. Kristin Thomas Sancken, the mom who’d organized the meeting, was surprised and heartened to hear about half of the parents say it was very important to them that any pods they created were diverse and didn’t exacerbate inequality at the school. Sancken, a white social worker whose younger daughter Annie was going into first grade, had sent an invitation to every Greenbrier parent email address she had, mostly the moms of Annie’s classmates from kindergarten.
I have no idea what my schedule will be or how we can juggle meeting M’s educational and social needs. The proposals were sort of pie-in-the-sky: Maybe someone could set up a tent in their backyard and host outdoor school everySancken, meanwhile, had found a few first grade families whose needs and concerns roughly matched hers, and they were having tentative conversations about how a pod might work. They all wanted a place where their kids could assemble during the school day and play with one another after school, and they all felt pretty conservative on safety.
She contacted the school’s parent-teacher organization and local nonprofits serving the Black, Latino, and refugee populations in Charlottesville, asking them to connect her to Greenbrier families who lived outside the immediate neighborhood. In early August, still worried about reaching families of color, she posted to the Facebook group:
Watson attended several pods get-togethers, he said, because he was considering the option, but also to observe the meetings themselves: “Are families of color present in those conversation? Are they invited?” Despite the group’s attempts at outreach, often, they weren’t. “Our Black and brown families had no idea this was going on,” said Yeaton, who attended the pod group meetings.
“I took the first day of the refugee pods off work, because I knew it would be crazy,” Sancken said. That Monday morning, she drove her Honda minivan around Hearthwood, tracking down children and driving them to the pod. One family, newly arrived from Afghanistan, showed her the Chromebook the school had sent them. It had worked at first, they said, but now it wouldn’t turn on anymore.
Yeaton, the Greenbrier teacher, drove up to deliver supplies to one of her second graders, a Congolese boy who’d arrived from a refugee camp earlier this year. He was sitting on a fence and looked absolutely gobsmacked when the person from his computer screen appeared in the flesh. “Are you mine?” she asked. She’d stopped by, she told me, because the boy was behaving disrespectfully in class, and she thought it might help if he really understood she was a real person who cared about him.
Great article.