As the COVID-19 pandemic spells uncertainty for the 2020-21 school year, the Campbell Union High School District is aiming to put all of its students on level ground when it comes to the technology needed for remote learning.
By the time the next school year begins, the district will have distributed a computer to each of its approximately 8,000 students as part of its “one to one” program. But before they could meet that lofty goal, they had to rise to the challenge of the pandemic.
By the end of February, district leaders had begun to develop a plan for the increasingly likely reality that schools would be shut down due to COVID-19. For years, the district had been working to put laptops and hotspots into the hands of students who didn’t have reliable technology at home, but there was still a substantial number of students who didn’t have access to WiFi or a computer, making remote learning impossible. CUHSD Superintendent Robert Bravo then floated the idea of hand-delivering computers and hotspots to families in need during the pandemic.
“It was literally something I never thought of in my career that we would be looking at,” said John Keating, CUHSD director of technology. But, he said, they could see “the writing on the wall.”
Keating and his team placed a bulk order for wireless hotspots and began to gather the district’s on-campus technology to repurpose and check out to students. Campuses organized programs for parents to pick up laptops and hotspots directly from the school. The next step: Bravo’s idea of “milkman-style delivery.”
“Not every family is able to get to the school or has the same abilities,” Keating said. “Our plan to deliver devices to the households could remove all of those barriers.”
Families were instructed to call a hotline if they needed technology for their students, and the district would generally deliver it by the next day. Keating said his team members—Son Trinh, Aaron Rosales, Dannii Wang, Jose Stennett, Matt Saul and Alan Chase—were responsible for mobilizing and getting the technology into students’ hands so quickly.
Using district vans and route technology from San Francisco-based Samsara, the district technicians delivered nearly a thousand Google Chromebooks and WiFi hotspots in two months.
“They would deliver 15 to 20 (devices) some days,” Keating said. “We were in shelter in place, and it was looking very, very bleak. They were out there on the streets delivering, taking risks, and really showing how we can come together.”
This delivery effort was the most recent—and most urgent—effort in a years-long push to invest more district resources into technology. Keating said the district has been working to increase students’ access to technology since he began in the department more than six years ago. He said the district went from having only a few desktop labs for students to use to having 140 laptop carts in just a couple of years. And over the last few years, the district’s leaders have attempted to further address the digital divide, a term used to describe the disparity between students who have technology at home and those who don’t.
They kicked off a pilot program where they checked out about 40 laptops to students, but the costs quickly added up. But after receiving grant money, the district was able ramp up its efforts. Two years ago, the district launched its first one-to-one program at Del Mar High School in San Jose, expanding the program to Prospect High School in Saratoga last year. And next year, the program is set expand to its other campuses, including Branham High School in San Jose’s Cambrian neighborhood and Leigh High School near the San Jose-Los Gatos border.
According to Keating, the district is gearing up to check out about 6,000 more devices to students in the coming months. Because no one in the district is sure what next year’s instruction will look like, Keating said he isn’t certain what the large-scale distribution will look like either, but the goal is for every student to have a Chromebook in their hands by the time school starts.
“Once we went to shelter in place, it was clear that our technology is now our only means of education,” Keating said.
District Communications Coordinator Sarah Foy said the technology department has done a remarkable job meeting the challenge and planning for the upcoming year amid so many variables.
“It took a lot of creativity and a lot of hard work to get this all on board,” Foy said. “They’ve thought of really creative solutions to get this off and running for next year.”
