Home schooling exploded among Black, Asian and Latino students. But it wasn’t just the pandemic.

When school buildings were shuttered last year, Torlecia Bates had not given much thought to home schooling her two school-aged children. Like a lot of parents, Bates, who lives outside of Richmond, viewed remote schooling as a temporary inconvenience, and had plans of sending them back as soon as schools reopened.

Then something in her shifted.

Following the murder of George Floyd, Bates, who is Black, had a panic attack. She worried about the safety of her family. And she began to question whether the school her children attended was equipped to talk about racism with young students. Bates, who has a master’s degree in theology and is now a manager in the banking industry, did not learn about systemic racism until she was in college. Would her children have to wait that long, too, to understand the roots of injustice?

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