn't.  Karl and Henry often worked together in the basement, and Karl was frequently appalled at the complete lack of instruction going on.  At least fifty incompetence points to that house.  Ingrid did remarkably well though!  Her teacher absolutely rose to the occasion, and had 26 pairs of eyes on the screen every time we popped in to observe Ingrid in her carefully-arranged bedroom office.  I actually nominated her teacher for our city's Teacher of the Year award.  She was a rare silver lining.

So we were. . . doing that, and mostly hanging on, and then Fritz's school shut down too.  Having the preschooler gone during peak zoom hours was our only saving grace.  But with grace gone, we limped through until Christmas break.  Over Christmas break, we reached "f* this" cruising altitude, and planned a road trip across Florida for the first 10 days that we would have ostensibly been back in virtual school in January.  

Florida was delightful (post coming soon!).  We did not even pretend to log in to zoom.  The school did not even notice my children were absent.  Ten more incompetence points!  

We returned from Florida, tanned and relaxed and caring even less, to resume distance learning.  Fritz was back in school or it wouldn't have worked at all.  And we continued on with another month or so of virtual.  At the end of January, the school announced they would bring the kids back in mid-February, with the little kids starting first.  Heidi went back to her four-day-a-week schedule.  Two weeks later, the older kids started back on the same M-T-Th-F schedule (not the hybrid one from fall).  Two weeks after that, someone realized that asynchronous Wednesdays were actually really stupid, given that the M-T/Th-F cohort split no longer existed.  Five incompetence points awarded for sheer confusion.  The kids suddenly went back to school five days a week, almost exactly one year after they left five-day-a-week school in 2020.  

We proceeded that way until the end of the school year.  Oh, except for the two times that Henry's class was quarantined because a family member of a student got COVID.  No children ever had COVID.  But they nonetheless missed almost four weeks of school.  Fifty more incompetence points for completely crushing my oldest child's interest in school, with bonus points to the nurse for making the kids cry.  School wins the house cup for worst pandemic performance!

And so we ended the 2020-21 school year.  For those keeping track, that was delayed school, hybrid school, no school, virtual school for all, f* it we're going on vacation, virtual school minus the preschooler, one kid in hybrid school, all kids in a new hybrid schedule, all kids in mostly normal school, and two quarantines for Henry.  Writing it down, I almost can't believe it all happened, but we have the Total Wine receipts for confirmation.