"My Thoughts on a Recovering Economy," by Angela Valenzuela

This is a good time to look for work in Austin and other places throughout the U.S. However, it is clear that COVID fears exist. Remote work is increasingly preferred as many do not want to work in an office right now. COVID fears have also translated in early retirements. Others are changing careers wanting higher salaries and benefits, or perhaps reassessing what they really want to do in life. 

A closing off of the border also makes for fewer workers. Informally, I hear that the construction industry, particularly in a context of rapid growth in our city and state, can't find enough workers. Note: Here is another read from September 4th out of the Washington Post titled, "Why America has 8.4 million unemployed when there are 10 million job openings."

The ravages of COVID notwithstanding, I hope that the "cosmic pause" of the pandemic is enabling clarity of thought, including a reassessment of our obligations to ourselves as individuals, to our families and communities, and Mother Earth with whom we have been massively and consequentially out of sync. 

In a space of epistemic humility that this moment could actually engender, can we not begin to vision a new economy, perhaps one where we share, instead of compete, for resources? Why not create a world where we care for and value one another, as opposed to one of hoarding and selfishness? 

Instead of the toxic battleground that many want to make right now of our education system, I ask how can we reinvent education, making it affectionate, creative, and life-giving? 

The problem is not at all with the children, but with the adults who fall prey to the ceaseless, fear-mongering and moral panics that become the noise in our heads, manifesting in polarized discourses and policy positions.

It is up to each and everyone of us to bring balance to the chaos. At least for some, finding the right job or vocation is precisely what is happening right now as they realize that the built up world as we have known it is neither of their own, nor of their preferred, fashioning. 

I say then, let's re-make the world anew. Let's work collectively to create spaces of happiness and joy. And let these spaces merit the name, "education." Let's live lives full of gratitude and become champions of peace for a deeply troubled world. 

My thoughts on a Sunday morning. 

Happy Labor Day, everyone!

Peace/ paz,

-Angela Valenzuela

Austin area employers facing stiff competition for workers amid recovering economy

Bob Sechler

Austin American-Statesman | September 3, 2021

By at least one measure — the prevalence of “help wanted” ads — it might be the best time ever to be looking for a job in the Austin metro area.

The number of online postings for employment in the region is at a record, the latest manifestation of an extremely tight local labor market that’s providing qualified job seekers with their choice of opportunities — and also fueling intense competition among businesses seeking workers.

About 88,500 jobs in the Austin area were being advertised in July, according to an index of online postings produced by the Conference Board, a private economic research group. The figure is the highest on record for the region and nearly 80% above the estimated 49,500 in the same month of 2019, prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

For Amy Garza, who has been trying to fill nearly three dozen open positions and is finding the task daunting, the trend comes as no surprise.

"It's crazy — just getting someone in the door (for an interview) is difficult," said Garza, human resources director at Austin-based Athena Manufacturing. "People can basically go out and pick their jobs right now."

More:Austin's jobless rate fell to 4.2% in July, lowest since COVID struck

More:COVID-19 surge puts brakes on Austin's return-to-office plans

More:Rents rising: Austin apartment market shifts into overdrive as pandemic recovery continues

Athena, a fast-growing contract manufacturer that specializes in precision metalworking and mechanical assembly, has raised its starting pay twice over the past year — to a range of $15 to $17 an hour for trainees with no experience, which is up from $12 to $14 an hour previously, she said. The company is trying other measures to boost employee satisfaction and retention, such as prioritizing career development and catering some workplace meals.

But "it's such a competitive market (for workers), and companies like ours that are kind of in the middle, we don’t have the budget right now” to match big firms on pay and benefits, Garza said. "It's hard right now — it is really, really hard."

Austin businesses aren't alone in that assessment. Nationwide, employers are scrambling to hire enough workers, with recent federal statistics pegging U.S. job openings overall at an all-time high as the economy has continued to recover despite the ongoing pandemic.

The wide gulf between job openings and job seekers — both locally and nationally — is being chalked up to a number of factors.

Economists say some people are simply looking for different kinds of employment than they held before the pandemic. That shift is believed to be hurting the leisure and hospitality sector in particular, where working remotely isn't an option and wages have been relatively low traditionally.

