A message from Sal on school closures and distance learning with Khan Academy

- Hi, everyone. Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. And as we all know, we are now many months into this whole COVID-19 crisis, and you can even see that I am clearly still giving myself a haircut with a clipper. And I'm still operating out of the walk-in closet where Khan Academy all began. And we're all operating out of our, I guess, literal or figurative, walk-in closets. For those of y'all who are new to Khan Academy, we're not for profit, with a mission of providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. And we could've never foreseen this crisis, but over the last decade plus, we've been building the types of resources that we realize are well suited to keep everyone learning. To support classrooms, to support teachers and to support families as we're all struggling with the situation. We have Khan Academy Kids for early learners. That's math, reading, social, emotional learning from pre-K all the way through kindergarten and first grade. And elementary, middle, high school and early college, we have math, interactive exercises, teacher tools, videos. We also go into the sciences and the humanities. And so you could imagine when it started to become clear that COVID was going to significantly disrupt the global education system last spring, it's one of those moments where we kinda looked left and looked right and said, "I think this is us, we have to step up. It's our duty to step up." And so we've tried to do more. Obviously, our server load has been 250, 300% of normal. We've been running webinars for teachers and parents. We've just launched get ready for grade level courses, which allows students to not just work at their grade level at their own time and pace, but make sure that they have all the prerequisites and they filled in all of their gaps, pre-grade level. Those might have been gaps that they had pre-COVID, but as we know, a lot of students unfortunately are continuing to accumulate gaps or some of their skills are getting stale as we go through this extended period of school closures. And as we look forward to this coming back to school season, we know that things are continuing to be extremely uncertain. And so we're gonna do everything in our power to support you as we go through this very, very uncertain time. Continuing to improve the content, the software, create learning plans, any supports that are possible to just keep us all learning. I do wanna remind folks we are not for profit. We can only exist because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself, if you're in the position to make a donation. We were running at a deficit pre-COVID, and that deficit has only grown because of our increased need during COVID. I wanna give a special shout out to several corporations that have stepped up during the crisis when they learned about this deficit. Bank of America was the first to step up, followed closely by google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis. But even with that support, we're continuing to running at a deficit. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about making a donation. Because together, I'm confident, even though this is a very suboptimal situation, we can help as many children as possible or students of all ages as possible, keep learning.