Elizabeth Walsh, a Washington, D.C. mother of three elementary school aged children, is determined not to become one of those wealthy white families that abandons urban public schools when the going gets tough, as it's been since the coronavirus shuttered schools for 50 million children more than a year ago.To get more latest in education news, you can visit shine news official website.

But with the vast majority of students still learning virtually in cities across the country - and upwards of 90% in the nation's capital - she is hanging on by a thread."I don't want to generalize, but where we live so many people already have it in their head, 'I'm just using the public school system until fifth grade or fourth grade and then I'm applying my kid out anyway,'" Walsh says about the majority white neighborhood nestled in the northwestern part of the city, where median home prices often exceed $2 million. "I believe in the public school system. I want my kids to go until twelfth grade."

"I think they're going to get into a better college coming from DCPS than Sidwell Friends," she says, referencing one of the dozens of elite Washington-area private schools, in which she estimates at least 50% of the families in and around her neighborhood have already secured enrollment for their children.'

"We have the money to go to private school, but I'm not changing course," she says, unless, that is, her kids don't go back in person this fall.

Walsh is trying to hold out, but anecdotal evidence from cities across the country suggests an uptick in wealthy parents pulling their kids from public schools. While the data lacks demographic details, enrollment in urban public schools is down roughly 4% since schools shuttered a year ago - in some cities enrollment is down by more than 30% in prekindergarten and early elementary school grades. And as white parents increasingly insist on in-person school, leading them to enroll in private options or move to the suburbs, at the same time that many parents of color are reluctant to send their children back in person, it's exacerbating the inequities that already plague urban public school systems.

Like so many other mayors and superintendents of big city school districts, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and DC Public Schools chancellor Lewis Ferebee have promised that schools will be open, in-person, five days a week next fall for families that want the option. But as it stands, 87% of fourth-grade students and 93% of eighth-grade students in Washington were still learning entirely remotely in March. And fall might be too late for some of the parents who have already left the public school system.

Walsh's three children get two and half hours of in-person instruction four days a week at their neighborhood public school. The in-person offering began mid-April.

"What the public schools have done to us has shown us that they are not necessarily going to be there for us," she says. "And what the private schools have shown people is like, 'No, no. You pay us a lot of money and we are going to be here for you. We are not going to leave you high and dry.'"

That's why Walsh has a back-up plan in case her children's school doesn't fully reopen next school year: Relocating to a house she and her husband own on Cape Cod.If something falls through, we will go up there next year and I will enroll my kids in Massachusetts, where they have in-person school," she says. "But I don't want to do that at all."

With the latest federal data showing that less than 30% of elementary and middle school students in cities are receiving in-person instruction, full time, five days a week, Walsh is on the verge of joining a chorus of parents pulling the plug on their urban school systems - a phenomenon that stands to financially handicap districts where enrollment is already down due to the pandemic and further segregate children in cities where white students and students of color are already separated by boundaries and feeder patterns.