Andy and Amy Jo Hellenbrand live on a little farm in south-central Wisconsin where they raise corn, soybeans, wheat, heifers, chickens, goats, bunnies, and their four children, ages 5 to 12.

For the entire fall semester, the quartet of grade school students learned virtually from home, as their district elected to keep school buildings closed.

That has put a strain on the family, as well as the childrens’ grades and grammar.

“I definitely feel like they’re falling behind,” said Amy Jo Hellenbrand. “You just notice certain things as far as their language and how they talk. You’re constantly correcting them.”

As the first full semester for U.S. schools during the pandemic comes to an end, education experts and parents alike are concerned about its effects on children’s academic progress. From the Mexican border to the Upper Midwest, Oregon to Virginia and on Native American reservations across the West, that anxiety is magnified in rural areas, which are far less likely to have access to high-speed or even consistent internet in a time of extensive virtual schooling.

Gauging students’ progress right now is like tracking a panther — both are elusive. It’s unclear how far the pandemic has set back learning in the past year, as many states have . And many children are not in classrooms for educators to keep tabs on. But some initial research has not been encouraging, with students falling behind, most notably in math.

The push in many parts of the United States now is to put children back in classrooms. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that among the 62% of K-12 school districts that had either full or partial in-person instruction, ” — although the agency said it lacked data to gauge the risk among staff.

“CDC recommends that K–12 schools be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures have been employed and the first to reopen when they can do so safely,” the agency said.

President Joe Biden is proposing $130 billion to provide to help schools reopen safely as part of a $1.7 trillion plan to combat coronavirus, provide financial relief and boost the economy.

Some policymakers and education experts also are pushing for a massive tutoring surge to help students recover from the inevitable academic regression.

Online access poor in many rural areas 

This school year, many teachers faced the unenviable task of motivating antsy students on flickering computer screens. Nearly 20% of U.S. students in grades K-12, or about 9 million children, go to schools in areas where the internet is often spotty or freezes up.

While the country has made great strides in improving and expanding access to high-speed internet, that nearly 6% of Americans don’t have access to fixed high-speed internet. That number mushrooms to 22% of folks in rural areas, and it’s even greater in tribal areas, where nearly 28% of the population lacks access. And these numbers may vastly , some experts suspect.

That means a big chunk of the rural United States is still living in the 1990s when it comes to internet speeds.

Steve Elliott, school board president of the rural, 300-student school district in Albany, Wisconsin, highlighted this problem when he testified before state legislators in June.

During the pandemic, his three school-aged children sometimes studied to get effective internet access.

Said Elliott: “Our schools are dependent upon infrastructure that doesn’t exist.”

Slap bracelets, hotspots

In internet deserts where access is poor or worse, rural schools and communities had to get creative.

The Cuba Independent School District in rural northern New Mexico — a district larger than Rhode Island — . Students use them to download lessons after driving to an internet hotspot. Back home they can upload the lessons to their school district-supplied laptops.

, local telephone companies set up wifi connections to keep students online for remote learning, and several churches opened their doors to provide socially distanced space for students to work on their laptops, said Ken Howard, superintendent of the 700-student South Hamilton School District in Jewell.

As it is for many rural areas, internet access is a problem at Prospect Heights Middle School in rural Orange County, outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. to help students connect with their teachers and learn online, Principal Renee Bourke said.

Shoddy service in Wisconsin..

“The internet has not been our friend,” Hellenbrand said during a school day last month. “It’s been down a lot today. They’ve been kicked off their meetings quite a few times. That’s been the story recently.”

One of her daughters, 10-year-old Reagan, was more succinct: “Our internet sucks.”

View of student progress spotty 

Of course, virtual schooling was a remedy for the burning August fear that schools would be superspreading sites. That concern has been somewhat doused by increased understanding of the COVID-19 virus.

That has led to a refocusing on another danger of the pandemic: children lagging academically.

The chaos of the pandemic led states to cancel spring assessment testing, making it harder to evaluate progress. And some districts are declining to , raising questions about how many students remain engaged.

But some data are now available, and the picture is not great. Early studies from research organizations and suggest that students are falling behind, especially in math.

The NWEA study found that while student achievement in grades 3 through 8 was comparable to previous years in reading, progress in math dipped as much as 10 percentile points from levels before the pandemic.

Even those declines likely understate the problem, researchers noted, because “student groups especially vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic were more likely to be missing from our data.”

The McKinsey study found that, on average, students started school in the fall about three months behind expectations in math. Students of color were about three to five months behind, while white students were behind by about one to three months. In reading, students were only about a month and a half behind historical averages. Differences in achievement between rural and urban students were not studied.

In Iowa, early literacy assessment results of kindergarten through third grade saw a drop in scores, said Heather Doe, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Education.

How much damage has occurred is hard to gauge, experts say, at least while so many students are still learning outside of school buildings.

Texas allowed parents to make the choice of whether their children can take class in person or remotely. Both Tornillo and Fort Hancock, rural high schools outside of El Paso, have encouraged parents to send children back to campus.

“Testing students is futile,” , an English teacher at Fort Hancock. “We will not know anything until testing is consistent or controlled.”

Risk to failing students magnified

Most students who performed well academically prior to the pandemic continued to succeed as learning adapted to avoid spreading COVID-19, said Martina Collins, a social studies teacher at Tornillo High School, which is rural and mostly Hispanic.

“The way students acted in school is the same way virtually,” she said.

And many are slipping through the safety nets in-person schooling usually provides, educators say.

— one of every 10 enrolled in public education — have been referred to a state-sponsored coaching program, many for being disengaged, regularly missing classes or in danger of failing one or more classes. Fewer than a third of students referred are participating in the coaching sessions, as of Jan. 18.

