Butler Area School District continues with plans to move toward remote instruction for its students.

While the district passed out instruction materials to students March 12, it has become apparent those materials may not be enough to last the rest of the now open-ended closure announced by Gov. Tom Wolf last week.

“Eventually, we will run out of things to do with the materials,” said Brian White, district superintendent. “They represented a portion of instruction, not a year of it.”

One of the challenges in moving to a long-term remote learning approach, White said, was ensuring that all students would have access to both a computer and the internet to obtain educational materials online.

“We had been working to transition to online instruction. We were not a district well situated to go to all-digital before this happened,” he said. “Not every kid had a device, not every kid had the internet, so we were working to resolve that.”

While it has taken time to distribute technology, both devices and internet hotspots have been generally successful, as the district has distributed more than 100 hotspot devices and is actively working with Armstrong to connect even more students.

“As we move forward, we're going to start getting to a point where we can get to deliberate instruction, meaning we can move forward deliberately and hopefully with equity in delivering to all our students,” White said.

As the district moves past that challenge, it is greeted with another: helping students learn.

Many students are used to being supported by a teacher, White said, and the lack of that structure throughout the day can pose a challenge to parents. Not only that, but many parents work, he added. That means parents, in addition to a job, are now tasked with supporting their students during the daytime in lieu of a nightly homework routine.

Even then, White said, he hopes to support both parents and students while being responsible for the continuity of education.

“I believe creating some kind of structure in the student's day is important,” White said. “But more important than any curriculum we do as a school district is the relationship at home with the child and parent and finding ways to reassure them that we're going to get through this, and this crisis will come to an end at some point.”

Another challenge many districts face is to keep helping students in special education while schools are closed by government mandate.

In Butler, a special-education teacher — in this capacity, as a case manager — calls parents every day to say how the instruction will look that day. Programs such as speech services, White said, are already done in a remote fashion.