Real-World Practical Field Guide:

How we started a School Pod...
...and you can too!

Overview

How this came to be
End of July 2020: Amidst the COVID pandemic and the decision of Seattle Public Schools to go 'full remote learning' indefinitely, the families of soon to be kindergarteners graduating from our (fully operational) preschool were faced with the impending "doom" of having to provide daycare and instructional help for our kids throughout the day while keeping full time jobs.

It felt daunting...

...We were lucky, privileged, and had a large group of sharp parents working together to be able to set this up. We wanted to share exactly how we did it to make it easier for others to make this happen to help families of all situations.

The only way forward was to put together some kind of co-op pod. If felt daunting. We didn't know exactly what we were doing, but we were desperate to figure it out and we had each other to help support and keep us accountable to come through. We had 6 weeks to pull it together in time for the start of school. We had an unfair advantage most don't have, we had the owner/principal of our Montessori pre-school as one of the parents in the group. We were lucky, privileged, and had a large group of sharp parents working together to be able to set this up. Now that we've made it through a month and ironed things out a bit, we wanted to share exactly how we did it...

...SO YOU CAN TOO!
Who this is useful for?
  • Families that are struggling with managing their kid(s)' remote learning and need help to setup a Pod.
  • Families that have already started a Pod but are looking for ways to better manage it.
Why start a Pod?
Starting a Pod (also referred to as a 'micro-school' or 'nano-school') - even with just one other family - serves the dual purpose of 1) reducing or even eliminating your workday parent commitment to help your child complete school activities so you can focus on your job, and 2) improves your child's educational and social development given the significant limitations of remote learning caused by the pandemic. This saving grace of a Pod is even more of a relief if your job requires you to be out of the house. By banding together with a few other parents, you can give each of you a fighting chance at 'normal working hours' and a normal, balanced life with your family.

Research has shown that the value of a Pod for a child's development is greatest for younger kids (K-2 up to K-5) as these early stages are more about building foundational skills, dexterity, and social/behavioral discipline...it comes as no surprise then that this age group is less able to effectively learn/focus on a screen for prolonged periods of time. In our case, we had kindergarteners - starting real school for the first time. Given these unprecedented circumstances, the kindergarten teachers from our schools running the remote classes were very understanding and even supportive of our Pod and were ok with us attending only 1-2 hours of remote school a day leaving the rest of the day open for our own teacher-led, in-person experience.
Notes and Disclaimers
Note: As we went along, we discovered that many resources have arisen to aid parents in constructing Pods (some really strong ones are this Facebook Group and the organization behind it - Pandemic Pod) which is really awesome. Our goal, here, is to supplement resources like these with actual, real life examples and learnings from how our group of parents orchestrated an in-home, teacher-led Pod.

Disclaimer: This is a practical guide that's based on our Pod experience and how we're getting through remote learning amidst the pandemic. It is not to be considered legal advice and you may have differing perspectives on handling COVID-related policies, etc.
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And, a special thanks to all the parents and teachers in our Pod that made this resource possible!

Initial Setup

What can I expect?

It will take at least a few weeks to over a month to get started

It took us about 2-3 weeks of planning and interviewing to hire a teacher and the teacher may need some lead time in order to give 2 weeks or more notice at their current job if needed. If you're not going the teacher route, it may still take some time to find families to join in that share enough of the same goals/schedule.

It's an evolution

Once your Pod starts, the first month will be figuring out what's working and what's not - both schedule-wise and kid-learning-wise. Don't expect for it to go perfectly the first month and there is likely to be reduced learning during this time as well. It's more about the parents, kids, and teacher(s) adjusting to this new way of doing things and then you'll get more settled in with a routine/structure that works.
Finding Pod families to go in together with

Parents of kids leaving existing school/class

In our case, we were lucky to have been going to a pre-school with a group of kids graduating to kindergarten at the same time with the parents all being within 15 minutes to the school. With all the class events and child pickups over the last year+, we already knew each other well enough and had similar goals as we bought into the philosophies and curriculum at our school (a Montessori school). If you're less connected to the parents of your existing class, you could reach out to your teacher for the other parents' contact info. Chances are, your teacher would have some insight on your situation or been asked by others as well to help connect. One advantage of this approach is that there's one less dimension of uncertainty about how the Pod will go because your child already knows the other kids from before.