, only half of Latino students were attending on a regular basis at the start of the school year, and students of color were failing high school classes at twice the rate of their white classmates, according to records obtained from several Oregon districts.

Kevin Genisot, superintendent of the rural, 500-student Hurley School District in far northern Wisconsin, .

“We’re going to lose kids,” Gensiot said. “Every district is going to lose kids. Your high at-risk kids that are not in attendance are in serious jeopardy of not graduating.”

Ideas are swirling, or have already been implemented, to counter the blows the pandemic has landed on student progress.

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators is advocating for expansion of national service programs, including AmeriCorps and Senior Corps, to add .

Johns Hopkins University education researcher Robert Slavin is pushing Biden for a similar effort, calling it a Tutoring Marshall Plan and arguing that simply reopening schools “will not heal the damage students have sustained to their educational progress” — especially in high-poverty schools.

Funding helped close internet gap 

The federal government has provided schools some ammunition to fight the battle against shoddy internet.

The massive, $2.2 trillion COVID-19 CARES Act . Schools spent some of that on personal computers for students, as well as wifi hotspots — hockey puck-shaped devices that provide access to the internet through cell phone networks.

Prior to the pandemic, had a computer, but only 60% had access to high-speed internet service, according to the U.S. Census. Now, every family with a student has a computer or a Chromebook and internet access, said Lance West, principal of Schurz Elementary School on the reservation.

The tribe received more than $20 million from the CARES Act and put some of those funds towards purchasing devices, tribe chairwoman Amber Torres said.

In the second, smaller COVID-19 relief bill of $900 billion, passed last month, Congress provided , including a $50-a-month benefit for anyone laid off during the pandemic. The package also had $1 billion in grants for tribal broadband programs and $300 million for broadband infrastructure grants.

For the Hellenbrands, the return to the classroom this semester cannot come soon enough. After watching her four children struggle with online learning, Amy Jo Hellenbrand is ready to set aside their home hotspot for the 45-minute bus ride.

“They need to be back in school,” Hellenbrand said. “That was always my view.”

This story is part of a called “Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID-19”. It includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Charlottesville Tomorrow, El Paso Matters, Iowa Watch, The Nevada Independent, New Mexico in Depth, Underscore News/Pamplin Media Group and Wisconsin Watch/The Badger Project. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

Augustine Guido looks forward to the chance of again playing under the Friday night lights on the Gervais High School football field, even in a shortened spring season. After graduating, the 17-year-old senior hopes to do it on Saturdays wearing the uniform of his favorite college team.

He’s kept his grades up to be eligible to stay on the field, but the pandemic has changed the way he views school.

“I’m just not as focused and committed,” said Guido, known to his classmates as Auggie. “It’s been a bummer.”

Without football, Guido said he has found it harder to stay engaged with online classes, and his grades are slipping.

“It was sports that kept me motivated” said Guido, who also was a starter for the Cougars’ basketball team last year. “It’s all shut down now.”

shows that the COVID-19 pandemic is widening achievement gaps for Oregon students of color, including those who attend rural schools.

In the previous academic year, Gervais High School, which has a majority Latino student body, boasted a 92% graduation rate.

The latest schoolwide grades — a two-week snapshot of December — indicate 40% of students are failing. At the same time, the number of completed college aid applications at Gervais High School is down 43% from this time last year, indicating there is less interest among this year’s senior class in continuing their education after high school.

Students feel the need to work

The drop-off comes as students like Guido navigate a host of challenges that come with the unusual circumstances of a pandemic.

“I think most high schools in our state are having trouble with students engaging and distance learning,” said Andrew Amen, vice principal at Gervais High School. “We noticed we had an outstanding number of absences, which led to an astounding number of failing classes.”

The decline in attendance and grades forced Amen to reimagine his role as vice principal, stepping out from behind the desk and knocking on doors.

“Any students who have three or more F’s, we now go out and knock on their doors two days a week,” Amen said, “and what we have found is that the majority of our juniors and seniors are working full time.”

National youth participation in the labor market is at the highest point in 10 years, 36.2% compared to 35.2% this time last year, even as adult participation levels in the economy haven’t returned to prepandemic levels.

“They’re having a very difficult time going to work eight or 10 hours and then coming home at night tired, and they’re not engaging in the classes,” Amen said.

Some parents don’t have the option of working from home, as agriculture or service jobs are unable to be performed over Zoom.

“A lot of people were losing jobs,” said Sylvia Valentine-Garcia, the district’s director of special programs. “I think some of the kids who have jobs, their families maybe need them to keep that job.”

Valentine-Garcia recalls talking to a couple students in her office about their work obligations.

“They couldn’t quit,” she said.“They just couldn’t afford to.”

So, she reminded them that all the classes are recorded.

“I’m saying, ‘When you get home from work you have to eat dinner, right? So, while you’re eating dinner, can you listen to your recorded classes?’”

Child care also is a factor

While some students are working outside the home, others are fulfilling a role usually done by schools.

“Another thing we’re running into is students having to spend time with their young siblings, helping their younger brother or sister with their elementary classes, which gets in the way of pursuing their own education,” Amen said.

Guido can relate to that.

“I have two younger brothers,” said Guido, who watches over his siblings while his parents are at work. “We have music on in the background and mute our microphones, but I make sure they’re doing their work. I have to tell them ‘quiet down, we’re all in class.’ I have to motivate them, stay positive.”

Valentine-Garcia started a program offering tutoring every night from 6 to 8 p.m., shifting funding to help students who are working or looking after siblings during the daytime.

“If we have a student not doing well because they’re taking care of their siblings during the day, while their parents are at work, then we have to help those students in the evening,” Valentine-Garcia said.

She knows extending the school day is not ideal, but it is an effort to accommodate the needs of students.

“When you’re dead tired and going to eat dinner and get ready for the next day, how can we get some schooling in?” she said.

