CovEducation, Inc.

Orchestrating Educational Access: Our Story

As school shutdowns across the U.S. continue due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many students are faced with financial and logistical challenges that greatly impact their learning experience. This has exacerbated long-standing educational inequities among American K-12 students, especially among high-poverty districts, rural areas, and families with limited access to resources for remote learning. In response to recent and projected school closures, we aim to bridge the widening achievement gap by providing academic support and personalized mentorship for U.S. students whose education has been affected by the pandemic.

CovEducation (or “CovEd”) is a community of undergraduates, postgraduates, students and educators from colleges and universities across the U.S. who are interested in supporting K-12 students in light of the pandemic. Our goal is to create a free virtual platform for pairing mentors from higher education institutions with K-12 students affected by school closures. We are also working to compile free, web-based educational resources for students, families, and educators, as well as partner with schools and other non-profits to improve the learning experience of K-12 students.

With an expanding community of 4,000+ undergraduates, postgraduates and educators from 387 higher education institutions and nearly 3,000 mentees across 50 states, CovEd is constantly advancing outreach efforts to strengthen our reach to disadvantaged school districts. Using data from the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project, we implemented a metric-based ranking system to strategize outreach in 40+ states, and we are actively recruiting more members to cover remaining states. We have connected with Native American communities, parents/advocates of special needs students, and communities with high percentages of low-income and immigrant families, adapting our outreach methods and organizational programming to best support students of all backgrounds and identities. Our goal by the end of 2020 is to expand our network to the 1000+ counties charted by the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project, continue developing educational resources to facilitate the ongoing transition to virtual schooling, and partner with technology companies to supply students with learning-supported devices for continued virtual education. Our work has been featured by the MIT Rapid Innovation Dashboard and supported by the Clinton Global Initiative, among other district and government officials across the nation.

While the issue of ensuring equity and equal access in K-12 education is not by any means a “new” problem, the pandemic provides a significant impetus for directly and quickly addressing widening achievement gaps. As school shutdowns are projected to persist into the 2020-2021 year, CovEd will expand outreach to students in high-poverty districts, rural communities with limited Internet access, and children of frontline workers. Through personalized mentorship and access to free educational resources, we hope to foster an extensive network of support for K-12 students, thus bridging the widening socioeconomic achievement gap in the long term.

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