Dennis Dent, Author at redefinED atlanta

COR combats food insecurity at Carver S.T.E.A.M. Academy

March 21, 2023 No Comments

It started with what some might call a wild idea. Jennifer Bartl says she’s one of three Jenn’s, the ‘Jennerators’, (the other two are Jennifer Henn and Jennifer Greenlee) who decided to create COR to support trauma-affected and historically excluded students and provide them with what they need to succeed.

Bartl says that when they decided to house their organization in Carver S.T.E.A.M Academy in south Atlanta, they knew there was a lot of food insecurity in the school. COR works in South Fulton County (30315), which has a Child Well-Being score of 30.9 (avg. score for Georgia is 68), and 55% of children in the zip code live in poverty (United Way of Greater Atlanta, 2020).

“And so we opened a grocery store inside the school. If our kiddos have food in their belly and the rest of their basic needs met, they are more likely to come to school, stay in school, and thrive,” Bartl said. The food primarily comes from Second Helpings, an organization that “rescues” food that is still good from grocery stores, restaurants, and corporate events. Available items range from prepackaged sandwiches and organic fresh produce to hygiene items and clothes, all free to students and their families.

The CORner Store also has some necessities that can’t be bought with an EBT card. For instance, the Homeless Period Project provides pre-made bags of period products for students to grab and go, making menstruation one less thing that gets in the way of learning.

COR tries to reduce any barriers that might stand between students and their needs, and they provide more than nutrition. Bartl said that COR is unique because they offer counseling, prevention education and care coordination for students and their families, on-site at school. Services are offered where kids spend most of their day. Counseling is free and doesn’t require an appointment or an insurance card, so students can walk in when needed. They also equip students with important social and emotional skills necessary for adulting.

“The Whole Child Approach is an example of how we ensure students have access to a great K-12 public education,” says Dennis Dent, communications director, redefinED atlanta. “We [redefinED atlanta] partner with organizations like COR to address intersectional issues that create barriers for student performance and negatively impact students and families,” Dent added.

“Every child, no matter their socioeconomic status, deserves to flourish at school and beyond” Bartl said.

“Our idea is that your zip code shouldn’t determine whether or not you have food in your belly or access to a decent education, or to see a successful future for yourself,” Bartl added.

The CORner Store supplements the school lunch program when there’s not much food at home. Often the lunch and breakfast they receive at school are the two guaranteed meals they have. Bartl says that allowing students and their families to shop at their grocery store helps fill in those gaps.

“Maybe it’s that dinner meal that they don’t get at school, or weekend meals, or snacks,” Bartl said.

Another benefit of the store is that it provides a point of contact with parents or guardians who may otherwise be hard to reach.

“It’s like, oh, this students’ Mom comes every Tuesday to get groceries,” Bartl said, adding that regular contact and resources also help the adults in a student’s life to see interaction with the school as positive, rather than just a sign that their child is in trouble.

Improving family engagement is a frequently discussed goal of many school districts because involved parents can mean better outcomes for students. Bartl says that developing a strong relationship with parents was a happy consequence of the pandemic – they made countless home visits and became quite the fixture in many south Atlanta front yards and porches. Connecting with parents and caregivers is something they’ve been intentional about prioritizing since a return to in-person learning.

COR tries to educate students and families about nutrition by using models like the US Department of Agriculture’s My Plate plan. They love to share personal family recipes and parents often return with pictures of what they made and stories of getting their kids to try something new.

COR’s “CORner Store” and the other on-site services they provide help keep students in school. COR also advocates for students and will try to intervene if a student is on the verge of being disenrolled due to absence, starting with asking what is happening in the student’s life.

“We try to jump in if it gets to the point of saying ‘we’re going to disenroll’ and say, can we put some brief interventions and support in place to see if we could get this kid to come to school?” Bartl said.

Bartl said that school-based grocery stores and the kind of wraparound support that COR offers is an idea that is spreading.

“There’s one at Tri-Cities High School this year and they just put one at Banneker [High School],” Bartl said.

“In a perfect world, I think that this model of tiered levels of structured, in-school support should be the norm,” Bartl added.

While improving nutrition is an important part of COR’s approach, Bartl says the goal is to reduce all of the barriers that get in a student’s way.

