Rep. Katie Porter Is Using Her Trusty Whiteboard With Her Kids While She Has Covid

If there’s anyone who knows how to make a whiteboard work to their advantage, it’s California Rep. Katie Porter. The mom of three has made a name for herself with her “whiteboard of justice” in her work as a congresswoman, and it seems she likes to take her work home with her. Particularly when she’s sick. Porter is using her trusty whiteboard to communicate with her children after testing positive for Covid, and it’s actually a genius use of a simple medium.

Porter took to Twitter on Monday to explain that she had tested positive for Covid-19. “I was exposed at work here in CA,” she explained. “I’ll vote proxy this week rather than travel to D.C. I have the usual symptoms, especially a sore throat, so I’m communicating via text—and whiteboard.”

Presumably she’ll be communicating with her colleagues via text, but when it comes to her kids, she just whipped out the red marker and took to her best ally. The whiteboard. There she wrote messages like, “If you can read this, you must be wearing your KN95 or N95,” as well as a reminder that “Just because I am sick does not mean YOU cannot do your homework. Go do your math.”

Finally, Porter used her whiteboard to give this salient bit of advice to her kids. “Load your dishes into dishwasher. Do not pile them in sink.”

Three cheers for whiteboard parenting whether you’re sick or not.

Porter’s whiteboard has a history of being incredibly effective. She has used her whiteboard to call it injustice and inequity when confronting bank CEOs like JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, when she asked him a hypothetical question about bank tellers working for him making enough money to survive and then used the whiteboard to show him it was impossible. She also used her whiteboard more recently to call out Celgene CEO Mark Ellis for rising drug prices and his own exorbitant compensation.

In her home life, however, the whiteboard is essentially used to call order in the home. Porter is a mom to a high schooler, a middle schooler, and a little one in elementary school, and she uses the whiteboard to remind them of the simpler rules of the household. Like how to behave at the dinner table. “Ask to please be excused,” for example. Or her personal favorite, “Volume control - turn your knob down.”

Her kids have already been trained in the rules of the whiteboard. So this Covid-era communication should work perfectly for Porter’s family.