Amen said that the challenges he’s seeing are impacting all kinds of students.

“It’s not just kids who weren’t motivated before,” he said. “It’s also kids who were doing well. We have students who were very successful, straight A’s, and are now not engaging.”

Student athletes like Guido may find some motivation in tentative plans to host a shortened athletic season in Oregon starting next month and, in some districts, resume in-class learning.

“It’s weird getting up in the morning and doing this from home,” Guido said. “I’d rather be in school. Hopefully there’s a chance we can get back.”

This piece, originally published by , is part of a called “Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID-19”. It includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Charlottesville Tomorrow, El Paso Matters, Iowa Watch, The Nevada Independent, New Mexico in Depth, Underscore News/Pamplin Media Group and Wisconsin Watch/The Badger Project. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, which also funds ����Ӱ��. 

Gusty winds blew corn husks through the school’s parking lot on November 16 at South Hamilton Schools

It was another day of the staff trying to keep up with the daily reports of sickened students and faculty, making sure kids pumped hand sanitizer and wore face masks nearly all the time, properly social distanced during band practice and lunch periods, and pivoted from teaching in-person and virtual learners while taking extra time to help those struggling.

Even the lunchroom is different this year.

Cafeteria tables limit seating.

Extra tables have been set up in a balcony area of the high school gym; the scent of pasta with marinara and alfredo sauce lingers near the school banners declaring South Hamilton’s athletic prowess.

Here are more glimpses of the South Hamilton school district of more than 700 students and the community.

The Superintendent

Ken Howard’s office shows off the history of South Hamilton like a freshly opened time capsule.

There are historic momentos on the wall, from a 1968 program from the opening of the current buildings in Jewell to the lyrics of the school song.

There are also current reminders of this year, like the mask that rarely leaves his face.

No one could have anticipated the radical changes to the way Iowa instructs its students. According to the Iowa Department of Education, there are 330 public school districts, 487,652 students and 37,386 teachers. They work in 1,316 buildings.

In mid-March, Howard saw the rapid spread of COVID-19 across Iowa and the United States.

“I saw this and said, ‘Oh, this is hitting our own doorstep,’ “ Howard said.

Howard helped gather resources and the community pitched in to keep kids on the path to learning.

Local telephone companies set up WiFi connections to keep kids online for remote learning. Staff members spent hours of extra time to prepare lesson plans and develop innovative ways of teaching. Local churches opened their doors to give students socially distanced space for working on their laptops during spring, summer and fall.

The school district’s towns set up food distribution sites for families who were hit financially. Hamilton County’s unemployment rate flared up to 9.2 percent in April but has been sliding since then, U.S. Department of Labor Statistics data show.

A food pantry at Bethesda Lutheran Church in Jewell helps feed the hungry, said Leo Reiter, the town’s mayor.

“Our local food bank has drive-by pickup; they take stuff out to people,” Reiter said.

The Band Leader

A plastic tub in the South Hamilton band room reads “USED.” Aside it is a basket that says “CLEAN.”

Inside each container are drumsticks, some of which are sanitized.

It’s another simple way to help protect students from catching the virus.

Band instructor Alexa Gibbs is serious about cleanliness. There are 140 band students for grades 7-12.

The school’s auditorium is marked with assigned seats six feet apart for students, spread out over socially distanced areas.

For brass players’ proficient spit valves, puppy housetraining pads are on the floor to soak up the deluge.

“It’s more beneficial to have something rather than nothing,” Gibbs said.

The Principals

Steve Neuberger, who oversees the elementary school, and Jason Woodley, who runs grades 7-12, started their positions in July.

They faced redesigning the schools to make them safe while keeping students motivated and on the path to graduation.

Woodley walked into the school lunchroom, where students have a diet of not only meals, but socialization. He eyed it with a new perspective, using a Disneyland perspective — a fun experience driven by enthusiastic employees, even if masks are required.

“Let’s pretend this is the greatest place on earth, in the cafeteria,” he said.

Academic plans had to be drawn up for a variety of situations: Online only learners, in-person students and a hybrid schedule that was used during the mid-September outbreak.

“I feel like everyone’s bought in,” Neuberger said. “This is something we’re going to have to do.”

It’s a continual effort.

“Nobody could really wrap their heads around it; it’s almost like people have embraced the craziness of the year,” Neuberger said. “In the end, we’re going to embrace that it’s the best that we can do for our kids.”

The School Nurse

Shelby Fonken serves on the front line between the South Hamilton school doors and COVID-19.

Children with a fever, cough or runny nose wander into her office.

She plays a critical role in keeping students and staff safe, while working with the public to keep fear from enveloping the community. Fonken does contact tracing of students who have tested positive for the virus, tracking down a student’s known whereabouts for 48 hours before he or she first felt sick at school.

One critical part of her job is providing information about COVID-19 on the school website. South Hamilton posts daily notices of how many children and staff members are missing school.

It’s a bold step to provide those details, because some school districts don’t share them.

“To me, there’s no secrets with COVID,” Woodley said.

In her first months since she started in August, she’s become an essential part of the South Hamilton team.

“We’re all in this together,” Fonken said. “We’ll get through it one day at a time.”

The Teacher

Elementary physical education teacher Jeff Steines’ created his own YouTube.com channel (SHCoachSteines) to keep kids active.

From March until June, he created a “Be Like Mike Challenge,” asking students to perform and record their own basketball feats. Being inspired by NBA great Michael Jordan was an obvious choice, as posters and photos of Jordan decorate Steines’ desk and office walls.

Two students using leaf blowers to keep a ball suspended in midair? Done.

Putting value on hitting targets? Got it.

“I just want them moving,” Steines said.

South Hamilton has utilized technology to help reach kids during the pandemic. Area communities have had improved broadband access this fall, thanks to local providers who have increased signal strength for some laptops.

