For over 5 years, The Education Trust-West's #Data4ThePeople campaign has been a statewide effort to ensure California builds a data system that is designed with achieving equity and the needs of students, parents, and families at the center. Now with school and college closures caused by COVID-19 posing a real challenge to data accessibility and quality, state and education leaders are urged to find workable solutions. Data is critical to ensuring communities and educators are empowered with the best information to highlight inequities and demand educational justice for California's schools and colleges. The latest resource in our Education Equity in Crisis series, called "#Data4thePeople but How?" aims to highlight the real impact of school and college closures on data. While it's not possible to adequately collect data at this time, it is possible to understand the current limitations and find workable solutions to ensure useful data is collected in a timely fashion.