Like parents across the country, the 43-year-old single mom in Vallejo, California, spent many days this past spring struggling to help her children navigate online classes. She watched her daughters falling behind, but often wasn't sure how to help.
And to make the situation even tougher, she was unemployed. Burnett says she lost her job in April after asking for time off to pick up a school-issued laptop for her youngest daughter.
Now she's worried her new job could be in jeopardy, too, since the schools her daughters attend will begin the year teaching online once again.
"With them doing distance learning, I have no way of knowing if I can keep a job, and what kind of hours I can work," Burnett says. And even more distressing, she says, is the ground she sees her children losing academically.
"I don't feel like my children learned anything (last spring)," she says, and she fears the new school year, which starts August 17, will bring more of the same.
Some of the nation's more than 56 million K-12 students are thriving in the new remote learning environment. But the shift toward distance learning during the pandemic has exposed long-simmering inequities throughout the US education system, highlighting digital divides along socioeconomic, regional and racial lines.
Millions of school-age children live in households without home internet service, high-speed internet, access to computer devices or help from parents who know how to use them, an expert at Duke University told reporters this week.
"About 8.6 million children, K-12 age, do not have the necessary equipment at home to participate in online learning," says Kenneth Dodge, a professor who studies early childhood development. "That's about 1 in 6 children in America."
And parents like Burnett who spoke with CNN say they're worried for their children's futures as the school year approaches. Some say they're desperate to help their kids, but unsure of where to turn.
"When you make a choice for the world, it needs to fit the world, not just certain groups of people in it," Burnett says. "I feel like decisions that are being made by the government right now, they don't impact some people as much as they impact others."
This essential worker tried to watch her son on a webcam
She couldn't stop going to her job in the strawberry fields, even though her teenage son was home from school and taking classes online. So Carmen, a single mom in Oxnard, California, who asked to be identified only by her first name, set up a camera to keep an eye on him via her phone while she worked.
Seeing her 14-year-old son sitting at a table with his tablet gave the farmworker peace of mind -- until she started hearing from his school.
"Suddenly I started getting messages from his teachers that he hadn't completed his work," she says. "Even though I was monitoring him, I saw him there on his tablet, he wasn't really working. He left a lot of work undone."
Carmen says she's frustrated and doesn'