Giving Compass' Take:

• One Chief technology officer for the Highlands School District is ensuring that cost-effective equity practices are happening district-wide. 

• What kind of resources do schools need to drive progress in building equity during school closures? 

• Read more about equity in education during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As the start of the 2020-21 school year approaches, states and school districts are wrestling with decisions about when, how and whether school will take place inside brick-and-mortar classrooms.

For Highline schools — based on input from parents, data from local agencies, state guidance and the needs of the most vulnerable students in our district — we’ll be starting with all students in fully remote distance-learning. But digital delivery raises serious questions about the educational soundness of digital products as well as the protections they offer for student privacy.

One of the largest concerns, though, is equity — not just how we must fund solutions to address disparities in student access to digital devices and broadband Internet, but how students safely engage to drive learning. Safeguarding equity is particularly important in my district in suburban Seattle, where 69 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunches and 29 percent are non-native English speakers.

In fact, it’s so important that our district views all decisions through our “equity lens,” which aims to increase equity in educational technology to reduce inequities within the district, including disproportionality in student outcomes.

As the district’s chief technology officer, I co-direct a district-wide team devoted to maintaining student equity. When Covid-19 forced us to close schools and move to at-home instruction, the first task of the Digital Tools team was to ensure that all students had devices and Internet access at home so they could partake in daily instruction. This was a critical first step.

Without devices and broadband access, a significant percentage of our students would have missed classes and fallen behind, losing critical months of instruction. But access alone wasn’t enough. It also was vital that we selected, and then supported student engagement with, the right ed-tech tools to use on those devices — not just to promote equity, but to protect private student information, too.

Read the full article about equity in edtech by Mark Finstrom at The Hechinger Report.