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March 22, 2020

Arailia Jeffries works for a plasma collection company, but her hours as a phlebotomist are being cut as the coronavirus pandemic scares away potential donors.

Her husband, a metal fabricator, also is working reduced hours for reduced pay.

So Wednesday evening, as dark clouds built outside Jeffries’ house near the Pearsall Park neighborhood, frustration built inside her sweltering living room where, still wearing navy scrubs, she and her four school-aged children waited on hold with Spectrum.

Schools are closed for at least the next two weeks and classes are moving online, but the family doesn’t have internet access. The telecommunications company promised to hook up students for free, but now a representative was telling Jeffries she first had to pay a previous balance.

Jeffries didn’t ask how much. She knew it was at least $300.

“So what are these children supposed to do to learn, when they’re getting their Chromebooks tomorrow and they don’t have internet?” she said into the phone. “If I could afford to have internet, I would already have it.”

Schools, under a state directive, now must provide “remote instruction” and many will start Monday.

Although several districts are offering curbside pickup of paper packets, lessons largely will be given online — further exacerbating the digital divide in a city with one of the nation’s biggest income gaps.

Even in better times, students who don’t have ready access to computers and the internet face greater challenges completing homework and college applications. But now that teachers are replacing their physical classrooms with virtual ones and a free public education increasingly involves a home computer and a high-speed internet connection, low-income children are on deteriorating ground.

Almost a quarter of Bexar County households do not have desktop or laptop computers and about 21 percent don’t have broadband internet, 2017 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show.

That includes Arailia Jeffries’ family. There are four boys at home: a ninth-grader at Southwest Legacy High School, a seventh-grader at McAuliffe Middle and two third-graders at Indian Creek Elementary.

The younger two got tablet computers for Christmas, but one got lost and the other broke last week.

The family can use Arailia Jeffries’ smartphone as a wireless hotspot, but that quickly drains the battery and data plan.

“It’ll be gone in a day, especially if they all want to hook it up at once,” she said.

Luckily, the Southwest Independent School District already had achieved “one-to-one” status, meaning it provides one electronic device for each of its roughly 14,000 students to use in school. All campuses ran pickups Thursday and Friday, allowing parents to collect their children’s devices — iPads for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, and Chromebook laptops for the rest — without leaving their cars.

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San Antonio ISD, more than three times the size of Southwest and with a similarly high poverty rate, placed an order last week for 30,000 electronic devices, mainly Chromebooks for students who don’t have computers.

The district is hoping to pay the $6 million cost from a $1.25 billion bond scheduled for the November ballot, said Vanessa Hurd, chief of external relations.

SAISD is raising money from local and national philanthropies to buy between 3,000 and 4,000 hotspots, which along with data plans will cost $1 million, Hurd said. The district also bought earphones last week for students.

As part of a long-term goal to ensure all students have devices and access, SAISD last year gave hotspots or smartphones to every high-schooler who didn’t have reliable internet.

“This is an incredibly ambitious undertaking that we had planned to meet within three years,” Superintendent Pedro Martinez said in a Thursday letter to families. “The time is now, though, and our goal is to close the gap in two weeks.”

In Southwest ISD, a line of cars spilled out of the Indian Creek Elementary parking lot onto Old Pearsall Road by 8 a.m. Thursday.

A teacher wearing disposable gloves handed Jeffries two laptops, paper math and reading packets, pencils and crayons. When Jeffries brought up her inability to connect through Spectrum, she was told to call AT&T, but she has a past balance there too.

Jeffries’ concerns were relayed to Principal Aracelie Bunsen, who said she might be able to find a spare hotspot. She promised to call another mother who needed help getting internet.

About 100 families showed up during the first hour. Bunsen hoped to give every last device away, saying very few of the 575 students have them at home. Parents listed their children’s names, grades and teachers, and signed checkout forms that held them accountable for the $400 cost of a broken laptop.

“What if they break the Chromebook?” Jeffries worried. “They love the Chromebook.”

After driving through Indian Creek’s line, she collected laptops from the middle and high schools. Even if they score the technology, Jeffries and other parents who can’t work from home had another worry: keeping their children on task, as teachers do.

Her older boys have been staying home unsupervised while the younger two go to day care, where she didn’t think they’d be made to do schoolwork.

Last week at day care, they made coronaviruses out of Play-Doh and Q-tips.

Teachers will use Google Classroom and Google Hangouts to give video lessons during their normal class times, Bunsen said. Work will be assigned and there will be deadlines, just like a normal school year.

The paper packets were to tide children over until they could get online, said her assistant principal, Marissa DeHoyos. While schools remain closed, some students are spending days at grandparents’ houses without internet, she said.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio area school districts extend classroom closures by two weeks

If the new structure causes students to fall behind, they’ll get tutoring when school is back in session, Bunsen said.