Parents of kids in upcoming school/class

Had we not already been well acquainted and aligned with parents from our previous school, we would have reached out to our upcoming school for a list of parents with kids in the same grade that were in close geographic proximity to us to see if we could form a Pod together. Then we would have cycled through families until we got a small group together that we felt we were aligned enough with the goals/priorities listed below. Our school district uses Microsoft Teams for conference calls with all the parents of a particular grade which also enables side-conversations for like-minded parents to connect about Pod possibilities. Once school started, our elementary school teacher actually collected and published parent info into a directory so that parents can connect with each other for various purposes. Chances are, your school does something like this or would be willing to if asked. The big benefit of this route is that there's just one remote curriculum/schedule to deal with.

Parents of kids 'next door' or family friends

If none of the above had worked, we might have considered partnering with neighbors that also had kids and try to go in with families that were as close together in age as possible...or if we had friends that were within 30 minutes with kids that were close enough in age, we would have tried them.
Agree to the goals/priorities

Teacher-led or parent-led

Choose whether you want to be teacher-led or if you're taking turns covering as parents. We had 10 kindergartener students - fairly distributed as to what schools they would go to - at most, only 3 kids would have gone to the same school if school were starting normally. We decided to search far and wide for a qualified teacher as long as we could with the parent-led option as the back-up, as managing all the different remote programs all-day would be difficult vs having a single teacher run their own curriculum. If you're parent-led, it's easier to be with a group of kids that are in the same class, school, grade, so there's only one curriculum to manage yourself.

Size of the student groups

We initially thought it made sense to split up into 2 groups of 5 based on geographic proximity and to have fewer kids to manage. Ultimately, we decided to do one large group of 10 in a single parents' basement as
  1. the kids were all together and getting more diverse interaction with each other
  2. only one set of parents had realistically enough space for 5 or more kids in room together (with a dedicated bathroom as well)
  3. the cost would be further reduced per family
  4. it would be easier to cover watching the kids should a teacher be sick or need a few hours for an appointment, and
  5. all our kids were already going to school together in the same preschool following strict guidelines sanitizing and wearing masks without any outbreaks and so we were comfortable with them being together.

Day coverage

All of our families' were dual income households. Some had earlier workday schedules and some later. Therefore, our ideal schedule was 8a-5:30p, but we were prepared to trim off the edges depending on what our options were.

Blend of remote vs in-person

This will depend largely on how strong the remote program is, how strong your onsite teaching is, and the age/maturity of your children. For the parents in our group, we were highly focused on ensuring our kids were getting the live social interaction and discipline (such as learning to take turns with other kids without the additional tech friction).

Curriculum approach

Align on what type of learning is important and how you want to go about it. We wanted the kids to do projects as a group, but have individualized support for various subjects so that each child could learn at their own pace. Our parents wanted the kids to be off screen as much as possible to avoid over-stimulation and interact more normally with each other and the teacher. We set aside time for individual work and group project work with various themes (e.g. a 2-week long theme learning all about apples - the life cycle of an apple, apple tasting, making apple prints, dissecting an apple, and an apple oxidation experiment).

Where to host it

This was an easier decision for our families as there were really only a few families that had the space to host the kids in a way that was separate enough from the rest of the house and that was more centrally geographically located. Generally, it's easier to have one family host so you can establish a stable 'classroom' environment where kids can leave things/supplies. To figure this out we plotted out each family's home location on Google Maps and had each list what kind of space they had available. This made it easier to choose.
Setup a cadence to do a parent check-in via video conference

During Setup

We decided to meet weekly on Monday night at 8p (once most of our kids were down). We carried a weekly agenda (a channel we posted topics to discuss in Teams). We used someone's work Zoom account as it works way more reliably and robustly relative to Microsoft Teams (or Slack).

Once Settled

Once we started getting confidence in the process and had fewer topics to discuss, we moved to bi-weekly Zoom calls. We thought we could handle any issues that came up over Teams and if necessary, we could call an impromptu meeting at our usual 8p time. So far so good!
Assign people to own tasks
The only way to succeed with busy schedules was to divide and conquer and come through for each other. So people that were most passionate or proficient in a particular area volunteered to handle a particular task.

Communication

Pick a communication platform

Non-urgent, ongoing communication (Teams or Slack)

Teams or Slack - Teams won.

