Disclaimer: This article does not constitute legal advice. If you have any questions about your individual situation it is best to seek the advice of an experienced legal professional.
If you have a child of school age in California, chances are you will not be sending your kids back to a brick and mortar school in the Fall. California Governor Gavin Newsom just announced that almost all schools will be going online in September. Metropolitan areas like Santa Clara, CA and San Diego, CA will definitely fall within this remit. So as a divorced parent living in San Diego CA, Santa Clara, CA or elsewhere in Southern California, your parenting plan will involve you and your co-parent working out how to supervise your child’s education.
In the first few months of lockdown parents and teachers were flying by the seat of their pants as everyone struggled to come to terms with the new normal. Now there is a chance to agree on a more deliberate plan to make pandemic parenting easier on your kids, your co-parent and yourself.
If one or both parents have gone back to work, schooling your child may be a challenging prospect. Fortunately, if you mediate your plan for your child’s education, there are plenty of ways you can find efficiencies in your schedule and learn to delegate to each parent’s strengths, which can greatly reduce stress.
Educating Your Child: What are Your Options?
Parents and children’s situations are so vastly diverse. Is one parent a whizz at math or science or an artist, musician, historian, dancer? Do your children have special talents, and/or do they have special needs? Your co-parent, your kids themselves, and even your friends or in-laws can be resourceful, and can be a resource in your child’s education. The key is the ability to cooperate. It’s more likely that you can get your retired math teacher in-law to assist your kids if you can get along with your ex. Conflict in your divorce can mean missing the opportunity to lean on your co-parent’s strengths as an educator. Due to the pandemic, the reality is that most parents are now educating their children to some degree.
Taking on too much or too little will not help your kids. Mediating your schooling plan involves taking an honest look at your schedule, your ability to help your kids, your budget and other resources. The mediators at BCS have psychoanalytical, mathematical and financial expertise, allowing you to sort the emotional from the practical, and agree upon concrete plans that are realistic.
Both Parents Working
If you’re both working parents you will need a different solution than when one is a full-time caregiver or works part time. You may want to hire a private tutor to supervise your kids, get a relative or friend to support them or enroll them in supplementary online classes or activities.
Homeschooling your Kids
If one of you is a full-time parent, you may decide it’s better to officially homeschool your kids. There will be important documentation to complete if you are going to avail of this option before the school year starts. You will also need to learn to become a teacher, and you may have to overcome ideological differences on homeschooling your kids with your co-parent.
Distance Learning Not Working?
If you’re supervising your kids but finding distance learning doesn’t help them, do you want to enroll them in a charter school? Do you need to delegate your co-parent to support the kids’ learning based on their strengths? (ie a biologist Mom or Historian Dad).
In mediation, parents can learn to see that there are often more options than might be expected. This can help them view their co-parent’s contribution in a positive light and ease the parenting burden.
Who We Are and How We Can Help
We are caring, well-educated mediators who are skilled in applied financial mathematics, the law psychoanalysis, and game theory. We are familiar with the challenges facing families and parents in the West Coast area in cities like San Diego, CA and Santa Clara, CA. We strive to efficiently comprehend your situation and its opportunities for sustainable and agreeable resolution. This may include a review of your parenting plan, spousal support calculations, community property equalization, settlement agreement, and all other aspects of your case. We can either confidentially present you with a private analysis, or mediate the conflict with both of you until resolved. Any resolution you come to will be informed by a deeper analysis of the conflict that can be psychoanalytic and/or more financially-focused. Conflict analysis can result in a more optimized understanding of the net community property, which adds value to the overall estate, benefiting you both. If you are struggling in your marriage but don’t want to get divorced, we offer marital mediation that helps you resolve conflicts over a variety of issues from parenting, sexuality, finances, careers, family, spirituality, and more. Marital mediation is goal oriented, time limited, and practical, and often results in clearly written agreements that are private, but can also be drafted as postnuptial agreements with legal significance if needed. The sooner you can resolve your conflict, the sooner you can begin to craft a sustainable future for you and your children. We work with individuals from several cultures and countries, and can help with national and international relocation issues associated with divorce. Our safe, socially distanced mediations can be facilitated by Telephone, Zoom, Facetime and other videoconferencing tools. We are available 7 days a week and at urgent notice. Please contact us to see how we can help.
Read More:
https://abc7.com/homeschool-school-at-home-coronavirus-classes/6320863/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/us/california-orange-county-reopen-school-no-masks-trnd/index.html