School Disrupted: The Impact of COVID-19 on Parent Agency and the K-12 Ecosystem

Kelly Smith (Prenda), Richard Whitmore (Lafayette School District), Jennifer Sutherland (Omnis Education), Adam Newman (Tyton Partners), Casandra Stewart (Homeroom) talk School Disrupted: The Impact of COVID-19 on Parent Agency and the K-12 Ecosystem at the 2021 ASU+GSV Summit.The pandemic wreaked as much havoc on parents and their decision-making regarding their children's education as it did on K-12 schools and districts. Since Fall 2020, Tyton Partner has surveyed nearly 9,000 parents across three time periods to understand the factors influencing the educational choices they made for their children, both in terms of their primary school experience and the “supplemental investments in learning pods, enrichment activities, and other educational resources and apps. This panel will share selected findings from this initiative, including what models and behaviors are anticipated to persist, how those may vary by parents and children socioeconomic circumstances, as well as where parents plan to allocate their financial resources in support of their children's education in the future. Importantly, we will address these findings with a set of stakeholders actively addressing parents' challenges and aspirations through this period and interrogate the pandemic lasting impact on our K-12 community.