We started by using classic email threads - this quickly became very disorganized and after a week or 2 of this we had to switch. I use Slack religiously for work and find it works much more smoothly and intuitively than Teams. HOWEVER, Teams gives a lot more away for free (like video/conference calls) and has file-storage built into the experience (no classic structured file storage in Slack) - super convenient for all the things we need to collaborate on. Teams is far from perfect and is quite clunky/unintuitive in some places, but it gets the job done well-enough...and it's free for the functionality we needed (Slack was not if we wanted video-chatting as an option).

Important setup notes:
  • You need to setup Teams as if you were an organization (not a consumer), otherwise you won't be able to use the mobile app (which is key to be able to access Teams any time or place).
  • Teams notifications settings on your phone are difficult to differentiate between channels and between different Teams (especially if you use Teams for your job or kid's school as well). Some people turn them off as a rule, so you may not be able to reach everyone in a timely manner.
  • Use Zoom video conferencing over Teams Video Conferencing if you can. We were lucky to have someone have a Zoom account from work that we could use for the group. Zoom's video quality and mature feature set greatly streamlines the video experience.

Urgent, direct communication (Group Text Messaging)

Whenever we need to quickly figure out a situation (e.g. we had to close early for air-quality from wild-fire smoke), report if someone's more seriously sick, or if the teacher has an issue - we do this via text message to ensure everyone sees it. We initially setup a Google Sheets spreadsheet that had each parent's contact info so everyone could contact any parent and to setup the initial text message groups.
Teams channel setup and structure

Team setup - 2 separate 'Teams'

We broke Teams into 2 separate 'Teams' one for just the parents and then one for the parents AND the teachers to communicate with each other.
  • You need to setup each Team as 'private'. This will ensure that when you invite each person via email into each group, no one's in the wrong group and sees potentially sensitive information. Teams doesn't warn you that by creating a separate 'Team', if one of the other Teams is set to 'Org-wide' anyone added to new Team will also be added there. This could be bad... → that's bad Teams - very bad!

Channel structure

We setup the channels much like this 'how-to' is categorically setup so we could naturally have discussions and store files on each to stay organized:

Files and Notes

We used the following channels to hold various documents/links:
General
Finances
  • Simple parent expenses tracking spreadsheet that we square up monthly
Instructor
  • Job descriptions, teacher candidate resumes
Logistics-Operations-Legal
Communication Rules and protocols
The communication rules were that anything less urgent or general was communicated in Teams and anything urgent/emergencies were communicated through group text messaging so everyone was more likely to see it.

Instructor

SO - as mentioned in the overview, we were super lucky to have a Montessori school owner/principal as one of our Pod parents which made finding an instructor way easier and boosted confidence throughout the whole process. We leaned on her network to help find candidates and we ultimately went with someone she knew. If you don't have someone who works in education in your group, there are ways to source a teacher and we've included a variety of resources to help you post, interview, and set policies, schedules, and curriculum with your teacher.

This is as great of an opportunity for the teachers as it is for the families looking for them.

An important note regarding finding teachers/caregivers during COVID: for many teachers, running a Pod is a really great opportunity. Some qualified, but young/less-experienced teachers may be able to get more direct, expanded teaching experience. Some teachers may have been furloughed or laid-off because of reduced school demand and a Pod could bridge the gap for them. And finally, for many teachers, the amount of income that's possible for privately operated Pods is much greater than what they could earn in established schools/organizations. This is as great of an opportunity for the teachers as it is for the families looking for them.
Places you can find instructors
  • Your existing teacher's network: ask your existing teachers if they know anyone that would be interested in running a Pod, chances are they'll know someone or know someone who might know someone.
  • Your upcoming school's faculty/teachers: many of their network have experienced furloughs and lay-offs, they'll likely be more than happy to help connect you to qualified instructors.
  • Previous nannies/daycares: we actually hired one of the parents' previous nanny who's going to college to get a degree in education to cover the afternoons as a part-time support teacher. The known quantity of someone's experience with a nanny can increase the confidence in the candidate working out.

