An author friend of mine was scheduled to do an appearance at a small bookstore in Worcester (run by another friend of mine) last week. With the COVID situation, and the fact that in this store, two people would have trouble staying six feet apart, let alone a group, the event was moved online, and held as a Zoom meeting.

The author event got "Zoom bombed" and had to be shut down.

My friends are very intelligent people, but possibly not as Internet-savvy as some. I first heard about Zoom bombing back in April when so many schools and businesses were running classes and meetings online for the first time, and "bombing" them became a thing. My friends had never heard about it. They were completely unprepared when the meeting filled up with trolls who started running pornography videos in their video windows, spoofed the author's name in chat and made crude racist comments under her name, and pretended to be "Zoom Admin."

In the wake of this debacle, my author friend is posting lists of helpful tips to keep your Zoom meeting from being bombed. Their first and biggest mistake, of course, was to post the link to the meeting on social media, so that anyone could attend without having to jump through a lot of hoops. It's hard enough to attract attendees to an author event; they wanted to make it easy. And in more innocent days, based on standard marketing and promotion guidelines, this would have been the right thing to do.

But we're no longer in innocent times. My author friend discovered that there are whole Discord rooms devoted to posting links to Zoom meetings people have found that seem less secure and easy to troll.

This object lesson is a serious one for all of us, as all our town board and committee meetings have been run on Zoom for months and will continue to be for the foreseeable future...and as it appears likely that at least some of our schooling will be done via Zoom and other platforms, starting in just a few weeks. People are spending more time in front of screens than ever before, and those without easy access to the Internet or at least a smart phone find themselves outside of the loop.

The Town of Winchendon has been running Zoom meetings for months, and they're doing quite an amazing job with setting up the meetings, simultaneously broadcasting them live on channel 8, and then posting the Zoom videos on the town website. But Zoom meetings are only as good as the sum of their attendees' technology. Even after four months, town committee and board meetings are still plagued by glitches. Freezing video, individual audio that is almost inaudible, staticky, or loud and metallic, so that everyone who speaks sounds different, Powerpoint slides that are blurry and illegible in the video, attendees who lose their connection and drop out...all these and more are chronic problems. I haven't seen a town meeting get "bombed"; security is tight. But trolls are endlessly ingenious.

If the town is still having these issues after four months, and even town staff and board members are grappling with inadequate equipment and Internet connections at home, what issues does this portend for online schooling in another month?

The focus group on remote learning is meeting twice a week to work on these questions, as well as the much larger project of developing curricula that can be taught effectively on screens. But there's only so much the schools can do from their end. Remote learning assumes--because it has to--that students have equal access to the basic technology and environment required to participate. Just as school buildings must be ADA compliant, and just as school programs must be accessible to students of all needs, remote learning must somehow accommodate all students.

But not all students have Internet access. Some don't have computers. Many people don't have printers at home. Smartphones made all of those superfluous for many families, whose budget for technology is limited. We've been able to provide students with Chromebooks, but we can't hand out free Internet access to every family.

And even with technology, how do we provide every student with an environment conducive to learning from home? Zoom meetings, and the vast numbers of people who have been working from home for the first time, have thrown a spotlight on those challenges, too. Adults have struggled with finding a space to work all day in their apartments and houses, with spouses, kids, pets, ringing phones and noise from outside a constant distraction. How will kids do the same thing? What about kids whose home circumstances make this extremely difficult?

Of course, we hope that schools can open this fall. Massachusetts is doing very well in controlling the coronavirus, in spite of the small percentage of "mask-holes" who still resist doing the one thing experts say would, all by itself, bring the pandemic to a halt: wear a face mask. Winchendon hasn't had a new case of COVID-19 for weeks.

But we don't know what will happen for sure, and with some parents saying they simply won't send their children to school, remote learning will be happening. Like it or not, we now live in an online world, and we haven't yet caught up to that reality.

We need to catch up, and we need to be working on this all together, because the pandemic is likely to be around well into next year. We can't put our kids on hold until everything "gets back to normal." Just like travel after 9/11, our lives, and schools, have changed for good.

Inanna Arthen