Effective Learning Tips for Students of All Ages

Three education companies with ties to the Rivertowns are offering learning pods for the fall: Mohawk Camp and Country Day School, owned by Irvington resident Adam Wallach; Hudson Lab School, a private elementary-level school located at the Andrus on Hudson nursing home in Hastings and owned by Irvington residents Stacey Seltzer and Cate Han; and WK Pods, a division of Irvington-based WhizKidz Tutoring owned by Erica Maltz. Each company is taking a slightly different approach to how they set up their program.

Wallach, whose son is in fourth grade at Irvington’s Main Street School, said the genesis of the pod options started “because my family is not planning on being involved in distance learning… my family started talking to other families, and they have friends.” Wallach found there was a gap between what the schools were offering and what parents wanted.

“Irvington has announced they’re doing their two days in school and three days out of school,” he noted. “This presents a childcare challenge to many parents. And we know from operating camp for the past three weeks that kids are thriving, and kids needed camp more than before… needed social and emotional experiences.”

Wallach saw the opportunity to bring children in kindergarten through fourth grade to Mohawk Country Day School on the days they would otherwise be distance learning.

“I know some of the pods are hosting them in someone’s basement. I just feel without a school director or a nurse, someone providing leadership and direction to the teachers and the families and insuring everyone’s following the rules, it could be difficult for everyone getting along.”

He envisions an Irvington pod for four to 10 children, with a head teacher and an assistant teacher who will help the students with the work assigned by their regular school teacher. For the rest of the day, “Our teacher will then provide supplemental math, science, reading, and history based on the New York State Core Curriculum, to ensure kids are still receiving a full year of education even though they’ll only be in their actual [public] school two days a week, and they’ll be in our school three days a week.” All teachers will be certified by New York State.

Wallach added, “Every member of the Mohawk experience has to act responsibly. The expectation is that people follow New York State travel restrictions, make good decisions about who they interact with, and if a family member is sick, don’t expose a member of the Mohawk community. There would be zero interaction with anybody else from any other pod.”

For the fall and spring, Mohawk plans to offer 100 percent outdoor classrooms, transitioning indoors from December through March. The fee structure was not available at press time on Aug. 5.

Hudson Lab School’s pods, for grades pre-K through 5, will be based on what they developed for their “hands-on, project-based” summer camp at children’s homes this year. “We quickly realized that given the uncertainty of the way the nation’s school systems were going to handle [teaching in the pandemic], we could provide the certified teacher, the curriculum, and the kit [teaching supplies] in the confines of someone’s home,” Han said.

“Parents can choose an option where they enroll as home-schoolers and employ our curriculum — they dis-enroll from their school and they enroll with us and follow our curriculum. Or option B, where they stay enrolled in their current school, but we’re supplying the teacher who will work with them on their existing distance-learning plan in the morning block, and in the afternoons, they do our hands-on multidisciplinary project.”

Pod members can be self-selected, or Hudson Lab School will help match families up.

Seltzer said the school will promote health and safety through what he calls “the pod accords,” with member families pledging to follow certain protocols. The school also has an operations team to make sure the teaching environments are properly set up and maintained.

An elementary-level pod would cost $125,000. “Tuition per family ends up being an equation of the number of students in the pod,” Seltzer explained. Accordingly, a pod of five would cost $25,000 per child.

Whiz Kidz’s WK Pods will operate in clients’ homes, and will offer certified teachers for preschool through grade 12.

“While ‘pods’ has a commonly understood meaning in the educational world, pods as they are coming together during the pandemic mean a number of different things depending on what school districts are providing this year,” Maltz explained. “We provide teachers or tutors for all different types of variations of ‘pods’ based on parents’ requests and needs — starting as simple as providing supplemental hours on a weekly basis.”

Maltz said participants would have to maintain social distancing whenever they meet. “WK Pods is staying up to date on all CDC guidelines and other relevant rules and regulations, as are our tutors. We will remain abreast of best practices as we move forward in the school year.”

Costs will vary depending on the makeup of the pods.

Pods might be safer and, some might argue, a better educational choice than putting a child in front of a computer all day. But are they an equitable choice when so few can afford them? Hudson Lab School is trying to soften that line. Han said that in addition to offering financial aid, “Part of each tuition goes to a scholarship fund to make learning pods available to all people.”