Services

General Matching Services Nation-wide
Seattle Area
  • Weekdays - https://joinweekdays.com/, Weekdays is an instructor/care-provider match-making service supporting Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and continuing to expand. They take 10% of your monthly tuition spent on the provider. You can get a feel for the programs they provide here and also use it as a reference for your own curriculum: https://joinweekdays.com/programs.
  • Nanny Parent Connection Learning Guides - https://nannyparentconnection.com/learning-guides-parents/: Learning guides will work to pair you with a qualified educator/care-giver based on your child's age, etc.
    • Currently in beta in Seattle, will roll out nation-wide soon.
    • $299 annual membership fee includes: matchmaking to a teacher, 30 min prescreen interview, standard Washington State contract. Pay ranges ($50-$75/hr), recommend setting a 3 month contract. Has 30 days to find a match for you and must present you with at least 1 candidate. They recommend a payroll services company (Growing Numbers) to work with ($56/month).
Local Job Site and Childcare Search
Job Description
2020 - 2021 Kindergarten Wage Description and Details:
  • Hours per week - 40
  • Hours worked/day 8 total, 8a - 4p
  • Wage - $X,XXX/month + $YYY insurance stipend = $Z,ZZZ to be paid the 1st of the month for the coming month.
    • (Salary based on 23 working days/month x 8/day =184 hrs/month 185hrs/month x $AA/hr = $X,XXX/month + $YYY insurance for a grand total: $Z,ZZZ/month)
  • One month salary to be paid at termination of position.
Description of Responsibilities of Teacher
  • Teacher will create and implement units to engage the children in fun learning activities.
  • Teacher can order materials from a central budget.
  • Teacher will facilitate the children’s on line learning actives from Seattle Public School.
  • The children will play outside daily (rain/shine).
  • Teacher will follow agreed upon COVID/Sick policy (link).
  • Teachers and children will wear masks while indoors.
  • Teachers and children will not be required to wear masks while outside.
  • Teachers at the end of the day will do a daily cleanup/wipe-down of surfaces and vacuum a few times a week - parents will help with more thorough cleanings as needed, or fill in if a teacher needs to leave early.
Responsibilities of Parents
  • Parents will be respectful of stated work hours.
  • Parents will follow agreed upon COVID policy (link).
  • Parents will provide all food daily for their child (no refrigerator available).
  • Families will wear a mask when they drop off/pick up their child.
Interview approach and questions
Some parents had particular areas they wanted to go deeper in so our interview questions did sometimes vary depending on who was on the interview zoom call. Here's a sample of some of the more prominent interview questions we asked:
  • Are you able to and interested in developing enrichment curriculum for kindergarteners to keep them excited about learning? What previous experience do you have in this regard?
  • Would you be able to facilitate and guide the children with their remote learning online work?
  • What hesitations do you have about working with a small group of children without other adults around?
  • Could you pass a background check?
  • What kind of COVID precautions are you personally taking?
  • Let's say the kids are getting a little out of hand, what methods would you use to calm the situation down?

Figuring out what to pay ($)
Most public school districts actually publish hourly rates that they pay teachers. We used this as a guide to set a range and then discussed the hourly rate expectation with the teacher candidate.

Important to keep in mind: while these ranges do represent market hourly rates in normal times, these times are hardly normal. The demand for private teaching is at a peak so be prepared to pay the upper end of the range or even over.

Curriculum

Curriculum

Daily Schedule (see in Scheduling)

Activity sources: Educational

Here's a summary of popular sites and services that offer immediate content options or programs for you to follow:
Common Core State Standards for each grade:
The Common Core State Standards describe learning goals for each grade level in math and English language arts, with a focus on preparing students for college and the real world. The standards were developed by a group of state education chiefs and governors with help from teachers and curriculum experts. Forty-three states have adopted the standards and are currently implementing them in their public schools. Here are some resources to learn more and plan for your child to be ready at the end of each grade:
Comprehensive full school year plans:
Rich project/subject/lesson resources:
Outdoor/nature focus:

Activity sources: Physical, Play, Brain-Breaks

Materials

Beyond the resources that the above services provide, make sure you take advantage of your local school or public libraries for books and have parents circulate books, games, puzzles, Magnatiles, and other things to do at least every few months.
Community Equity & Local School Support
Many communities don't have the means or resources to create educational pods for all families. The WSJ published an article about the tough social challenges of forming a Pod - even when families are trying to help. This article covers the topic extensively and offers many ways to help, here's a few called-out:
  • If your parent group isn't already sponsoring or including an underrepresented and/or low-income family in your pod, reach out to your school to find a directory of parents and see if a family or few would like to participate. If you and other participating families have the means to offer discounted participation to a family in need, doing so would be very meaningful to your community.
  • If you don't have the ability to take on another family, there are other ways you can support:
    • Donate to local community services helping families in need such as Boys and Girls clubs.
    • Don't remove your child fully from the public school system if you were planning on attending. Attending a few sessions a day/week of remote learning and/or completing school assignments are a lightweight way to keep yourself in the system. Widespread removals result in cut budgets for both teaching staff and programs that offer care and meals to low-income children.

