Getting her daughter ready for the first day of sixth grade, in a normal year, Lidia Rodriguez would have by now spent a pretty penny on a lunch box, her charter-school uniform and a special backpack, perhaps embroidered with her name: “Sofia.”
But why buy a new uniform if last year’s top still works for a virtual Zoom call? And why splurge on a new backpack when the walk to school is a shuffle from the kitchen table to the bedroom desk?
“I don’t feel like investing … until she actually physically starts,” says Rodriguez, whose home in Tampa will be her daughter’s classroom at least for nine weeks.
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