For lower-income families, and particularly people of color, it is not always as easy as “just” hiring a teacher. We gravitate towards what we know, right? If we have the opportunity to teach our kids and hire someone to teach them, would we do it? The ability to financially provide in this way is often a more accessible option for white parents. But in practice, they will exacerbate inequities, racial segregation, and the opportunity gap within schools.” Clara Totenberg Green, a social and emotional learning specialist in Atlanta Public Schools, offers this insight in her New York Times Opinion piece on the debate, “At face value, learning pods seem a necessary solution to the current crisis. The special needs population isn’t even considered in much of the discourse I’ve seen. The idea, a phenomenon catching a little heat, shines a light on what is already happening in schools: socio-economic segregation and academic segregation. As parents, we are charged with creating opportunities both inside and outside of the classroom which includes introducing them to other children who are different from them in race, gender, and so on.
#Might time up your pandemic pod professional#
How is this intent any different than what we’ve been doing since March - trying to keep our kids engaged, at home, and healthy, and keep them learning their ABCs and phonics? Or any different than what most parents want for their kids - to nurture and educate our children in a safe environment and right now, that environment is in this new kind of homeschooling environment?įor me personally, these pods don’t feel any different than what we’ve been doing for the last three months, except there is a hired professional (like the teachers who teach in public schools) to teach in-home.
Or perhaps even that parent, that teacher, looks like me - a Black, educated mom who wants to teach her children about what it means to be studious, curious, and to respect others. But so are “ pandemic pods,” a kind of teaching which allows for kids to join other kids within their community in a homeschooling environment taught by a private teacher - an option that typically white parents subscribe to. The pressure to commit to one or some hybrid of distance learning and in-classroom instruction is real. Is that enough? Should we also keep them home for the entire school year? We’ve taken our kids out of their after-school program run by the YMCA as a precaution and, we hope, a means to limit their exposure.
Our district has made it clear that the first option on their three-pronged list of possibilities is that they expect to have kids attend school five days a week, beginning September 3rd when our schools reopen. We want to make memories (this is their first introduction to elementary school they’ll be entering as kindergarteners), but we’re not sure the memories are worth the risk. In my household, we’ve been debating what we want to do with our kids this school year - keep them home as we wait out the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine, or take a chance and send them to school.
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