Scheduling

Sample daily kids schedule
Here's what a typical day looks like for us. We generally stick pretty close to this as establishing a routine is so key with kids. After a week of trying out the remote video sessions, we established a rule that all video calls are to be ended by 10a. Otherwise, managing everyone's different schedules became a nightmare and kept our teacher from having her own curriculum.

Daily Schedule

  • Public school login time & snack: 8 - 10/10:15a
  • Walk: 10:15-10:45a
  • Morning circle/Pod worktime: 10:45 - 11a
  • Group or individual work/Seesaw (digital tasks for remote school) 11a - 12p
  • Lunch: 12p
  • Quiet time: 12 -1p
  • Group or individual work/Seesaw 1 - 2:30p
  • Park (rain or shine): 2:30 -3:45p
  • Come together circle & snack: 3:45-4p
  • Public school login or Seesaw assignment time, or project time: 4 -5:30

Pod general subject plan

  • Monday - Science
  • Tuesday - Math
  • Wednesday - Art
  • Thursday - Language/Reading/Writing
  • Friday - Creative Writing/Storytelling

Communication to parents

Teacher will plan two weeks at a time and communicate themes to parents - here's an example plan:
Staying organized with school closures and other events that impact the pod
We generally snap to the public school system in our area (Seattle Public Schools). We published a simple list of the closure dates, but also created a shared calendar so that everyone could see the dates on their calendar of choice. We used Outlook's shared calendar setup, but you can also use Google Calendar's as well.

Covering an unexpected teacher absence

In the event of a teacher needing extra help or if a teacher couldn't make it to part or all of day/week, we had each parent fill out their general availability for AM, lunch, and PM windows of the school day. With teams/texting, we could most easily find the parent that was most likely to be free during that particular time. Here's a sample of that you could use in your Pod.
Staying in sync within your family to cover pick-ups, etc

Texting/Emailing/WhatsApp

One of the most challenging parts of remote learning/Pods is just staying on the same page as your spouse throughout managing drop-offs/pick-ups, the remote learning schedule, and any intermittent schedule changes during a day or week. As everyone in our pod has a dual-income situation, horse-trading with who is covering kids vs attending a work meeting is an ongoing dialogue. Text messaging and emailing is an option...we've found that WhatsApp offers a pretty clean cross-platform messaging service you can use on your phone, Mac or PC you use to stay in touch throughout the day.

Shared Calendars (Google & Outlook)

While messaging helps you communicate immediately, it gets hard to keep track of when things are happening relative to work or other meetings/events. Google and Outlook let you set up shared calendars between you and your spouse or older kids, however setting up a shared calendar can be a little tricky and does require you to either include the shared calendar on every event that affects everyone or create a duplicate event at the same time to store it.
Weve VIP Awareness Sharing
This shared calendar problem is something we're actually working to improve with Weve - we call it Weve VIP Awareness Sharing. In Weve, when you setup a VIP, you can tap your VIP's profile button at the top of any event of yours to instantly share the event to your spouse for their awareness. This won't affect the other's availability, it just shows up on your calendars so you both always have full context of what's going on. Additionally, Weve lets you start a text message from any event with your VIP so you can quickly have a conversation about an event that impacts coverage. You can check that out here.

