We as a community of parents working to help educate our children during these unprecedented times, ask that you hear our concerns. We are grateful for the many professionals at Oakwood City Schools working to help continue a high level of educational standards, but we also ask that the district allow parents a format to provide feedback. We also expect that the district will respond with empathy, understanding, and support for parents and students. Each family is impacted in unique ways by the pandemic and a "one size fits all" approach is not working for many of us. Some of the family dynamics we are facing include both parents working full-time, having multiple children in different grades, children on IEP’s, single parenting, being on the front-line of fighting this pandemic, or facing illness ourselves. We hereby request the following:

On the topics of Related Arts. We ask that the district officially announce that Specials/Related Arts assignments are all optional. This is consistent with what other district in the state have done to try to lessen the burden on families. Some of us are extremely overwhelmed just navigating and completing the core classwork and the added stress these assignments place on families is not in our best interest at this time. We appreciate the lessons and recognize the importance of these subjects, but in a time of crisis some of us cannot do any more right now. We would like the related arts lessons to be delivered in a way that is more accessible so if we do find ourselves capable of completing some of them, less time is wasted navigating to the assignments. The assignments should be delivered in a way that the children can access them on their own. Lastly, we feel that if a child submits work for a special, the specials teacher should provide feedback to that child to acknowledge their effort.

We appreciate that teachers are providing extra assignments for when children need more structured activities, but we request that these extra assignments be clearly marked as “optional”.

When new content is introduced in a subject, we request that teachers record themselves teaching that lesson before expecting children to complete online assignments. Links to these video lessons can be provided so students can learn the new material from his/her own teacher rather than relying on a website to teach them new material.

We request that an online survey be distributed to district parents on an urgent timeline so that the district can gather feedback, be made aware of unique challenges some families are facing, and take an approach of continuous evaluation and improvement of content delivery. Much could be learned from asking us what is working, what is not working, and how each of us are being uniquely impacted.