By: Alex Oh
Dear Los Angeles Times writers,
Hello, my name is Alex. I am a sophomore at Flintridge Preparatory School and I am writing this letter to you because I was intrigued by your article. Before the summer, almost all students were forced to participate in online learning for school. The down side to this is that many students were not as engaged in online learning and some were not even logging into class.
In your article, you talk about how students in poorer districts are especially struggling with online learning because they don’t have computers or access to good internet. For example, you specifically mention Coachella Valley Unified School District, where 90% of the students are from low-income families, and how the lockdown affected one of the students named Maria. Thanks to your article, I became aware of the struggles that many have faced to participate in online learning. So, I thought I would suggest a couple of things that might help this difficult situation.
The first suggestion would be for teachers to give out handouts. While I know learning from handouts lacks the kind of engagement you get from being in the classroom, it’s the only way for students without any access to computers to learn all the necessary material. The second suggestion would be for schools to reach out to Big Tech companies for support. Whether that means repairing a set of old computers or replacing them with new computers, these companies could greatly help students in need. In fact, in an article I found by Education Week, many companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google have already been helping K-12 schools not for profit, but to help kids learn better and encourage some to learn computer science, or coding, or even to go into the field of engineering.
In conclusion, while I do recognize that this problem will take a significant amount of time and effort to fix, I think these suggestions could really help these kids.
From,
Alex