Local Facebook group connects families, teachers for cooperative learning

A new Facebook group called Parallel Learning and Nanny Cooperative seeks to connect families in the Henrico and Richmond area who want to share teachers, tutors or nannies with other families.

Group admin Zach Felder created the group on July 8, and it has more than 750 members.

The purpose of the group is to provide a platform, Felder said, for families “that want to explore alternative solutions to providing education and social interaction in a reduced risk environment for their children in the upcoming school year.”

Felder said he had created the group as he was searching for families who would want to share a nanny and a teacher to assist with the Henrico County Public Schools parallel learning track. He has a 3-year-old, a rising pre-K student and a rising first-grader. His children’s grandparents are high-risk for COVID-19, he said, and they maintain a high-touch relationship with them, meaning that he and his wife needed to find other parents who were strict about social distancing.

“It kind of just ran away with me,” Felder said. “I just kind of started it to be able to cast a wider net and then saw a need for this, and it’s just been great to be able to be useful and connect people.”

The groups of families and the teacher or nanny they cost-share are matched by information gathered from two Google forms: one for families/students and one for teachers and nannies. The forms gather information like location by zoned school and risk tolerance. Felder thinks he has matched about 20 to 30 families so far.

Members of the group seem to be seeking varying solutions. Felder does not have hard data for the whole group yet, but he thinks the largest subset of the group are families with a stay-at-home parent looking to cost-share a licensed teacher to assist with in-home guidance in the parallel curriculum. Another large group is probably arranging complete teacher and nanny sharing. One small subset, Felder said, is likely to craft a homeschooled curriculum with a board-certified teacher. Another small subset seems to be parents with young children who want to help look after each other’s children to provide breaks.

Giving parents a way to connect

Parents mentioned uncertainty about back-to-school plans as one reason they joined the group.

Kelly Downing, parent of a rising first grader and a kindergarten student zoned for Nuckols Farm Elementary School, joined the group in search of a teacher to help with the times that students are not in the classroom in the HCPS hybrid plan. She is in favor of her children returning to school full-time and considered private school, but she does not want to lose her son’s Individualized Education Plan.

“That’s why I said, you know what, I’m going to take whatever the school can give us but then look for support within the community to try to see if we can pull some kids together and try to find some resources and help, a teacher, to help teach him during this time,” she said. She feels that her son has regressed, she said.

Downing is part of an informal group in her neighborhood that formed as a result of a post she made in the Facebook group.

“I’m glad that this group exists because I feel it gives parents a way to connect, and that’s great,” she said.

Stephanie Fox, a Glen Allen resident and parent of a rising first grade student and two younger children, also said that the group helped form connections.

“I think it’s looking like it’s a great place to connect people — families and teachers and people who can benefit from other services and being paired together,” she said.

“I think this group would give me the greatest pool of families to find matches with versus my circle of friends or a local online mom group,” she wrote in a follow up, and said that she thinks she might be looking for a needle in a haystack because of her family’s comfort level with distancing.

She joined the group because her family will not return to in-person school in the fall, she said, and is mainly looking for a group of peers for her son to socialize with and be with in a group setting, she said. A teacher would be ideal, but she would be open to a group without one.

“I’d like to have a safe place for my child to interact with a safe group of similar-aged children,” she said. “I do not see that happening in a school building for this school year.

Although she has not found a formal group yet, she is talking to several people, she said. People are still figuring out their needs since public schools have not announced plans, she said, although her family has decided.

Some teachers in the group are interested because they have high-risk family members, Felder said. If they cannot teach only virtually, they will need to resign, he said.

The group is not meant to detract from teachers’ requests for safety precautions in reopening schools, Felder said.

“The purpose of this group is to create a system or method people can explore if the reopening of schools aren’t done in a way that’s satisfactory to their risk profiles,” he said.

People from other cities have asked Felder about creating similar groups for their areas, he said, and people in Northern Virginia and in Spotsylvania County are gathering information to form groups.

Felder has currently spent about 35 hours on matching families, he said, and is talking to coders about automating the group. He also is working on leaving a team of moderators in charge of day-to-day posts.

Although COVID-19 is driving the use of the group, Felder said, he sees a potential for the future.

“I would also like to see something like this if it’s beneficial for our children,” he said “and they’re getting a better quality of education in smaller groups, to be able to continue past COVID as some sort of cooperative education childcare model.”

Felder has also consulted teachers and thinks that a platform like the group could potentially employ teachers at above the market value in the public sector and could provide benefits if it becomes a lasting business model.

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