Popularity of education pods soars as parents seek school solutions for their students.
Published: August 11, 2020
By: Jennifer Jhon
With the start of school looming in South Florida, parents are scrambling to find solutions to their distance-learning dilemmas.
Micro schooling and “pandemic pods” have grabbed headlines as families band together to find structured learning alternatives for their children.
Lara Behrmann, a teacher and owner of Get That Grade Tutoring, has been working outside of traditional schools for years. “I’ve worked with two homeschool co-ops over the last five years, smaller groups, and then I’ve worked with a couple bigger, 40-kid micro schools. I do a lot of online and virtual schooling because we support a lot of junior tennis players.”
But she’s never seen anything like the current environment. “It’s been very eye-opening. Since July 10, I’ve had over 600 phone calls. … I have over 400 kids signed up with my company for this coming school year.”
Summyr Siegel, a former elementary teacher, said she started seeing social media posts as soon as schools announced they would be 100 percent virtual in the fall. “The posts started coming in: I need to find a teacher to help me during the day, I need to find a place for the kids,” she said. “So I started the Facebook group.”
Her group, Matching Students with Teachers – Broward, has almost 2,500 members and pages of posts from desperate parents.
“The Number 1 thing that I hear most often is that there’s no time to do this, there’s people who work,” Siegel said. “It’s heart wrenching, the amount of people who you can see their frustration in their posts that they make on Facebook. Some I know personally, so it’s even harder to hear their struggle.”
Even if parents have time to teach their children, the dynamic doesn’t usually work, Behrmann said. “The connection that you need to be a teacher, as opposed to a parent, are just such different wavelengths.”
She doesn’t teach her own 4-year-old, but swaps with other teachers. “They call me like, ‘Argh, I don’t know what to do. I can’t get so-and-so to work.’ And I’m like, ‘Let’s trade. I’ll work with your child, and you work with mine.’ ”
Behrmann said for most parents, it’s almost impossible to teach your own child, and that dynamic is putting a huge amount of pressure on families. “All these parents are now suddenly being asked to facilitate their children’s school when usually they have to fight with their kids to do an hour worth of homework a day, and now they’ll have to fight with their kids to keep them in school. It’s going to damage relationships.”
Tutoring can solve that problem, but it is expensive, so many families are forming pods with 4-6 children to reduce costs. Behrmann said the pods range from homeschooling with a personalized curriculum to umbrella schools (with a teacher teaching provided curriculum) to e-learning with district schools. Pods can reduce costs to about $10-$25 per child per hour, depending on the structure and level of instruction provided.
May Silvers, a mother in Cooper City, recently formed a kindergarten pod with parents of three other students.
None of the students adapted well to distance learning this spring. “It’s very difficult. They are so small. There’s no way we can have their attention span for more than 15 minutes,” she said, “and our kids need social interaction.”
The pod is hiring a teacher for instruction at the chosen family home from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday to Friday. But it has been a challenge, she said, to “find the right parent and the right child and the right teacher and the right home.”
Using social media, Silvers found several others in the same neighborhood. The fourth family lives about 20 minutes away. “The host mom is Type A and very, very detailed, so we trust her,” Silvers said. They will be touring the house and setting up meetings with the moms, dads and students, as well as interviewing the teacher together.
“I’m sure there are going to be a lot more things that come, things we don’t know that we don’t know,” Silvers said. “But we have to go in with an open mind and trust and go with the flow and put
our children first.”
Pods offer a lot of flexibility. In Silvers’ pod, the teacher will be teaching a homeschool curriculum that all of the students will follow, although one student is staying enrolled in a Broward elementary school and two others are enrolled in Florida Virtual School Flex.
Another option is enrolling students in a drop-off program designed to monitor and care for kids as they attend classes online. Many such programs are being offered by tutoring centers and aftercare facilities, such as martial arts studios and gymnasiums.
Behrmann is also considering this option. “I’m looking at opening a center in Coral Springs because I have about 15 different people who aren’t comfortable dropping their children at somebody else’s house, but at the same time need someplace to drop their kid.”
Any education solution with outside instruction or supervision will have a cost, and many parents can’t afford to hire a teacher to come to their house or send their children out to facilitate e-learning.
“It’s definitely going to create a very big divide educationally,” Siegel said. “There will be children who are getting nothing, and it isn’t because their parents don’t want to do that, it’s because they can’t.”
She suggested parents look for help through resources such as Boys and Girls Clubs, libraries, community scholarships and free online programs.
Behrmann has created a program to help, called Teach It Forward. “I have a lot of high school and college students who are going to be doing virtual tutoring for free. It will be virtual, it will be extra support.”
She said she is setting up the free resource because “at this point in time, for me, it’s more about helping the community and making sure that the kids do actually get the support and help that they need.”
