Pottstown finally gets online learning
Underfunding kept computers from students’ homes
POTTSTOWN » Classes, such as they are, finally got going in earnest on April 20 at Pottstown High School.
The same can be said of the middle school on Monday, April 27.
But it won’t be until May 4 that Pottstown elementary students get online and start getting new lessons.
It’s all thanks to two factors. The first, and most obvious, is the coronavirus pandemic which led to the shut down of all Pennsylvania schools on March 13.
The second factor, which the pandemic is making increasingly obvious, is the inequity in how Pennsylvania funds those public school, says Pottstown Schools Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez.
Rodriguez is also the president of the Pennsylvania League of Urban Schools and for years has been advocating, loudly, for Pennsylvania to fund public education according to its own fair funding formula.
Currently, only about 10 percent of state funding is distributed according to the formula, which will result in Pottstown getting nearly $14 million less than it should under the formula in the coming school year.
So when the coronavirus swept across Montgomery County, schools with more resources to draw upon barely missed a step in shifting to an online education model.
In Pottstown, it was not so easy.
That’s because there are many more families in the borough, where the 2019 median income is $49,377, that don’t have computers in the house.
“We have some families that have issues with having access to the Internet, but absolutely our number one issue was households not having devices,” Rodriguez told the school board during the April 23 meeting.
Fortunately, the district had already begun a rollout, years behind other districts, of computers for all high school students, which is why new learning was able to begin sooner there.
At the middle school, Chromebook computers were in the buildings, but many had been purchased through a state grant specifically designed for afterschool enrichment and the state initially refused to let them be re-purposed for everyday use by the students at home.
Ultimately, “the state loosened its regulations,” Rodriguez told the school board Thursday.
But at the elementary level, solutions were harder to find.
Helping the district get to where it could begin to plan for delivering education was an anonymous $60,000 donation to the Foundation for Pottstown Education.
“For years, Pottstown has held the dubious title of being one of the most underfunded districts in the state and, as a result, the playing field has always been uneven for students,” the donor wrote to Foundation executive director Joe Rusiewicz.
“At some point, Harrisburg needs to fix our very broken school funding system so that zip code does not determine the level of educational resources for children,” the donor wrote.
“But it struck me that if Pottstown couldn’t find computers for each household now, the students in Pottstown would not be on an uneven playing field — they wouldn’t be on the playing field at all,” wrote the donor.
The donation came in the wake of a Mercury article highlighting the problem Pottstown faced in getting computers into the hands of all its students.
In that article, Rodriguez estimated it would take about $1 million to get computers into the hands of every student, and all teachers trained to teach on them.
Thursday night, during a budget review by Business Manager Maureen Jampo, it became evident that the cost was about $1.2 million, not counting the contribution or a $123,000 grant the district may or may not be awarded.
Jampo said in total, 1,800 Chromebooks, including those previously distributed to the high school students, are being used. That includes 80 for use by the district’s paraprofessionals and 582 that were “re-purposed.”
“It is my hope that this donation will help the district’s efforts to get a computer into every home so that Pottstown can implement distance learning through the current crisis,” the donor said.
And it looks like that is exactly what will happen.
Rodriguez told the board that the district has now distributed more than 460 devices to 700 Pottstown students, which is about 20 percent of the district’s population who needed them.
If a household has two students, they get one device. If there are three students, they get two devices, he said.
“We have about 100 to 200 left and we will begin to distribute those to households with more than one student,” Rodriguez said.
“We already have about 150 families in the cue,” he added.
The district has also had to set up hot spots for families with no internet access, Rodriguez reported.
“Normally, I would say I don’t know if it should be the school district’s job to set up hot spots in households, but we do what we have to do,” said John Armato, a school board member, and the district’s director of community relations.
That’s true of the community too.
Armato said as technical issues became better known, “we had parents come forward and say ‘I have some technical skills, just point me in the right direction and we can help those families get connected.’”
He said he regrets the month Pottstown’s elementary students have gone without any new learning.
“The students who should have missed the least will lose the most,” Armato said.
Kishan Patel is a Pottstown High School senior and student member of the school board.
He said Thursday the online learning “is going pretty well. I like the pass/ fail grading. It lifts a lot of pressure off the students during this pandemic.”
His classmates “are really quite disappointed that we won’t get to do the milestone things, go to prom and graduation,” Patel said.
The pandemic arrived with Pottstown schools unprepared to deliver education remotely.
But School board president Amy Francis praised the staff effort. “They say it takes a long time to turn a ship, but the administration and the staff turned the ship really fast.”
“There has just been an amazing response to this situation from the entire community,” said board member Raymond Rose.
Math department chairman Robert Decker, who spoke Thursday on behalf of the Federation of Pottstown Teachers, said the teachers stepped up and did what they could as the ever-evolving impacts of the pandemic unfolded.
“Schools were closed on a Thursday. Friday was not a school day and by Monday, we had teachers online providing enrichment. Students did not miss one day of enrichment,” said Decker.
“And they’re doing it while working from home, teaching their own children and taking care of their own families, just like everyone else,” said Decker.
Armato explained that while there were students who did not have online access, it would have been unfair to teach new material.
So while the district scrambled to figure out the online puzzle, teachers provided enrichment and review materials for subjects already covered before the schools closed.
For those without access to online lessons, paper packets were made available either through the mail or for pick-up during the weekly food delivery hosted at the district’s four elementary schools — an effort which has now reached 80,000 meals.
“Our teachers are aggressively exploring our new future, getting Google-certified and becoming cyber specialists,” said Decker.
Echoing an earlier analogy used by Rodriguez — “we’re flying the airplane while we’re putting the wings on it.”
“The students who should have missed the least will lose the most.”
— John Armato, Pottstown School Board
“There has just been an amazing response to this situation from the entire community.”
— Raymond Rose, Pottstown School Board