“It’s never just food insecurity. Poverty, housing insecurity, racism, and the subsequent historial exclusion…you can’t separate [them]. And I know that none of our families struggle with just one. It’s layered, it’s infuriating, and it’s largely preventable,” Bartl said.

redefinED atlanta is transforming Atlanta into a place where every student in every community has opportunity, well-being, and self-determination. We will continue to grow and participate in coalitions to address intersectional issues that create barriers for student performance and negatively impact students and families. To learn more about our intersectional coalitions and grow your understanding of public education, take the A.R.I.S.E. pledge today!

Voting for Education Celebrates Black History and Black Futures

February 27, 2023 No Comments

Black History Month highlights Black achievements and people pushing for change. What better way to celebrate these past efforts than to advance future opportunities?

Education promotes future success and well-being for individuals and communities. That’s one reason to increase access and equity in our K-12 education system. Others include fighting systemic oppression, honoring Black youth and ensuring that every child in every community receives a great K-12 public education.

As passionate education advocates, we move this work forward in many ways. Whatever each of us does to advance systemic change, it’s also critical that we vote for education and encourage our friends and neighbors to do the same.

Civic Leadership and Our Schools

Since nothing about this work is quick or easy, keeping historic civic leaders and their progress in mind is helpful. Centuries ago, during post-civil war reconstruction, Blacks overcame countless barriers to educate children and increase the number of Black teachers. In addition, Black leaders and activists laid groundwork we’re still benefiting from and building on today — one being the building of the nation’s largest complex of Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) in Atlanta between 1865 and 1881.

The effort was impressive and successful despite being repeatedly undermined by constantly shifting rules and political responses. One prominent example of this systemic undermining happened when the U.S. government stopped funding the Freedman’s Bureau in 1872. Another happened 82 years later when desegregation coupled with systemic racism shut out many successful Black teachers from our public school systems in Atlanta and nationwide.

Today, communities across the country continue to feel the impacts of disparities and inequities and a shortage of representative teachers and administrators in public education. Like those who came before, current-day leaders like you, parents and caregivers, educators and advocates, and our youth continue to navigate obstacles and find this moment’s opportunities.

Why School Board Elections Matter

One current-day opportunity worth taking a closer look at is school board elections. Unlike national elections, school board elections take place in a local context. By learning about and supporting candidates who champion educational equity, we can better our schools and create a pathway for more representative leadership at the state and nationally.

School board elections also promote democracy. Communities gain more understanding about school issues when candidates bring attention to their priority issues. Candidates representing and in dialogue with communities give citizens a voice and ownership over critical education decisions. Once voted into office, we entrust these elected officials to protect children, create safe and welcoming schools, equitably distribute funds, write, research, and vote on policies that ultimately advance the impact of education as a public good.

Voting Takes Our Work Further

At redefinED atlanta, we believe one vote can make a difference, but collectively we are even stronger. Our work around voter mobilization means activating a well-informed voter base that can help elect community leaders into seats of power who will aid in advancing policy change to ensure all children and families have access to high-quality public education.

In 2022, we set specific goals to grow voter participation among Atlanta public school families during the midterm elections and the race for state superintendent. The results are worth celebrating. Highlights include a 19% higher voter turnout at our four partner schools than in the general election in 2021. The turnout in 2022 among these families was also 23% higher than voter modeling predicted.

After incorporating lessons learned from our 2021 voter mobilization efforts into our 2022 campaign, we plan for even more progress later this year. A few lessons learned included starting our efforts earlier in the year, increasing the content we distributed online and in print, and securing voting champions at every school to increase outreach and engagement.

In addition, we launched an electoral fellowship, a pilot cohort designed to engage families and educators who served as organizers for their schools’ community. The fellows also hosted and tabled at events, canvassed in school communities and phone banked to mobilize families to increase voter turnout.

While one vote can sometimes feel insignificant, it’s not – especially when done as a community. It’s yet another example of the power of sustained collective effort over time. By making it a top priority to vote and urging those in our circle to do the same, our impact continues to grow. To learn more and grow your understanding of the power of voting, visit www.redefinEDatlanta.org/voter-mobilization.

STEAM Program Immerses Students In Hands-On Curriculum

February 19, 2023 No Comments

Celebrate National Engineering Week!

