And I know that we’re already seeing this. The schools get money from the amount of students that are enrolled there. “Do not take your kids out of public school, no matter what. That’s the thing about education.”īut taking children out of the school system is alarming to many educators, who say it will take resources away from the students who need them the most. “These other families for whom distance learning was disastrous need to have some other alternative for their kid because that’s not going to work,” says Julie Schiffman, a white mother and homeschooler who created Ten Toad to help families transition to homeschooling. In some instances, parents are creating the curriculum and teaching it themselves. Some parents are even choosing to take their children out of the public school system entirely, teaming up with a few other families and paying a teacher to homeschool their children. “Because nobody’s about to drop their kids off at a house with someone they’re not comfortable with.” Most people hang out with people like them, around class, around race, around politics and beliefs,” she says. She says the pod issue wasn’t brought to her attention until she wrote an article in Medium about socially just schooling during the pandemic, and believes the pods forming today are representative of a society that is still segregated by race and class.
#Be time up your pandemic pod professional#
So I get that other people are having this conversation, but in the school that my kid goes to, there is no conversation about hiring an adult professional person to come and help take care of or educate your children.” “I’m a middle-class or upper-middle-class person. Griffin is also the author of several books about race and reform in schools as well as a social justice educator and co-founder of the Justice Leaders Collaborative, which educates and coaches groups and individuals about social justice. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences.
“It’s going to also kind of remove that financial burden of saying, ‘OK, maybe I’m not going to have to shell out $300 a week to put my child in some kind of daycare supervision because I can work with this family or this other family or this group of families, and we can see how we can support each other,” she says. Less than two weeks ago, she created a pandemic pod Facebook group for Las Vegas to unite the parents of students in the Clark County School District, which is made up of a majority of Hispanic students.ĭ’Ambra, who is a woman of color, says she believes the answer to the inequity of pandemic pods for parents in middle-to-lower-income groups who can’t afford homeschooling or a private tutor is to band together in small communities to help each other out with weeknight meals, trips to the parks and assistance for kids logging in to Zoom classes. Zurii D’Ambra, a mother of four who teaches at an online charter school in Nevada, is looking to help working-class families find more inexpensive solutions to help their children with distance learning while they are at work. In Las Vegas, where many families work full-time in the casino and food service industries, the Clark County School District recently announced it will conduct full-time distance learning for at least the first semester of the 2020 school year. But it’s sparking an intense debate about the extent to which these pods will exacerbate racial inequality for low-income students who can’t afford to join them.
The main Facebook group, created in early July, already has more than 35,000 members.
Initial research reveals that distance learning in the spring set many students behind, and so parents are creating and joining local Facebook groups to connect with other parents, tutors and educators to figure out how they want to handle their children’s schooling as a new school year approaches. (Design: Nathalie Cruz for Yahoo Life)Īs America’s school districts weigh whether to pursue distance learning this fall, parents around the country are considering forming “pandemic pods,” creating small groups with other families in their neighborhoods and pooling money and resources to hire a tutor or educator to handle their children’s Zoom lessons during the workday. Pandemic pods are sparking a debate about the extent to which they will exacerbate racial inequality for low-income students who can’t afford to join them.