Column One: A coronavirus commune with 16 people? ‘Who’s to say we’re not family?’
Kristen had spent nearly two decades teaching third grade in the Riverside Unified School District. So, when school ended abruptly on Friday, March 13, she knew she had to do something to keep her family from lolling around in pajamas for weeks at a time.
She was sitting on the Roths’ porch, trying to keep her face mask in place while explaining the intricacies of Brothbush Academy. On the other side of a big front window, Gabe was playing a sequence of notes on a guitar and having the little kids echo it back to him on piano. Interviews for this article were conducted from at least six feet away, through masks or on the phone. Neither the reporter nor the photographer set foot in any of the three houses.
The Brothbush parents are not fans of distance learning for the youngest students — children such as Sylvester Roth, 8, and Andie, who are still learning the basics — but twice each week, Andie clicks into a live video chat via Google Classroom with her two teachers and 20 or so fellow first-graders at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School. The group’s done video scavenger hunts and guessing games and accomplished a little math here and there.
The highlight of every school day starts at 1:30 p.m. Lunch, music, art and silent reading have ended, and the students gather around the Roths’ dining room table. Sometimes there is instruction, but often the students are paired up — a young child with an older one — and given a research assignment that ends in a presentation to the group.
They were unanimous on just a few things, such as the superiority of home school bathrooms and lunches. Their judgments were rendered the old-fashioned way — handwritten on paper or white board. Framed through a shed window, music producer Gabe Roth teaches Kat Bristow and his son Sylvester Roth how to build a raised bed in a gardening class.
“That to me was the hardest,” Gabe said. “Trying to make these decisions about when can you come home and when can you not come home ... and doing this communally.” “It all went backwards from the way I wanted it to happen,” Samra recounted. “I was in this weird position. He was going to end up in town for five days. I wanted him to just come home. That was a tense situation.”On April 10 at 11 p.m., Will called. He said he was already in L.A. County. Samra asked him what he was going to do. He said he didn’t know. The Furbush home was filled with girls, a Brothbush sleepover.
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