Tomica Neal is a single mom and full-time Fresno State student. Since the coronavirus pandemic shut down her kids’ Clovis school last month, she’s also become a teacher.

“To say that it’s a struggle is kind of an understatement,” she said.

Latisha Slaughter is staying at the Fresno Rescue Mission and doesn’t have a computer or WiFi. It’s up to her to keep her 14-year-old son reading and writing while the Fresno Unified schools remain dark.

Deshae Lee is a McLane High School senior who’s been taking care of her two younger brothers since schools closed. She’s also taking a class at Fresno City College that’s now online and said she’s a little “nervous” about it.

“I know how I do with online stuff,” Lee said. “I get distracted easily and it leads to me to not doing it at all. It could be a problem.”

It has been three weeks since schools across the nation shut down and for students, teachers and parents interviewed by The Bee, online education isn’t working.

In fact, they say, it’s a mess.

Some districts are making schoolwork mandatory and others aren’t. How students will earn credit for their work remains a mystery.

And there’s no top-down plan to make it work. The U.S. Department of Education has provided resources for schools on distance learning but otherwise has told local districts to figure it out for themselves.

Without a cohesive set of standards or even tools for students, teachers and administrators have cobbled together piecemeal lessons that frequently fail to reach many of their students.

The Fresno area is far from alone in its struggles to make online education work. On Monday, Los Angeles schools said 15,000 students have never logged into their online curriculum and 120,000 high school students haven’t logged in regularly, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“This has shined a light on the inequality that we already knew was there,” said Dr. Elisha Smith Arrillaga, the executive director of Education Trust-West, an education advocacy organization.

‘Short end of the stick’

One out of four households in Fresno County has no internet access, an estimated 73,600 homes. The majority of those homes are low-income and in rural areas, U.S Census Bureau data show.

Low-income kids, English learners and students of color are most likely going “to get the short end of the stick,” Arrillaga said.

“Some (schools) don’t have resources to respond and some districts do have creative and innovative ways to respond” to school closures, Arrillaga said.

Most school districts in Fresno County have online resources for students and work packets parents can pick up, but those plans rely on students having consistent web access or a ride to pick up their packets – and many families have neither.

Arrillaga said that without consistency it’s going to be difficult to know where students are in their education when they return to class.

“These are all unanswered questions that could become very concerning,” she said.

Fixing the problem

Slaughter, a Fresno Unified parent, said she worries her son will fall behind because he hasn’t been focused on schoolwork since the shutdown. She and her children are staying at the Fresno Rescue Mission, a shelter for homeless and struggling residents.

She hasn’t been able to pick up a packet from her son’s school because the shelter doesn’t allow people to leave unless it’s an emergency, she said.

“He’s been reading and telling stories with his imagination but of course access to educational materials would be awesome,” Slaughter said.

Black teens and low-income households are more likely not able to finish homework because of the lack of digital access, a Pew Research study shows. About one-third of households with kids aged 6-17 with an income below $30,000 a year do not have internet access. Only 6% of households that make $75,000 or more annually don’t have the internet.

Fresno Unified has about 74,000 students, making it the third-largest school district in California. District officials recently surveyed their students and found 10% to 15% don’t have internet access. The district has distributed 500 WiFi hotspots so far, officials said, and plans to have 9,000 more by summer.

Some smaller districts have the infrastructure to support one-to-one learning, like the Fowler Unified School District, meaning every student has a tablet. Fowler Superintendent Paul Marietti said 8% of students in his district don’t have internet access and Fowler is working on distributing WiFi hotspots.

Teachers are recording lessons for students and are available to answer questions, Marietti said.

But student access isn’t the only challenge. Not every teacher has the same level of technical competence to make distance learning work.

Fowler schools brought in coaches to train teachers on the technology available, but even then, many classes like science labs and even physical education don’t translate as well online as other classes.

“These are new uncharted waters for us and we want to make sure we are giving teachers the support they need,” Marietti said.

Without equal access

Administrators across the county are working to make sure all students have Internet access, but that only solves part of the problem. Many students don’t have a personal computer or tablet to work on.

On Monday, Fresno Unified began passing out laptops to all kids in grades 4-12, Superintendent Bob Nelson told The Bee. All other grades will receive tablets. Schools will reach out to families with information on how to pick them up, Nelson said.

