Public School Operating Status During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Implications for Parental Employment

Abstract

Parents rely on public schools to maintain paid work outside the home. The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented closures of this critical resource in spring 2020. In the fall of 2020, school districts across the country reopened under varied instructional modes. Some school districts returned to in-person instruction; some operated remotely. Others reopened under hybrid models, wherein students alternated times, days, or weeks of in-person instruction. To capture this variation, we developed the Elementary School Operating Status (ESOS) database. ESOS provides data on elementary school districts’ primary operating status in the first grading period of the 2020-2021 school year, covering 25 million students in over 9,000 school districts in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. In this research note, we introduce these data and show extensive variation in school operating status at the state and school district levels. We show that school districts with greater representation of Black and Hispanic students were less likely to offer in-person instruction. We also show that fewer in-person elementary school instruction days was associated with reductions in maternal employment. ESOS is a critical source of information to support plans to address long-term implications for students who experienced less in-person learning over the past year, and reentry support for mothers who exited employment in the absence of in-person instruction and care.

COVID‐19 and the role of gender, earnings, and telecommuting in parents' employment

“…This rate reflects the fact that our sample is restricted to those who worked in the prior calendar year (2019). Married fathers' employment rate (97.6%) was substantially higher than married mothers' (91.3%), confirming prior research showing that mothers left work in greater numbers than fathers during the pandemic (Landivar et al, 2020;Landivar & deWolf, 2022). Examining these patterns from January 2020 through May 2021 in Figure 1, we find that the largest drop in employment occurred in April 2020.…”

“…Fathers' labor force participation rate also dropped between 2019 and 2020 (93.3% to 92.3%, respectively) but remained largely unchanged in 2021 at 92.5% and significantly higher than that of mothers (71.2% in 2021; U.S. Census Bureau, 2021). Fathers reached pre-pandemic employment levels by September 2021, and it took more than a year longer for mothers to reach employment recovery (Landivar, 2023). As of February 2023, mothers with lower educational attainment levels and Black mothers had not yet fully recovered their employment losses (Landivar, 2023), showing employment recovery has been uneven among mothers.…”

“…The COVID‐19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted mothers in the United States. They have reported steeper employment declines (Collins, Landivar, et al, 2021; Landivar et al, 2020; Landivar & deWolf, 2022) and greater childcare, housework, and home‐schooling demands than fathers (Carlson et al, 2022; Petts et al, 2021; Ruppanner et al, 2021; Yavorsky et al, 2021). At the start of the pandemic, telecommuting was a critical resource that buffered many workers from job loss (Dey et al, 2021), but mothers of preschool and young school‐aged children still experienced greater employment disruptions (Collins, Landivar, et al, 2021), in part due to extensive childcare and school closures and the widespread transition to remote learning (Collins, Ruppanner, et al, 2021).…”

Mothering load: Underlying realities of professionally engaged Indian mothers during a global crisis

“…We argued that the mothering load experience is invisible, enduring, and limitless in nature, and the current system of care is thus unsustainable and damaging to physical and mental well‐being. There has been a crisis in care that the COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted (Craig & Churchill, 2021a, 2021b; Landivar et al., 2021; Plotnikof et al., 2020). Awareness of shared experiences (Plotnikof et al., 2020) along with discussions toward policy making would help mental health concerns and implications of mothering load be identified and addressed.…”

Online or In-Person Instruction? Factors Influencing COVID-19 Schooling Decisions Among Latinx Families in Houston, Texas

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The question of how and when to safely reopen schools has been hotly debated since U.S. public schools closed for in-person learning in March 2020 in response to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. In fall 2020, school reopening was fragmented and contentious; in states like Texas, Arkansas, and Florida, schools were required to open their doors, while in many other states, these decisions were left up to local school districts (Henderson, 2021;Landivar et al, 2021;Waltens, 2020). A narrative of equity and racial justice was used to advocate that schools reopen, arguing that the most structurally vulnerable families, low-income and non-White, needed access to this vital service.

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