This Wilmington nonprofit aims to make COVID-19 learning pods equitable and accessible

Betsy Renzo, a mom of two elementary school-aged kids and a teacher-turned-program manager with Wilmington’s Social Contract, first started hearing about learning pods earlier in the summer.

“‘Pods’ became the word of the summer,” she said, of the concept of families pooling their money to hire educators to teach small groups of children at home during the pandemic. “As I heard them talking about it, it very quickly dawned on me that this was going to be a problem for our students who can’t afford to hire a tutor.”

While the decision to keep most public and charter school classrooms in Delaware virtual for at least the first six weeks of the school year is a positive from a public health standpoint, remote learning threatens to widen the education gap, which disproportionately affects Black and Latinx students in Wilmington and Dover.

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