How One Ridgefield Business Came To Love Online Learning

RIDGEFIELD, CT — Even as area commerce slowly begins to awaken from the nap imposed by the coronavirus, many of the small business owners still standing find themselves executing what MBAs in less-complex times termed a "pivot."

But it's one thing for a business to pivot; it's quite another to pivot when you are already teetering on cliff's edge.

Recess Playworks in Ridgefield opened in February, providing a space where working-from-home parents could bring their children during their work day. On one side, it offered all the amenities of a modern office, including a conference room and podcast studio. Down the hall, there were classes in movement, coding, and chess for older kids; and story time, and an art studio for the younger crowd.

The paint on the walls of the podcast studio was barely dry when the virus began its sweep through southwestern Connecticut, sending parents and their children into lockdown at home. Suddenly, we were all working-from-home parents. It no longer mattered if you felt unproductive trying to get work done while your children were home, you had no choice.

It should have been the very definition of frustration for a businesswoman: an unexpected black swan event like a virus pandemic greatly increasing the demand for her services, while at the same time the government reduces her business's capacity to accept customers.

Kelsey Hubbard is co-owner of Recess Playworks, alongside her husband. She had hired a "really great" art teacher just before the shut down, she said, and decided to keep her classes running online. She just needed to get the classroom to the students.

"We put together an 'art box' each week that has all the materials the child would need for the classes," Hubbard told Patch. There's a 60-minute art class scheduled on videoconferencing app Zoom each day, for two different age groups. The art boxes are delivered to the child's home at the beginning of the week, so the students can all create, online, together. "We've had a lot of moms saying 'It's the one hour of the day that I am not hearing, 'Mom! Mom!'"

The children have been creating Easter baskets, Mother's Day projects, and spring-themed activities which incorporate seeds and soil. The initiative was so popular it's been morphed into online art teacher-led birthday parties and play dates. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, "When the going gets virtual, the virtual turn pro."

Hubbard is looking ahead to an undetermined time when she can reopen the doors to her business. Upstream of that, the co-working space for adults and play spaces for their children are being retooled to accommodate social distancing and new physical barriers.

There's a lot of retooling to do. One of the big attractions at Recess Playworks for the younger set was its ball pit, and that's not going to fly very far, post-COVID.

Recess Playworks is not included on Gov. Ned Lamont's Phase One list of non-essential businesses allowed to open on May 20. At this moment, there are no details about when Phase Two might begin, or what types of businesses would be included. Hubbard is hopeful she will be allowed to open a social distancing compliant version of her business before the June 17 end of the public school year. She has plans to offer online tutoring for students while her adult clients make use of the brick-and-mortar co-working lounge workspace at 66 Danbury Road.

Of course, being cleared to open by the town and state, and luring customers who have become accustomed to working from home with their kids around to show up, are two very separate goals. In a slowly unfolding Vindication of the Germaphobes, that quirky CPA sitting two desks down from you who couldn't start work in the morning before disinfecting his phone and keyboard has made the leap from nerd to bellwether.

"We're walking that balance: even when they say, 'you can be open,' are people going to come?" Hubbard asked.

That's the multi-billion dollar question. If southwest Connecticut area social media is any indicator, half the town is chomping at the bit to get back to work and resume some semblance of a normal life, and the more cautious other half still want to stay indoors (and they want you to stay inside, as well). Hubbard said many parents told her they would not have sent their children back to a brick-and-mortar classroom even had the schools made the decision to reopen before the summer.

"As much as it makes me feel weird to say this, maybe we'll have to take people's temperatures coming in," Hubbard said. "Maybe that'll be the normal."

Or maybe nothing will ever be "normal" again — not that abnormal would be a bad thing, for some businesses.

Hubbard says, after talking to many parents, she has learned that some students who never quite made a proper connection in a traditional classroom environment are thriving with distance learning. The long-term implications of that we'll leave for the sociologists and the science fiction authors, but short-term, Hubbard sees a business opportunity: The Ridgefield Public Schools have not been able to launch the live Zoom classes for elementary school students, she said. And as she has been forced to prioritize her virtual services above the real world, she's grown her business into Wilton, New Canaan and Greenwich.

Long-term, if working from home becomes more common (and it will, as epidemiologists drive a stake through the already widely-loathed modern "open" office space), Hubbard expects her client list to swell even more. The more parents who need to conduct business from home, the more Hubbard's cash register should ring.

"For so long as we don't have a vaccine, I think many people will opt for a more virtual experience."