In Philadelphia during the pandemic, school staffs were asked to do far more than teach. When classrooms went virtual, they became tech support — walking families through logins, troubleshooting devices, and keeping kids connected. They delivered Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots by hand, organized food distributions, mediated family crises, and made welfare checks when students vanished from the video grid. As SEPTA drastically reduced service and neighborhood resources went dark, schools became the fallback — the one open door when every other door felt shut. Any educator who lived through those months knows exactly what that felt like.

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This isn’t just a story about emergency improvisation. It’s a mirror held up to our civic life. Across America, we hav

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