This week is National Engineering Week, a call to recognize engineers for their contributions to society. redefinED atlanta recently sat down with one of our pandemic innovation fund partners Dr. Marsha Francis, executive director for STE(A)M Truck, a program dedicated to immersing students grades 3-8 in hands-on STE(A)M content through high-tech and low-tech tools, unleashing their creativity to ensure that they can design the lives and future communities of their dreams.

Dr. Marsha Francis describes STE(A)M Truck as “an amazing mobile maker space and innovation lab on wheels.” Through their programs, 3rd-8th-grade students can roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. STE(A)M Truck carries high-tech and low-tech tools into the classroom…from 3D printers, drones, virtual reality, and coding to drills, hammers, saws and glue guns.

That creative focus sparks understanding and interest in students who might need access to more intensive STEM programs in their neighborhood or district that engage them in ways that traditional classroom learning does not. It’s an intervention that can change the trajectory of their education and future careers–exactly the type of innovation and opportunity that redefinED atlanta strives to make possible to all K-12 students

As a former elementary teacher and district administrator, Francis believes the rigid “sit and get” style of teaching doesn’t stick, and more to the point it doesn’t allow students to develop the imaginative, creative, collaborative skills that corporations whose bread and butter is innovation are looking for.

Francis earned her Ph.D. at the University of Georgia, studying equity in science education, especially for elementary school students. When shewas teaching, one of her principals told her, “the kids we taught only needed to learn to read and count, and I knew that wasn’t actually true,” said Francis.

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, redefinED atlanta provided funding that allowed STE(A)M Truck to convert its very hands-on approach to something that could translate into remote learning.

“The funding helped us breathe a little bit, spend some time thinking about what does this mean to provide virtual components and get materials out to kids and families and engage them multiple times to create a similar build,” said Francis. She added that while they couldn’t send everyone saws, hammers and 3D printers, they could find coding and art projects and other ways to get students to make things from home.

That necessity led to a partnership with Clayton County Schools, which is still thriving. Francis said that at first, they partnered with schools providing instruction virtually. Their programming staff led class builds through Zoom and eased the burden on teachers, who were trying to navigate the shift to remote classrooms. But as students returned to school buildings, they pivoted to providing professional development and support for teachers to lead projects with their students with coaching from STE(A)M Truck’s Teacher Engagement team.

Francis said that the teachers, who are frequently as weighed down with regimentation as their students, seemed to get just as much joy out of the opportunity to be creative in the classroom. “It’s not a worksheet, it’s not a lecture, it’s not a video, it’s a thinking, a doing, a talking, percolating, and that’s really really rich,” said Francis.

“That early support and that vote of confidence and that seed money from redefineED atlanta really helped us stretch and continue to be relevant and provide this just-in-time service to kids who were home but really deserved an opportunity to learn like this,” said Francis.

Francis said the pandemic highlighted the need to be innovative and nimble, but the need remains after schools re-opened. Changing technology means that the relatively slow pace of curriculum development and education policy changes may need to catch up with the demands of the job market.

Enter companies like SNIPES and Nike, that are willing to put their money where their sneakers are to develop the imaginative design skills they are looking for.

Francis said she got a call from SNIPES in September for a program that launched in October. “They wanted us to create an eight-week program for high schoolers to think about universal design, sneaker design and creating innovative sneakers for differently abled people,” said Francis.

“They said, high schoolers are really smart. We want to see what they would dream up if we gave them all these resources. And that’s STE(A)M Truck in a nutshell,” laughed Francis.

“I’m a person that when I get a blessing, it won’t be squandered,” Francis added.

Students were divided into teams and given roles equivalent to real-world project management jobs. They did everything from considering who their target audience was for a design, to sawing a sneaker in half to see how it was made and making multiple prototypes of inclusive footwear.

Students in the program responded with exactly the innovation the sponsors hoped for. One student designed a sneaker that would alert a deaf and blind wearer to a nearby object through electronic pressure sensors near the toe of the shoe.

“I’m optimistic about all that we have on our horizon. I love the commitment that our corporate partners are making to students. And we’re just excited to continue this work,” said Francis.

STEAM programs are important in exposing students in under-resourced communities to unique opportunities that enrich their education journey. redefinED atlanta will continue supporting STE(A)M Truck in its vision to ensure K-12 youth throughout Atlanta have equitable access to relevant, transformative and inspiring learning experiences that open doors for future life opportunities. To learn more about STE(A)M Truck and its programs, visit www.steamtruck.org.

