School Closures

Schoolclosures.org is a partnership run by 150+ volunteers and 80+ organizations pooling resources to provide a unified response to the current crisis and its impact on families. The hotline is staffed by volunteers with expertise in education and social services. 

A month ago, we realized 75 million families were facing the prospect of having to teach their kids from home. As parents and educators, we wanted to create a place where any family could go to get concrete help and emotional support through this difficult transition - and beyond. We also saw a lot of companies and individuals trying to help, but no unified effort to respond to the crisis. We called on our friends in edtech, food and psychological support to help us coordinate our efforts to help families. Twilio helped us build a hotline overnight staffed by volunteer parents with experience in remote learning. 

Parents and teachers all over the country started calling in with questions about a wide. range of issues - including where to find meals, the best tools for online learning, how to use google classroom, how to engage kids while parents work from home - or just to have someone to talk to who could listen and empathize with their situation. 

In the first week, we were able to provide a chrome book to a family in St Louis, MO, groceries to a mom with a new baby in Gardena, CA, a volunteer tutor to a family with children with special needs in Raleigh, NC and emotional and practical support to many more.

We are equipped to give callers concrete help and/or advice on a wide range of issues including:

Since we created the hotline a month ago, we’ve received 85k unique visitors and fielded calls from parents and teachers all over the country. 

This is the place to call if a parent wants help planning their child’s education, needs healthy meals or just needs someone to talk to.

We are growing every day as new volunteers and organizations reach out to see how they can be of support. As we learn more about what parents and teachers need and create new projects to support them. There is so much information coming at parents and teachers every day. It’s our hope that we can continue to be a place where families can call and get a clear resolution to whatever problem they are facing and more importantly find a loyal friend with expertise - committed to getting them through this time and to the next.