Virginia School Division Operations during SY 2020-21: Use of Remote Technology. SY 2020-21 School Divisions' Operations Research Brief Series No. 1

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Virginia school divisions to limit the amount of time students spent learning in-person in school buildings during the 2020-21 school year. Divisions, therefore, needed to make many decisions on how to provide instruction in each student's home. We collected and coded over a thousand documents pertaining to the SY 2020-21 operations of Virginia's 132 school divisions. We coded documents for information on divisions' plans to provide students with access to technology (e.g., whether and to which students the divisions provided a personal computing device), access to internet, and access to technological support. Our descriptive analyses explore how divisions responded to the COVID-19 pandemic through their planned use of remote technology overall and by division-level characteristics. We find that a majority of divisions guaranteed access to technology for all students, divisions with higher concentrations of minoritized students and economically disadvantaged students were more likely to guarantee students' access to technology, divisions were more likely to rely on community hotspots to provide access to the internet, divisions in which more residences had access to broadband internet were more likely than divisions with less access to assist students in connecting to the internet at home, and that most divisions provided technological support to students, but fewer also offered these supports to staff. During such an unprecedented school year, it is important that we identify the heterogenous responses of school divisions across the state.