What’s it like to juggle work and remote schooling? These military moms tell all.
Coast Guard couple Sarah and Jeff Janaro with their daughters, Juliette, 5, and Sophia, 1. (Pea Ridge Photography)
When schools in Washington transitioned to remote learning in March, life immediately got hectic for the Janaro family.
With limited child care options due to COVID-19, Coast Guard couple Lt. Cmdr. Sarah Janaro and her husband, Cmdr. Jeff Janaro, had to alternate days they could telework and also stay home and manage their eldest daughter’s school work.
“For us it was very crazy,” Sarah Janaro told The Spouse Angle. “When we were home solo with the girls, we just had to do the best we could balancing our work and keeping the girls alive, changing diapers, getting them snacks and — I’ll just come out and say it — we did a lot of screen time.”
“‘Sid the Science Kid’ became our schooling.”
Janaro shared her family’s relatable experience on The Spouse Angle’s 40th episode, “Military Parents Prep for an Unusual School Year.” And now that D.C. Public Schools will be meeting virtually through November, the family is still looking for a permanent solution — which will mean paying for child care they weren’t planning on needing once their daughter, a rising kindergartener, was in school.
It’s just one example of how military parents are faced with making some difficult decisions about their children’s schooling and safety for the upcoming school year, often at great personal cost.
Army spouse Kristen Smith at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is adjusting her work schedule for her company, Blog Your Genius, to home-school her seventh-grade son instead of sending him back to his Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) middle school. She said the decision was “challenging” and “difficult,” even though he seems to be adjusting well so far.
Smith, also a guest on episode 40, said her family moved to North Carolina in summer 2019 and picked their house specifically for its proximity to the school. But after a few months of remote learning, it became clear the school “is just incredibly spread thin,” she said, and that her son would do better with his own schedule and curriculum at home.
DoDEA is offering families two options this fall: fully online or in-person, with safety precautions such as face coverings, frequent hand washing, social distancing and a contingency plan if further closures are necessary.
“The idea that they might shut down and open back up and shut down and open back up and then the routines might change as they try to adjust to everything — that idea was just very frustrating to him and he didn’t want to be a part of it,” Smith said.
Instead of prioritizing her work in the mornings as she once did, Smith is making sure her son’s school work gets done, then working during his free time.
“It’s meant a little bit of a reorganization of how I plan my day and definitely reorganized my plans for the fall,” she said. “We’re really fortunate, though, that because of military life, I’ve built a business where I can work from home, and never have I appreciated it more than in this last month or so.”
Janaro is trying to focus on the positive as well.
“We all have such unique situations, and these are unforeseen times and it gets really stressful and emotional,” she said. “So, I just keep reminding myself to show mercy and grace and be grateful for my job — even though that is kind of a point of contention with child care and virtual schooling — and I think there’s not a right answer, so we just have to do what’s best for us and our families and do the best we can.”