He'd group his 3 and 4-year-old boys with several other students their age and, along with the other families' help, rent out a space -- perhaps a vacant Brooklyn storefront -- to transform it into a temporary classroom. They'd hire a teacher and maybe arrange for a nurse to come in several times a week to conduct Covid-19 tests and check for symptoms.
"Essentially, you're creating a small bubble for your children to be with other children so they can maintain social interaction with human beings while being educated," he said. "As a parent, (you) want to do the best for your kid and want them to live a semi- normal life, to develop semi-normally. In such crucial developmental years, it's hard, it's horrifying."
His idea, he says, may sound like a pipe dream, but so does allowing his children to return to a school setting any time soon.
It's a harsh reality that parents across the country have had to face in the past several weeks. With back-to-school season quickly approaching and many districts still weighing their options, families who don't want to send their children into school buildings have been forced to get creative to find schooling options that work for them.
Some parents are beginning to form groups in hopes of collectively hiring a teacher for home school. Other families have opted to create rotating virtual learning groups which will meet at a different student's home each day of the week. Other parents are recruiting neighborhood volunteers, like college students, to help supplement their children's virtual instruction with some time outside or activities. And other families are exploring more nature-based approaches, hoping to find ways to get their children off the screen.
"We need creative solutions for what we're going to be doing with our kids because it seems inevitable that the institutional learning and the big school buildings are not going to be able to function in the next couple of months," Rich says.
Parents feel 'backed into a corner'
As she watched new cases of the virus rise in Georgia and awaited a decision from her daughter's school district about its plan for the fall, Jenn Schestopol decided to create a Facebook group for several families in her area to come up with options other than returning children to school.
In three weeks, that group grew to more than 3,380 members.
"It's just beyond frustrating and I think that's what a lot of people in our group are starting to feel like," Schestopol, a single mom and teacher, said. "They are feeling backed into a corner."
Some of the options the group offers include virtual learning groups -- which families will take turns hosting as groups of students tune in to their online lessons together. Other parents, including Schestopol, are looking to boost their children's online lessons with after-school study groups with two or three other students from the area.
But many of the group's members don't want to opt for their county's virtual learning option, Schestopol say
