A message from Sal on school closures and remote learning on Khan Academy.

Hi everyone, Sal here from Khan Academy. I am back in the walk-in closet where Khan Academy all began, socially distanced, obviously.

The entire globe is going through a very unusual crisis right now, and as part of that crisis, you know people are worried about three things: they’re worried about their health, both physical and mental health; they are worried about the economy; and then they’re worried about how do we ensure that kids can keep learning.

With now nearly a billion kids that otherwise would be in school, are now out of school in order to protect people from this virus. All of us here at Khan Academy, as a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere, recognize that it's our duty to step up in this crisis.

We never could have foreseen this type of situation, but we want to be there to support you, support students, parents, and teachers to get us through this situation. So, we've always been working on resources starting from Pre-K with Khan Academy Kids that covers math, reading, writing, social-emotional learning, all the way through the main Khan Academy website and app that goes from kindergarten through the core of college, including middle school and high school in math, English language arts, the sciences, we have history, economics; we also have official SAT practice for you.

But as we saw the school closures begin to happen over the last few days, and now it's accelerating, we realize that we need to do more. So, on top of that, we are publishing resources for parents, for students, and for teachers to be able to understand how to navigate the situation. Just recently, we published schedules so that students, parents, and teachers can structure students’ days, and there's different schedules for students of different age groups.

We are doing daily live streams so that in this time of social distancing, we all can feel connected and make sure that we’re there to support each other. The team here at Khan Academy is very focused on making sure we can support you all through this crisis.

We’re seeing the server load increase, so the engineering team is reassuring me that we think we have it under control. But I also want to remind folks that we are a not-for-profit. Even before this crisis, we were operating at a bit of a deficit, and so if you're in the position—especially as our demands on our server and our costs are going up as people use us more, if you are in a position, I hope you could think about supporting us philanthropically.

I want to really thank Bank of America. Just over this past weekend, they stepped up; they realized that our costs were going up, that we had to have a better response effort, so they have helped us there. But we need more help.

So, for any of you all out there who are in a position—whether you’re an individual or corporation, if you’re finding use out of the resources we’re providing, please think about making a donation to Khan Academy. It will allow us to support the nation and the world as we go through this very, very unusual crisis together.

Last but not least, I just want to say, as one human being talking to another, this is a new frontier for all of us. But I’ve been very heartened by the humanity that I’m seeing in everyone. Everyone is just trying to help everyone else as a human being.

I’m confident that if we just do the next right thing, one step after another, that we're all going to be able to get each other through this situation. Thank you.