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It’s mission: lift up the Black and Latino children in their community. “So other families are on our minds a lot.”įor fifteen years, Tree House Books has served as a lending library and community center for North Central Philadelphia.
#Might be time up pandemic pod free
“We are … relatively well-resourced, and we still found this incredibly challenging to pull off,” Joel Nichols, a 39-year-old administrator at Philadelphia’s Free Library. The experience has only ratcheted up their concern for the other families at Lea, the ones they no longer bump into on the school yard. “I thought it was the roughest day for me, but when I heard it was rough for other parents … that’s good for me to hear.” “I like that we can have these cathartic experiences like, ‘How did your day go?’” Jackson said. But, the parents said, there is comfort in commiserating with each other on group texts and meeting for socially-distanced drinks in each other’s yards. The group doesn’t like the word ‘pod,’ but have struggled to find a substitute: neither ‘co-op’ nor ‘learning circle’ have stuck. Over the last few weeks, the parents have found their rhythm, shifting around their work schedules to accommodate their shift as teacher’s assistant. “At the end of the day, it was us again,” Gentry said. No other pods formed from the outreach effort. They struggled to reach parents outside of their social circle without the common ground of the school building, or playground. “But we thought maybe we could do the best we can for second grade.” “We knew we couldn’t solve all the problems of the parents at the school,” said Phil Gentry, a forty-year-old professor of Music History at the University of Delaware. At the end of July, the parents began distributing a survey on child care needs and virus concerns to the other parents of second graders at the school, with the idea of facilitating pods for every family that wanted to be in one. They decided to try and do something about it. The equity concerns, though, bothered them: wouldn’t banding together just exacerbate the gap between their kids and the children of parents harder-pressed to navigate virtual learning at Lea, where 75% of students are considered economically disadvantaged? When it became clear over the summer that their students would not return to the classroom full-time, they started talking about forming a pod. Before the pandemic, the parents had become friendly over chats at the playground, and shared a commitment to public school education. Lea Elementary, the neighborhood school in Walnut Hill. The five families’ children all attend Henry C. WHYY thanks our sponsors - become a WHYY sponsorĪ few students from Lea Elementary School in West Philadelphia gather at a home for online learning with other kids.