Across industries, however, persistent coronavirus fears, difficulty finding affordable child care, early retirements, the availability of unemployment benefits and reduced rates of immigration are all issues thought to be contributing to the labor shortage.

In Austin, where competition for workers was tight even before the pandemic because of the booming economy, the hiring difficulty appears to be particularly pronounced. Local business activity went into deep freeze during the initial months of the pandemic — along with the economy statewide and nationally — but it has been heating back up relatively quickly, helped by a steady drumbeat of corporate expansions and relocations to the region.

More:Texas manufacturing, service sectors expand in July as COVID-19 worries return

"We can hardly pick up the daily paper without seeing (that another company) is coming to town," said Jon Hockenyos, president of Austin-based economic analysis firm TXP Inc.

"That is part of all the job postings we have now," as companies that are new to the Austin metro area compete with existing employers for workers, Hockenyos said.

But other factors also are playing roles locally, he said, such as "COVID hesitancy" among would-be workers concerned about the ongoing pandemic, as well as an inability among some businesses to pay enough to get them off the sidelines.

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the Austin metro area recently hit 4% — its lowest level in the pandemic era and well below the current state and national rates of 6.2% and 5.4%, respectively.

The local unemployment rate routinely came in at or below 3% before the coronavirus sent the economy into a tailspin. But 4% is still considered near the point where most people who want a job have one, particularly given the lingering overhang of the coronavirus and the tremendous disruptions that it wrought.

It also marks a huge improvement from the initial months of the pandemic, when the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the Austin metro area soared to 12.7% and 11.2%, respectively, in April and May of last year, as coronavirus-related fears and shutdowns triggered huge job losses.

With the recovery now gaining steam, however, local employers are having trouble finding enough workers to meet all of the demand for goods and services.

Kwee Lan Teo, an Austin Chamber of Commerce vice president, said 

5,700 job openings that were advertised in July offered signing bonuses 

for new employees — well over double the 2,100 that offered them in January.

“That tells you a lot," said Teo, who writes a monthly review of the region's 

job market. "They are trying to incentivize people to come back” to the 

workforce.

Overall, the fierce competition among businesses for job seekers has made 

it "hard to hire right now," she said.

Garza, of Athena Manufacturing, knows that firsthand.

If Athena doesn't meet its target of doubling in size over the next five 

years — from 270 employees now to 540 — she said it won't be because 

demand wouldn't support the growth. Instead, she pegged the most likely 

culprit as an inability to find enough new workers.

"I have never seen it this difficult (to hire) before," Garza said. 

I echo Travis County Commissioner Brigid Shea's statement. There are indeed no words for this, for Gov. Greg Abbott's recklessness. My heart goes out to this family for their incredible loss. This should never have happened.

"Necropolitics" is what we should call this. Via his mandate against requiring masks, he traffics in death. 

-Angela Valenzuela

#Necropolitics 

#Covid

Austin Public Health reports first child death from COVID-19

---

by Fred Cantu, CBS Austin Staff

Tuesday, August 31st 2021

AUSTIN, Texas — The health authority for Austin Public Health reported the first child death Tuesday from COVID-19 for the Austin area during a joint briefing with the City Council and Travis County Commissioners Court.

Local Health Authority Dr. Desmar Walkes announced the death during the weekly Austin Public Health covid update for local leaders. She said the child had a “comorbidity.” That’s a separate serious health issue that could result in death.

While hospitalizations are seen to be plateauing, there has been a surge in COVID-19 cases in schools.

Dr. Walkes told council members and commissioners that case numbers in schools have gone up tremendously. "We do know that the case numbers in our schools have gone up tremendously in this past week, and so we're cautiously optimistic about whether this plateau that we're seeing is going to persist or whether we're going to see another increase in our cases."

RELATED: Del Valle ISD parent says 3 of her children tested positive for COVID first week of school

She said school numbers reflect not using last year's mitigation techniques. "We found a marked increase in school cases across the state of Texas with schools reopening and not using the mitigation efforts that we used last year to decrease case spread in that environment and congregant setting when children are in close quarters and not social distancing," Dr. Walkes said.

Just in the last week they counted 817 pediatric COVID cases in Travis County schools and identified 17,240 close contacts and 67 clusters. But they note Texas Education Agency does not mandate that the close contacts quarantine themselves following an exposure.

Children under 12 currently are not allowed to be vaccinated, but it's possible that could change by the end of the year.