Building Collective Power to Provide a Great K-12 Education for Every Student in 2022 and Beyond

January 20, 2023 No Comments

We know transforming Atlanta into a place where every student receives a great K-12 education is only possible with leadership, buy-in and shared vision from our supporters.

For that reason, we engaged parents, caregivers, school talent and community leaders to listen, learn and identify opportunities to advocate for equity in education and grow great schools.

Our work is wholly about bringing our “village” together to serve, anticipate, and adjust to the rapidly evolving community and education landscape. In the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls.”

Looking back over 2022, we focused outside those school house walls on building collective power for Atlanta’s K-12 students. Our A.R.I.S.E fellowship program engaged leaders from all nine of Atlanta Public Schools’ (APS) clusters to grow their advocacy for the city’s children. In addition, we’ve partnered with a new coalition of over 20 local education-focused nonprofits that are creating the space and structure for increased collaboration to move all our missions forward.

We’re motivated and inspired to build on the momentum from this year and continue creating real change for every student in 2023 and beyond.

2022 Highlights

A.R.I.S.E.

This year, we launched Atlanta Reimagining & Innovating for Schools Everywhere Fellowship (A.R.I.S.E.), a nine-month fellowship that aims to grow community power and influence by exploring the levers that drive systemic change for all of Atlanta’s children.

Through this fellowship, participants learned about the history of the APS district, explored student achievement trends and identified opportunities to partner with communities to allocate a two-year $300,000 grant fundthrough participatory grantmaking. These funds will offer support towards community-driven solutions focused on literacy outcomes for APS students.

Ultimately, graduates of this program can clearly articulate their commitment, goals and role in advocating for positive change in K-12 public education. We’re looking forward to opening applications for our next A.R.I.S.E. cohort in May 2023.

Education Community Convening

We facilitated quarterly convenings for more than 20 local education nonprofit organizations to work collectively in serving the expanding needs of children in Atlanta Public Schools. The Atlanta Board of Education’s introduction of the Goals and Guardrails policy in the spring of 2021 catalyzed the collaborative to grow into a working coalition.

After the policy passed in October 2021, the coalition’s participating organizations initiated efforts to formalize their partnership and announce the coalition and its focus during the 2022-2023 school year.

Scaling School Excellence

We worked closely to help expand two excellent charter schools, Amana Academy and Resurgence Hall, in Metro Atlanta to support their goals to serve more students.

Amana has consistently been a top-performing school in Fulton County for the past decade with outsized academic achievement and growth amongst a diverse student body.

Resurgence Hall has been one of the highest-performing schools in GA since its launch and was the only A-rated school on Georgia’s CCRPI in the area in 2019.

We have worked with both organizations for the past several years, but 2022 was special as we supported the launch of both Amana West and Resurgence Hall Middle School.

Amana West is the second school for Amana Academy and as they grow out, Amana will serve 750 students in the Metro Atlanta area.

Resurgence Hall has added a middle school to its existing campus to continue serving students in East Point. With the addition of the middle school, Resurgence Hall will grow to serve an additional 400 students.

We are so honored that our partnership and support of Amana and Resurgence will help ensure an additional 1,150 students in Metro Atlanta can attend a great public school.

2020-2022 Impact Report

January 17, 2023 No Comments

We are proud to share our first-ever impact report. This report covers our commitment to race, equity and inclusion (REI); our support for students, families, school-level talent and schools; our response to COVID-19; and the milestones we’ve achieved across the 2020-2022
school years.

Family & Community Engagement in Support of Great Schools

November 7, 2022 No Comments

Teamwork makes the dream work.

It may sound cliche, but it’s a statement that highlights the impact created when people aiming to meet a common goal work together to accomplish it. We often share our beliefs with an oversimplified equation: active family & community engagement + the best & brightest teachers & school leaders = great schools.

Though other factors like equitable access to resources and freedom and flexibility for teachers and school leaders are also necessary to serve the unique needs of every student, we know the power of people working together will get us further faster. Since the reopening of public schools, after they shut down due to COVID-19, we learned that additional financial resources were needed to jumpstart and strengthen schools’ engagement with families and community members.

