| | SEPTEMBER - 20218IN MY OPINIONBy Neal C. Weaver, Ph.D., CETL, Chief Information and Strategy Officer, Santa Fe Public SchoolsSanta Fe Public Schools (SFPS) is a New Mexico district of nearly 12,500 students. Our students are predominantly Hispanic, with a large English language learner population (21 percent) and those who qualify for the federal Free and Reduced Lunch program (74 percent). Santa Fe celebrates the rich cultures of our students' families and our unique history as the nation's oldest capital city.When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March 2020, SFPS was prepared to quickly pivot to a remote learning environment. The district was committed to guarantee that every single student had access to high quality remote learning resources. We ensured every student had a digital device, we had our learning management system (LMS) in place, and our teachers had already received regular professional development from our digital learning coaches on the thoughtful integration of technology in their classrooms -- meaning the use of technology and digital resources as critical supports for best practice teaching and learning was commonplace.Understanding the magnitude of this transition, SFPS leadership added an extra week to the district's 2020 spring break. During this time, all teachers took district-developed online refresher courses covering the best practices of remote instruction, while our digital learning coaches provided them ongoing personalized support. With our teachers prepared for remote learning, we then turned to the daunting task of ensuring every SFPS student had access to the internet. Like many U.S. districts, SFPS deployed a range of solutions to get our students connected -- wifi hotspots, reduced-rate home internet packages, and the installation of access points, through a city partnership, in school parking lots. When we believed we'd finally connected every student, we took a moment to toast our success. But our celebration was short-lived, because it wasn't long before students complained about poor connectivity, and teachers reported students were frequently dropped from virtual classrooms and unable to connect to digital resources. It became clear SFPS had been asking the wrong question, and that students' responses to "Do you have internet access?" didn't provide adequate information for us to effectively address their needs. So, we switched to a series of questions designed to help us better understand if students' connectivity was actually sufficient. In doing so, we became less focused on students' internet capacity and more interested in their actual internet experiences. And once we made this transition, the shortcomings of their connectivity were revealed. Through a partnership with the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN,) Innive, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, SFPS joined twelve other districts in an important Student Home Internet Connectivity Study. Over the course of six weeks in 2021, SFPS captured and analyzed the internet throughput of each student every time they engaged in remote learning. Millions of data points were collected and used to understand their internet experiences.Transitioning to Remote Learning EfficientlyNeal C. Weaver, Ph.D
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