‘A tremendous inequality.’ How rural schools, students adapt to remote learning amid pandemic

Madelyn Bailey starts her week at 6 a.m. with an eight-hour shift at the Dunkin’ in Bellefonte, taking people’s coffee and doughnut orders.

On top of finishing her classwork online during a pandemic, the Bald Eagle Area High School senior has been working 40 hours most weeks since school closed to save money for her freshman year at Penn State’s University Park campus.

But unlike many of her peers at the flagship state university, Bailey lives in Moshannon, an area of Centre County where internet options are limited and connectivity is both spotty and slow.

“I work a lot. So, if I want to skip a day (of schoolwork) and then do it at the end of the week instead, it’s kind of hard sometimes,” she said. “If it’s windy, sometimes the power will go out. If it’s snowing, raining, literally anything ... but sunshine, the power could have a chance of going out. That would delay my schoolwork ... because I can’t use cellular service, because we live in a complete dead zone.”

While rural areas of Pennsylvania are less likely to have access to broadband internet, no area of the state is immune. A 2018 Penn State study sponsored by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania found that over 50% of the population in every single county in the state does not have access to broadband — defined as 25 megabits per second download speed.

For Bailey, whose internet speed is about 1 Mbps, that looks like waiting until nighttime to do schoolwork because fewer people in her nine-person household are using the internet, making it faster. When she calls her friends over FaceTime to do homework, the call usually drops or the connection lags, leaving her to constantly catch up with the conversation.

“I’ve been a rural superintendent for 15 years; I’ve worked in rural schools all my life for 30 years. There is a tremendous inequality between rural schools and the more affluent schools and this pandemic has really brought that to the forefront,” said Scott Graham, the incoming Bald Eagle Area School District superintendent.

School districts forced to ‘reinvent’ themselves amid pandemic

With administrative offices located in Wingate, BEASD serves a mostly rural population in the Bald Eagle Valley and Mountaintop communities. About 25% of the student body either does not have access to the internet or only has limited access, according to interim Superintendent Joseph Clapper.

Clapper, who came out of retirement to lead the district while it searched for a replacement for former superintendent Jeff Miles, was settling in for a normal semester when Gov. Tom Wolf suspended in-class instruction for Pennsylvania schools in mid-March. When Clapper thinks about that abrupt transition from normal to pandemic shutdown, “‘challenging’ is the word.”

In a situation like that, “you’ve got to work pretty quickly to reinvent yourself as a school district in terms of how you’re going to deliver education to students,” he said. Luckily for BEA, he said, teachers and administrators “flipped the classroom” for students and came up with a game plan for delivering instruction online — and in some cases, by paper.

Some teachers are dropping off or mailing weekly paper assignments for students with limited or no internet, said Clapper. “Our version of curbside delivery,” he joked.

Over in Penns Valley, at the eastern end of Centre County, a similar series of events is playing out, as teachers work to educate students in the low broadband connectivity area.

About 8% of Penns Valley Area School District students only have access to dial-up internet, according to Communications Director Nate Althouse, and many more rely on slow satellite internet, cellular data hotspots or no internet at all.

To provide a more equitable experience for students unable to access internet at home, both Penns Valley and Bald Eagle Area have installed WiFi hotspots in the school parking lots. There, administrators say, some students download their work for the week off Google Classroom to complete at home, offline, on their laptops.

Unique challenges to remote learning for all age levels

Stephanie Hettinger, a mother of six Penns Valley students ages 9 to 14, says that even though her family hasn’t used the hotspots, they have their own challenges with six people sharing their unreliable satellite internet.

Their satellite internet plan, offered through ViaSat, allots them a data threshold of 10 gigabytes per month, with speeds that range from half a megabit per second to 3 Mbps. Their service doesn’t get cut off if they go over the threshold before the end of the month, but ViaSat deprioritizes their data on the network, making the connection much slower, Hettinger said.

