Stepping Up With Tech Support: CNH Industrial Helps Schools With Online Learning Transition

A CNH Industrial manufacturing site in Wisconsin is helping local families get access to much-needed tech support for homeschooling and online learning.

The company’s Corporate Racine Site has provided a grant to Racine United School District (RUSD) to support the barriers associated with online teaching and learning since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The district has been working to ensure all of its students have access to technology and to the internet, but even with that in place, they found that many families still needed support to troubleshoot problems with everything from connecting to Wi-Fi to forgotten passwords.

Teachers and school district staff didn’t have the resources to provide that support. But with the help of the grant from CNH Industrial, the district was able to hire a tech support company who set up a student call centre where parents and students could call for help 24/7.

The school district is currently 100% remote, so the support centre has quickly become an invaluable resource that has helped create a better teaching and learning environment for both students and educators. During the first two weeks of online schooling, the centre received calls from almost 600 families alone. The school district intends to keep the service in place until students are able to go back to in-classroom learning. 

Data shows that at the onset of the pandemic, 20 to 30% of students didn’t have access to the internet or devices they needed to participate in online learning from home, a gap that disproportionately affected non-White households.

This is part of a longer-term relationship between the Racine manufacturing site and the local community. Last fall, for example, the plant donated 66 tablets to the Racine United School District that were ultimately put to use in the Racine Alternative Learning Centre.

CNH Industrial supports a wide range of communities and educational initiatives local to its facilities as part of its company-wide community engagement and sustainability strategy. CNH Industrial manufactures and markets construction and agricultural equipment under its Case IH, New Holland Agriculture, CASE Construction Equipment and New Holland Construction brands, as well as powertrains for FPT Industrial in North America.