A reason I'm not sending my kid back to IRL school now (that hadn't occurred to me until recently)

Every parent is having to make decisions right now that both they and their kids can live with regarding in-person school. 

I made the decision to not send my kids back to school for the remainder of this school year.

At its most basic, this decision is about the virus.  

But the decision is about a lot more than the virus, and it took me a little while to see this. 

My basic argument in my head was that all this seemed like an awful lot of work and struggle (especially for teachers and staff) for what will ultimately amount to 12 days of in-person school per child (due to the hybrid scheduling). 

In "normal circumstances," the first six weeks of school in August are aimed at establishing routines (that is 30 days of consistent 5-day-a-week school). To me, starting IRL school in mid-April (after Spring Break when everyone is mentally done with school anyway) seemed like an effort in futility. 

But it dawned on me (finally) that my feelings about this futility had a lot to do with what the virus did to all the work G had done pre-pandemic (starting in November 2019) to manage his OCD. 

He had been going to therapy once a week. 

He was dealing with his uniform and his shoes.

He was going to school ok and managing his anxieties.

And then COVID hit. 

No IRL school; no uniforms; no shoes; nothing normal.

No being around unknown people and having to manage his anxiety in the face of them. 

So a lot of those things that set off his OCD haven't been there for a year. 

Which is EXACTLY the wrong thing when you're doing exposure therapy. The goal is to EXPOSE yourself to the things that cause anxiety. COVID made exposure not happen. 

(If I was a better person, I would have forced him to wear his uniform and put on his shoes, but given all the pandemic and all my dad's stuff and all the STUFF, I didn't have the mental energy to fight with my child constantly.)

And part of the therapy is the consistent practice of managing your anxiety in the face of exposure. Consistent being the operative word. 

To send G back to school now for two days a week in a hybrid schedule means to force him to deal with all of his OCD issues for six weeks inconsistently and then have a huge summer break (again, no consistent practice). 

It means to send him back to deal with all his old OCD issues and all the new anxiety issues from the virus. 

Prior to COVID, G would experience anxiety seeing his classmates and peers act out in school and not do what they were asked to do by teachers. How will he handle seeing this happen with mask-wearing or social distancing? 

Last year, he rode the bus home. How will he handle that, being in obviously close quarters with other kids who may remove their masks and hide behind the seat? 

G could barely manage the uncomfortable feeling of his uniform so I'm not sure he could manage 7+ hours of mask-wearing.

I know there are lots of kids who need to go back and have some semblance of whatever they describe as normal. But there are, I suspect, an awful lot of kids for whom going to school before COVID was an emotional labor that they maybe aren't super keen to return to especially because all the COVID protocols will heighten their anxiety even more. 

My kid is one of those. 

OCD itself is tantamount to rolling a stone up the hill to only have it roll back over and over and over again. It is a labor at all times, and I really do not have the desire to intentionally make ourselves Sisyphean in April of the nearly over school year.