Some districts in Massachusetts hope to provide personal instruction for their most vulnerable students, while in Marin County, California, the school system will deal with small groups of special education students. A district near Denver that begins the year entirely remotely allows small groups eligible for elementary and high school students to receive instruction in classes staffed by neighborhood workers and provided with good Internet access.
San Francisco aims for a broader reach, and plans to transform recreational facilities, libraries and community centers into ‘learning hubs’, where 6,000 students out of a total of 54,000 can go every day to complete their online schooling. Indianapolis will provide similar “hubs” for its homeless students, with school staff helping them with assignments. New York last month announced a plan to provide free child care, saying it was looking for space for up to 50,000 students a day – about 5 percent of its total public school population.
“What we need is a kind of quilt from various sources of care to teach support, among other parents, organizations based on communities, churches and child centers themselves,” said Elliot Haspel, author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and how to solve it. “” But it is not sustainable without Congress passing another important funding bill. “
He added: “What scares me is the idea of the 10-year-olds who will be looking at the 6-year-olds at home all day.”
Ms. Rodriguez has so far recruited two other families for the babysitting co-op she makes, called Child Poolers of Northeast Pennsylvania. She created a Facebook page for it and posted a video explaining her vision: “tag teams” of two to four host parents, who would assume child care at least six hours a week each school day.
The coronavirus breaks out
Back to school
Updated 13 August 2020
The last highlights as the first students return to American schools.
Instead of returning to her job in a nursing home, which she stops in the spring out of fear for her health and that of her children, Mrs. Rodriguez plans to provide food for DoorDash. She also hopes to include her group “child pooling” as a non-profit and one day open a community center.
“I have to leave her with someone I trust,” she said of 8-year-old and 11-year-old sons, who enrolled in an online charter school after the pandemic began because of the online program of the public school seemed so unstructured. “Someone who can just make sure my kids sign up and do their job.”
