> What drew you to tune into that particular talk?
I wanted to hear Talmidei Chachamim opinion about the pandemic, as advertised. I was not looking specifically for hizuk on internet issues.
> brick and mortar schools did not have the ability or resources to convert instantaneously into online schools.
If they would have been slightly creative, they could have. There are a lot of online resources available. Schools could have outsourced to the experts, for example. I hear Florida virtual school, for example, outsources their curriculum to other states. There are also lots of specialized sites on specific subjects that online schools bundle. One of the Jewish schools my kids attended gave group subscription to some of the math/English sites and gave homework from there.
I asked my local rep to allow increased enrollment into online public school as an emergency, and he first was interested but then said “there is local opposition” … instead director of the online school gave a couple of talks to the local districts. One irony, shortly before the pandemic, one of the schools was, Baruch Hashem, not interested in one of my kids because he, inter alia, attended online school for half a year, which the principal persisted calling “home schooling” despite all the info I gave him. I did not hear him giving tuition discounts, though, when his students were “home schooled” over the phone.