Pandemic Had 'Silver Lining' in Broadband Buildout, but Millions of Students Still Aren't Online

The COVID-19 pandemic sent educators scrambling when schools closed overnight in March 2020, said Jason Amos, National School Boards Association director-communications, during a Broadband Breakfast webinar Wednesday. The “silver lining” is that the pandemic led to better broadband buildout, he said. Experts said schools continue to face challenges, including the advent of generative AI.

“A lot of school districts got creative -- they put Wi-Fi on school buses and parked them in high-needs communities” at the start of the pandemic, Amos said. In Alaska, a school district used a radio station to broadcast content to students, he said. Schools continue to use broadband three years later, he said. Snow days have become remote learning days in some districts, he said, and kids who are sick have more opportunities for remote learning. “Some kids actually benefit more when they’re learning online,” he said.

Challenges remain with millions of school children still not online and some having to share a device with multiple family members, Amos said. In some cases, school districts overstate the extent broadband is available, he said. “The pandemic certainly exacerbated disparities … in education and access, opportunity and achievement,” he said.

Amos said when his daughter brought home an iPad for remote learning he realized how lucky he was to live in an area where such devices were readily available. As test results start to roll in, educators are seeing some of biggest declines ever in average math and reading scores, he said: The results aren’t surprising, “but they’re no less worrisome.”

Schools came out of the pandemic “stronger and more aware of how our students learn, and the access that they have at home,” said consultant Eileen Belastock, a former high school principal and director of technology for Nauset Public Schools in Massachusetts. Parts of relatively wealthy school districts still don’t have access to reliable broadband, she said. “We’re really still dealing with the digital divide” and some families find that even low-cost service “is a stretch for them,” she said. Data privacy and security also remain concerns, she said.

Schools knew “everyone was going through a really tough time” during the pandemic, and expectations dropped, said Charles Severance, University of Michigan clinical professor-information. “It’s difficult to convince students to go back to the previous expectations,” he said.

Just as education became more normalized, schools started to face the challenges posed by ChatGPT, Severance said. The combination of moving things online and allowing remote learning “tends to make some of your coursework ideally solvable by ChatGPT,” he said. Educators don’t want to prohibit use of generative AI, which is “like saying you need to do this job and you can’t use Google search,” he said: “We’re facing another sort of transformation.”

Amos noted the FCC said this week more than 20 million households have enrolled in the FCC's affordable connectivity program (see 2308140059). “That’s great it’s serving so many people -- the downside is the more people it serves the faster it’s going to run out of money,” he said.