'Education has changed forever' - COVID upended K-12 schooling, and there's no going back

In March 2020, Sean Maika was getting ready for a family camping trip when he realized that everything was about to change, fast — not just his spring break plans, but his job as superintendent of North East Independent School District and education as a whole. It was a phone call from Taylor Eighmy, president of the University of Texas at San Antonio, who told Maika he was shutting down his campuses because the coronavirus had arrived and was starting to circulate locally. “I looked at my wife off of that phone call and I said, ‘I’m pretty sure my break is over now,’” Maika recalled a year later. “I knew at that given point there were going to be so many questions and so many things to work through.”

School buildings in San Antonio and across the country shut down almost overnight as educators scrambled to figure out how to teach from a distance while supporting students, school system employees and their families. As more than half a million K-12 students in the San Antonio area started learning through laptops and tablets at home, the educational system began a transformation — radical, on the fly and far from smooth. “In a week, we had to totally change the way we had done business for decades,” Maika said. “Education has changed forever.” Among the early priorities was finding a way to quickly transition to online classes — a massive endeavor that proved to be a major logistical challenge in an area where thousands of students do not have reliable high-speed internet access.