Sebastopol arts center throws lifeline to working parents with a supervised learning program

Rhianna Frank’s life was challenging before the pandemic hit. Since then, the climb has been even steeper.

The single mother of a 6-year-old, she also holds a full-time job in the environmental field.

Her son is a first grader at Sebastopol’s Park Side Elementary School. While monitoring his remote learning, she’s also been working from home.

“So I’m doing two full-time jobs,” she said, “plus trying to keep my house in order, which sometimes feels like a third job.”

With no partner or family in the area to support her, “It’s been tough. He and I are both behind. We’re struggling.”

Help is on the way in the form of a new program offered by the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, a hub of culture and creative thinking in the town for 30 years.

Starting Nov. 2, that 17,000-square-foot building will be the site of a supervised distance learning program for 46 first through fifth graders in Sebastopol. While Frank is excited by the prospect of enrolling her son in the program, she’s worried that he may be exposed to COVID-19.

Anticipating such concerns, the arts center has taken several steps to mitigate the virus. In addition to providing academic and technical support, the learning assistants hired to supervise the children have been trained in safety and sanitation procedures.

The kids will be be organized in “pods” of 12 — two learning assistants per “pod” — to allow for proper social distancing, said Dana Swint, the center’s education manager and driving force behind this new program.

“We really wanted to do something for the community, and we had this very large building that could not be used for events or our documentary film festival,” said Catherine Devriese, creative director of the arts center.

One of the center’s goals is always to get more young people into the building. “And we knew there was this need,” Devriese said.

Una Glass, who is both managing director of the arts center and vice mayor of Sebastopol, expressed concern about the fate of young children in families — “particularly families that aren’t very privileged” — whose parents had to keep working. “What’s going to happen to them?”

Some of those children will now spend weekdays at the arts center. The program will run Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Not surprisingly, after-school activities will be art intensive, with actual teaching artists helping their charges learn the finer points of dance, music, painting, ceramics, ukulele and more.

Half the students will come from the Sebastopol Unified School district, which has partnered with the arts center. Others are coming from schools in the Sebastopol area.

While her teachers are doing “a phenomenal job” engaging students remotely, said Linda Irving, superintendent of the Sebastopol Unified School District and principal of Park Side Elementary School, “nothing replaces in-person instruction.”

While some children thrive with remote learning, others “are difficult to engage,” Irving said. “It’s easy for them to check out,” especially if their parents can’t frequently monitor them.

Those students at the highest risk for “learning loss,” as Irving put it, are being steered toward this new program. Some of the costs for students from Irving’s district are being defrayed with federal pandemic relief funds earmarked for public schools in the $2 trillion U.S. CARES Act, signed into law in March.

To make the program affordable to all families, the arts center has launched a GoFundMe campaign.

“We’re all in this together,” Swint said, “and we are committed to supporting families and students navigating this difficult time.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.