Parents unhappy with school options assemble learning 'pods'

MIAMI (AP) — On the 4-acre farm at the edge of the Everglades where Timea Hunter runs a horse academy, she has hosted plenty of parties, picnics and workshops. So with her children's school building closed, she figured why not use it also a classroom?

While her son and daughter will participate in distance learning at their school, she plans to hire a teacher together with the families of four to six other children who could provide supplemental, in-person instruction on the farm shaded by royal poinciana trees.

“We have a very nice picnic area, a mini playground and big tables where the kids can seat under the shade and they can study there,” Hunter said. “We are not educated to do this, so everybody is freaking out and saying, ‘What are we gonna do, how we are going to do it?’”

As the coronavirus pandemic has clouded hopes of reopening schools nationwide, parents who want more than remote instruction have been scrambling to hire tutors and private teachers for small groups of children. The race to set up “learning pods” threatens to vastly deepen inequities in access to education.

In some cases, parents are paying thousands of dollars each to include their children in pods, promising teachers $40 to $100 an hour or more. A Facebook group on learning pods attracted more than 30,000 members within three weeks of being formed and launched numerous offshoots in states and cities. New sites like pod-up.com and partnerpods.org have emerged offering to connect families and instructors.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has called learning pods “luxuries” that are not an option for low-income parents.

“We hear these different things about some parents are going to create their own learning pods and all this other stuff, and just to understand...