MORE| More TX students tested positive for COVID-19 last week than at any time last school year

County Commissioner Brigid Shea blasted Gov. Abbott for his fight against mask mandates, "I don't even have words for how reckless and dangerous it is that the governor is preventing school districts from requiring masks for a population in elementary and secondary school that legally cannot be vaccinated."

WATCH the briefing here.

Austin families navigate food insecurity inflicted by Covid-19 by Alyssa Weinstein

This story was written by a journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin. The Austin Monitor is working in partnership with the UT School of Journalism to teach and publish stories produced by students in the City and County Government Reporting course.

#Covid19 Coronavirus #foodinsecurity #foodsecurity #covidresponse pandemic #ATX

Photo by Central Texas Food Bank

Monday, October 5, 2020 by Alyssa Weinstein

 AUSTIN

Austin families navigate food insecurity inflicted by Covid-19

Jacylin Moya and her mom woke up early Saturday morning to do something they had never done before – go to a Central Texas Food Bank drive. With a line of cars ahead of them, they waited in their car until 8 a.m., when it was time to drive up and collect their box of food.

The pandemic unleashed an overwhelming number of pitfalls for families to navigate through, and unemployment and food insecurity have hit home for thousands of them. In August alone, the Central Texas Food Bank served 112,000 households across its 21-county service area, which translates to more than 350,000 individuals, said Paul Gaither, spokesperson for the food bank. Of those households, more than 18,000 used CTFB services for the first time, about 16 percent of the total.

Along with food stamps (SNAP), local resources like CTFB and UT Austin’s food bank, UT Outpost, have also seen an uptick in clients since the pandemic hit Austin.

“Once the Travis County Covid-19 stay-at-home order hit, we had to shift our model quickly and we knew food insecurity doesn’t care about a pandemic,” said Will Ross, UT Outpost coordinator. “If anything, (the pandemic) amplifies that need.”

For Moya and her family, who are members of the local Puerto Rican and Mexican community, unemployment has been the driving cause of their food insecurity. Moya said they intend to share their food box with other family members who were unable to come to the food drive due to work conflicts or lack of transportation.

Moya and her mother tried exploring other resources, like food stamps or Meals on Wheels. However, they either received nearly worthless benefits or were turned away due to eligibility requirements.

“Particularly now because of the pandemic, we see the driving force for Austin food insecurity being that people are out of work or their hours were reduced,” Gaither said.

Before the pandemic, about two-thirds of CTFB clients were employed. Gaither said many were part of the “working poor,” in that they had a job yet did not make enough to put food on the table.

More than 70,000 workers in the Austin metro area were unemployed in August, double the number a year earlier, according to Texas Workforce Commission data. And while metro-area employers added almost 20,000 jobs in August, local payrolls remained almost 30,000 jobs below August 2019 levels – a decline of 2.7 percent in a region that had regularly posted 3 and 4 percent increases.

Gaither said before Covid-19, CTFB served about 46,000 clients a week, or 184,000 per month. On average, he said that monthly number has doubled since the pandemic began.

According to a Feeding America report from May, areas in the U.S. that already had high rates of food insecurity will continue to have the highest rates in the country as the pandemic drags on. The state with the highest 2020 food insecurity projections for the overall population due to Covid-19 is California, with a total of 6.4 million people. For children, the state with the highest projection is Texas, with 2.3 million food-insecure children.

While Covid-19 may have exacerbated the food insecurity issue in Austin and nationally, CTFB has been able to accommodate all of its clients so far.

“The biggest (change) was basically reinventing the way we do business,” Gaither said. “There have been interruptions in the supply chain due to shortages of certain items because the whole country is competing for the same resources.”

This left the food bank no choice but to buy its own supply and seek more monetary donations to make up for the large decline in food donations, Gaither said.

“Our top priority remains ensuring eligible Texans and their families have access to healthy, nutritious foods as well as the systems that support them,” said Elliott Sprehe, press officer for the Texas Health & Human Services Commission, in a statement. To accomplish this, Sprehe said the commission has made SNAP benefits more accessible by making the eligibility determination process easier.

