Learning pods form to fill schooling gaps amid virus pandemic
Parents look to paid in-home tutors for help
Back in June, Jennifer Tomko first heard the term “pandemic pod.” She had been teaching her 9year-old son at home after the pandemic shut down his school in the Norwin School District in Westmoreland County.
“I thought, ‘What the heck is that?’” she said.
At the same time, she wondered what would her son’s education in the fall would look like.
What it will look like is a pandemic pod. A teacher she found by posting her needs on North Huntingdon’s Facebook page will go to her house to teach Michael and three other children in the dining room, if she can connect with the parents of that many children once she knows who will be in her son’s
hybrid class at school.
“Whether I get other kids or not, I will have her teach Michael on Mondays and Tuesdays.”
The hybrid method — some days in the classroom, some days learning at home virtually — is the option many school districts are choosing. Pittsburgh Public Schools is among them, but it also is providing the option of online learning only.
Education pod parents will share the costs of a teacher, and the costs vary. One teacher in the Fox Chapel School District, who wished to remain anonymous because she wants to stay under the radar, said she is charging $150 a week per child to teach them in her home five days a week. She is taking no more than 15 and said she has had to turn kids away.
She said parents and teachers are stepping into uncharted territory where there could be more challenges than the obvious. For instance, teachers who bring children to their homes and accept pay for the service could be considered to be conducting business in a residential area if someone wanted to make an issue of it.
On Facebook, posts include:
• “looking for a certified teacher or grad student for a group of four second-graders three days a week”
•“ISO part-time teacher, $25 to $40 an hour”
•“offering tutoring”
•“two families looking for a teacher for two secondgraders”
Christine Koman, of Ross, posted her availability for a nanny job on Facebook. She said she found two mothers who want “someone to help their kids in reading comprehension. I don’t have a teaching certificate.”
But she will be working with the girls in a homeschool pod two or three days a week, four or five hours a day, she said.
In O’Hara, Nicole Garofalo Blodgett, who has a son entering kindergarten and a daughter entering second grade, connected with seven other families of kindergartners to bring a teacher to her house five days a week. She said she and her husband decided not to risk sending their children to school.
The teacher is a graduate student who needed a job, she said.
“She will be following the Fox Chapel School District’s online learning program,” she said. “We have the classroom set up in the basement, and we have an outdoor classroom.”
The family’s former nanny will be working with her second grader separately.
“This model we’re doing? I hope it works for nine months but nobody knows. Everyone is doing the best they can with the information they have and crossing their fingers,” she said.
The logistics are hard enough for people of means, but children from low-income families could be left behind further in the world of pods. This is one reason child-care centers have expanded their scale.
In Allegheny County, the organization Trying
Together is working with the county’s Early Learning Resource Center to provide school-day education to older children as an option to parents who cannot afford private tutors or who cannot work from home.
“Many families are looking to child care as a solution,” said Cara Ciminillo, executive director of Trying Together.
Child care offers subsidies for this education alternative.
“We have permission from the federal government to use these subsidies for school-day hours,” she said.
Subsides are available to lower-income families. To find out if you quality, go to the Early Learning Resource Center website at https://elrc5.alleghenycounty.us/.
In Allegheny County, 170 children are on a wait list, Ms. Ciminillo said.
“We have to invest in our children,” she said. “We have to make sure we put enough subsidies into this.”
In the next week, the location of between 10-20 new community learning hubs in the county will be announced, she said. These will be larger spaces that add to the capacity of child care.
“We are right now making decisions about where these will be. They will be free, with tutors, caregivers and food,” she said. “What is still unknown is what the demand will be.”
Parents can sign onto the learning center or call 412-3503577 for more information about subsidies and the new community learning hubs.
Another resource can be found at alleghenychildcare.org.
Into this uncharted territory, tutoring companies are also working to try to help satisfy the demand. One is Varsity Tutors, based in St. Louis, which reports having signed on about 1,300 Pittsburgh-area families as clients since the pandemic began in March, chief academic officer Brian Galvin said.
Varsity Tutors switched gears to meet the demands of the pandemic, he said, adding, “We were built for this.”
The company started in 2008 as a matchmaker of parents and experts for children to “go deep in what they are interested in,” Mr. Galvin said. “We wanted to tap into the expertise that is out there, to get kids excited about learning — like having astronauts teach them about space, magicians teaching magic tricks, having game designers teach them how to design video games instead of just playing them.”
Since the pandemic hit, he said, “We have taken a chunk of what we used to do off the table” to provide the more nuts-and-bolts school curricula. “This is a growing field, and almost every family is trying to figure out what’s going to work for them. It’s been exhausting.”
Another national tutoring service, KidzToPros, based in California, will be offering at-home learning pods using certified teachers across the country.
Ms. Tomko, the North Huntingdon mother, said she is relieved to have a plan, but she is already thinking about a Plan B, in case schools shut down again and Michael is home every day.
“I taught him through the end of the last school year,” she said. “But it’s not the most effective way for him. We had a sit-down with him about our options, and he said, ‘Please send me to school. Please don’t let you and Dad teach me.’”