Schooling amidst a pandemic in the United States: Parents’ perceptions about reopening schools and anticipated challenges during COVID-19

  1. Ankita Meghani
  2. Smisha Agarwal
  3. Alexander John Zapf
  4. Jeffrey G. Edwards
  5. Alain Labrique
  6. Dustin Gibson

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Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous states in the United States instituted measures to close schools or shift them to virtual platforms. Understanding parents’ preferences for sending their children back to school, and their experiences with distance learning is critical for informing school reopening guidelines. This study characterizes parents’ plans to return their children to school, and examines the challenges associated with school closures during the 2020–2021 academic year.

Methods

A national-level cross-sectional online survey was conducted in September 2020. Focusing on a subset of 510 respondents, who were parents of school-aged children, we examined variations in parents’ plans for their children to return to school by their demographic and family characteristics, and challenges they anticipated during the school-year using multivariable logistic regressions.

Results

Fifty percent of respondents (n = 249) said that they would send their children back to school, 18% (n = 92) stated it would depend on what the district plans for school reopening, and 32% (n = 160) would not send their children back to school. No demographic characteristics were significantly associated with parents plans to not return their children to school. Overall, parents reported high-level of access to digital technology to support their child’s learning needs (84%). However, those who reported challenges with distance learning due to a lack of childcare were less likely to not return their children to school (aOR = 0.33, 95% CI: 0.17, 0.64). Parents who reported requiring supervision after school had higher odds of having plans to not return their children to school (aOR = 1.97, 95% CI: 1.03, 3.79). Parents viewed COVID-19 vaccines and face-masks important for resuming in-person classes.

Discussion

About one-third of parents objected to their children returning to school despite facing challenges with distance learning. Besides access to vaccines and face-masks, our findings highlight the need to better equip parents to support remote learning, and childcare.

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  1. Version published to 10.1371/journal.pone.0268427
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.02.21252777: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: Ethical approval: The study protocol and survey instruments were approved by the Institutional Review Board at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (IRB00012413)
    Consent: All participants provided electronic consent at the beginning of the survey.
    RandomizationDynata randomly selected US residents from its database and emailed online surveys to eligible participants.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    StataCorp LLC, College Station, TX) [29].
    StataCorp
    suggested: (Stata, RRID:SCR_012763)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitations: The findings of this study should be interpreted in the light of some limitations. Survey participants were drawn from the Dynata database and were not randomly drawn from the general population, potentially limiting the generalizability of our findings. Furthermore, participating in the survey requires access to a device with internet access. While smartphone ownership has been increasing, and the digital divide has narrowed in the United States [42], it is possible our online survey may not captured the experiences of individuals without the resources and technology to access the internet [43], which may be associated with lower levels of education and low-income households [44]. In addition, we did not collect demographic data about parents’ underlying health risks, such as chronic health diseases, and whether respondents belonged to intergenerational households, which may have also influenced their responses. Despite our large sample size for the overall survey, the substrata for specific age groups and racial or ethnic minorities were relatively small, which may have reduced the statistical precision of our estimates. While our study systematically oversampled African American and Hispanic racial/ethnic groups, our estimates for smaller racial/ethical groups are not generalizable for parents. Finally, residual confounding may limit our estimates as we did not capture data on potential confounders, such as living in multigenerational households, employment of...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.03.02.21252777v1 on medRxiv