NEWS THE PATH TO REMOTE EDUCATION HASN'T BEEN AN EASY PROBLEM FOR PITTSBURGH PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO SOLVE
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he switch from brick-andmortar schools to remote education has not been a smooth pivot for the Pittsburgh Public Schools. It took the administration more than five weeks to resume classes for students and even two weeks after classes started, the district did not have a tally of how many of the 23,000 public school students it is reaching. In early March, local educators were in the midst of annual routines that included preparing students for upcoming state assessments and battling the predictable spring fever fidgeting among students. Two weeks later all normalcy disappeared as the coronavirus descended on Pennsylvania, forcing the closure of schools and the overnight responsibility of educators to figure out how to move their district’s lessons into students' homes. In Allegheny County, a handful of districts, including Elizabeth Forward, Fox Chapel Area and Pine-Richland were almost immediately out of the chute with online remote education. The effort was easier for those districts because they already had one-to-one technology programs that provided a device for all students. But at the end of the line was the Pittsburgh Public Schools, where students were without instruction from March 13, when Gov. Tom Wolf ordered schools closed, until April 22, the day remote learning was instituted for all students. Pittsburgh seniors started remote classes on April 16. The five-and-a-half-weeks without formal instruction — including six days previously scheduled for spring break — has frustrated some parents and advocates. Those frustrations have spilled out through online forums and testimony at the April public hearing of the Pittsburgh
BY MARY NIEDERBERGER - FOR THE PITTSBURGH CURRENT
INFO@PITTSBURGHCURRENT.COM
school board. “I guess it’s just a sense of shared frustration about why it took so long,” said James Fogarty, executive director of the advocacy group A+ Schools. “PPS students' last day of school in a brick-and-mortar building was before spring break; the remote learning was a slow roll out with homework collection beginning April 22. A lot of education time has been, and continues to be, lost,” wrote Felicia Williams in her testimony at the April public hearing of the school board Some parents cited the lack of time out of school for supporting lenient grading in the final quarter. Superintendent Anthony Hamlet said all students will pass the final quarter. Lamont Jones, grandfather of students at Manchester K-8, asked in his written comments: “Why was the district, compared to other districts, so late to begin educating our children?” District spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said there were a number of factors that made it more difficult for Pittsburgh schools to transition to remote learning. But the main obstacle is the fact that Pittsburgh’s education model was created for a brick-andmortar setting, with few students set up to access a cyber school. “Other districts already had a oneto-one environment and already had a platform. We had a few schools using Google Classroom or Schoology, but that was it,” Pugh said. In recent remote public forums, Hamlet has said that moving 23,000 students to a remote setting has been a difficult task and took a lot of planning. He has not been specific about what obstacles the district faced beyond a lack of computer devices and internet connections for all students.
10 | MAY 12, 2020 | PITTSBURGH CURRENT
Pugh said the district had conducted an internal technical device inventory by March 20 but that tedious process involved team members visiting all 54 schools to find devices. Before the computers could be transported to the district’s 10-member tech team, each device had to be cleaned and sanitized by district custodians. After delivery to the tech team, the devices were tested to see if they worked and then had to be reimaged to support the Microsoft Teams platform. That process took about an hour per device, Pugh said. On March 23, the district announced it was conducting a district-wide survey to find out what technology families had available for their students.
At the conclusion of the internal and community survey, it was determined 17,000 devices were needed. The district purchased 5,000 new laptops to be added to the 2,500 in its inventory. Another 559 were donated by the University of Pittsburgh. But the total fell far short of the need and a remote learning fund was established to raise money for additional computers. Though more money has come into the fund — including a $360,000 grant from the Heinz Endowments — a backlog in the supply chain means that those computers won’t arrive until late this month. Currently, all students in grades nine-12 have computers and the district is setting up distributions for students in grades six-eight. The district also plans to distribute iPads
