Sara Elahi does not expect to know if her children’s schools will reopen in the coming months.
After an extensive interview process of various candidates, she found a private educator who will come to her home to professionally educate her two children during the first semester.
“Education is the most important thing for our family,” he said. “My children need to receive in-person instruction to really learn and absorb material, and, through no fault of their own, I cannot trust the school to provide that for me.”
Elahi, a consultant in the Baltimore area, said that although the costs were high, she and her husband, a pharmacist, were willing to invest in their savings to provide their children with “uninterrupted education.”
“In our opinion, it will be a long-term investment for our children,” he said. “If they fall too far behind in the confusion, they will catch up forever.” Her children are starting ninth and seventh grade.
Although the additional cost, about $ 2,800 a month, will affect family finances, Elahi said that he recognizes that having the option is a luxury that few can consider.
As the education dilemma continues to intimidate millions of parents, some with the means to cope with the high costs are hiring private educators and tutors, an option experts say few can afford and will likely widen an already evident educational gap.
Some systems, such as those in Los Angeles and San Diego, have already announced that they will go online, but many others are still grappling with how to proceed between in-person learning, online instruction, or a hybrid of the two.
Agencies that locate professional educators, who are certified licensed teachers, and tutors have reported a sharp surge in interest in recent weeks, said Teresa Lubovich, representative of the National Tutoring Association, which owns Poulsbo Tutoring in the state. from Washington.
Some parents are concerned about sending children back in the middle of a pandemic. But most are even more concerned with the quality and consistency of their children’s education, and many are simply not happy with the options presented by schools, Lubovich said.
Others cannot continue to shoulder the burden of being their children’s de facto teachers, juggling home lessons, video conferencing and full-time child care with work and life responsibilities, he added.
While costs for private instructors are $ 25 to $ 80 an hour, depending on the location and the instructors’ qualifications and experience, parents are “more willing now than ever to sacrifice something to help their students cope. better right now, “said Lubovich.
“Although this is out of their price range for most families, they are leaving out something else for this to happen,” he said. “And that has never been truer than now.”
Rachel Urtiaga, owner of Capitol Park Nannies & Staffing in the Sacramento, California area, said she has never been so busy in her nine years in business.
Before COVID-19, private educators were infrequently used outside of situations involving children with special needs or parents who traveled extensively. Now, families who have never had babysitters or guardians before are reaching out to private educators and other education supervisors, Urtiaga said.
“People are extremely desperate right now,” he said. “Parents have to work, and some have just been overwhelmed in this role as teachers.”
Division of costs
In addition to digging for savings, some families join divided guardians or use supplemental part-time instructors.
Brian Richardson, who is the Midwest regional director for the non-profit organization Lambda Legal, began looking for a tutoring “capsule” with one or two other families to complement his first-grade student attending a public school. from Chicago.
“It is not in any budget, and it is not something we have prepared for, so we are looking to share it with other families to try to make it work,” he said.
The Chicago Public Schools released a preliminary framework for reopening on Friday that calls for a hybrid model that would include two days at school, two days of independent learning at home and one day of “virtual” instruction each week. A final decision on reopening plans is expected in August.
Amid the uncertainty, Laura Reber, owner of the Chicago Home Tutor, which offers private instruction, said she received a lot of calls from parents, as well as teachers who are considering becoming private educators.
“Many teachers are talking about how, if their school requires them to be in person, they may not come back,” he said. “I see more and more teachers saying that they won’t come back if they don’t feel safe.”
While private tutoring is a desirable option for most parents, access is still reserved for a small percentage who can pay the costs, which can be tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Learning pods can reduce costs, because most private instructors charge less for additional children or give small group package rates versus individual instruction. The cost is shared equally per child between the parents. This option has been extremely popular with parents asking about private instruction, many tutoring companies said. But with an ongoing pandemic, they added, most capsules probably couldn’t extend beyond two or three families to keep up with health precautions and avoid liability issues.
Even a group agreement is financially out of reach for many parents, who are forced to follow it, yet their children’s schools choose to operate, regardless of how optimal it is for the children’s learning process.
The learning gap widens
The abrupt transition to online learning in March, coupled with an apathetic summer, left many children behind.
The average student is likely to return to school with only 63 to 68 percent of learning gains in reading retained and only 37 percent to 50 percent of learning gains in mathematics compared to a typical year, according to the projections in a working paper from NWEA, a nonprofit formerly known as the Northwest Assessment Association, and academics from Brown University and the University of Virginia.
The gap widens along racial and socioeconomic lines.
“The exposure to instructional time was different between high and low income schools, so if we consider that in the projections, what we saw was a widening of the achievement gap based on the socioeconomic status of the school,” he said. a co-author of the study. document, Jim Soland, assistant professor of quantitative methods at the University of Virginia School of Education. “Now, if you imagine that parents in high schools are also going out and getting additional resources to pay for a tutor and the like, it’s hard to imagine that that doesn’t further exacerbate achievement gaps.”
An educational analysis by the consulting group McKinsey & Co. found that the average learning loss is approximately seven months, but that Latino students are falling nine months behind and that black students are lagging 10 months.
Private tutors will further widen the gap in education, and those who cannot afford them will continue to lag behind their more favored peers, said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
“We had many children without Internet access, so they were not involved in online learning for much of the quarantine, but this [private tutoring] it’s just going to exacerbate it even more, “he said.
Noguera said he fears that disparities in orientation and instructional support during the COVID-19 pandemic will have a persistent impact for students for years to come.
“It will show up at higher dropout rates and more children who are unprepared for college or work because they did not receive an education to make it possible,” he said.
The cost of reopening
Under the federal CARES Act, $ 13.5 billion was allocated to K-12 schools to help coordinate long-term school closings, purchase educational technology to support online learning for all students, fund activities to address needs Unique to low-income students, improve mental health service and pay for various other plans necessary for optimal and safe learning.
The Department of Education has distributed all of those funds, but as of Friday, only 2 percent of that money has been spent or “reduced” by the states, the Department of Education told NBC News.
This means that the money has yet to reach many needy school districts that are struggling to come up with a reopening plan.
The decision to reopen schools, in large part, comes down to cost. A study published in June by the School Superintendents Association and the Association of School Business Officials International estimated that it will cost school districts nearly $ 1.8 million on average to reopen.
The projected costs, divided between health monitoring, cleaning and disinfection; additional staff members to carry out health and safety protocols; personal protection equipment; and transportation and child care – combined with guidance and suggestions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Advocates of education say schools will need tens of billions of dollars more from the federal government to be able to reopen throughout the school year.
In addition, several states and the District of Columbia sued the Department of Education and Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, for guidance that, according to the lawsuit, it would reallocate some of the money from the CARES Act intended for public schools “to private schools rich, without considering any of the private schools, the needs of the schools or the available resources or the damage that these reassignments cause to the public schools. “
Financial unknowns are fueling more anxiety. And as schools consider their options, more parents are considering alternative options.
Sara Elahi said her heart goes out to the parents who are still waiting to hear from the schools, but says she is thankful that she was able to accommodate their children. She is not sure if she will continue to use the private educator during the second semester.
“If there is anything I can do to help them stay on track, yes, no doubt, I will,” he said. “Any parent would.”
