Chris Molinski has a house full of 8-year-old boys in his North Chattanooga home every day, and a fast-evolving plan to make third grade work - one way or the other.
"We are figuring things out on the fly, but it's an exciting adventure for everybody," Molinski said. "On our first day, the kids had a lot of energy to burn off. They were just excited to play with some other kids."
As the coronavirus crisis persists into back-to-school season, parents are getting creative to balance the demands of doing their jobs and trying to restart the academic year.
"Right now, we're just trying to survive," said Sarah Mattson, a specialist with the Tennessee Small Business Development Center. For months, Mattson - who helped organize the mini-school with the Molinski family - has spent half her day with her children and the other half working at home, trading shifts with her ex-husband to balance the load.
"It is so draining," she said. "On paper it should work, but I'm not taking a lunch break, I'm hardly taking a dinner break. Usually, I can chit-chat with my coworkers and bounce ideas off them, and I can't do that."
She feels fortunate to have a flexible employer and a boss who supports her, but she's also been eager to get back to some semblance of a normal routine, Mattson said. She didn't think, however, a return to the classroom for her children, 8 and 4, was the right answer.
"If there's an active case, the school may have to close down for a few days," Mattson said. "We all need consistency - it's like having snow days constantly."
So Molinski, a full-time dad, is acting as proctor for four boys in his family's home, tapping his experience as an art educator at the Harvard Art Museum, where he worked before his family moved to Chattanooga a year ago. Three families enrolled their sons, who are in third grade together at Normal Park, in the school's online program, but they get together every day with Molinski to oversee their activities.
"It kind of seems like this will afford us consistency, allow the boys to bond and socialize," Mattson said. "One of them is already a very best friend he hasn't seen in person since March."
Meanwhile, at Mattson's nearby home, Molinski's 2-year-old daughter is the youngest of four children who are the other half of this schooling experiment. The three families hired a nanny to tend the younger siblings while the older children attend school at Molinski's.
MAKING IT WORK
After the first day Hamilton County schools were open Wednesday, Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences (CSAS) and Loftis Middle were closed down for cleaning and contact tracing when cases of COVID-19 were reported. Then Barger Academy and Lookout Valley Middle/High were closed for cleaning and tracing on Friday. And late Friday, Signal Mountain Middle/High announced it too would be cleaning and beginning contact tracing after receiving confirmation of a positive case in the building.
That stop-and-start schedule will be problematic for working parents, according to a recent survey by Care.com, the COVID-19 Working Parents Survey.
The study found that 73% of respondents said they may have to make major changes at work if schools and day cares don't reopen consistently. Of those, 21% said they'd need to find another job, and 15% said they would leave the workforce entirely.
Eric Fuller, CEO of U.S. Xpress, recently surveyed employees to get a sense of how working parents were coping. Particularly as the school year approached, and it became clear they wouldn't be back in the office this year, he knew the 1,400 U.S. Xpress employees working from home were juggling a lot.
"More than half of our employees have school-age children, and nearly all of them in some form or fashion are concerned about how they'll manage it," Fuller said. "Even working from home, a lot of employees said they didn't see a way for managing both their children's at-home schooling and work their job."
Some even mentioned that they were considering quitting, or that a spouse might have to quit to balance the needs of school-age children and work, Fuller said.
"We're looking at making some changes for some of those employees and finding roles that are more task-oriented," he said. Alternative work may entail split shifts that would allow parents to cycle on and off the clock to balance work and kids throughout the day, he said.
"We're trying to provide flexibility as much as we can," he said. "As employers, if we don't provide flexibility, you're going to have people leave."
Jessica Ramsey, a digital experience manager for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, worked for months in her children's playroom, dividing her time and attention between her job and her daughters, who are 1 and 4 years old.
"They were both at home with me starting March 14 all the way through the middle of June," she said. "I'm really lucky they're both good kids and they're self-sufficient and they play well together."
She has been able to get them back into day care on a limited basis, and she counts on the support of an employer who has been extremely flexible, but she's also ready for her routine to derail when and if it does, Ramsey said.
"We're taking it day by day," she said. "We do the best we can each day and then start over again the next day."
At Mattson's neighborhood school, the parents have built contingency planning into their thinking, she said. Even small numbers of people can pass the coronavirus around, so the families were very deliberate in setting expectations for how to handle a potential COVID-19 exposure, Mattson said.
"Two of the parents are attorneys, and we have a parenting agreement and an agreement with the nanny we hired," she said. "We agreed to be very transparent. If there's been exposure in the inner circle, we'll tell the parents and let them decide how they want to proceed."
Contact Mary Fortune at mfortune@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6653. Follow her on Twitter at @maryfortune.