Parents in the know, with the dough hire teachers

Think of the movement as the 2020 version of the one-room schoolhouse

Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes.

This goes beyond tutoring. In some cases, families are teaming up to form “pandemic pods,” where clusters of students receive professional instruction for several hours each day. It’s a 2020 version of the one-room schoolhouse, privately funded.

Weeks before the new school year will start, the trend is a stark sign of how the pandemic will continue to drive inequity in the nation’s education system. But the parents planning or considering this say it’s an extreme answer to an extreme situation.

With novel coronavirus infections rising in large swaths of the country, school districts in many big cities and suburbs are planning to start the fall with distance learning, either every day or for part of the week.

President Donald Trump has implored schools to resume in full, and many health experts agree, partly because remote learning went so poorly for so many in the spring. But many local leaders say the health risks are too great. Children do not get particularly sick from COVID-19, but less is known about whether they can spread it to others. School officials also worry about the health of teachers, and districts are daunted by the logistics of keeping students and staff from coming into close contact with one another while indoors.

Parents are worried about health risks, too. But they also are worried their children will fall behind. And they fear they will be unable to work, even from home, while supervising children.

“We had lots of family discussions about what we wanted to do, and is it worth it to pay extra, and we said yes,” said Katie Franklin, who has a 7-yearold daughter and lives in Herndon, in northern Virginia. She is in talks with a few other families to hire a teacher to share. The estimated cost for her family: at least $500 per month.

Across the country, families are gathering with strangers in Facebook groups and friends over text messages to make matches. Teachers are being recruited, sometimes furtively, to work with small clusters of children.

A Facebook group dedicated to helping families connect and learn how to do this drew 3,400 members in nine days, with at least seven local groups already spun off.

“This is a thing now,” said Phil Higgins, a psychotherapist in Salem, Mass., who joined with two other families to hire a woman to create a “pseudo summer camp” for their four children this summer. They are now considering hiring this woman, who normally works as a school-based behavioral specialist, as a teacher for 40 hours per week during the school year. She would help the kids work through their school-offered remote learning.

“We wanted someone who could do a better job at home-schooling than any of us felt like we did,” Higgins said. He said the cost would be about $1,300 per child per month.