However, for families in disproportionately affected communities of Austin, such as the Black or Latino populations, using SNAP and other resources may be near impossible due to lack of transportation or internet access, as KUT reported back in April. Families with an undocumented member may even be fearful to pursue these resources. And meals that require pickup, especially for families seeking school lunches during the pandemic, can present a problem rather than a solution for some.

“The city is way behind the times in being culturally responsive to its diverse constituents,” said Angela Valenzuela, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at UT Austin. Valenzuela noted that the city doesn’t always provide resources in Spanish, while other resources may require internet or computer access.

The food insecurity dilemma caught Austin Mayor Steve Adler’s eye and he has begun to look for ways to resolve it.

“We got a certain amount of resources from the federal government that does not come close to meeting the need that the community has,” Adler said. “There are no good choices here. … Every choice is a bad one for the individuals you’re leaving out.”

One step the city took was to offer food and housing assistance to everyone in the community during the pandemic, without asking for a Social Security number, Adler said. And for now, CTFB is a resource that is accessible to most households with few limitations.

“The bank and our staff and our volunteers do everything we can to make people feel extremely comfortable with the situation. And we actually thank them for coming out and getting food from us,” Gaither said. “We try to do everything we can to eliminate that stigma that some people might have. Because there’s no shame in this situation … if you need help, you should get help.”

With the pandemic still far from over, Moya and her family understand there are others who are in even greater need than they are. “My mom taught me to not be greedy and only get what you need when you’re in need,” Moya said. “So that’s why we feel OK coming today, because we’re in need.”

The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible by donations from the community. Though our reporting covers donors from time to time, we are careful to keep business and editorial efforts separate while maintaining transparency. A complete list of donors is available here, and our code of ethics is explained here.

This piece by Olivia Messer in the Daily Beast on COVID-19 and Texas is unsettling, particularly as parents, teachers, and school leaders work on opening up schools. There appears to be serious issues of measurement and consistency in tests and approach, explaining how COVID-19 tests jumped up by 124,693 five days ago on August 13, 2020. Even professionals find all of this confusing. Not a good report.

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas Just Hit 10,000 COVID Deaths, and It’s ‘Flying Blind’

JUST A GLITCH?

“It’s not making sense,” one expert said of infection stats that have been all over the place—right as schools move to reopen.

Olivia Messer | Aug. 18, 2020 | The Daily Beast

 

Last week, Texas hit the grim milestone of 10,000 COVID-19 deaths. That is, it did if you went by local news outlets and the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The Texas Department of State Health Services didn’t report a similar figure until around 5 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. 

That small, seemingly modest inconsistency might be easily brushed off—especially in the context of divergent COVID-19 stats across the country—if it weren’t for the fact that the state has endured weeks of data woes, sowing distrust across Texas. State officials have blamed coding errors, system upgrades, backlogs, changes in methodology, and closures of testing centers for a recent surge of red flags in its coronavirus stats.

Regardless of the cause, the deluge of questions about figures ranging from infection rates to total deaths have made it difficult to get a clear picture of what’s happening in the virus-ravaged state, public health experts told The Daily Beast. That would be concerning in its own right, but it’s especially glaring given the state is using that data to make decisions about reopening schools and other facilities as summer turns to fall.

“There’s a fog around Texas right now as to what’s actually going on,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, whose COVID-19 models have played a role in White House policy-making. “Things are kind of messy.”

“It’s not making sense,” Dr. David Lakey, vice chancellor for health affairs and chief medical officer at the University of Texas system and a member of the Texas Medical Association COVID-19 Task Force, told The Daily Beast of the state’s positivity rates last week.

Positivity rates reflect the proportion of tests that come back COVID-19 positive out of the total number performed. It’s an indicator, experts generally agree, for whether enough tests are being performed to paint a complete picture of a region’s caseload—as well as, more obviously, how widespread the infection is. As of Monday, Texas had 555,394 cumulative cases of the virus, according to Johns Hopkins data, and a positivity rate over the past week of 12.95 percent.

But as Lakey explained it, things got weird around July 27, when the state changed its method for reporting deaths, rather than infections. Specifically, that responsibility went from one that was placed on local health departments to a tally based on death certificates. More than 400 previously unreported deaths were added to the total death toll in that single day. 

“All of a sudden it looked like deaths sky-rocketed,” Lakey told The Daily Beast.

