Education Week - September 2, 2020 - 16

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Will Learning Pods
Be Only for the Rich?

Pods must be accessible to all

By Bryan C. Hassel
& Sharon Kebschull
Barrett
HASSEL is the copresident of Public
Impact, a research
and consulting firm.
KEBSCHULL BARRETT
is the vice president
for communications at
Public Impact.

o exhausted or worried parents
deciding whether to send their
children into school buildings
this fall, "pandemic pods" may
look like an appealing way out.
Keeping their boys and girls at
home learning alone may be
better for physical health but not for mental health,
and the arrangement is difficult or impossible for
many employed parents. Equally undesirable is the
greater risk of children catching and spreading a
potentially deadly disease from a larger number of
people at school.
Some parents are creating home-based, closed
groups of a few families' children to learn together
under the rotating supervision of parents or a paid
supervisor. Pods could keep students' learning
and social-emotional development on track while
helping protect their and their teachers' health.
But if pods are exclusively organized by
parents and those parents are disproportionately
well-off, this approach will inevitably further
widen economic and racial gaps in learning
opportunities.
Lower-income families are in fact more likely to
need pods because the parents are more likely to
have to go off to work. According to a study from
the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of
Chicago, 63 percent of jobs cannot be done from
home, and these jobs are disproportionately lower
paid.
Even if they can arrange adult supervision for
a group of children, lower-income families may
struggle to provide spaces conducive to learning
in their homes. The KidsCount Data Center
found that as of 2018, 14 percent of children live in
overcrowded households.
Communities should not make families choose
between work, health, and their children's
learning.
Instead, all students and their families deserve
the opportunity to join a pod, and for that to
happen, community leaders must step up.
Community groups can play a big role in meeting
this need.

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 2, 2020 | www.edweek.org

The challenges would be huge, but here's how
this could work with leadership from a mayor's
office, a communitywide nonprofit, or school
districts themselves:
First, district leaders must immediately survey
parents to identify interest in a pod versus staying
at home, so they can plan for the true need
rather than assuming they must create pods for
all students. They should prioritize placing the
children of parents who must work in person and
the most educationally vulnerable students.
Second, communities must identify all the spaces
and adults available to supervise these students
while they learn through remote instruction-and
be creative! After using space in school buildings
(with the need for physical distancing taken into
account and not restricted by the school's usual
grade levels), consider local organizations and
businesses willing to sponsor one or a few pods.
Focus first on existing organizations such as the Y,
Boys and Girls Clubs, and local community centers
and camps for both spaces and staffing. But look
beyond those for space-such as restaurants that
have closed for good and religious organizations'
buildings (which already have food-prep areas
and restrooms), as well as libraries that are closed
indefinitely.
Within these options, leaders must precisely
identify the number of available slots for students
given space and power-outlet needs, negotiate use
arrangements, and mandate a consistent set of
safety and hygiene processes.
These partnerships, plus creative thinking,
can also ease the effort to hire enough adults to
supervise the students. Of course, districts can
look to current teaching assistants and substitutes
but then should turn to existing organizations
that serve youths and either have underused-butfunded staff or already have the means to recruit
and screen adult supervisors.
Finding enough people to supervise learning
for some portion of 50 million students will not
be easy but may not be as crazy as it sounds. For
example, AmeriCorps has 75,000 volunteers
(who receive stipends) each year; the Boys and

Girls Clubs have 68,000 adult staff members and
457,000 volunteers.
And communities can look for ways to reduce the
number of staff needed, such as increasing pod sizes
safely by keeping siblings together regardless of age.
Of course, no organization or individual would
be forced to participate, given health risks and
other concerns. But many would likely respond to
this call to action.
Third, fund these pods through a combination
of redirecting existing staff and funding streams,
tapping pandemic-related state and federal
support, and accepting contributed time, staff, and
space from community groups. Extra costs may
include upgrading internet access and electrical
capacity at some venues and providing more masks
and cleaning to meet public-health guidelines.
Fourth, districts must assign students to pods.
Transportation feasibility and keeping siblings
together to reduce viral spread are considerations,
as are racial and economic diversity.
Finally, once the pods are established, districts
would need to carefully spell out expectations and
communications. Each pod's supervising adult
must ensure that student work is uploaded daily-
including photos of work completed by hand-and
communicate often with teachers about student
progress, challenges, and possible solutions.
Schools with strong teaching teams would have
an advantage as the teams could share the load of
maintaining this extensive communication. Teams
have more flexibility to share tasks according
to each person's strengths and schedules. This
arrangement may ultimately benefit teachers
who, during the spring's at-home learning, were
overwhelmed by the needs to stay in touch-often
at all hours-with students learning remotely and
to find those who failed to show up online.
Notable examples of district and community
attempts to provide spaces and staff for pods for
lower-income families are beginning to pop up,
such as a district-led effort in the Adams 12 district
north of Denver, a city-led undertaking in San
Francisco, and a nonprofit-led plan by The Mind
Trust in Indianapolis.
Organizing small multifamily pods would be an
enormous task but one that optimizes students'
learning, physical health and safety, mental health,
and family economic stability-and would be
worth the time it takes given the likelihood of a
drawn-out pandemic in which school buildings
may need to close repeatedly and possibly for the
entire year. Communities eager to show their
support for the people hardest hit by the pandemic
can undertake this planning knowing that together
they can make an enormous difference.

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Education Week - September 2, 2020

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