Families Navigate the Maze of Pandemic Pods, Distance Learning and Inequity

If you’re a Bay Area parent, you’ve probably heard by now that most schools are starting the fall in distance learning mode. That’s got some parents looking to create or find small in-person learning groups for their kids as they seek to limit their exposure to COVID-19 and blunt the havoc remote learning is wreaking on child care needs and educational norms.

But even as the idea of so-called pandemic pods is catching fire, so, too, are concerns that these arrangements will worsen inequities among students.

Berkeley mom Liana Chavarín said that despite the best efforts of her 9-year-old son's public school teachers, the experience of distance learning during the spring semester after schools were shut down was “absolute hell.”

While trying to keep the preschool she founded and its staff afloat, she was also overseeing her son’s Zoom lessons and homework. She even recruited relatives to virtually tutor him while she worked. But it got to be too much.

“So we ended up just saying, forget it,” Chavarín said.

It wasn’t an easy choice, she said, in part because of the attitudes ingrained in her as the child of Mexican immigrant parents.

“Coming from a background common in immigrant communities, you listen to the teacher. You do the work. You don't question the teacher,” Chavarín said. “ I had to just let that go and say, ‘You know what? We can't do it.’ ”

Instead, Chavarín and her son came up with an individual learning plan and schedule of their own.

With fall approaching, she decided to go even further: She withdrew her son from public school. Even if it were to reopen for in-person instruction, she wants to avoid yet another transition. As a single mom who sends money back to support her parents, she's also worried about either of them catching the virus if school campuses were to reopen.

Now Chavarín plans to expand her preschool, the Berkeley Forest School, to create small pods for her son and other elementary school-aged children in the same boat. She plans to prioritize former preschoolers, other families of color, and less-resourced families. She’s already hearing from parents.

“They just emailed me off the bat and they want to pay double to guarantee them a spot,” Chavarín said.

But she said she isn’t offering enrollment to the highest bidder.

Parents in her preschool pay a sliding scale of tuition from anywhere between $50 to $2,000 per month, and she intends to do the same with the elementary groupings as part of her mission to “center less-resourced families, and families of color seeking a safer space (outdoors) to have community and mitigate risk, since we all know of the inequity in medical care for us.”

While Chavarín’s profession allowed for a fortuitous fix to her child care and educational woes, many parents aren’t so well positioned. The frenzy is palpable. The types of pods and small groupings proliferating through grassroots networks and being discussed on Facebook groups (one hub quadrupled in size to nearly 30,000 members in little more than a week) vary in form. Some are shared child care arrangements, others are more like microschools with tutors and teachers.

By design, however, there is one thing about pandemic pods that remains constant: exclusivity. Who gets in and who's left out isn’t just about money, however; it can be about how strictly your family is quarantining.

When El Cerrito mother of two Andrea Wildenberg heard that her eldest daughter wouldn't be able to start kindergarten in a classroom, she thought, “I just can't do another year of just ignoring her while I sit at my laptop.”

Wildenberg explored joining together with another family to bring in a tutor to teach and also give the kids some opportunity to socialize, maybe in her own backyard.

But she sensed that others might not share the same standards when it came to quarantining. Wildenberg said her family is careful — both she and her husband work from home, but they do take their kids out for hikes and other allowed activities. She thought that didn’t sit well with one mom she courted who had been more strictly sheltering in place.

“After meeting with this one person, I just feel like she's going to say no,” Wildenberg said. “I don't want her to say no. But on the other hand, I think she's going to.”

Wildenberg instead ended up securing a spot for her daughter at the preschool she attended in the spring, which opened a kindergarten program.

Safety concerns can be an even bigger barrier for families with living arrangements or jobs that are perceived as less safe — say, a grocery store or health care worker, or residents of a multifamily household.

While some well-intentioned families have floated the idea of sponsoring other children in their pod, for example by covering that child’s share of the costs for a tutor, safety concerns can thwart such a match.

Nevertheless, Oakland mom Elisa Cecaci supports the much-debated idea.

“I think it's vital that a child with less resources be offered a space, tutoring,” Cecaci said.

Cecaci has been working behind the scenes in online forums to try to get moms — yes, they’re mostly moms — to think more critically about issues of fairness and community. That’s despite the fact that she won’t be participating in a pod herself. One of her sons has Type 1 diabetes. Their grandmother, 72, also lives in the home. Cecaci feared that her son and his grandmother would be more vulnerable to COVID-19, so she quit her lifelong job as a nanny and said it’s unlikely she’ll send the boys back to a physical school until there is a vaccine.

But Cecaci is committed to sticking with distance learning for another reason.

“I think the thing that's really sad for me is that in all the time that all four of my sons have been in school, it has been maybe once or twice that they've had an African American male teacher,” she said. “[My son] has an African American male teacher this year.”

For now, her husband’s income as a truck driver will allow their first grader to continue on — virtually — at the private school where he has a teacher who resembles him. Cecaci is of Mexican and European heritage, while her husband is African American.

Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Brent Stephens acknowledged that many parents feel abandoned by schools and state leaders.

While many public school districts like Oakland Unified and Berkeley won’t endorse families creating small learning pods on their own, some are trying to make it easier for parents to connect by doing things like providing early class lists.

Berkeley is also exploring ways to try and address the inequity inherent in both distance learning and microschools.

Stephens said he’s considering the creation of all-day "fall camps" on campuses for between 50 to 100 students who “receive special education services, students who are receiving English language development services or intervention. And then, it might be possible to also consider prioritizing students who are not right now a part of a pod.”

Meanwhile, Stephens said the district is working hard to improve the distance learning experience, by making it more predictable, interactive and supportive. He's urging parents to try it on for size before opting out.