Education Week - September 9, 2020 - 16

Laptop Delays, Zoom Glitches,
Equity Gaps: Remote Learning
Faces Big Challenges
The Leander school district, near
Austin, Texas, was set to start the
school year with full-time remote
learning on Aug. 13, but ended up delaying until the following week after
a web content filtering tool malfunctioned, potentially preventing some
high school students from connecting to the internet on their schoolprovided devices.
A couple hours' drive away, the
San Antonio district had distributed
30,000 Chromebooks to K-3 students
in early April. But the district eventually determined that tablets work better for younger students, so it ordered
a bundle using state funds and is now
in the process of swapping them out,
leaving the Chromebooks as surplus.
The Indianapolis school district
sent surveys to parents between April
and July, gauging whether or not they
had broadband service at home. But
it later became clear that some parents who answered "yes" didn't have
a connection at home that was strong
enough to support two or three children at once, especially if parents
were also working remotely.
And late last month, on the first
day of school for students in Atlanta,
Clark County, Nev., and across Arkansas, Zoom was down worldwide.
These situations highlight the
complex and oftentimes unpredictable technological challenges schools
are facing as many start the new academic year with buildings once again
closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Thirty-nine of the 50 largest
school districts in the country have
chosen remote learning only as their
back-to-school instructional model,
affecting over 4.5 million students,
according to Education Week's reopenings tracker.
Many districts have gotten better at
some of the remote learning basics,
such as ensuring every student has
a digital device and an internet connection at home.
Others continue to struggle to
achieve the basics as gaps in access to
virtual education threaten to widen
existing disparities in education that
leave poor students and students of
color at a disproportionate disadvantage.
California students, particularly
those in districts that serve areas with
a high percentage of low-income families, need a million more devices,
state officials told The Los Angeles
Times this month. The state's Lynwood district, with more than 14,000
students and a 94 percent Latino and
5 percent Black student population,
couldn't find Wi-Fi hotspots for sale,
so it partnered with the city to temporarily provide internet access at a few
city-owned locations.
"The school house and the school
bus are now a computer and Wi-Fi,"

said Cara McClellan, assistant counsel for the NAACP's Legal Defense
and Educational Fund, which has
recently taken up nationwide efforts
to advocate for expanding at-home
internet access.
"In some districts, we're talking
about a third of Black students who
are not able to access their education," McClellan said. "This is clearly
in line with our school desegregation
work."
But even in districts where every
student is connected, big challenges

close. While some had already outfitted every student with a take-home
digital device, others were only inching toward that goal when the urgency suddenly spiked.
The rapid surge in demand for
laptops and tablets led to a delay
in shipments for device orders.
More than 8.4 million devices were
shipped to districts between April
and June, 54 percent more than
during the same quarter last year,
said Lauren Guenveur, a senior
research analyst who specializes

Rich Pedroncelli/AP

By Mark Lieberman

Chromebooks were loaned to thousands of students last spring in California's
Elk Grove Unified School District.

remain. Making sure that teachers
know how to construct meaningful
virtual instruction for students, and
that parents and students know how
to access and engage with it, is a formidable task, especially with a relatively short time to prepare.
"Hav ing 20,000 laptops for
20,000 kids is not the be-all end-all
by any stretch of the imagination,"
said Leslie Wilson, founder and former CEO of the One-to-One Institute, a nonprofit organization that
for two decades has been helping
districts engage students with technology tools. "It could be disastrous
in a lot of ways if you don't have the
infrastructure to support it, and if you
have some kids who have internet at
home and some who don't."

Surge in Laptop Demand
Ken Thompson, the chief IT officer for the San Antonio district, has
spent recent weekends coaching
parents on using the digital devices
that have recently been provided to
students. He's even taken to troubleshooting families' connectivity issues from his car, pulled over on the
side of the road.
"Everything is riding on IT right
now," Thompson said.
Schools were caught off guard this
spring when the COVID-19 outbreak
forced buildings in all 50 states to

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 9, 2020 | www.edweek.org

in devices at technology market
tracker IDC.
Still, even as the supply chain has
fully recovered from the strain it experienced in March, Guenveur said,
getting devices to all the districts asking for them won't be easy.
"Will that need be fulfilled by the
end of the year in 2020? Probably
not," she said. "The good news is
from all the evidence we saw, the
orders will be fulfilled. It's just the
unprecedented demand that is really
throwing everyone for a loop."
That demand is particularly strong
heading into the new school year
because many districts that had expected to reopen school buildings
at least part-time are keeping them
closed for now. The threat of the
virus has persisted nationwide and
even increased in some states since
the spring, and many schools haven't
found the time or funding to safely
reopen buildings while adhering to
public health recommendations and
accommodating concerned families
and staff.
The biggest difficulty for some
districts is grappling with the uncertainty of what's ahead, and planning
simultaneously for a variety of scenarios.
Administrators at the Indianapolis district did "the hardest planning
first," focusing early in the summer
on contingencies for a hybrid model

