When West Hartford mom Tia Miller decided to look for a “learning pod” for her eighth-grade son so he could work with a few fellow students and receive hands-on help during online learning this fall, she posted a flier on Facebook to connect with similarly interested parents.
Within days, the response became overwhelming.
“That flyer was shared and shared and shared; 100 people were calling and emailing and texting me all last weekend,” Miller said recently. “I just needed this for myself. Now I’ve got a spreadsheet with 127 families on it, and it’s only been a week.”
Learning pods and “microschools” are not new concepts, but they’ve become increasingly popular during the pandemic among busy parents seeking to split the cost of a tutor to help their children with online schoolwork. In some cases, the pods effectively serve as homeschooling, with unique curriculum. In others, the students remain enrolled in their schools and the tutor supervises students’ remote learning based on the curriculum provided by the school.
There is broad variety in what the pods look like. Some include paid tutors or instructors; in others, children might rotate from one home to another during the week to aid in child care and maintain social contacts.
But while pods that include outside instructors are growing in popularity for parents who can afford the added cost, education experts say the trend could widen Connecticut’s racial and economic achievement gaps, particularly if wealthy families decide to remove their children from public schools.
“Connecticut is one of the most segregated states in the country,” said Mira Debs, executive director of Yale’s education studies program. “Despite a lot of ambitious work … there’s a long way to go,” she said. “There is a danger with some pandemic learning pods, with parents unenrolling their children from the public schools, that it is another form of white flight from public education.”
Debs noted recently that her program had received about half a dozen letters from wealthy Connecticut parents asking about recent graduates who could be hired to teach their children at the family’s home.
In a state that is “massively struggling” to create educational equity, Casey Cobb, a professor of educational policy at UConn’s Neag School of Education, also shared concerns about microschools widening the gap between Connecticut’s “haves and have nots.” If families with political connections and wealth stop using public schools, it can be a disadvantage to those students who have no other options, he said.
“It’s a slippery slope, where all of a sudden now you’re talking about potentially voucher-type programs where, ‘Hey, we’re going to educate these six-10 kids in our home; we want our public tax dollars to go toward that instead of toward the school,'” Cobb said. “That’s a very real possibility down the line.”
Cobb said he could not “begrudge parents for wanting the best for their child,” but warned that microschooling may not be as easy as it sounds.
“It sounds like an easy fix, but it’s not as easy to carry out,” he said. “Schools exist for a reason. They provide certain legal protections. They provide support services beyond just academics … school psychologists and special educators.”
Debs said she expected learning pods to grow in popularity not only among well-off families, noting people of “all socioeconomic, racial and ethnic backgrounds are concerned about sending their children back to school.”
“This phenomenon is not just going to be an elite and wealthy thing,” Debs said. “It’s going to be happening in Avon … in Hartford … in New Haven. At the extreme, it’s people hiring a tutor that they’re paying $120,000 a year, but it’s also parents pooling their resources together, hiring an older student as a tutor, working with a church network. There’s a lot of variation to what that looks like.”
Pod parents splitting costs
Miller, CEO of children’s activity and event planning company CreativistaCharm, decided to pivot her business to focus on learning pods, grouping students and matching them with teachers who are background-checked, COVID-19 tested and fingerprinted. The students are still enrolled in their schools, and the teachers help with their online schoolwork.
The sessions Miller offers are three hours a day, mornings or afternoons, for three, four or five days a week, with no more than six kids per pod. Miller said she charges $270 per three-hour day, not per hour or per child. The pod parents decide among themselves how to split the charges.
Melanie Theresa Billings of Middletown recalled a similar experience to Miller’s when she decided to hire herself out as a pod teacher, while her children’s grandparents helped them with their online learning. Billings has already been hired to do a four-hour pod with a small group of cousins, some of whom are doing full distance learning, others of whom are doing hybrid.
“My query [on Facebook] really took off,” she said. “There’s so much interest because parents are scared right now. They don’t feel safe.”
Katie McCabe, a mother of two children in Wilton, said while the learning pod concept has been portrayed as an option only for the “super wealthy” she’s found the weekly cost comparable to that of the local YMCA summer camp.
“Our district is doing a hybrid schedule, but the superintendent has already said to expect frequent closures, and I fully expect everything will go 100% online again, so we chose this route to allow us to secure a regular teacher,” she said.
She said paying for a teacher for possibly only one semester is not as much of a financial strain as leaving her job or going part time.
“I’ve seen other pods where the parents are going to rotate the teacher duties and not pay a teacher, but I assume that means those parents aren’t also working,” she said.
McCabe’s kids still are enrolled in the local school district. Her teacher will use the school’s curriculum and supplement it with other lessons.
“We have committed with our teacher through at least winter break at home, and if somehow things make a miraculous turnaround, I would love to send them back in 2021,” McCabe said.
Becky Anne Ellis of Enfield, who has two school-age children and a baby, said her entire paycheck will go toward child care, including hiring a pod teacher. Ellis, who has a job in the medical field, said she cannot work remotely. In March, when all schools went online-only, her children’s grandparents took turns monitoring their learning.
“We had a very hard time with it,” she said. After dinner, they would try to help the children with homework until 9 p.m.
“It consumed our entire day. The kids didn’t like that, and we didn’t like it either,” she said. “I did suggest to the public schools that they have a remote learning p.m. opportunity. … That option was declined.”
Miller, the West Hartford mom, and other parents say they recognize the concerns of Debs, Cobb and others about the impact learning pods could have on Connecticut’s achievement gap, which is already among the worst in the nation. She said she is contacting nonprofit organizations in Hartford, including Compass Youth Collaborative, Our Piece of the Piece and the Blue Hills Civic Association, to see if they would fund a pods for “high-risk inner city students.”
“Priority will go to those students that did not log in to distance learning since March,” Miller said.
Debs, the director of Yale’s education program, noted some school districts, including San Francisco, have responded to the pod phenomenon by opening up community learning hubs for students in need. She also suggested community-accessible tutoring programs.
“I think that’s a promising way districts can try and equalize some of these resources, and make them more broadly accessible,” she said. “It’s going to be a long year, and if we’re out of school, at some point students are going to need some kind of personal contact.”
Amanda Blanco can be reached at ablanco@courant.com.