If it’s a problem reaching students who aren’t in the building, then Steines will find a way.

“If there’s a barrier, we’ve got to knock that down,” Steines said.

This piece, originally published by , is part of a called “Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID-19”. It includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Charlottesville Tomorrow, El Paso Matters, Iowa Watch, The Nevada Independent, New Mexico in Depth, Underscore News/Pamplin Media Group and Wisconsin Watch/The Badger Project. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, which also funds ����Ӱ��. 

Even by the most optimistic standards, the logistics of learning in 2020 have been difficult, if not close to impossible, for a significant number of New Mexico students.

Technological challenges have combined with trauma caused by COVID-19’s deadly rampage through hard-hit populations, especially the state’s Indigenous communities, to disrupt classrooms and educational plans.

More than — or one of every 10 enrolled in public education statewide — have been referred to a state-sponsored coaching program, many for being disengaged, regularly missing classes, or in danger of failing one or more classes. Less than a quarter are participating, however. And more than half of those, or 5,173 students, are in need of the most help, according to the state education officials, meaning they endure significant on-going barriers and are receiving regular interventions, sometimes daily.

Public Education Secretary Ryan Stewart and his staff didn’t mince words about the severity of the challenge in a December presentation of to state lawmakers.

Learning losses caused by the pandemic — particularly for at-risk students, which make up a majority of New Mexico’s student population — will likely weaken already low student outcomes, according to the 13-page memo.

“Additionally, school closures and remote learning have had a dramatic impact on enrollment in many school districts, leading some school district leaders to worry about the pandemic’s impact on their school district’s finances,” they added.

The state education agency went on to ask the legislators for $4 million in emergency funds, citing the possible need for additional grants in light of enrollment shifts in school districts and increased costs related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The challenges facing New Mexico’s public education system were numerous before the pandemic swept into the state last March. Nearly three of every four public school students come from low-income families. One in seven are English language learners; the same percentage are disabled.

Keeping many public school students engaged in pre-pandemic classrooms was hard. Now add to that the chaos of COVID-19 as students without access to the internet struggle to continue their education.

Deputy education secretary Katarina Sandoval drove those challenges home during last month’s legislative presentation, telling lawmakers of a student who regularly missed classes before a counselor working for a contractor hired to help students tracked him down.

“When the counselor reached out (to the student’s) mother she learned that (the student) and his siblings were all living with different people because the family lost their home,” Sandoval said. “He was actually kicked out of the place he was living and even his mom was trying to reach him. She wasn’t even sure where he was at the time.”

The counselor finally found the student and remains in contact, sometimes multiple times a day, Sandoval said. She has connected him with state services for housing and technology support to resume school online.

“That just gives you a sense of the kind of services that were occurring in the spring and continue to occur now,” she said.

One teacher’s experience

This fall, Viola Hoskie greeted her fourth-grade students online from her classroom at Tobe Turpen Elementary School in Gallup, N.M. Going in rather than working from home helped her focus and maintain her work routine, she said. Not that her consistency simplified her students’ remote learning experience.

“My students who live behind mountains or in the canyons have a hard time getting online,” said Hoskie, who, like many of her students, is Navajo. “I have one student who tries to, like, get into class and I try to get him into class and it just will not work on certain days. And so that has always been a struggle.”

The connectivity issues complicating Hoskie’s instruction time persisted despite the Gallup-McKinley School District forking over $10 million in 2020 to distribute laptops, iPads and mobile hotspots to students.

for broadband access, a problem particularly acute on Indian reservations and remote, rural communities — categories that describe the challenges for much of Gallup-McKinley’s student population. The city of Gallup borders the Navajo Nation, and its school district covers an area nearly the size of Connecticut. So not only do large numbers of Gallup-McKinley’s students lack devices to use; less than half of McKinley County’s 71,000 residents have access to high-speed internet.

The district’s diverse student population is almost exclusively low-income; nearly lives below the poverty line in McKinley County. Four of every five students are Native American, about 30% are English Language Learners, and 8% are homeless, Superintendent Mike Hyatt noted in that’s part of a landmark education lawsuit in New Mexico.

Students aren’t the only ones struggling with the digital divide, either.

“Some of our teachers do not have access to the Internet in their homes,” Hyatt added. “For example, at Navajo Elementary, eight teachers out of 16 did not have Wi-Fi at home.”

Hoskie is lucky that way. Much of her time outside classroom instruction during 2020 was spent troubleshooting tech issues with parents or checking in via emails and text messages, she said. So far, all of her students have kept attending online classes.

“Sometimes the parents will send me pictures of their student work which I’m totally fine with,” she said, “In a typical week, I probably send around 100 text messages.”

It’s difficult to know if Hoskie’s day-in, day-out remote classroom experience played out the same way in hundreds of classrooms across New Mexico from March through the end of 2020. But it is likely some version of it did.

As the fall semester drew to a close in mid December, the vast majority of New Mexico’s more than 750 public schools — many in small towns and rural areas — were using the model for instruction, according to the state Public Education Department.

Still, at the halfway point of the school year, it is unclear the degree to which the virus has deeply thwarted educational achievement in New Mexico and what the long-term consequences will be. The New Mexico Public Education Department announced in early December that it would pause the state’s spring 2021 standardized testing due to the unpredictability of the pandemic and would reassess the situation in early to mid January.

What is clear, though, is that the new normal isn’t working for everyone.

Top education officials at the December legislative hearing briefed lawmakers on findings from a recent survey confirming what many around New Mexico have suspected:

—44% of families with children in kindergarten through fifth grades reported struggling with using a computer for learning.

—19% of students in sixth through 12th grades reported having to take care of younger siblings while 16% reported not having an adult checking in on their progress.

—More students are reporting a current housing situation impacted by economic hardship.

