Pandemic Pods In Place Of Standard Schools?

With the dangers of in-person learning still considered high risk in light of the ongoing coronavirus, some parents are choosing Pandemic Pods for their kids over common classrooms.

Current Events
A junior high school in Greenfield, Indiana reopened its doors to students last Thursday. However, after learning that an active student was COVID-19 positive, the school was forced to close its doors again only a day later.  The same happened involving a Georgia 2nd grader.  Is there anyone who didn’t see this one coming?

Recognizing that the novel coronavirus is still very present and that the nation has progressed little (if at all) since schools were shut down in March, many parents are understandably concerned about sending their kids into a veritable petri dish of a classroom. That’s why parents across the country are creating Pandemic Pods in place of sending their kids back to traditional school.

Pandemic Pods include 3-5 students in a self-contained network hosted inside a home for shared learning. A parent may invite a few trusted neighbor kids to join their “pod” then agree to share homeschooling responsibilities with the other parents. For example, if Johnny and Jill join Billy and Bonnie inside their Pandemic Pod, Johnny and Jill’s parents would handle homeschooling on Mondays and Wednesdays, while Billy and Bonnie’s parents would be responsible for Tuesdays and Thursdays. That way, each household could still maintain their work schedules while making sure their kids were educated.

Some Pandemic Pods are even hiring their own teachers or tutors to create a virtual school inside the home for the same 3-5 students. Although more expensive, this method has its benefits. The kids could receive a more personalized education from the same accredited teachers they likely would have had in a classroom. Also, the parents could have total mobility to continue working without having to schedule their days around their children.

“If you think of coronavirus as a natural disaster, like a tsunami that has swept over the land, it’s actually left a lot of things intact,” said one father. “The only rule is, you can’t bring a lot of people together in one enclosed space. The teachers are by and large available, the content and the curriculum weren’t destroyed,” so there’s no reason kids can’t go to school — it just has to happen in lower numbers and different spaces, he added.

Another concept of the Pandemic Pod could greatly benefit gravely underpaid teachers. Instead of an educator being hired to teach 20-30 students inside a traditional school, these instructors could host a “virtual” classroom from their own homes or physically visit individual “pods” for several hours each day. They could then charge whatever fee they wanted and be their own boss.

However, children would benefit the most from this new-fangled educational experience.  Instead of having to learn while home alone, kids would have a few friends to share learning and playtime with. The experience would be the same idea of a classroom but on a much smaller scale.

Various services are already popping up to assist parents in creating their own Pandemic Pods. Selected For Families, Schoolhouse, and the San Francisco based Red Bridge School are just a few of the companies embracing the concept of pod learning.

Kids still need an education.  However, they also need to stay healthy and alive.  Joining a Pandemic Pod just might be the best solution for both.

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Parents are choosing pandemic Pods.