NAMPA, Idaho — On Thursday, the Nampa School District (NSD) announced that it will delay the school year by a week to August 24 and require classes to be online. KTVB spoke to two Nampa parents, one of which is also a teacher in the district, about starting the school year online.
"I know it's going to be really hard, to say the least, but I know parents were really struggling with 'Do I send my kids to school? Do I keep them home? What's the right decision for my family?'" Robin Farney said.
Farney is the mother of two Nampa School District students and teaches in the district.
"I think myself and a lot of other parents and teachers had mixed reactions. As a parent, I was really hoping that we could go back just to give the kids something outside of the house, but as a teacher, I was really worried," she said. "I wasn't sure what it was going to look like, how safe it was going to be."
The district will begin the school year online and will reevaluate whether to allow students back into schools every two weeks. But not everyone is happy with the decision.
"it affects work for both my husband and I. We want our kids to be out and learning, we don't want them to be sitting all day long at their desk with this online option," Aundrea Friedly, a mother of an NSD student, said.
Friedly added that she's worried about the quality of education that online schooling will offer.
"I'm not a very good teacher, and they really need that interaction with someone who has the skill set to teach them at school," she said.
For Farney, she told KTVB that she's proud of the NSD's decision.
While she's grateful that students and parents had some experience with online classes at the end of the last school year, Farney said it's still going to difficult.
"It was really stressful, it was really hard to educate our own kids while working full time from home and that causes a lot of stress for us, let alone our kids," she said. "So we are anticipating that and we are already planning out a schedule so that our new normal can be as smooth as possible when school starts back up."
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