Cabin fever sets in for Philly parents snowed in: ‘Are we just supposed to pull another parent out of our butts?’

On the second day her kindergartener was off from his Philadelphia public school because of snow, Karen Robinson shut herself away in her Fairmount home, hoping to take a 15-minute meeting for an important work project.

Her husband had put up a baby gate to signal to 5-year-old Sam that mom was briefly off limits.

Naturally, “my son crawled under the baby gate to come find me,” said Robinson, whose son attends Bache-Martin Elementary. “If I’m working, he wants to be right next to me.”

For thousands of Philadelphia parents, Wednesday is day three of school buildings being shut — a real snow day on Monday, and virtual school Tuesday and Wednesday. With frigid temperatures and a city still encased in ice, it’s not clear whether the district will hold in-person classes all week.

For parents who rely on hourly work, or jobs that have no remote flexibility, the inclement weather-forced school changes have meant either foregoing pay or figuring out childcare arrangements that are often costly, complicated, or both.

But for others, the cabin fever is real. Many are getting into existential angst territory — and conjuring up memories of the pandemic, as parents juggled work and online school, often feeling they were failing at both.

North Philadelphia mom Asjha Simmons’ son attends a charter school that’s been closed — no virtual learning — since Monday.

Simmons runs her own business, so is able to be flexible with her schedule and stay home with her son. But she’s getting antsy.

“I feel forced to be in the house and it’s killing me,” Simmons said. “I would rather be in the gym than in the house. And I don’t even go to the gym.”

Simmons’ son, who’s 12, relishes the down time since “he has every screen known to man on,” she said. She keeps the snacks coming, and it’s all good. (He was less than thrilled when Simmons made him shovel snow, she said.)

Leigh Goldenberg said she was having uncomfortable flashbacks to the pandemic, when her daughter completed virtual kindergarten.

“For me, it’s an emotional regression to that terrible time,” said Goldenberg. “And I feel for the people that didn’t build up that muscle before.”

Virtual school with a fifth grader is much easier than virtual school with a kindergartener, said Goldenberg, whose daughter attends Kirkbride Elementary in South Philadelphia. Her daughter spent 30 minutes on Tuesday completing schoolwork, and managed to keep herself busy socializing with friends online and outside, a short walk away in their neighborhood.

Goldenberg is trying to keep things in perspective — this is not forever, this is not the pandemic.

But, she’s still frustrated.

“All the suburban schools around us went back already, but here in the city, we’re stuck with a giant pile of snow at the end of our street, and it feels pretty unfair,” she said.

Coral Edwards was prepared for Monday’s snow day, but when the district announced a virtual day Tuesday, she began to panic.

“I was like, oh my gosh, there’s a real possibility the entire rest of the week will be virtual,” said Edwards, who lives in Graduate Hospital and has a seven-year-old son who attends Nebinger Elementary and a four-year-old daughter in a private prekindergarten program.

Her daughter’s pre-K is reopened Wednesday with a two-hour delay. And that means dropoff time came when Edwards would have needed to be helping her first grader with virtual learning. So instead, she paid to send both children to Kids on 12th, a Center City school open the full day, so she can get her work done as a marketing consultant and leadership coach.

The scramble has also summoned up emotions and frustrations she last experienced during the pandemic, when her son was 1 and his daycare shut down. While she acknowledged that she is “incredibly privileged,” she said the fact that parents like herself are in such a bind speaks to a larger systemic problem with childcare, Edwards said.

“There’s literally no one to help us,” she said. “There’s just no systemic support whatsoever.”

Streets are being plowed, SEPTA is running, and trash is getting picked up, “but there’s nothing in press conferences about how we’re supporting parents and students,” Edwards said. “The schools are like, ‘we have this virtual learning environment’ — are we just supposed to pull another parent out of our butts?” she said.

Edwards’ husband works in-person as a research physician running a lab, and the burden of childcare logistics falls to her.

“There’s a lot of rhetoric about supporting parents, and raising women up, ... but when push comes to shove, something about our kids’ childcare is changed or tightened, it falls on those people,” she said.

Hannah Sassaman, a West Philadelphia parent of a district fourth grader and ninth grader, is making it through.

“We had another fourth grader live here for 24 hours randomly. I think they went to school? My ninth grader seems to be going to school. We’re just lucky we don’t have little kids,” said Sassaman.

But the storm has Sassaman thinking: how is it that New York, which got a foot of snow in some neighborhoods, had kids back in its (much larger) public school system by Tuesday?

“The questions that I have knowing that the storm was coming for over a week,” Sassaman said, “is what could the administration have done to help resource our sanitation workers and the rest of our incredible city servants to really focus on what it would take to get our kids back in schools, our teachers and the other staff back in their buildings safety to support not just the economy, but also all of the important supports and services kids access at schools every day?”