A Hard Year 

COVID’s destructive power came at a significant moment in New Mexico. It is hard to overstate the educational needs in New Mexico, now magnified by a once-in-a-century pandemic. Before the virus shut down large sectors of the economy, reducing state tax revenue, New Mexico had begun to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to address long-standing educational inequities.

Now some worry that recent progress could be wiped out and old problems could continue to fester.

“COVID-19 has exacerbated the opportunity gaps in an already unfair state public education system in which some districts, families and students have access to broadband Internet, while others, like Zuni Schools and its students and families, do not,” Zuni Public Schools superintendent Daniel Benavidez said in a .

His testimony, like Hyatt’s, the Gallup-McKinley school district superintendent, is part of a court motion by plaintiffs in the landmark Yazzie-Martinez lawsuit, which is forcing the state to address decades-old inequities. The plaintiffs are demanding New Mexico do more to ensure that the pandemic doesn’t roll back recent educational gains — or allow the state to use the virus as an excuse to slip back into old funding habits.

“Our students, nearly all of whom are Native American and English Learners, will most likely fall farther behind students in other districts due to our lack of access to computers, technology and necessary broadband infrastructure,” said Benavidez. He and Hyatt were joined by four other school superintendents in the court motion who sounded the alarm.

Stewart, the state education secretary, defended the state’s response to the pandemic, pointing to the “thousands of digital devices” the state had put “into the hands of New Mexico students who lacked them” and the expansion of internet access.

The education secretary was referring to Chromebooks distributed around the state, including to Native Americans thanks to the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department. And to creative approaches to provide more internet connectivity around the state.

Consider, for example, the systemic barriers to remote learning posed by poverty, geography and technology in the Cuba Independent School District, about 100 miles northeast of Gallup.

About 70% of Cuba’s 570 students lack sufficient broadband or cellular service, said Cuba schools superintendent, Dr. Karen Sanchez-Griego, who was one of the six district leaders to contribute their voice to the court motion. More than 40% of the families in the district and 60% live below the poverty level.

The pandemic forced students out of school buildings where they had the technology needed for a 21st century education.

After that happened, some could be seen sitting or parked on school grounds to connect to the schools’ broadband Internet, the superintendent recalled in the court motion. The need for broadband access across a school district the size of Rhode Island was so overwhelming in 2020 that the district took unprecedented steps to help families connect. It purchased Wi-Fi hotspots near three Navajo Chapter Houses — communal, administrative meeting places for tribal members — and laptops for students and smartphones for teachers, who used them to provide daily instruction, including administering tests.

“And, because some families cannot afford phone plans that allow for regular instructional learning, (the district) has opted to pay those phones bills through the phone companies directly,” Sanchez Griego said in the motion.

One solution — buying and distributing “jet packs,” small mobile internet hotspots for Cuba’s students — revealed the depth of the monumental challenge, Sanchez Griego said in a telephone interview.

When students continued to not show up for online classes after receiving the devices, district officials discovered they had overlooked a fact of life for many in and around Cuba. It is not uncommon for people to heat and light homes with generators. And some families couldn’t keep the generator running because it cost too much. So some of the mobile hotspot devices weren’t regularly charged.

The school district leapt into action, applying for and receiving a $2,000 grant to help families buy gasoline to run the generators, which keep the internet devices charged, which, in turn, keeps students online so they can learn, Sanchez-Griego said.

Cuba’s example demonstrates how education officials, school districts and parents are responding creatively to historically challenging circumstances.

It’s important to remember not everyone is experiencing the pandemic the same.

Compared to many on New Mexico’s tribal lands, Desiree Harjo of Zuni Pueblo seems to have it good. But everything is relative.

Her family has an internet connection. And her workday commute is short.

She powers up her computer and, voila, she’s at work: Teaching kindergarten at Shiwi Ts’ana Elementary, the same school Lucia, her fourth-grade daughter, attends. In mostly rural northwest New Mexico, Shiwi Ts’ana is one of four schools operated by Zuni Pueblo, one of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes.

Like everyone else, Harjo and her family have adapted to pandemic life. That has meant keeping Lucia distant from relatives who experienced COVID-19 in their own homes. The fourth grader struggles without the family presence, her mother said, but she’s adapting with technology solutions with skills she’s learned in class.

“She’s become really heavy with the email and sending pictures and stuff like that so that helps a lot.”

Still, Harjo’s limited internet bandwidth causes her video to buffer and freeze sometimes — not the worst problem in tribal lands where more than , a percentage that jumps to 68% in rural areas.

But it’s frustrating.

“Because a lot of devices are connected to the Wi-Fi and I’m on my Zoom pretty much all day too so you have your regular technical issues,” Harjo said.

Harjo and her family represent an oasis of relative connectedness in a desert of digital challenges.

As of May, about 70% of Zuni Public Schools’ students could only go online via smart phones, according to Benavidez, the Zuni superintendent.

Soon after the pandemic hit, the school district installed equipment into three school buses capable of providing up to 20 gigabytes of broadband to serve as mobile sites for families to connect to the Internet temporarily.

Meanwhile, about 650 Chromebooks made their way to Zuni students thanks to the state Indian Affairs Department. And nearly 90% of Zuni’s school population — or 1,244 students — have been referred to the state-sponsored coaching program, although only about 300 are participating, state records show.

Prepping for pandemic schooling

For her part, Hoskie, the Navajo fourth-grade teacher at McKinley-Gallup, is weathering the pandemic. This summer she prepped for the 2020-21 school year, developing technology skills to enhance her instruction through a course at Central New Mexico University. She also used programs offered to her by the Golden Apple Foundation of New Mexico, .

She met up with other teachers on Microsoft Teams, her district’s software platform, to familiarize herself with the technology.

