When Nevada’s school buildings closed in March 2020, the state’s 17 districts had varying abilities to support distance learning. A couple were well on their way, with quality instructional materials, access to devices and connectivity for students. But an overwhelming number of districts, including the largest one, Clark County School District, just didn’t have the infrastructure in place for teaching and learning remotely. But through the public and private partnerships formed by the state Department of Education to close opportunity gaps during the pandemic, Nevada is emerging from school closures with a much stronger ed tech infrastructure than it had before, advancing equity and access for all of our students.

The state was fortunate to receive an offer of help from a partner early on. Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert and I had existing relationships with Renaissance’s myON, an online literacy platform, from previous positions we’d held. In April 2020, we were still trying to decide how to move forward for our students when Renaissance reached how they could help. With relief funding having not yet made it to schools, the company committed to temporarily providing myON at no cost; by June 2020, students and educators throughout Nevada had access to thousands of online books and news articles.

Part of the reason this happened so fast is that the governor issued an executive order streamlining the adoption process. Instead of going through several layers of review, we were able to flag the rollout as an emergency response to the pandemic, drastically shortening the process from several weeks to just days.

Part of the challenge the state faced, even with a generous partner, was that we knew the federal government was likely to provide emergency funds, but we didn’t know how much, when or what restrictions there would be on spending the money. In short, we knew we could launch the program, but we weren’t sure how we could sustain it beyond that. So we looked for partners to bring on board to expand this initiative beyond the Department of Education.

We began by reaching out to the Nevada State Library and Archives because it was already providing support and services to students and families throughout the state, from putting together packages of books and offering various mobile technologies so families could access the internet. It was a natural fit, so we asked them to start sharing information about myON along with their other offerings.

Next, we began working with our regional professional development program. We needed teachers to understand that myON was more than just a reading tool or online books, and to consider how they could leverage it for teaching and learning, given that the shift to remote classes was so abrupt and totally new to most of our teachers.

Read the full article about getting students online successfully by [u'Jonathan Moore'] at Home |The 74