COVID-19 & Minorities in Low-Income Families

Who would have ever thought we would face a global virus that flipped the world upside down, due to COVID-19, many minorities hold low-income jobs in restaurants, hotels, cleaning office buildings, etc… this has a ripple effect because they have higher risks of catching the illness. Parents/Guardians can’t pay for the internet, technology, etc., so remote education becomes impossible. Not to mention that many parents of school-aged children in Boston, Massachusetts, and Seattle, Washington do not use English as their first language.

Education

The effects of COVID-19 on minorities in low-income families are detrimental to educational success. They already start out at a deficit and with the missed opportunity for learning that the quarantine has caused, these students will be further behind. On top of that, studies have shown that minorizes are at higher risk of catching the illness. The fact that those students are behind is no fault of their own. The system has always been set up against them. By that, I mean that the teachers who are teaching a lot of our students are not equipped with the resources needed to effectively educate the many students they face who need much more than a single teacher to address their needs and students are not able to learn from them.

In a city like Boston and Seattle, these effects may be less detrimental than they are in other poor school systems because these cities possess enough resources to be able to feed all the students and provide a computer to each and every student in the school system. 

Also, their learning is not proportional to kids from wealthy families because they don’t have as many resources because most of these programs require payments which low-income families cannot afford and officials tend to pick the Caucasians over minorities due to the fact that they feel that they are more fortunate and have more potential in life.

Future Impact

This will cause a lack of experience in terms of skills that are generally developed during a student’s time in school. Some of these skills include public speaking, analytical skills, and problem-solving. For younger kids, virtual learning will create a lack of social interactions with their peers, which translates to single-minded perspectives on important topics. Minorities in low-income families may not be working to their full potential, and those students may not have the physical support they need from teachers or parents and will begin to lose interest in school. Resulting in their feeling like they’re less fortunate in life due to being a minority in a family that is income deficient will discourage these students from achieving their goals.