A little over 15,000, or about one-third, of Hamilton County Schools’ 45,000 students opted to participate in some form of remote learning this semester, according to Hamilton County Schools Family & Community Engagement Coordinator Kate Skonberg.
Many of those students learning from home during the coronavirus pandemic are doing so alone and with little support and few resources available.
To help support them and provide a safe, supervised environment for learning, community organizations are working together to establish virtual learning centers at 15 urban churches affiliated with Kingdom Partners.
Kingdom Partners’ mission is to improve access to resources for Chattanooga’s urban churches and faith-based organizations in order to help them transform their communities, according to its website.
“In affluent communities, parents have teachers to do this in their homes and they have the technology. And of course in underserved communities we don’t have that,” said the Rev. William Terry Ladd, pastor at First Baptist Church on East Eighth Street, a trailblazer in the effort to establish virtual learning centers at Chattanooga’s urban churches.