Days later, according to the Texas Tribune, an “automation error” caused approximately 225 deaths to be incorrectly added to the overall state tally. They were later removed after a quality check on the information revealed that COVID-19 was not the direct cause of those deaths.

But as soon as those discrepancies were explained and began to even out, following the shift in reporting, another—equally disturbing—one started to arise.

An early August upgrade increased the Texas Department of State Health Services’ capacity from 48,000 to more than 100,000 electronically-submitted test results per day, a spokeswoman told the Tribune.

Last week, the seven-day positivity rate suddenly climbed up dramatically, to around 25 percent on average in the week ending Aug. 11. For comparison, positivity rates in New York state have hovered below 1 percent in recent days. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in May that if the state’s positivity rate went over 10 percent, it would be considered a red flag. 

That red flag has been present every single day since late June. Even so, local and state experts on the ground told The Daily Beast last week that the actual information coming out of hospitals all over the state seemed to clash with such enormous positivity rates. Those findings were bolstered by national experts who said the rates seemed out of line with hospitalization numbers.

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 tests reported in Texas jumped by 124,693 in a single day on Thursday, Aug. 13, after declining over the previous days, according to the Texas Tribune. A spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services told the news site that the jump was the “result of coding errors and a system upgrade,” as well as backlogs at labs that could not be added until the errors were corrected.

Before the pandemic, about 1,200 lab results per day were sent to the Department of State Health Services, but that has increased dramatically. Now, the data comes in much larger quantities from labs all over the state, which is sorted according to its format—including faxes and electronic records—and then uploaded into the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Electronic Disease Surveillance System.

By Sunday, experts told The Daily Beast that Texas’ positive test rate seemed to be looking more credible, as it had dropped down to 11.25 percent after a fourth straight day of a decline, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of state data.

As these issues arose, the data changed in one other (likely related) way: The number of reported tests went down, which Abbott has said he would investigate. The governor has since noted that a possible explanation for the drop was the closure of temporary testing sites, which were opened in July to help handle hot spots. Others have noted a drop in demand for diagnostic tests, a claim seemingly bolstered by the state health department’s claims, to the Tribune, that community testing sites have “plenty of capacity” and few, if any, lines.

In another twist, a coding error by Walgreens Pharmacy led to an undercount of about 59,000 coronavirus test results across the state, KVUE-TV reported.

Diana Fite, president of the Texas Medical Association and an emergency physician based in Houston, explained that what keeps a positivity rate high is when “most people going for tests are doing so because they’re sick.” A lower positivity rate will only be observed once enough people are going in for tests that more of them come back negative, but with current testing capacities in the state, “you just can’t practically do that right now,” said Fite.

And though to her mind, “that 11.25 percent makes more sense,” she still “can’t really say how accurate it is.”

Those fluctuations, which Fite acknowledged were “confusing” even to professionals, have raised concerns about Texas’s ability to track—let alone handle—the spread of the virus as schools make crucial reopening decisions in cities from Houston to San Antonio this week.

Big changes in the numbers, said Fite, “make everybody not trust anything.” 

Neither Gov. Abbott’s office nor the Texas Department of State Health Services responded to requests for comment from The Daily Beast. But the latter told CNBC last week that it was “looking into the situation and has reached out to clinical labs and statewide health-care associations.”

“We are looking into why the number of lab tests reported to DSHS has been trending lower over the past few days,” Lyndsey Rosales, a spokesperson, told the news site. “We are closely analyzing our data to uncover any anomalies.”

So what do experts tell school boards or counties or the average Texan trying to make decisions about their children’s safety?

“Without really good data, it’s going to be hard to navigate and know where we are in the response,” Lakey said. “If you don’t know that you can trust that positivity rate and trust the case counts, then you’re flying blind.”

Still, according to Fite, the answer in the interim is the same as it always was: Pay attention to the broad trends instead of the specific numbers. Look at all the metrics together, instead of relying on just one. And be cautious.

Whatever the positivity rate, said Fite, “People who are at risk, who have chronic illnesses or elderly, need to stay quarantined.” 

“No matter what, it’s still out there,” she added.

Olivia Messer

Reporter

 

@OliviaMesserolivia.messer@thedailybeast.com

 

 

Parents are arriving at creative solutions here in Austin, Texas, as a consequence of not wanting to send their children back to school this fall due to COVID and with many leaders saying right now that opening is impossible.  

