WRAL poll: Parents give online learning during pandemic passing grades

Students might not be learning as much remotely as they would in class, but parents give the online instruction effort during the coronavirus pandemic passing grades, according to a WRAL News poll released Friday.

Posted 9:34 p.m. May 1, 2020 — Updated 1:16 a.m. May 2, 2020

Cullen Browder

, WRAL anchor/reporter, & Matthew Burns, WRAL.com senior producer/politics editor

RALEIGH, N.C. — Students might not be learning as much remotely as they would in class, but parents give the online instruction effort during the coronavirus pandemic passing grades, according to a WRAL News poll released Friday.

SurveyUSA contacted 179 parents of students taking lessons online April 23-26 for the exclusive poll. Results have credibility intervals of plus or minus 7.5 percentage points.

Fifty-four percent of parents polled said they believe their children are learning less through online classes than they were before the pandemic closed schools statewide in mid-March. Only 12 percent said they thought their children were learning more now, while 31 percent said the learning is about the same online as it was in person.

WRAL News poll (May 1, 2020)

"It's kind of like a pass to slack off and, you know, not give 100 percent because you can turn your camera off and be lying in your bed half asleep," said Parker Maiorano, a sophomore at Green Hope High School in Cary.

"The last three months have really been ripped away from all of us," said Parker's older sister, Taylor Maiorano, a Green Hope High senior. "It's completely different. I don't get to see anybody's faces, really."

Respondents in the Charlotte area were more likely to say their students are learning about the same now as before the pandemic (37 percent) than parents in the Triangle (26 percent) and Triad (25 percent) regions. Parents in urban areas (22 percent) were more likely than suburban (11 percent) or rural (6 percent) parents to say students are learning more online than in the classroom.

"This pandemic has also revealed a stark digital divide among our families," Wake County school board Chairman Keith Sutton said.

The Wake County Public School System has provided more than 27,000 Chromebook laptop computers and 3,500 Wi-Fi hotspots to help get families better connected.

Even with all of the challenges, educators are getting high marks for transitioning from classroom to computer.

Forty-nine percent of parents in the WRAL poll gave teachers an A for effort. Another 35 percent gave a B grade, with 12 percent a solid C. Only 2 percent assigned the effort a D, and less than 1 percent flunked the effort.

Parents in the Triangle were more likely to hand out a C (18 percent) than those in Charlotte (11 percent) or the Triad (4 percent). Meanwhile, those in the Triad gave out A's more often (57 percent) than the Triangle (49 percent) or the Charlotte area (46 percent).

"I think, for the most part, we've made the most of it," parent Missy Maiorano said. "The teachers have been great with communication. That's really all you can do is communicate, even if it's communicate that they don't know."

Wake County schools Superintendent Kathy Moore said the 2020-21 school year "will look very different" from others, noting continued remote learning could be combined with some sort of social distancing in classes.

Moore said a traditional graduation ceremony in May or June for Taylor Maiorano and other area high school seniors appears out of the question. A working group will decide in the next two weeks whether to conduct a virtual graduation or hold some type of in-person event later, she said.

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