What’s That About Pandemic Pods? Organizing a Pod for Safety and Caregiving

With school restarting, but not reopening, working parents need a better solution to keep children out of their hair and engaged with education. Organizing a “pandemic pod” or small group of families to host children during the workday/school day may be an effective way of staying productive, reducing caregiving costs, improving learning and socialization for children.

When developing your pandemic pod, make sure all the families are aligned on the goals for the pod as well as rules for reducing exposure risk to the coronavirus. From there, try to fill the pod with classmates and children of similar age, if not in the same grade. Organizing pandemic pods based on grades and shared curriculum will help keep children closer to on track as it’ll make it easier for the caregiver to supplement their classes if they’re all covering similar material at once. In these times, though, optimal outcomes aren’t possible, so in some ways, aim for the least bad outcomes, even if that’s simply finding someway to care for the children during the workday.

When it comes to finding families you can use some of these resources:

• Friends and local family
• Helpr.com
• Podmatch
• CareVillage
• Nextdoor
• Facebook groups, including Moms/Dads/Parents groups of your town or city
• Your local school district or teachers

ORGANIZING YOUR POD

Determine Level of Supervision & Supplemental Activity

You know your children, their needs, and abilities. Figure out what you want out of the pandemic pod: just someone to host and watch your children, someone to make sure they’re paying attention to online learning, or someone to replace or complement schoolwork with additional learning and activities.

Another parent may suffice if you just want someone to provide supervision and modest help keeping children engaged with online learning. If you want more hands-on support, including planning activities throughout the day and help with coursework, you should consider a paid caregiver, maybe even a tutor or teacher. Asking another parent to do all of this may be asking a lot of a stay-at-home parent or parent that’s been laid off. Further, someone with direct experience in care or education can develop more effective programming to enhance the coursework.

Determine the Size of the Pod

Including your child(ren), how many children are you looking to have in your pod? You should set the size of the pod to a max of 5 families total to limit exposure.

• Consider building a single pod for all of your children to attend rather than sending your children to different homes, which raises exposure risk.
• While the most effective pods will likely be composed of children from the same classes or grades, safety and limiting exposure is paramount. In some situations, combining multiple ages or grades into one pod may not be as effective in keeping children on track with coursework but it will reduce coronavirus exposure.
• If you must send your children to multiple pods, limit the size of each of those pods to 3 or fewer other families.

Questions to Ask Prospective Pod Members

• What school, class, and grade are the other children in?
• Can you organize one pod that includes your children of different ages to limit exposure?
• How many kids were they thinking of being in a pod?
• What is each family’s weekly budget for a caregiver?
• What activities do you want your children to participate in throughout the day? Align on activities.

Finding a caregiver and pandemic pod members should be done in parallel. Time is of the essence here. It’s also best if one parent gathers criteria for vetting the provider from participating families and directly vets the caregiver to make finding a provider faster and easier. Time will be of the essence as school restarts. (Need help finding a caregiver or teacher? See: “Figuring Out Care & Schooling in a Pandemic: Questions to Ask”)

Select a Host Family

Any family hosting the pandemic pod should have:

• Distraction free space for kids to do work
• Access to an outdoor area, preferably
• Ready internet access
• Comfort knowing other parents and children will enter their home, who may have ready access to the whole home

Once you’ve determined what you want for your child, if you don’t want to host the pandemic pod, with the other families of the pod, select a host family (or rotating hosts) based on the hosts’ genuine willingness to host, their setup for learning, and household COVID-19 risk. Make sure the family selected to host genuinely wants to host and isn’t feeling pressured to do it. The pandemic pod may need to last for months, and building a good relationship with all families involved will enhance the stability and safety of the pod.

When selecting a host family, ask about the potential host’s set up for learning and make sure it’s as conducive to distraction-free learning as possible. Do they have tables and desks for all the kids? Are they willing to add more if the parents in the pod purchase the needed materials? Ask if anyone else outside the household, besides the pod and its caregiver, accesses the inside of the home. Host families should have no one from outside the household, except the pandemic pod entering the home.

Ask if the host family has anyone particularly susceptible to COVID-19 within the home, such as aging parents or family members with underlying conditions (e.g. diabetes, asthma, obesity). If so, they’re not a good host family.

Make sure all the families in the pod align on risk tolerance for exposure. All the participating families should agree on what activities are acceptable in and out of the pod. Reference the COVID-19 exposure risk chart below.

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Align on Acceptable Exposure Risk

Not to be forgotten, determine your family’s tolerance for risk of exposure.

The more families in your pod, the more risk of exposure. Agree on acceptable general precautions and habits for outside the pod with the other families. Families that take fewer precautions or engage in certain activities may have increased risk of exposure and may spread the virus.

All families should agree on what activities are acceptable to engage in based on the same criteria, and agree not to engage in those activities with a greater risk of exposure. Use the chart at the bottom as a guide.

Once established, make sure the pods follow recommended actions to reduce risk of exposure throughout the day.

Recommended procedures for the pod:

1. All children and caregivers immediately wash their hands for 20 seconds or sanitize their hands upon entering the house and after eating or drinking; younger children should have their hands and toys washed throughout the day
2. Children and caregivers will properly wear masks all day inside. Cover your nose!
3. Everyone must remain at least 6 feet apart when outside if they remove their masks

Policies for the pod’s families:

1. Parents must work from home
2. If anyone in any household has been exposed they must inform the parents in the pandemic pod immediately
3. No one in the household will engage in any activities above the risk threshold set by the pod, according to the COVID-19 activity risk chart
4. Limit exposure to families outside of the pandemic pod

While there’s a lot to finding a pandemic pod and keeping your children on track, remember these times are unprecedented and we all need to be patient, accommodating, and understanding.