CINCINNATI, Ohio — While many jobs were lost over the past year, many parents left their full-time job to stay at home with their kids to help with virtual and at-home learning. In fact, 10 million moms living with school-aged children were not working in January, that’s 1.4 million more than last January, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
For Kellie Arnold, leaving her teaching job seemed like the best option for her family.
“The district that we were in decided to do six weeks of online instruction only and we were told that probably two weeks before school started and we didn’t have child care,” Arnold said.
Arnold said that was one of the main reasons she left her teaching job in October.
“I don’t know how people are swinging it for a year working at home with their kids at home,” she said.
Arnold isn’t alone.
According to the U.S Census, about 45% of moms weren’t actively working during the pandemic. That number has since dropped to 35%. But Arnold didn’t entirely leave teaching. She decided to keep her kids home, too, and home school.
“The kids weren’t getting really what they needed educationally,” Arnold said. “Teachers are amazing, they are, but in order to learn virtually at home, parents got to be sitting beside them. I have a daughter that just turned six. She’d never done Google Docs or Google Classroom. She didn’t know how to mute herself and unmute herself.”
So instead of spending the day inside a classroom, Arnold is busy teaching her eight, six and four-year-old at home. She said the flexibility of homeschooling has allowed her children to follow their passions and interests.
“It’s really nice that I can say you know what, we’ve mastered this skill, we can move on,” Arnold said. “We can explore a topic that they want to learn about. We did a whole unit on baking and Charlotte really wants to do chemistry and she wouldn’t normally get to do that stuff in a first-grade classroom.”
But while Arnold loves being home with her kids and seeing them succeed, she’s still hoping to get back to work one day.
“I do think eventually I will want to go back to work in some capacity,” she said. “If I could find a really progressive school that allowed a lot more creativity I would probably see myself there.”