in which some students learn in the
building and others stay home, said
Ashley Cowger, the district's executive director of professional learning
and the director of its e-learning efforts this year.
When the school board decided on
July 30 to keep all students at home
through at least Oct. 2, administrators were able to tweak the hybrid
plan. "We're not executing that right
now, but it's in our back pocket," she
said.
Device deliveries arrived in June
and July, and the district spent the
last two weeks offering the devices
for pickup at school buildings. Twelve
weeks of optional professional development for teachers this summer focused on "what blended learning is,
what the quality practices are, how to
do things like assess students when
you're in a remote environment,"
Cowger said.
In the last two weeks, the district
had to order more "Mi-Fi" cards-
wireless routers that act as mobile
hotspots for Internet connections-to
help ensure that families with weak
internet connections are able to log
on. "It's a little bit of a moving target,
but we've committed to responding
to the needs of our families," Cowger
said. "If that means we need to purchase 250 to 500 more Mi-Fi cards,
that's what we're doing."
Glitches may be unavoidable,
though. Some students' home internet service providers had installed a
security feature that prevented them
from logging into class. "That created a little disruption to afternoon
attendance" on the first day, Cowger
said, but the problem has since been
resolved.
Schools that haven't reopened yet
should likely build in time for glitches
and malfunctions to eat up the first
day or two of remote instruction.
The Eastmont district in Washington state pondered a three-day delay
to the start of the school year after a
computer system upgrade that had
begun in January was preventing
teachers from engaging with training for virtual instruction. Garn
Christensen, the district's superintendent, later announced the school
year would proceed on schedule.
"I anticipate a few bumps in the
first week or two of school," he wrote
to families. "This is because some of
the upgrades we initiated early summer to improve our ability to communicate and deliver technology
in preparation for a possible remote
start have not gone as smoothly as
hoped and parts and equipment have
been delayed."

Short-Term Solutions
Schools nationwide are facing a financial crisis as state and local budgets dwindle during the ongoing economic downturn. Congress has failed
after months of negotiations to pass
a new relief bill that would include
billions of dollars for school districts.
More than three-quarters of D.C.
insiders surveyed recently said they
believe federal relief won't be passed
until the end of September.
Some of those funds would go towards more permanent solutions

to address the reality that 15 million
students and as many as 400,000
U.S. teachers lack a reliable Internet
connection at home. Without broader
relief, districts have turned to a variety of short-term solutions: ordering
hotspot devices students can use in
their homes; partnering with local
businesses to offer internet access;
and negotiating temporarily reduced
rates with internet service providers
in the area.
The rural Mountain Empire district
in California serves 3,900 students,
including residents of three Native
American tribal reservations. Seventy percent of the district's students
qualify for free and reduced lunch,
and 30 percent are English-language
learners.
In the next few weeks, the district
will receive 150 hotspots for families
who have broadband connectivity
where they live but can't afford to
pay for service on their own, according to district superintendent Kathy
Granger.
The district is also searching for a
cellular hub that would serve several
rural mobile home communities,
and the county's education office
is negotiating with local satellite
service providers to extend access.
"Adequate service through them will
not be available for several months,"
Granger said. In the meantime,
5 percent of the district's students are
starting the year with independent
study or homeschooling; roughly
half of those students don't have the
option to learn virtually at home,
Granger said.
Others have turned to more drastic
action.
The city of Chicago has pledged to
pay for up to four years of internet service at home for as many as 100,000
K-12 students, using a combination
of public and philanthropic funds.
After teachers and parents protested
outside Comcast headquarters in
Philadelphia this summer, the city
announced that 35,000 low-income
families will receive internet access
either through a Comcast program or
via a T-Mobile hotspot.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund
wrote a letter last month to 20 internet service providers in areas that
serve large numbers of people of
color, urging them to offer free Internet access to students for the entire
school year; expand broadband infrastructure in currently underserved
areas; and widely advertise internet
access opportunities schools and students can use.
"This is obviously one thing they
can concretely do that would have a
huge impact on the ongoing institutional inequalities based on race,"
McClellan said.
The organization's short-term goal
is to identify public-private partnerships that will shrink the number of
households without access to broadband service.
Building networks in rural areas,
though, will take a more sustained
commitment and federal support,
McClellan said. "We can't just keep
having this model of school districts
or of local government agencies having to bid against each other" for devices, she said.

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Education Week - September 9, 2020

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