Online Portal Will Connect Tulsa Families to Expanded Learning Sites, Other Services

When teachers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, walked out In 2018 to protest education cuts, community organizations mobilized to help families find child care and other assistance.

Now those collaborations are helping the city in the time of COVID-19.

An online portal set up by the Tulsa Area United Way two years ago is being expanded and repurposed to connect families with out-of-school care and other basic needs. The COVID-19 Kid Care Resource Portal is managed by the Opportunity Project, the Tulsa nonprofit that coordinates expanded learning. 

Normal back-to-school efforts to assist families — such as providing backpacks and school supplies — are more difficult in the pandemic, said Caroline Shaw, executive director of the Opportunity Project.

“A lot of organizations are struggling with how to continue to implement that,” she said.

The online portal lets them input information about the services they offer. After-school providers, for example, can input their locations, number of slots for kids and other information. 

The Opportunity Project is working to make sure those sites can provide kids with access to distance learning, Shaw said.

As coronavirus cases spiked in Oklahoma in August, Tulsa Public Schools decided to open Aug. 31 with online-only instruction. But one-fourth of households in the school district don’t have broadband.

Nearly one-third of the 118,000 households have incomes below the poverty level. And about 20% of students in the district are English language learners.

The Opportunity Project is working with the mayor’s Internet Task Force to fill the gaps in internet access. The city will spend $5.6 million in funds from the CARES Act to bring high-speed internet to 20,000 school families and to Tulsa Housing Authority complexes, as well as to set up “navigators” to provide technical support.

The Opportunity Project is also assisting early childhood sites that are expanding to include school-aged children, Shaw said. The goal is to “support distance learning in a robust way.” The organization will provide a toolkit for these early childhood sites to better enable them to work with school-aged kids.

A week after the COVID-19 Kid Care Portal opened to receive data from providers, it had about a dozen providers, Shaw said. She expects that number to double soon and the portal will open to families in search of resources.

The needs in Tulsa are considerable, Shaw said. Many students had been getting two and sometimes three meals a day through their school, she said. Since schools closed, food distribution sites have been active.

She’s also concerned about the change in child abuse reporting. Teachers and other school staff are often the first to see signs of abuse, but with school closed fewer cases are being reported. Through the training offered to child care staff, the Opportunity Project hopes to put systems in place so child abuse can be seen and reported and children can be protected.

And finally, Shaw wants to make sure children and families have access to the school supplies and clothing normally provided by nonprofits and faith-based organizations.