Before the kids were in remote schooling, Hettinger says she would reach the data limit in 10-14 days. But this month, they ran out in two days. “It’s much more saturated during the day time. The kids do a lot of programs. They do a lot with Google Classroom,” she said. Streaming videos on YouTube and downloading media becomes near impossible when the connection lags or files simply won’t download.

Hettinger, who lives in Madisonburg with her husband, his two kids from a previous marriage, and her four biological children, purchased satellite internet because of geographical challenges getting a fixed wireless signal to reach their house. There is no wired internet service in Madisonburg, but Atlantic Broadband is in talks with local governments to potentially bring service to the valley.

Each of Hettinger’s kids has their own unique challenge with the internet. For Andrew, 14, having a video lag might mean he takes a break from one subject to try another. But Hettinger said if he can’t do either of his two core subjects, “then he’s kind of stuck. And he gets his work done, and he’s pretty diligent in his work ... but there are times he’ll come up to me and say, ‘I can’t do anything else right now.’”

New Penns Valley Area High School Principal Zak Wynkoop, who started May 1, said the school district is doing its best to work with students who have limited internet access, but it’s been a challenge all around. Teachers offer office hours throughout the week over the video app Zoom or by phone call for students to check in and ask questions.

“Teachers are going above and beyond that, if needed,” he said, adding, “I’ve heard a lot of conversations not just about the academics, but (about) the social-emotional well-being of the kids.”

Former Penns Valley high school Principal Dustin Dalton held regular livestreams throughout the quarantine period, and the district shared videos on its Facebook page sharing messages of hope and positivity from teachers and administrators. Teachers have been organizing virtual games, scavenger hunts and ceremonies for students who may feel like they’re missing out on big milestones, or just fun.

Bailey said when school first shut down, teachers were assigning a lot of work, because neither they nor students were used to managing workloads virtually. But as the semester has progressed, the workload has become more manageable, and teachers are being more flexible with deadlines.

Planning life around the internet

By taking extra shifts at Dunkin’, Bailey has already saved enough money to buy a laptop for college. Penn State is now offering a FlexStart program that allows incoming freshmen to take their first year online through a branch campus and finish out the rest of their time at University Park. Bailey is preparing for the possibility that she may have to take online classes through the fall semester, but her hope is that if it comes to that, she can work at her boyfriend’s house in Clarence or her dad’s house in Julian, where the internet connection is better.

Even though Bailey’s online schoolwork allows her flexibility to work during the day, she still wishes she didn’t have to plan her life around when the internet works best.

For classmates with better internet, she said, “they can do homework at any point of the day, it doesn’t have to be at nighttime whenever not a lot of people are on it. They have their entire day to be able to do something. Or they can plan things more accordingly for what they want to do.”

At the Hettinger-Ruoff household in Madisonburg, the best time of day to access the internet is in the morning, but each kid works at their own pace. More often than not, the internet slows them down, Hettinger said.

Hettinger drives to Penns Valley Intermediate School every Tuesday to pick up a packet of work for her son in sixth grade, who finds it easier to do the work for that subject on paper than download a massive file over the internet. He’s also quit watching the Zoom calls for his classes, because the lag makes it difficult for him to follow what’s happening, said his mom. Instead, he opts to read the notes teachers publish that capture the most important parts of the call.

Other children in the Hettinger-Ruoff household have had problems accessing Zoom calls, YouTube or Google Classroom videos and other large files. But Hettinger says they’ve gotten creative, and will help each other out when one of them starts having internet problems during an assignment. One of her sons, a seventh grader, couldn’t access a video, so he watched it on his brother’s computer, copied down the questions in a Google doc and answered them.

Hettinger knows the kids are aware that their internet isn’t good compared to students with faster or high-speed internet. But she’s glad they’re learning to make do even if they don’t have the same advantages as some.

“If the internet worked high speed all the time I think they could get their work done faster,” she said. “But they’re not as frustrated as I thought they’d be. Because I thought this whole thing would be a nightmare. But it hasn’t been. The advantages of the things that have happened have been pretty neat to see — the interactions between all of them.”

This story was originally published May 17, 2020 at 7:30 AM.