Far West Texas News

Fort Hancock’s 400 students and their parents are having a tough time adapting to online learning in Hudspeth County, where barely more than 45% of the population had a broadband internet subscription in 2018, according to the Census Bureau.

The Fort Hancock ISD bought hundreds of Chromebooks and wi-fi hotspots to narrow the technology gap, where 97.2% of students are Hispanic, with almost 90% of them disadvantaged and almost 59% are English learners, El Paso Matters reported. Not all the students who were enrolled in Fort Hancock when the pandemic closed schools in March remain in the district. Likewise, parents who sought work from West Texas or Northern Mexico brought their children with them.

“A lot of the students left for Odessa and Midland to be with their families. Others attended class from the bordering town of El Porvenir in Mexico,” Fort Hancock Superintendent Jose Franco said.

With border crossings limited by the U.S. and Mexican governments, parents like Alonso Muñoz, a teacher in Mexico, worried about his son who had been attending Fort Hancock Middle School.

“Since only people who have a resident and citizen status can cross the border, I will not be able to take my son to school every day,” Muñoz told El Paso Matters reported.

Fort Hancock ISD received plenty of new instruction material and online resources in the spring, but they didn’t get the training needed to apply them to the classroom.

“We provided a lot of feedback back and forth to figure out what was best. Maybe if we had more financial resources, we would have more online tools tailored to our needs,” Aurelio Saldaña, a history teacher at Fort Hancock High School and researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso, told El Paso Matters.

Fort Hancock plans a return to face-to-face instruction on Sept. 8 for students whose parents allow them to attend in person. Until then, students from third to 12th grade are attending online three days a week, with teachers offering support the other two days.

Children from pre-kindergarten to second grade receive instructional packets.

“The packets are not as effective as remote learning,” Aceves told El Paso Matters. "We will not be able to guide those students in real-time. Also, providing constructive feedback does not happen with packets because it takes longer to grade."

“My son is in second grade, and he received packets in the spring,” Fort Hancock parent Dalila Estrada told El Paso Matters. "He focused sometimes. I would divide his work, but it was hard sometimes because his teacher taught him different methods than I did, and he would get confused."