A Desk of Their Own To Ease Remote Learning For Kids In Need

As remote schooling surged during the pandemic, parents across the country realized that many kids didn’t have desks at home.

So they got busy building, collecting and donating them, giving hundreds or thousands of students workspaces to call their own and helping them get through long days of virtual learning.

For Mitch Couch in the Central California town of Lemoore, inspiration struck when his 16-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son kept taking over the kitchen table for their remote lessons. He made desks for them, and thought: Why not provide others’ children with individual learning areas they could decorate with stickers and paint?

The desks he made were kid-size, simple and inexpensive, fashioned from plywood with a hutch for workbooks and papers. But they did the trick.

“I was like, you know what, I built these desks for like $20,” Couch said. “Maybe I can show other people how to do it. So I made a quick YouTube video” to guide fellow parents in Desk-Making 101.