“We didn’t have a lot of support in terms of suggestions for how to prepare for the upcoming school year,” Hoskie said. “But I think it’s just something that teachers have within themselves to find a solution to things.”

Hoskie has found technology support isn’t the only skill she’s mastering these days. On occasion, the fourth grade teacher also dons the role of grief counselor when a student is dealing with COVID-19.

“I’ll send a message and tell them ‘I understand what they’re going through,” she said. “Then I just give them some time, I’ll tell them you know it’s okay to take some time for yourself and your family. And whenever you’re ready just let me know and we’ll work on the things that you missed in class.”

Recently, she did that when the grandparent of one of her students died of COVID a week before the semester ended.

Hoskie exempted the student from final exams, giving her space to grieve.

“I felt like this family has been through a lot,” Hoskie said. “Sometimes you just have to just make that exception and allow them to deal with their family. Sometimes things are more important than education.”

This piece, originally published by , is part of a called “Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID-19”. It includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Charlottesville Tomorrow, El Paso Matters, Iowa Watch, The Nevada Independent, New Mexico in Depth, Underscore News/Pamplin Media Group and Wisconsin Watch/The Badger Project. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, which also funds ����Ӱ��. 

Before class on a warm and sunny December morning, eight kindergarten students at Schurz Elementary School listened quietly as the Shoshone Indian Flag song played over their computer screens.

The lyrics, translated to English from the Shoshone language, mean, “Across the big water, the red, white and blue is fluttering in the wind. War spear thrown in the ground by a foreign water.”

This is how students begin their virtual school day on the Walker River reservation, which spans 325,000 acres across the Nevada desert, east of Yerington and north of Hawthorne. Surrounded by mountains, the river valley is home to a little more than 1,000 people. And 69 of the 72 students who attend Schurz Elementary School, which sits on the reservation, are American Indian.

The school’s principal, Lance West, who’s filling in for a teacher on medical leave, waits for the song to finish before diving into traditional academics: studying the alphabet, identifying nouns and reading with partners.

The school operates on a hybrid schedule in response to the pandemic, with some students learning in person at school and others connected virtually from home, split into morning and afternoon sessions. On this morning, West is in the classroom speaking to a computer screen, with the kindergarteners’ faces staring back at him.

The small, empty room looks like most kindergarten classrooms, full of colorful wall art, rugs with numbers and letters, miniature tables and chairs fit for 5-year-olds. But a tribal drum and a poster depicting Native American children, adults and elders distinguish the space as a classroom on a Native reservation.

The public school, which is part of the Mineral County School District, is about two hours southeast of Reno. The remote location jibes with a 2010 Civil Rights Project report, which found that American Indian students are more likely to attend school in rural areas than non-Native students. Additionally, about a third of Native students nationwide attend schools in which at least half the student population is American Indian.

Of the school’s six teachers, four are Native American, five if you count Principal West.

Although he is an enrolled member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, West grew up in this community on the Walker River reservation, his family split between the two tribes and reservations. He once sat in the same miniature seats as the ones in this classroom.

His path to the principal gig on Walker River reservation wasn’t direct. He lived and taught in schools across Northern Nevada — in Reno, Fort McDermitt and Spring Creek — for 17 years before returning to the reservation. He came with a singular goal of improving education for the young Native people in his community, and therefore contributing to the community at large, and for the long run.

“No one’s fighting for us,” West said. “Well, hard enough. So that’s kind of where my push is now, and everywhere I go, I’m always talking about Indian education.”

But improving education for Native students is a daunting task for a single person to tackle, weighed down by historical disparities that cannot be resolved or remedied overnight. Nationally and statewide, American Indian students have low graduation rates, high dropout rates, low math and reading proficiency scores and often don’t see themselves reflected in their teachers, many of whom are white.

It’s a situation, West said, built on years of systemic racism — the same racism behind federal boarding schools, where young Native children were separated from their families and forced to assimilate into American culture and society. Consider what Indian School Secretary John B. Riley said in 1886:

“Education affords the true solution to the Indian problem … only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents can he be satisfactorily educated.”

More than a century later, Native students still find themselves facing prejudice in other forms, West said.

“There’s a good ol’ boy system that exists and the system is not designed, never was designed for minorities or people of color to be fully successful as they should be,” West said. “There is a racist system, if we’re speaking clearly, particularly toward American Indian populations. Our kids, they’re minimized.”

He’s on a mission to change that. His journey just happens to coincide with a tumultuous period in the history of the nation’s K-12 education system, which has been rattled by the pandemic.
 

In Nevada, there are almost from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. It’s the smallest ethnic group. By comparison, Nevada’s school systems include more than 7,000 Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students, 26,000 Asian students, 56,000 Black students, 209,000 Hispanic students and 144,000 white students.

Nationally, American Indian and Alaskan Native students make up a little more than 1 percent of public school students, or approximately 644,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. About 90 percent of all Native students attend public schools, and about 8 percent attend schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education, under the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

There are 183 schools across the country in 23 states funded by the Bureau of Indian Education, including two in Nevada — a junior and senior high school on the Pyramid Lake reservation north of Reno and an elementary school on the Duckwater reservation south of Eureka. Other schools governed by local districts and the Nevada Department of Education — like Schurz Elementary School — educate a large share of Native students.

Improving education for these students is the priority for Nevada Native leaders, such as West, who say they cannot rely on local, state or federal organizations to take the initiative.

“I think that the topic, the issue of education in Indian Country, in Nevada, has always been near the bottom. It’s always been in someone else’s hands, but at the same time those other people’s hands don’t have our best interests in mind, because they have their own,” West said.

Mineral County students trail their peers in other districts when it comes to academic achievement. During the 2018-2019 school year — the most recent year of testing data — only 23 percent of Mineral County students were proficient in math and 39 percent were proficient in English Language Arts. Statewide, 37 percent of students hit proficiency benchmarks for math, while 48 percent did the same for English Language Arts.