Historically, we offered $1,000 grants to schools to support events or enhancements to efforts to engage families and communities. Through insights gathered from community listening with parents and caregivers, teachers and school leaders across the Atlanta Public Schools district, we decided to double down on the investment in schools’ engagement goals. This year, we dedicated $150,000 to offer Title I schools up to $15,000 to support their 2022-2023 academic year. More than 30 schools applied and we are excited to announce that we selected 16 schools to receive the inaugural Family and Community Engagement (FACE) grants, ranging from $4,000 to $15,000.

Congratulations to the recipients!

High School
- Benjamin E. Mays High School
- Frederick Douglass High School

Do you live near a school on the list? We encourage you to visit their website and stay tuned for upcoming opportunities to engage. Not sure which schools are in your neighborhood, enter your address here and consider attending their next GO Team or PTA meeting to get involved in supporting positive outcomes for children in your community.

References
Learn more about GO Teams here.

Learn more about Title 1 schools.

Georgia Milestones Results Shows Learning Loss from the Pandemic continues to impact Atlanta Public Schools students

September 13, 2022 No Comments

Over the past months, we have looked at various student-level data. Last month, the Georgia Department of Education (GaDOE) shared the statewide Georgia Milestones results for the 2021-2022 school year (SY). The state required Milestones for 2021-2022 testing after canceling the mandate for state assessment in response to COVID-19 in 2020. Schools across Atlanta Public Schools (APS) saw significantly higher participation rates, enabling us to better understand the scale of pandemic learning loss.

This month, the National Assessment of Educational Programs (NAEP) released its biannual nationwide assessment of student academic achievement in public and private schools across the United States. Both sets of data highlighted a few similar themes:

learning loss from the pandemic was significant,
learning loss was steeper in math than in reading, and
students that struggled before the pandemic were likely to have greater levels of learning loss.

National data from NAEP showed that scaled reading scores for 4th graders dropped by five points which represents the largest decline in reading scores recorded since 1990. Meanwhile, the 4th-grade math scale scores declined by seven points. This is the first time that NAEP results have shown a decline in math scaled scores. This aligns with what occurred in Georgia too.

Upon reviewing Georgia Milestone results between 2019 and 2022, proficiency across the state in grades 3-8 fell by eight percent in math and five percent in English Language Arts (ELA).

Another way to understand the data is that for every 100 students, eight did not meet the proficiency bar in math and five did not meet the proficiency bar in ELA.

The larger drops in math both at the national and state level align with projections noted in our summer 2020 learning loss report, Quantifying the Impact of School Closures on Metro Atlanta Student Proficiency.

These learning loss trends were also prevalent across APS. In APS, grades 3-8 ELA proficiency fell by six percent. Likewise, math proficiency in grades 3-8 math scores fell by 10 percent.

Students that are not yet proficient have even more pronounced results. NAEP scaled scores fell the most for students that were furthest behind before the pandemic.

This result was also consistent in APS with the Georgia Milestones results. Using developing and above Georgia Milestones scores, APS saw six percent declines in 3-8th grade reading and 12 percent declines in 3-8th grade math. When accounting for students in the developing and above category, the larger drops in math suggest there was greater learning loss with our students who entered the pandemic behind grade level.

Learning Loss Varied Even Among Similar Schools

NAEP has not yet released state or district-specific data, but the Georgia Milestones results include school-specific data. The state-level data shows that students and schools in under-resourced neighborhoods still need more support to recover from pandemic-era learning loss. However, the relationship is not the same in all cases. Using APS Insights data, we see that poverty matched up with Milestones performance. Still, schools with similar socioeconomics have as much as a 40-point difference in the percentage of students scoring developing and above on Milestones.

The Milestones Math Proficiency graph shows that test score changes from 2019 to 2022 have wide variation by the school.

Although the test scores from 2019 and 2022 were under different circumstances, we believe it is important to see the changes to understand the extent of learning loss at each school.

A New User-Friendly Way for Community to Understand the data.

In the spring of 2022, we soft-launched our Atlanta Schools Data Project to collect feedback regarding what is most helpful for different users. We designed the tool to organize publicly available data and make it accessible for APS parents, caregivers and community members to understand.

The tool does not determine what makes a great school; there is no amount of data that can determine what a student’s experience will be at a school. However, with information at hand for all, we can drive impact for the over 50,000 students that rely on Atlanta Public Schools for their education, setting them up for a lifetime of success.

So what’s next at APS?

