Bolivia cancels school year. Parents ask: What now?

Four kids. One cellphone. No internet.

That was the distance-learning setup for José Luis Torrez’s family in Tilata, Bolivia, a town on the outskirts of La Paz, at the start of the pandemic. “We were blowing through our savings” to buy phone credit, says Mr. Torrez, who runs a mechanic’s garage. But in early August, not long after a neighbor helped Mr. Torrez set up a Wi-Fi connection, Bolivia’s department of education canceled the rest of the school year.

Ever since schooling moved online last spring, just a month after classes started in the Southern Hemisphere, millions of Bolivians without access to the internet or electronic devices struggled to keep their children learning and engaged. The government argued that continuing digital classes through November, typically the end of the