Local parents express feeling left out of the national conversation on school re-opening so they're taking the problem head-on by setting up what they call "parents pods" run by teachers or tutors via an organized form of distance learning that allow children to socialize with age-peers this fall. Equity issues, of course, prevail.

I love the subtitle here because I'm proud to know one of these "rogue mamas" and her family, Dr. Emma Mancha-Sumners. For every family, no doubt, this shift in life as they've known it will continue to be disorienting and involve great sacrifices.

Go to this link to learn about the Austin Independent School District's re-opening plans.

-Angela Valenzuela

Parents are panicking, giving up their careers and spending thousands of dollars on piecemeal solutions for the school year

‘An unregulated band of rogue mamas’ tries to figure out what to do when schools are closed, jobs are open and child care is nonexistent

by JACKIE MADER  July 22, 2020

The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox.

AUSTIN, Texas — When Emma Mancha-Sumners saw her school district’s proposed schedule for remote learning this fall, she knew it wouldn’t work for her or her kids. The sample schedule called for students to switch back and forth between independent work and real-time teaching streamed on their devices.

This story also appeared in Mind/Shift

“Parents would be responsible for bringing kids on and off, on and off, on and off,” said Mancha-Sumners, the associate director for the Texas Center for Education Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. “I can’t do that. I’m usually 10 minutes late to Zoom meetings on my own. No way I can guarantee I can have both my kids on a different schedule of Zoom meetings on time.”

The Austin Independent School District plans to offer classes in person as well, but like many parents, Mancha-Sumners is afraid to send her three children to a school building with the virus still out of control in her state. Her youngest, who is 5, is immunocompromised.

Mancha-Sumners looked into forming a “pod” of families that could at least provide some socialization for her children, who haven’t seen their friends since schools closed in March. She co-created a Facebook group for local families seeking to set up pods, and quickly discovered that many parents were looking for learning pods, which would be run by teachers or tutors and allow families to navigate distance learning. Many families estimated they would each pay $700 or more per month for teachers.

Mancha-Sumners knew that her family couldn’t afford that. She is taking time off work to sort out schooling for her 5-year-old and her 10-year-old, who can’t work as independently as her high schooler. With a doctorate in applied demography, she feels that she should be able home-school. This summer, she is trying it out to see if she is up to the task for an entire year or more.

“Right now we are an unregulated band of rogue mamas trying to figure all this out.”

Diana Haggerty, Austin mom

Nationwide, fearful that the reopening of schools could lead to more coronavirus outbreaks and presented with less than ideal distance-learning plans, parents are being forced to make difficult choices. Some are leaving their jobs and closing down their businesses. Others are spending thousands of dollars to make sure their children are safe and learning each day. And many more have no idea how they’ll cope with an impossible decision: work or care for their children. The situation is especially dire for single parents, low-income families and those without flexible jobs, who rely on in-person school so they can go to work each day.

The Trump administration is pushing states to reopen their economies and schools, but without more funding for safety measures, many school leaders say reopening is impossible. As a result, more districts are releasing plans to continue instruction online through the fall. School districts that are reopening are often only doing so partially.

Meanwhile, parents say they’ve yet to see any real solutions to the child care crisis that touches millions of American households. They feel that local, state and national leaders are ignoring their plight. While affluent families may be able to afford solutions like starting their own mini-classrooms and hiring teachers, most middle- and low-income families have few to no options.

Emma Mancha-Sumners is hoping to find a socialization and enrichment pod with a few other families to give her children opportunities to see friends while staying home from school this year. Credit: Emma Mancha-Sumners

Experts say the lack of federal, state and district-led solutions for parents means families are on their own, and that will only exacerbate education gaps that already exist.

“There’s always an equity issue in the United States, even in non-Covid times,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, professor of law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of Harvard’s Child Advocacy Program. “But now, when kids are at home, privileged parents are going to be able to hire tutors and teachers. They tend to have more flexible schedules, and they will be able to provide a better education for their children than less-privileged parents. Kids who are poor, and Black or Latino kids are disproportionately poor, are more at risk of not learning.”

Some of the largest school districts in the country, including the Los Angeles Unified School District and the San Diego Unified School District, will start the year only offering distance learning. Children in New York City public schools will only attend classes in person one to three days each week, meaning most families in New York will have to figure out where their children can go, and how they will continue learning, when they’re not in a classroom. All three districts serve high concentrations of children in poverty.

