Many Schools Are Not Prepared In Case Pandemic Lasts Into Next School Year

With the current pandemic of Covid-19 not showing any real slowdown at present, K-12 schools should be having internal discussions on how to best utilize the current downtime and the upcoming summer session, to prepare and build out a new remote learning infrastructure for the fall school year. Schools should not assume that all will be well by August/September. It most likely will not be. Even if it is, many parents will be afraid to send their children back to school in the fall.

Schools should be preparing action plans on how to provide remote learning by either purchasing their own classroom session streaming hardware and software, or planning to partner with a 3rd party, such as Zoom, Cisco WebEX, GoToMeeting or other such provider of teleconferencing solutions.

Schools should consider this as an exercise in DR – Disaster Recovery – How do we keep the learning process in place if our students cannot come onsite our facilities?
A good DR plan should include multiple levels of crisis and multiple levels of SLAs (Service Level Agreements) to determine the correct response to each type of crisis.
In this case, a pandemic, where students need to learn from home, a DR plan might look like this.

For example purposes only.

Crisis

1. Level 1 – 25% of students, teachers and staff cannot attend classes
2. Level 2 – 50% of students, teachers and staff cannot attend classes
3. Level 3 – 75% of students, teachers and staff cannot attend classes
4. Level 4 – 100% of students, teachers and staff cannot attend classes

Response
1. Level 1 – Provide substitute teachers for teachers not able to attend
Level 1 – Provide online curriculum and homework for parents to assist children

2. Level 2 – Provide substitute teachers for teachers not able to attend and/or provide teachers with access to in-house streaming services
Level 2 – Provide online curriculum and homework for parents to assist children and provide in-house streaming services via internet to students

3. Level 3 – Provide in-house streaming services and/or teleconference access to teachers
Level 3 – Provide online curriculum and homework for parents to assist children and provide both in-house streaming services via internet and 3rd party teleconference to students

4. Level 4 – with no local support available at schools, provide 3rd party teleconference access only to teachers
Level 4 - with no local support available at schools, provide 3rd party teleconference access only to students

These solutions may seem alien or out of place, however, with the world we live in today, every educational facility not already familiar with such a plan, should be using the current downtime to create and support such a plan to ensure survivability of our educational system should this pandemic last longer than expected.

As always, “Geeksultant – Your I.T. Consultant of Choice!”
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