“We’ve been actively moving every minute since we had school closures to effectively make changes in our system,” he said. “A lot of that is happening in live time.”

And until the access problem is solved, formal education in Fresno will be on hold – and that’s for the foreseeable future.

Fresno schools won’t make online learning mandatory for students until every student has a real opportunity to learn. Nelson said that means students won’t have graded assignments for the rest of the school year. Any work handed in essentially will be viewed as extra credit.

“Demanding anything or insisting unilaterally that kids complete certain assignments when they may or may not have the technology to do that, that would create inequities,” Nelson said. “Just because the teacher can push content out does not mean the individual kid or family has the receptivity to do it. So demanding that would be not fair and not appropriate.”

Clovis Unified experience

Meanwhile, Clovis Unified schools are trying to make online assignments mandatory. But confronting many of the same access issues, teachers also have to be “empathetic” and “mindful” to the amount of work required, said Kirsten Aguilar, an English teacher at Clovis North High School.

“I want to give students an opportunity to do something and to be enriched,” Aguilar said. “I don’t know if my high school students would do educational activities on their own. I still really believe that something is better than nothing.”

Clovis teachers reached out to every student during the first week of closures, Aguilar said, to find out whether they were able to access schoolwork digitally or needed hard copies.

“We knew not every kid could work online and we really wanted to make sure that we were equitable,” she said. “We can’t mandate work and then give it in a form that they can’t do.”

Getting creative

Online learning remains challenging even for students with solid access and tech-savvy teachers.

Keeping students engaged is a challenge on a regular day, said Heather Miller, a Fresno Unified high school teacher.

“Half my job is trying to convince teenagers to learn something,” Miller said. “For the majority of kids, it’s (online learning) on the verge of completely useless. Most kids don’t learn that way and I don’t think it’s even that great of a model for college classes.”

Although school districts have been working to accommodate thousands of central San Joaquin Valley families quickly, putting together an efficient distance learning program takes time.

But teachers are trying.

David Hunter, who teaches transitional kindergarten in Fresno, created a website geared toward children, ages 4 and 5.

The website, FresnoTK.com, is visual and easy for young kids to navigate, he said.

“At our grade level there needs to be a lot of hands-on direction,” Hunter said. “You can give a third-grader a packet and they’d be fine but our kids need guidance because they are so young and still working on handwriting skills. I wish it wasn’t all just computer-based but that’s the moment we’re in right now.”

People from all over the world have utilized the website, Hunter said, and new content like videos created by Valley teachers is uploaded weekly. There’s also Spanish-language content available created by Scott Merrill, another Fresno teacher.

Other Fresno-area teachers are learning how to use smartphones as an education tool.

Smartphones have closed part of the digital divide for Hispanic and African-American students, a study from Pew Research found.

Efraín Tovar, a Selma Unified School District teacher, is hosting a smartphone workshop this week for teachers.

“It’s unfortunate we are going through this but at the same time it’s a wake-up call for all of us, not only teachers but school districts,” Tovar said. “This situation revealed the huge digital gap with families.”

‘I’m still on my own’

While educators work through the nuts-and-bolts issue of access, parents are forced to take on a teacher’s role.

Many parents can help a child develop reading skills or basic addition and subtraction, but other subjects – like algebra or chemistry – are more challenging, to say the least.

Lleimy Ramirez, a Fresno Unified parent, said it’s easy for her to help her 5-year-old but she struggles to teach her 13-year-old because she doesn’t know all the material.

The district has not provided families with the proper tools for kids to keep learning, she said.

“I don’t think they are prepared right now for students,” she said in Spanish. “I understand the situation we’re in, but as a parent, my responsibility is to help my kids learn.”

Not all parents have the time or capacity to step in as teachers while their kids try to get an education, especially working parents, Miller said.

Neal is a full-time student and single mom. She said she hasn’t received much support from Clovis Unified and the packet her first-grader received hasn’t been helpful. The way it’s copied you can’t see the pictures or writing, she said.

“I don’t think it’s realistic for kids to learn online because they need hands-on help and somebody that knows what they are doing,” Neal said. “Basically I’m still on my own.”

The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Learn about The Bee’s Education Lab on our website.

This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 11:12 AM.