The ads began popping up on social media almost immediately after the Los Angeles Unified School District said the campuses would be closed for the start of the school year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are looking for a TA / College student to help with virtual learning in LAUSD for the new school year. Parents are FMH. The children are fifth, third, and potentially K. We are starting a learning group with another family. Any TA on the west side … looking for a job?
“ISO: Teacher / Tutor for 2nd grade and a little Kindergarten if possible. It would be open to house a very small capsule in our backyard. ”
“I am looking for a TA or tutor to help facilitate remote learning with my 1st grade and 5th grade twin students. I am thinking 3 to 4 hours a day, 4 to 5 days a week … An added bonus: I am a very good baker. “
With most California schools closed for the foreseeable future, families with financial resources are rushing to hire tutors and teachers to augment distance learning with children individually or in small groups in their spacious courtyards or houses, creating a craft industry. overnight coronavirus: “learning capsules.”
Such cohorts of families, neighbors, or classmates result from parents who have to return to work entirely and can no longer continue studying and the pressure to supervise online learning alone. Instead, they are reinventing education on their own terms to keep their children on the academic and social path.
Disgusted with the quality of her son’s distance learning at Millikan Middle School in Sherman Oaks, Maryam Qudrat, a teacher at Cal State Long Beach and co-founder of the Concerned Parents LA group, said she is considering joining resources with parents to bring parents together. children. and hire teachers.
Fabielle Covington, a stay-at-home mother in Castaic, is looking to hire a guardian for her son, who is entering second grade. “The whole Zoom thing didn’t work for us,” he said.
But these accelerated moves could further exacerbate the equity gap between rich and poor students, some education researchers say. Neglected Latino and black students, those without full digital access, English learners, and those with disabilities will be left even further behind.
Additionally, low-income Latino and black families disproportionately suffer from COVID-19 infection. Students in those communities are less likely to have a family environment conducive to learning, and some parents say they are afraid to allow outsiders to enter their homes.
But students learning in person with a teacher “are gaining the emotional and social development of being together physically, and hopefully, in isolation, that children are not doing it in isolation,” said Janelle Scott, an education and UC Berkeley African American Studies.
Education officials recommend against podcasting.
“The ‘capsules’ in person do not align with current public health directives against meetings with people who are not part of your home,” said Los Angeles County Office of Education spokeswoman Margo Minecki.
How are the pods?
Although some families and students have adapted well to online learning, the learning module movement is gaining ground.
Since Los Angeles Unified closed, retired teacher Julie Kohner, who announced her services at Nextdoor, has received five to 10 calls a day from parents, she said. Families, many of them with kindergarten or first grade children, have asked for individual or group tutoring of five to six children, who would meet in one of their courtyards or on the Kohner Bel-Air playground, which they say she is set up with 6- standing tables. Everyone would wear masks, he said.
Kohner plans to use the schools’ existing distance learning curriculum (students will remain enrolled in their schools) and expand it with math, spelling, writing, English, storytelling, art, and music. Her individual tutoring rate is $ 60 per hour. But teaching the pod is a new concept, she is still working that beat.
While the tutoring industry is well established, companies are turning to meet the “pod” demand, said Roman Slavinsky, owner and CEO of A + Tutoring.
Compare outdoor tutoring to outdoor dining, with socially estranged children and “fluttering” teachers. Your company’s pod services, which will begin on August 1, aim to complement and take advantage of schools’ Zoom learning. In a likely scenario, he said, after morning distance learning from the child’s current school, the group would meet in a home with a teacher to work with students to master the concepts, ensure homework is done, and provide enrichment activities, such as art projects.
Slavinksy said he is offering “advance” prices for pods ranging from $ 20 to $ 55 per child per hour. Based in the San Fernando Valley, it is responding to requests from Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Brentwood and Santa Monica. Nonprofits also pay the company to provide some tutoring to students who cannot afford it, including foster youth.
Rhea Nandi Stewart and her husband, Mike Stewart, redone their Long Beach backyard when the quarantine began, knowing that they would use this space for social distancing to allow students to come to group projects.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
When closings began in March, Rhea Nandi Stewart and her family renovated their Long Beach backyard and added a new set of sofas to create a space for social visits and group work for their high school son and daughter. She opened her home to three other teens, neighbors, and close friends of her children, whose parents have essential jobs during the day.
“We made the decision to open it primarily for the mental health of our children, and I think it … will help them be motivated” to do school work, he said. “We take a calculated risk. But isolating my kids and having them on TikTok and Snapchat all day without seeing their friends, it no longer made sense. ”
“I couldn’t do that”
But not everyone has a backyard, nor the money to hire a tutor or teacher.
“I haven’t been able to do that because most of my friends don’t want that physical contact,” said Maria Thalia Carmona, whose two children attend Lillian Street Elementary School in South Los Angeles.
“We are mainly working class, we go to factories and take the bus,” said Carmona. “[We] finding more interaction with other people and more surfaces. ”
Julia Ortiz and her three children, ages 18, 17 and 10, sleep on inflatable mattresses at their parents’ Boyle Heights home. During school days, a child works from the living room, one from the kitchen and one from the grandmother’s room. It is difficult to support, and her 10-year-old son is losing interest in school and falling behind.
The nonprofit communities in the Los Angeles Schools, which provides neglect prevention and other services for some 1,000 families in Los Angeles, is working to find and pay for a guardian to help Ortiz’s son remotely, he said. executive director Elmer Roldan. The organization is surveying their families to assess the need for guardians and collecting donations.
But unlike private agreements between families, the organization will meet social distancing guidelines and cannot finance in-person tutoring or capsules.
Also, some families, including Ortiz’s, are not comfortable allowing non-home visitors to enter their home. “We are not going to know exactly where they have been,” Ortiz said. “I don’t want to expose my children to any of that.”
These disparate circumstances could have a major impact on educational inequalities, many advocates say.
“Schools will have to recognize that learning gaps will get bigger … because connecting and logging in children will be much more prepared,” said UCLA education professor Tyrone Howard. Add to that the benefits of in-person interaction and tutoring, and the advantage is compounded.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that the state is working to bridge the digital divide between families, but that there is much work to be done. He applauded parents who share “best practices, not just pain, struggles, and suffering” among themselves online.
Families who depend on schools to help their children with disabilities face a double challenge. Bell’s mother’s son, Joana Rico Carbajal, is supposed to receive speech therapy, but she doesn’t receive that treatment remotely. She worries, but is even more comfortable with remote learning for her children.
In some schools, parents are trying to plan learning that will help all students.
Parents in Highland Park send messages about parent-organized Zoom sessions such as cooking, yoga, and dance parties on Fridays, by email, and share resources on Facebook, in English and Spanish, said the incoming Parent-Teacher Assistant from Aldama Elementary. Vice President Kamren Curiel, who stays at home with her daughters, ages 6 and 5, while her husband works as a doctor.
“It is not going to be easy and we are not going to be good at it,” Curiel said. But for parents who are front-line workers or who don’t speak English, “it will fall to the kids.”
Staff writer Howard Blume contributed to this report.
