On Friday, Aug. 21, the Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District announced in a letter to families that while new cases of COVID- 19 in Yavapai County have decreased in recent weeks to levels that allow schools to begin reopening in-person in accordance with state guidelines, the district would be continuing education remotely for the nextfew weeks.
“COCSD continues to emphasize the need to meet ‘minimal spread’ metrics in all three categories [cases per 100,000, percent positivity, and COVID-like hospital visits] before considering a return to traditional in-person learning,” COCSD Superintendent Steve King wrote in the letter. “We are working diligently and looking forward to returning students to traditional in-person learning on Sept. 14.”
As part of its ongoing remote-learning initiatives that began earlier this month, the school district said it would provide families with the necessary computer infrastructure.
According to King, the district has distributed over 1,200 Chromebooks and spent $42,000 on 175 Wi-Fi hotspots that would be usable for students who have difficulty with internet connectivity.
However, several weeks into the online-focused semester, many families in the district lack access to the Wi-Fi hotspots that the district promised to provide.
“The Wi-Fi units have not arrived as of yet,” district administrators wrote in an email to teachers last week. “When they do, we will be notifying families as quickly as possible. That said, we are still almost 100 short of what was requested. I am trying to get my hands on more, but it will be a slow process.”
The email stated that students who need help and cannot access a hotspot can use the parking lot of a district building or school and log on to the COCSD network, or seek help at the local library.
According to King, the original count of how many hotspots were needed was made by teachers asking each of the families in their classes who needed the additional aid in accessing internet, but after class had started, numerous additional families requested hotspots, exceeding the number that the district had procured.
“We’re looking for the resources to get more, so we’re working with different agencies to do that. That’s all we have right now,” King said. “We are doing our best to get as many out there as we possibly can based on the resources and capacity we have.”
King said that there are still some hotspots at the district office from the original purchase that have not been claimed by the families who sought them. However, the district has not yet decided to give them to other families in need, wanting to wait a little longer to give the original families the chance to claim them. King said that the district planned to give those hotspots to families most in need if they were not picked up.
“It’s a triage model …. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination,” King said. “There’s nobody that can give them to every family that needs one, so we need to prioritize.”