Class Space & Logistics

A heads-up: our space setup has a younger child focus (K-3 vs towards middle school aged setup)
Our pod was created for a group of Kindergarteners. Children aged closer to middle school and older will generally have greater thresholds for focus time and be able to behaviorally handle a more conventional desk/table setup. Our setup is tailored toward younger school-aged kids' where a variety of spaces and sitting positions helps manage the class and aids learning. The above curriculum resources however are still relevant and useful for older grades too.
Classroom/Space setup
Ideally you'll have a dedicated space where the kids can spend a good portion of the day and can store their own supplies and shared general supplies.  Here are a few learnings/recommendations based on our experience.
  • Dedicated bathroom and entrance: If possible, have a dedicated bathroom and entrance for the kids/teacher. This way they're not having to interrupt the host of the Pod to leave or use the restroom. We used our basement which has its own powder room and access to the garage where the kids can get dropped off and store things like backpacks and wet shoes/boots.
  • Kids' supplies personal storage: Have a space where each child can keep their personal supplies. We went with a simple IKEA shelving unit with 1ft x 1ft x 1ft cubbies for each child.
  • A chair for each child: Table seating for physical or digital activities is a must. Also useful for eating lunches or snacks.
  • Section the room: Having one big open space is recipe for chaos - kids can build up momentum and run/jump onto things. Sectioning lets kids break into groups and more easily work quietly together. Here's how we laid out our classroom:
  • Have the parents fill it up: In addition to furniture-oriented things like tables, chairs, rugs, etc, each child's parents lent books, games, activities and more to give the kids a variety of things to do outside of the curriculum. The kids have rarely been bored through the course of the day.
  • Up your WiFi speed: If kids are at least partially participating in a remote learning classes from the school they would be attending, make sure you up your internet speeds to handle the additional bandwidth demand. Many internet providers have already received requests related to student use at home and are often willing to offer discounted plans. WiFi extenders can help strengthen weak areas to help handle bandwidth demand.
  • Air purifier: for better ventilation and perhaps an extra COVID precaution, you could decide to invest in an air purifier. We got one and it seems to work well enough - came in extra handy when we had the wildfire smoke which made it one of the purest rooms in the house. We went with a Coway Airmega.
Supplies Checklist & Sourcing

Checklist

We put together a list and had people sign-up for what they would purchase or procure (some people had extra rugs, tables/chairs, etc in available, while others might have a connection to some items). Here's the full list for your reference.

Sourcing

While many of the above supplies you may need to purchase and split costs among the parents, you can often source these things from buy-nothing Facebook groups (https://buynothingproject.org/) and even ask for things stating what you need them for (your Pod!). Families around your community are likely to want to help Podders trying to put together a usable classroom space.

Additionally, various preschools, care facilities, or other kids-spaces may have items that they're no longer using or are willing to donate. So ask there too.

Cost-splitting process (see in Finances)


Legal & COVID Policies

COVID-Handling Policies
While it's a good idea to follow the CDC's, State, and County guidelines, each group of families (and instructors) will have differing degrees of risk tolerance as to how to handle COVID-prevention on-premises, the event of a COVID case, and how each family should conduct itself outside of the Pod. In the end, you just need to agree across everyone what the plan is and stick to it. Here's a few resources we landed on for this:

Example of our plan/policy that we wrote-up

  • Of note: this includes commentary on external family travel in addition to child practices in school and general outbreak prevention requirements.

Survey to determine family risk tolerance and extent of COVID-prevention outside of school

  • We used this to see how far off all the parents were with each other and the instructor. We found we were pretty close (which made things easier!) with most of us in 2-3 range.

Childcare Licensing Considerations
Every state has different requirements/regulations for licensing to provide early learning and child care.  In many cases, as in Washington State, informal parent cooperatives do not require a license.
More Legal Resources Related to Pods
The above are sample documents of what we've used, there are resources online that have different types of forms that could work for your situation:

Finances & Insurance

Paying our teachers
The teachers and parents agreed to be paid once a month on the first day of the month. Rather than paying on a precise hourly-tracked basis, we decided to equate what a full or part-time amount of hours would be for a given month and pay that as a lump sum. Since we're snapping to the calendar schedule of our local public school system, we also decided to not deduct any income paid to them for typical school closure dates. This all simplified the tracking and demonstrated trust and care between the parents and teachers. To learn more about how we figured out what to pay our teachers, go here.
Settling up expenses outside of teacher pay
There were initial/one-time expenses to get going and then ongoing expenses. We decided to square up on a monthly basis. Beyond the supplies list for the school which we all chipped in on with most being things donated from peoples' homes, there are the normal day-in-day out supplies and utilities to prepare for. Things like: toilet paper, paper towels, hand soap, hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies, increased use of water/sewer/garbage, increased use of electricity, the additional cost associated with improving internet speed to name the most common. We had our teachers and parents chip in to do daily/weekly cleanings, so we decided we didn't need any cleaners to come outside of that.
Insurance considerations
Whenever you host a large group of kids - especially on a weekday basis - your gut might immediately go to "What is going to go wrong?" We took out an Umbrella policy for our Pod for this purpose. $1M in standard coverage for the entire year ended up being around $300 which we split evenly across the families - would imagine the cost shouldn't vary too much, but your experience might be different.
OverviewInitial SetupCommunicationInstructorCurriculumSchedulingClass Space & LogisticsLegal & COVID PoliciesFinances & Insurance<< Hide Index