Related: When both parents are on the front lines, who’s taking care of the kids?

In Austin, 53 percent of kids who attend the city’s public schools are economically disadvantaged. The Austin Facebook group that Mancha-Sumners co-created is full of parents for whom the cost of a learning pod is out of reach. Some are single parents who have been out of work for months and have to choose between staying at home with their children or looking for jobs. Some don’t want to home-school, but feel their children are too young for remote learning, so are considering spending tens of thousands of dollars on private schools that are planning to open this fall. And some are essential workers who are faced with spending hundreds of dollars for child care so they can go to work at grocery stores and hospitals.

Each day, distressed parents write posts saying they just don’t know what to do.

“The presumption is that we can just shut everything down that we’ve been doing and focus on our kiddos,” said Diana Haggerty, a mom of four in Austin, Texas, who recently launched a local initiative called Stronger Together ATX.  The group aims to connect low-income families with local learning pods and help families understand and navigate the legal considerations of forming their own pods.

Diana Haggerty shut down her business after 14 years to oversee distance learning for two of her four children this fall. Credit: Diana Haggerty

“We need to be thinking about the people who are going to have to leave their 5-year-old at home to go to work. And that’s a scary proposition. People who have school-aged kids, they are not budgeting for child care,” she said.

During the pandemic, glaring inequalities between families have only become more evident. This spring, as schools shuttered across the country, the switch to distance learning highlighted persistent gaps in access to technology and the internet, and experts say it likely widened academic achievement gaps. Before the pandemic, low-income students scored lower on national exams and failed to graduate at rates comparable to their higher-income peers. Similar achievement gaps existed between racial groups: In 2019, 82 percent of Black students and 77 percent of Latino students failed to reach a “proficient” score on fourth grade reading-level exams, compared to 56 percent of white students. 

Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has already disproportionately impacted Black and Latino communities. And distance learning only adds to the stress and challenges many families are facing. In low-income and rural areas, children struggled to find devices and internet access to log on to virtual classrooms or Zoom meetings. In families with parents who can’t work at home, children had to go it alone. Children with disabilities missed out on critical, in-person support.

Few districts have acknowledged the situation many parents are in; and those that have, can’t help everyone who needs it. In mid-July, New York City officials said they would provide child care for 100,000 children during the upcoming year. But that’s only a fraction of the more than 1.1 million students enrolled in the city’s public schools.

And if parents are left to piece together solutions, the disparities will only grow.

“I’m usually 10 minutes late to Zoom meetings on my own. No way I can guarantee I can have both my kids on a different schedule of Zoom meetings on time.” 

Emma Mancha-Sumners, a research scientist and mother of three

Some parents and entrepreneurs are responding to the crisis by creating a patchwork of mini-classrooms and micro-schools. But such solutions are largely only available to those who can pay. In the Austin Facebook group, one parent posted that she was starting a “Montessori-style micro school,” for 12 kids, complete with “organic/paleo” lunch options and a meditation teacher. Parents could pay tuition at a rate comparable to local Montessori schools. Similarly out of reach for many families are some companies that typically provide after school activities, like karate studios, which have pivoted to provide a school setting during the day. And several small businesses have cropped up to do the work of connecting parents and pods to teachers.

Austin mom Alyssa Villalon, who along with her husband runs a kids’ sports organization in Austin, launched a business called Teachers 2 U this summer specifically aimed at providing a school experience for kids in the fall. Parents can pay a monthly tuition for a spot in a pod with a qualified teacher provided by the company, who will teach the district’s curriculum at a family’s home. All locations will be added to the company’s liability policy. Because Villalon is wary of doing anything to harm the district, the organization’s teachers will use the district’s curriculum and help children complete their school-provided distance learning work — that way, the children will still be counted for the sake of school funding. “What we don’t want to do is take money away from the district,” Villalon said. “It’s an underfunded system already.”

In Austin, many higher-income parents say learning pods are the only viable option to give kids both a better academic experience than they had in the spring and safer opportunities to socialize, while also allowing parents to go to work. Rachel Dorman, mom of two, enrolled her son, a rising kindergartner, into a pod of 10 children after deciding she couldn’t risk sending him to school. Doing so would mean socially distancing from her in-laws, who provide child care help several times a week for her 1-year-old while she and her husband work.

