Our plan to work and teach from home blew up By Joshua Emerson Smith The San Diego Union-Tribune SAN DIEGO — The headline on July 13 — Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall — hit our household like a lightning bolt. I cursed loudly in the small sunroom-turned-office of our rented house in Southeast San Diego. “I just read it,” my wife called back telepathically from the kitchen, where she was making lunch for our two boys, ages five and six. Like so many working parents, we were counting on K-12 schooling to provide not only education but indispensable childcare. Online distance learning, on the other hand, required intense adult supervision for our soon-to-be kindergartener and first grader. The lightning strike sparked an at-times thunderous debate: Should one of us quit our job and go on unemployment? Could our extended family help? Could we afford a tutor to oversee distance learning? Would the kids even follow a tutor’s instructions? None of those seemed like great options. So last week we finally decided that I 10
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would take emergency family leave, a temporary program created by Congress in March under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. There’s no data yet on how many people are using the program, but the need is obvious. A recent New York Times survey found that more than half of parents plan to help their kids distance learn while also holding down paid work. And four out of five parents said they had no in-person help, such as from relatives, nannies or tutors. “A big problem is so many people don’t know about” the federal leave program, said Netsy Firestein, senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. “It should be better advertised.” The Families First act guarantees that parents and guardians of school-aged children can take up to 12 weeks of leave at two-thirds of their regular pay, capped at $200 a day, if local schools and daycares are physically closed due to the pandemic. We knew about the program because my wife had been using it for the last 10 weeks. She enrolled after her employer, a local homeless services nonprofit, forced
its employees to return to the office. Taking leave limited her potential exposure to the virus, while allowing me to continue working for the Union-Tribune through the summer. Employers must foot the bill, although those costs can be recouped through a dollar-for-dollar refundable tax credit under the law. The rules only apply to businesses with 50 to 500 employees. The amount of time off workers are eligible for is reduced by any leave they took in the last 12 months under the Family Medical Leave Act, such as to care for a newborn baby. The emergency-leave program expires on Dec. 31. Before the pandemic, we would often feel guilty for not spending more time with our kids. The younger one went to preschool from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and the older one to first grade from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., remaining on campus in the San Diego Unified School District’s aftercare program, PrimeTime, until around 6 p.m. Over weekend beers, we’d commiserate with other parents about how little time we spent with our kids. “I couldn’t even