At Schurz Elementary School, the achievement gap is even more visible. When 20 students in grades three through sixth took statewide standardized tests in 2019, none of them met proficiency benchmarks for math, and only 10 percent did for English Language Arts.

Of the more than 500 students in the Mineral County School District, 76 are American Indian or Alaskan Native.

Nationally, 19 percent of American Indian and 25 percent of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students tested at or above proficiency levels in reading compared to 57 percent of Asian students and 45 percent of white students, according to the .

The achievement gap is also reflected in disparities in graduation and dropout rates.

Nevada’s overall graduation rate , and American Indian students consistently have lower graduation rates than most other racial groups besides Black students. In 2018, nearly 80 percent of American Indian students in Nevada graduated, followed by a drop in 2019 and 2020, when 74 percent of American Indian students graduated both years. That mirrors in recent years.

Native students are underrepresented in graduation rates, and overrepresented in . In 2018, among students ages 16 to 24, American Indian students had the highest national dropout rate: 10 percent of students, compared to 4.8 percent of white students.

The situation creates a natural ripple effect for post-secondary education. Of the more than 600 people over the age of 25 living on the Walker River reservation, an estimated 86 percent have completed high school, but only 5.7 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The academic disparities contribute to cycles of poverty on reservations, where unemployment rates are high and rates of home ownership are low.

Prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate on the Walker River reservation stood at 22 percent, while the statewide unemployment rate was in December 2019.

Additionally, the from 2015 to 2019 was a little more than $30,000, while the was double that, at more than $60,000 during the same time period. Of all families living on the reservation, an estimated 39 percent live below the poverty level, including nearly 57 percent of families with school-age children.

Other troubling disparities linked to low graduation and high dropout rates include higher than average and among Native youth.

The academic, economic and mental health disparities among the Native population are historical and decades-long. Native leaders acknowledge the reality of these disparities, but to pave a way forward, they want to shift the focus from the disparities, which some say have created harmful stereotypes, to solutions, visibility and empowerment.

In 2018, principal West created the Indigenous Educators Empowerment group to boost conversations about and support for Native teachers. Since then, West has focused on reaching out to other Native educators across the state to join him and build a strong foundation, which includes compiling the research and data necessary to make progress.

Last year, the group also released a report analyzing factors that contribute to low academic achievement among Native students. Among the challenges: opportunity gaps, systemic racism, low teacher expectations and qualifications, and a lack of culturally relevant curriculum addressing Native history and generational trauma.

“Society’s narrative of us revolves around the Deficit Ideology,” the report states. “… This ideology generalizes disparities such as poverty, alcoholism, at-risk students. We have intentionally left out those reasons for low academic achievement of our students out. They play a role, but to emphasize them would propagate stereotypes and labeling.”
 

The pandemic, of course, added a new wrinkle in Native leaders’ quest to dramatically improve education. But it wasn’t all bad.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has generally intensified existing disparities, both West and Schurz Elementary School teacher Kellie Harry said the school’s response to the pandemic helped bridge the technology gap, making the learning material more accessible for students and their families.

“Nobody’s missing anything,” said Harry, who teaches fifth- and sixth-graders.

Prior to the pandemic, 80 percent of households on the Walker River reservation had a computer, but only 60 percent had access to broadband internet service. Now, every single family with a student has a computer or a Chromebook and internet access.

The Walker River Paiute Tribe received more than $20 million from the CARES Act and put some of those funds toward ensuring students would have what they needed to distance learn from home. Tribal members can also apply to receive $1,000 monthly stipends to help cushion the economic blow caused by the pandemic and help pay for the internet service.

The fiscal cliff — a Dec. 31 deadline for using CARES Act funding — had worried Amber Torres, chairman of the Walker River Paiute Tribe. If that money suddenly went away, she wondered how families would be able to maintain internet service during distance learning.

“We don’t have that kind of money lying around to continue to pay for these homes,” she said.

But the news that Congress approved a $900 billion relief bill on Dec. 21 brought some welcome mental relief to Torres and other tribal leaders. Torres described the legislation, which was signed by the president and includes money for expanding broadband services, as “an absolute win for not only Nevada but Indian Country as a whole.”

From a day-to-day learning standpoint, though, Harry said the most challenging part of the pandemic was familiarizing the students and parents to the new technology.

“The hardest transition was just getting everybody on board with the online and feeling comfortable. I think there was a lot of hesitancy and a lot of fear on the home front, like, ‘Wait, how do we get on the internet? How do we use the computer or the online platforms? Or what’s the login and what’s this?’ I think that was the most difficult part, and then just streamlining that.”

Several months later, after acclimating to the new learning model, Harry has seen greater academic equity in her classroom.

“Now our students are at an equal playing field. This brought equity to our school, distance learning did — getting everybody on the internet, getting everybody on a Chromebook and having them be required to do the work that other five-star schools or other schools are doing,” she said.

The new technology skills, she said, will pay dividends down the road as students enter junior high and beyond. Harry added that she’s not worried about a lag in academic performance among her distance-learning students.

“The performance is the same. I have a lot of distance learners who are outpacing and keeping up and have made a lot of growth on their math scores and keeping up with all the coursework just as easily as if they were right here,” she said.

Older students appear to have struggled more with online learning. When students graduate from Schurz Elementary School, which goes through sixth grade, they can choose what neighboring school district to attend for upper grades. For students on the Walker River reservation, that’s typically schools in Hawthorne or Yerington, although some go farther north to Pyramid Lake.

Yerington High School, which is in the Lyon County School District, employs a college career coach — with the help of a federal grant — who works exclusively with Native students, said Wayne Workman, the district’s superintendent. When the Lyon County School District began the 2020-2021 academic year, only select student groups received in-person instruction five days a week. Those groups included children in kindergarten through second grade as well as students in special-education programs, learning English as a second language or experiencing homelessness.

