A new poll indicates a division among Massachusetts parents on whether the state’s schools should focus on bringing more students back into classrooms or improving remote learning.
MassINC Polling Group’s survey of 1,528 parents of K-12 students, conducted from Feb. 8 through March 2, found that 41 percent favored a focus on improving remote schooling while 54 percent believed the focus should be on bringing more kids back for in-person learning.
Schools across the state are working on both objectives to carry on with learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Parents’ views depended on what method of instruction their child is receiving — support for a focus on improving remote learning was strongest among parents of solely remote learners, at 55 percent. Sixty-seven percent of parents whose kids were participating in a hybrid of remote and in-person learning said the focus should be on repopulating classrooms, as did 65 percent of parents of students learning entirely in-person.
A year after school officials first closed their physical buildings because of intensifying COVID-19 spread in Massachusetts, most of the state’s schools have resumed in-person learning at least part-time, while particularly larger, urban districts have remained remote. Many districts are starting to or have plans to transition to full-time in-person instruction.
The Baker administration has recently amplified its push to get more students into classrooms. Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Jeff Riley set an April 5 deadline for districts to phase out remote learning for elementary schoolers, with middle schoolers back in classrooms by April 28.
Districts will be able to apply for waivers in certain circumstances, Riley has said — for instance, if they have been fully remote and need to pursue a more incremental approach, or if a district has its fifth grade classrooms in middle school buildings and needs to start with just grades K-4 in-person. Parents will also be able to opt-in to remote learning for their children for the rest of the school year.
“We’ve always been in touch with the medical community, and they have been urging us now is the time to bring the students back more robustly,” Riley said at a hearing Tuesday on the education spending measures in Gov. Charlie Baker’s $45.6 billion budget proposal.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has clashed with Baker over issues around school reopening and educator vaccinations, is calling for the April 5 date to be pushed back to the week after April vacation, April 26, by which time the union says more school employees will have had a chance to get at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
“By then, it will give the school committees and the local education associations time to renegotiate any plans that need to be renegotiated, and even just to set up the physical space in the buildings, redo the bus schedule, redo the learning models, redo the lesson plans. In non-pandemic times, those things take many weeks,” MTA President Merrie Najimy told lawmakers Tuesday.
Sen. Anne Gobi asked Riley how education officials settled on the April 5 date, describing it as a “line in the sand” drawn “after months and months and months of telling our locals, ‘Do it yourself, you’re on your own, good luck to you.’ ”
In response, Riley pointed to the 10-day planning period that state education officials and unions agreed to before the start of the year, a deal that cut the required number of school days to this year to 170 to give districts and teachers time to plan their operations.
“We certainly think that districts have had the blueprint to go back all along,” he said. “We also know that many districts have already gone back, particularly on the South Shore, a lot of the elementary schools have gone back or are going back in March, long before our deadline.”
Guidance Riley issued to school districts last week says that districts that do not comply with in-person learning requirements or receive a waiver “will be required to make up any missed structured learning time … during this school year, over the summer, or into next school year if necessary.” The guidance also notes the section of state law that “links Chapter 70 funds to structured learning time.”
Gobi, a Spencer Democrat, appeared to reference the language around the Chapter 70 aid to local schools later in the hearing, when she told a panel that included Najimy and representatives of superintendents and school committee groups that lawmakers would be “taking a very hard look” at “this idea of penalizing districts if they don’t don’t seek out a waiver.”
The poll also asked parents how they feel the changes to school this year have affected their children. Half said there’s been a minor or major negative impact to their kid’s academic learning, and a majority also cited negative impacts to mental or emotional health (55 percent), and opportunities to form or maintain friendships (62 percent). Forty-three percent said there were negative impacts to their child’s day-to-day behavior.
Twenty-six percent of parents said they believed their child’s academics were behind grade level, up from 15 percent who said so before the COVID-19 crisis.
(Copyright (c) 2026 State House News Service.