A press release from APS mentions the district’s Academic Recovery Plan and The APS 5, five measurable methods to guide their academic strategy, based on the district’s five-year strategic plan: Data, Curriculum and Instruction, Whole-Child Intervention, Personalized Learning and Signature Programming.

In 2022-2023, the district will focus on effective implementation of and support for the academic strategy and monitor the plan’s progress through district and state data.
In 2023-2024, the district will continue monitoring the plan’s progress, assessing, reviewing, and making adjustments based on the data.

Now more than ever, we are committed to working alongside and supporting APS to realize their vision:

“a high-performing district where students love to learn, educators inspire, families engage and the community trusts the system.”

Forward, together.

We know public school systems exist to drive positive student outcomes and improve them when necessary. However, for generations, inequity in Atlanta’s public schools continues to disproportionately impact Black and Brown students and students living in under-resourced communities.

With the lingering impact of COVID-19 on students’ proficiency, we must all move with urgency to support students, encourage bold and innovative ways to accelerate learning and close the opportunity gap. We believe now is the time to reimagine public education. We can develop a new delivery system for Black and Brown students and students from under-resourced communities to give every student opportunities, a sense of well-being and self-determination.

Visit our Back-to-School campaign page to learn more about K-12 public education. Share the resources with your networks and get involved in supporting education for every student in every community!

Citation: The math comparisons include 2019 eighth-grade end-of-course results to create a more accurate comparison to 2022, when all eighth-grade students were required to take the eighth-grade EOG math exam

Quantifying the Impact of School Closures on Metro Atlanta Student Proficiency

August 24, 2022 No Comments

redefinED atlanta and Learn4Life (L4L) today announced the release of a new study, “Quantifying the Impact of School Closures on Metro Atlanta Student Proficiency.” The report estimates today about 21,000 fewer students in ELA and 29,000 fewer in math are now on track for grade-level proficiency than prior to COVID-19.

In 2019-20, metro Atlanta students lost nine weeks of regular instruction due to the COVID-mandated quick transition to distance learning in mid-March. Based on local and national data, if students had taken the Milestone assessments in spring 2020, the percentage of students demonstrating proficiency would be expected to drop 3.6 points in English language arts and 4.9 points in math as compared to last year. Two specific proficiency measures tracked by Learn4Life which are highly correlated to student long term success, 3rd-grade reading and 8th-grade math, show an expected decline of 3.5% and 4.8% respectively.

Achievement projections are more concerning for Black, Latinx, and economically disadvantaged students in the metro Atlanta region. The study projects that only three out of ten historically underserved students will now be on track to grade-level proficiency, which reverses recent gains.

“As districts prepare for cuts to already limited budgets, it’s imperative that district leaders take an equity-minded approach to resource allocation,” said Ed Chang, executive director of redefinED atlanta. “This is also an opportunity to take bold action and put forth radical changes because we cannot afford to regress.”

“Metro Atlanta school districts made steady progress in student achievement over the last few years. Unfortunately, school closures caused by the pandemic may have largely eliminated those gains for thousands of underserved students. Now is the time to learn from our partners across the region and to redouble our efforts as a community to get students back on track,” said Dr. Kenneth Zeff, executive director of Learn4Life.

The report findings drew from national research on student learning loss during the summer months as well as natural disasters such as hurricanes Katrina and Harvey. This data was then compared to Atlanta-area data reflecting how schoolwide student attendance impacts growth and achievement on the Georgia Milestones. This approach is based on the more conservative assumption that the steady improvement in proficiency over proceeding years remains at 2019 levels. If the study assumed continued steady improvement, even more students may have been impacted by the lack of in-person instruction.

The report commissioned by redefinED atlanta and Learn4Life includes several possible solutions for education policymakers, including:

Assess all students to secure a baseline to determine the actual learning loss when students return to school.
Lengthen the school year and/or school day by five percent for the next two years.
Prioritize math instruction as well as reading during any future remote learning.

On March 26th, Governor Kemp ordered all schools closed in Georgia as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption to the final months of the 2019-20 school year, metro Atlanta school leaders and staff rapidly worked to provide students with technology such as iPads, Chromebooks and internet hotspots to help teachers and students connect in an effort to continue their learnings and finish the school year. Even with the best efforts provided by districts, schools and teachers, families reported lack of technology and other resources that prohibited some students from participating in distance learning; districts have reported that student attendance after launching virtual instruction was low.

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