The decision boiled down to space constraints while operating under COVID-19 safety guidelines, Workman said. All other students were split into cohorts that rotate between a week of in-person learning followed by a week of online learning.

But more than a quarter of Lyon County students opted to remain in distance-education mode, giving schools more flexibility to expand in-person instruction, Workman said. So by early October, Yerington High School started welcoming back Native students full time after noticing the hybrid model wasn’t working well for them.

“If they’re here, I can motivate them to continue on a successful path,” said Gerald Hunter, college and career coach at Yerington High School. “If they’re home, I’m competing with TV, food, babysitting duties, other things.”

Yerington High School has 398 students, including 74 who are Native American, in ninth- through 12th-grade. Hunter, who’s in his fourth year serving as the college and career coach, has watched discipline and truancy problems fall among Native students, while seeing their academic achievement improve. Last year, 70 percent of the school’s Native students maintained at least a 3.0 grade-point average.

The majority of Native students chose to return to in-person instruction five days a week, Hunter said, and their grades have improved as a result. Some Native students remain in distance education, though, because of health concerns amid the pandemic.

While Hunter’s presence has helped boost academic achievement levels among Native students, Workman said, it hasn’t been a cure-all. Providing extra supports simply doesn’t reverse history and longstanding inequities that have led to Native students trailing their peers academically.

“We could talk for hours as to reasons why that might be the case,” he said. “For goodness sakes — how we treated our Native populations forever in our history has led to a lot of distrust.”

Back on the reservation, Harry is hoping Schurz Elementary School can preserve its pandemic-triggered 1-to-1 technology ratio for students that’s proven to help ensure the quality of education for her students. The great unknown, though, is how the school, like others across the state, will fare during the upcoming 2021 legislative session.

“It’s just keeping what we have,” Principal West said, “especially with the budget cuts coming.”
 

Despite the grim circumstances caused by the pandemic and an , West isn’t limiting his goals and vision for the future of Native education.

When he created the Indigenous Educators Empowerment group, West had four goals — to boost education awareness among the community, advocate for Indigenous education professionals, enhance recruitment and mentorship for Indigenous educators and revitalize and preserve Native language.

The 2020 Indigenous Educators Empowerment report offers recommendations for how to get there, such as advocating for more funding, bolster tribal and state leader involvement in efforts to improve education and establish scholarships for tribal members interested in becoming teachers.

But West said everything hinges on more data and recordkeeping.

Native students belong to what Native leaders call the because of the population’s small sample size, American Indians are commonly left out of research and data collection.

“The data is lacking,” said West. “How do you expect us to address education and seek that improvement that has never ever really been a focus if we don’t have accurate information?”

Armed with more reliable data, Native leaders such as West can provide benchmarks and guidance for state and federal agencies in regards to allocating funding and other resources for Native students. Increased data will also make Native students, their communities and the issues they face more visible.

Long-term goals also include efforts to exercise educational sovereignty, specifically, by establishing a tribal charter school on the reservation, beginning with younger children and eventually expanding to serve students through high school. With a charter school, the tribe and educational leaders could take full ownership and control of what their students learn and how they learn it — sovereignty.

The other goal is to establish “Indian Education for All” as state law, meaning the state would require Native history and culture to be included in the curriculum for all grades in public schools.

West has already started down that path at Schurz Elementary School, where the curriculum includes more Nevada Native history, to ensure the students learn about their identity in a positive and empowering way. He’s also made it a point to recruit more Native educators to build the representation for the Native students.

“Our Indian kids here need to see more of themselves reflected in the classroom and they need to see Native teachers,” West said.

West recruited Harry, who was previously teaching in the Washoe County School District at Depoali Middle School in South Reno, two years ago. Harry is an enrolled member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe as well, but half of her family grew up on the Walker River reservation. Now, a majority of the school’s teachers are Native.

“If there’s a chance to get back and contribute, that’s what I think our life’s journey is about,” Harry said. “Our purpose, mine anyways, as teachers, we want to give back and contribute. So that’s what brought me here to Schurz.”

Less than 1 percent of educators nationwide and in Nevada are American Indian or Alaskan Native. Harry said the representation she provides for her students helps create a sense of safety in the classroom.

“I think that it’s beyond words and beyond impactful for the students to have a Native teacher. And that’s why I did not hesitate to come out here. It was really hard to leave where I was, I had to move my family and my kids, but I would not have ever second-guessed coming here because of the unique situation and what I’m able to provide and contribute.”

In the last two quarters, Harry has incorporated lessons about the history of voting rights for Native people, Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day and what it means to her students to be Native American. Her curriculum is more timely and relevant than the Native American history and imagery in textbooks, which usually focus on events prior to 1900, according to a , thus contributing to the erasure of the modern presence of Native communities.

Harry recently asked her students to complete a written exercise exploring their Native identity. Their responses, submitted in late November, highlighted Native language, traditional dress, ceremonial events, such as pine-nut gathering, hunting and basket-weaving.

But the students didn’t just write about these things in the past tense — and, as far as tribal leaders are concerned, that’s evidence of educational progress.

“We are proud people by showing respect to family and friends,” wrote one student, Suiti Sanchez, 10. “We honor our ancestors by keeping our traditions alive. We respect elders by learning our language and by passing our traditions to others.”

This piece, originally published by , is part of a called “Lesson Plans: Rural schools grapple with COVID-19”. It includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Charlottesville Tomorrow, El Paso Matters, Iowa Watch, The Nevada Independent, New Mexico in Depth, Underscore News/Pamplin Media Group and Wisconsin Watch/The Badger Project. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, which also funds ����Ӱ��.