“It was sort of choosing family over public school,” Dorman said. “Which was obviously very difficult, but at the same time easy when there’s another option for us.”

“There’s always an equity issue in the United States, even in non-Covid times. … Kids who are poor, and Black or Latino kids are disproportionately poor, are more at risk of not learning.”

Elizabeth Bartholet, professor of law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of Harvard’s Child Advocacy Program

Her son’s pod, which was formed from families who all attended the same Montessori school last year, decided to forgo the district’s digital learning offering and instead follow a Montessori curriculum with a Montessori teacher. Dorman said she feels lucky to have that option, as she knows not all families do. But it’s hard to swallow the fact that they will be spending thousands of dollars this year for what they thought would be a free year of school.

Although many parents will continue to face tough choices, women of all incomes will bear the brunt of the crisis. Research shows that women have taken on more of the child care responsibility during the pandemic, even if they have full-time jobs of their own. One report found that, pre-pandemic, among couples that both worked full time, women typically provided nearly 70 percent of the child care during working hours.

When schools shut down due to the threat of coronavirus in March, Austin teacher Emily Shirey moved her fifth-grade classroom online while also taking over most of the child care work for her then-20-month-old daughter, whose child care center had closed. Although Shirey’s husband started to work from home, his workload increased dramatically.

An elementary school in east Austin. Many parents say even if in-person instruction is offered by the Austin Independent School District, they won’t be sending their children back to schools this fall. Credit: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

“He’s here, but he’s not here,” Shirey said. She worked relentlessly to balance work and mothering, spending her daughter’s nap times teaching and catching up on work in the evenings. “Last spring was very, very difficult,” Shirey said. “It stretched me thin.”

As the new school year approached, Shirey, who has been teaching for eight years, sat down to fill out a survey from her district about in-person teaching. Shirey responded that she would be willing to return to the classroom, but she needed child care help. The child care facility where she took her daughter every day is affiliated with the school district and is still closed. District officials responded that she could take sick leave, personal days and several weeks of partially paid leave under the new federal Family First Coronavirus Response Act. If she needed to extend her leave, she could, but there would be no guarantee that she would be paid or would get her job back when she returned. Shirey asked her principal if she could work a flexible schedule, and offered to pre-record her lessons, teach small groups or do anything else needed by the school, but was told that her principal doesn’t have the authority to allow that.

“I don’t want to have to leave [my job], even if it’s temporary” Shirey said. But with her active toddler, she doesn’t see how she’ll be able to keep working. “It’s absolutely impossible to do what students need with my daughter [home] right now,” Shirey said.

Related: Homeless students set adrift by school closures face crisis after crisis

Austin mom Haggerty, who created the “Stronger Together ATX” initiative this summer, took to Mancha-Sumner’s Facebook pod group in July and implored fellow members to leave one space open in each pod for a child who would otherwise not be able to afford one. Formerly a single mom, she says the equity issue has weighed heavily on her since schools shut down. “I think this is an important precedent to set,” she said.

This fall, New York City will provide child care for 100,000 children, a fraction of the more than 1.1 million children who attend public schools in the city each day.

A full-time women’s wellness coach with four kids, ranging in age from 20-months to 16, Haggerty can’t afford to pay to join a pod, even though both she and her husband work. “Absolutely under no circumstances could we pay right now for anybody to take care of our kids.” And Haggerty said she knows they’re not alone. “That swath of the population has grown exponentially since this crisis started.”

After 14 years of owning her own business, Haggerty shut it down to oversee her children while they’re home this fall.

“I either needed to do my work in my spare time or I needed to parent in my spare time,” she said. She still considers herself lucky. “We can barely survive on my husband’s income,” Haggerty said. “But we can do it.”

Haggerty intends to join forces with several other families and share the load of overseeing the distance-learning experience, for free. “It is neighbors helping neighbors,” she said.

In the absence of federal, state and school-based help for parents, Haggerty says, it’s going to fall on families — and mostly mothers — to come up with solutions, conventional or not, to get through the next school year.

“Right now,” she said, “we are an unregulated band of rogue mamas trying to figure all this out.”

Reporting contributed by Meredith Kolodner.

This story about distance learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.