“We’re going to work with everybody,” she said. “It’s an extenuating circumstance. It’s nobody’s fault. We don’t want any kids hurt by this.”

Josephine Garcia had to collect four laptops Thursday at Indian Creek. Her children are in the second, third, fourth and fifth grades there. She has eight children total, including one who’s already graduated from high school.

Next, she would get a laptop from McAuliffe Middle, where her seventh-grade daughter, Roselee Rodriguez, wished she still could hang out with her friends.

“I don’t have no one to talk to,” Roselee said from the front seat of the car packed with younger siblings.

Garcia, a supervisor at Luby’s, said she has high-speed internet at home and her sister comes over to watch the children. She was looking forward to the day virtual classes would begin.

“It’s good, so they’re not at home all day doing nothing,” Garcia said.

As a San Antonio Housing Authority digital ambassador, Janet Garcia has been helping her neighbors in the Alazan-Apache Courts public housing community on the West Side get connected, despite not having a laptop herself after hers was stolen.

She has two children, 4 and 5 years old, who attend KIPP charter schools. The charter district sent out a survey about students’ technology needs Tuesday that could be completed on smartphones and promised more information about online learning.

Campuses last week also handed out educational packets, but Janet Garcia, a single mother, worried about taking time off work to retrieve them.

Some of her neighbors are worse off. She’s trying to help one mother of five children in SAISD who only knows Spanish, and another who can’t read or write in English or Spanish, to understand the district’s instructions. A third friend has been receiving information from KIPP but didn’t know how to download it on her smartphone.

Early last week, Janet Garcia gave her children a used book from Goodwill.

“I’m having them retrace the letters from the book with a marker,” she said. “I need them to compete on a level with other kids.”

The Northside ISD neighborhood around Glenoaks Elementary School has one of the highest rates of households without internet in Bexar County, according to Census Bureau data. Catholic Charities settles many refugee families in the area because of Glenoaks’ program for immigrant students.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio ISD giving high-schoolers the gift of internet at home

Many of the families are from Afghanistan, said Elizabeth Ortiz, refugee education director for Catholic Charities, who works with more than 200 school-age children. Others come from Africa, the Middle East, Myanmar and Nepal.

The families’ limited access to computers will be a problem, though some have relatives in San Antonio already, who are more likely to have internet access, Ortiz said.

Catholic Charities runs English classes for adults, which the organization plans to continue by delivering paper homework packets, she said. She didn’t know how the school districts’ online learning plans would affect students who speak African and Asian languages and are still learning basic English.

“The challenge is, you’re going to have different levels of learners,” Ortiz said. “Not all can do the work independently.”

SAISD has created a “digital playground” for students, organized by grade level, with many videos and lesson plans that can be accessed from smartphones. The district won’t open its virtual classrooms until March 30, when students will be given work for teachers to assess and provide digital feedback on, Hurd said.

Schools need to get it right — they’ll likely remain closed past April 6, she said.

“We’re pushing for real accountability,” Hurd said. “Certainly, no one is suggesting we can fully replicate a classroom in a virtual environment. … We’re trying to provide as robust and credible an experience as we can, and we don’t have all the details yet.”

Northside ISD, the largest school district in Bexar County, received thousands of requests for electronic devices before pulling down an online form Thursday. The district was contacting families late last week to provide pickup times, dates and locations.

The move to virtual classrooms has created a learning curve for teachers as well. Thousands joined a “cov-ED co-op” Facebook group, named for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Teachers in the group request and offer help with online lessons.

Required Reading: Get San Antonio education news sent directly to your inbox

Steele Montessori Academy, in SAISD, already has started frequent online outreach, including a Facebook Live chat about online learning, a mystery game for students, videos of teachers reading and an online workout led by the physical education coach. The school also sent parents a spreadsheet with different online resources.

James Roadman’s 6-year-old son attends Steele. The family has high-speed internet and his son has access to computers and a tablet. From the school spreadsheet, Roadman picked a homeschooling link with math and reading games.

“It’s free for a little while and then it has a paywall,” Roadman said. “I think after I try several of these, I’ll pick one or two to subscribe to.”

Roadman’s wife is a nurse practitioner, but he works from home repairing guitars. He drew up a schedule last week for his son that included half-hour blocks of math, reading, writing and recess.

“I will use the computer for the things I think the computer is helpful for, but at his age, there’s a lot of things we can do with paper or markers,” he said.

Although Montessori classes allow students to choose between different hands-on activities, Roadman said he’s resigned to more screen time once SAISD’s required online learning kicks in.

“I think the quarantining is necessary and I’m not sure we have a choice,” Roadman said. “I really like the Montessori school. I wish he had access to that.”

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