On a recent Friday morning, Deanna Nye finished making pancakes for her three kids at their Bridgewater home and said it was time to prepare for the school day.
The kids — 10-year-old twins Tyler and Bailee and 15-year-old Trevor— gathered their supplies. But, instead of walking out the front door, they convened in their makeshift classroom in the kitchen.
With a whiteboard leaning against the wall and workbooks and worksheets sitting in piles, it looked like a scene from the early days of virtual learning that many New Jersey families endured during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Except in Nye’s home, where two of the children are immunocompromised, learning at home represents a lifeline, not a nuisance.
“This is the best thing for my kids,” said Nye, founder of New Jersey Parents for Virtual Choice.
While most of the state’s 1.3 million public school children have happily moved on from the days of Zoom classrooms and Chromebook lessons, a group of New Jersey parents is continuing the fight to bring back virtual options for students who have health problems or other issues that make it difficult to learn in person.
New Jersey Parents for Virtual Choice, a