On the day that her teenage daughter’s hair started to fall out, Eva Garcia knew that the stress had become too great.
For months, Kimberly Son Garcia was kicked out of Zoom classes and missed deadlines due to slow Internet access. Until November, the Los Angeles family had obtained Wi-Fi in the parking lot of Carl’s Jr, a local fast-food chain, or through an access point provided by the school. After buying her own Internet service and rejecting packages she couldn’t afford, Garcia finally signed up for Spectrum’s $ 30 a month plan.
“I told them, ‘I just need basic services – this is for my children,'” said Garcia in Spanish through an interpreter. “Sometimes I can’t pay for a month, and sometimes my bills accumulate. It is very difficult because the internet is an essential piece. “
A year after the coronavirus closed schools in the country, Garcia’s children, Cristofer and Kimberly, are among the “sub-connected” – the nearly 12 million students who, according to a recent analysis, do not have access to the Internet or are content with a patchwork of short-term solutions to participate in remote learning. Its problems are specific to each region, from the lack of broadband in isolated Appalachian regions to worn out and obsolete devices distributed to poor families on Chicago’s South Side. But the headache and exhaustion are universal.
The federal government is handling the $ 7 billion split with schools that they can use for hotspots and internet devices, part of Joe Biden’s pandemic relief bill signed last week. The problems, however, are not just technological. As schools continue to reopen this spring, they will face the legacy of the lost learning pandemic, which has disproportionately affected black students and low-income families.
“It is frustrating to see the state and federal government working so slowly,” said Devon Conley, chairman of the school district for the Mountain View Whisman, California school district. “In the grand scheme of things, internet access shouldn’t be just for students. I think it is a human right. “
Mountain View is not a rural outpost that is difficult to access. The district office is about a seven-minute drive from Google’s international headquarters, a company virtually synonymous with the internet. However, in some parts of Santa Clara County, which includes the district, more than a quarter of households have no internet, and there are many residents who cannot afford the high-speed internet required to run learning platforms like Zoom.
Educators are not immune. Jorge Pacheco, who teaches in the fourth grade in Mountain View, is among the 400,000 teachers across the country who do not have enough attendance.
“There is so much delay when I talk to the kids, who say, ‘Oh, you’re done,'” said Pacheo, who needs to connect four or five devices to the internet to teach distance classes. “I have to turn off the video for the children to hear me.”
Connecting the hardest to reach
Like the pandemic itself, the lack of a reliable Internet disproportionately affected those who were already struggling before Covid-19.
In Chicago, where one in five children under the age of 18 does not have access to broadband, a new initiative aims to offer free high-speed service to 100,000 students before the end of the school year. But even with $ 50 million from foundations and the federal government, Chicago Connected has yet to reach nearly 40,000 families.
Many are homeless or change their temporary situation with friends or relatives. Margaret Bingham has not had a stable place to live since the birth of Mariah, 12. They lived in her brother’s basement until he was murdered in 2019, and have since gone “from house to house and door to door”. The two currently share the living room of Bingham’s adult daughter’s home on the South Side. Keeping Mariah connected to the virtual school has been a series of daily frustrations.
The first laptop the school launched had a screen obscured by blue horizontal lines. They switched to an iPad, but even when loaded, the device wouldn’t turn on.
Districts across the country have endeavored to put about 4 to 6 million devices in students’ hands since last March, according to the Boston Consulting Group. But the devices are sometimes old and defective. Those that work usually get damaged in students’ hands, and repairs can take months – leaving them with no way to connect.
In Chicago, Mariah now enters school from her phone with a Wi-Fi hotspot that she shares with three other children in the house. “I understand quickly,” she said. “I do my job before the Internet goes out.”
Outside the main population centers in the country, the fiber optic cable needed for high-speed internet is irregular and sometimes nonexistent. Families in some rural areas are relieved that schools are reopening because they are no closer to having broadband at home than at the beginning of the pandemic.
At Polk County, Tennessee, schools located in a former copper mining center in the Appalachian Mountains, only about 35% of students in the district have high-speed internet. Before students returned to classrooms in January, Karen Cribbs used to take ninth-grade Maddie to school, Copper Basin high, to pick up a wi-fi signal.
Maddie, who plays volleyball for the school team and is also a cheerleader, said she and her colleagues were frustrated with the Internet so slow that links to jobs disappeared before they were clicked on.
“In addition, constant buffering is so frustrating that we just give up,” she said.
High-speed internet is now available at the Cribbses’ home after a local company extended the service – but not two miles away, where Holly Smith, the director of Copper Basin, lives. She has placed a wi-fi amplifier in her attic, but she still has to “sit in the front hall to get enough service”. While schools were closed, she went to the post office to attend Zoom faculty meetings. At one point, she offered to donate part of her country’s farm to a cell tower so that students in her region could have a better connection – to no avail.
‘Still struggling to communicate’
The pandemic year caused a huge drop in the number of “sub-connected”: an estimated 4 million students who did not have Internet at home when schools closed last March are now connected. But the resulting impressive amount of lost learning will not be easy to correct. For example, a recent analysis found that 20% fewer kindergarten students are on track to learn to read, compared to their peers at the time of last year; for black and Hispanic kindergarten students, these projections were even higher.
Evan Marwell, founder and CEO of EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit organization focused on expanding Internet access for students, said that while “tremendous efforts” have helped more students connect, “the main obstacle to closing the duty gap at home is accessibility “.
Experts say the fragmented approach to the problem is not sustainable. They argue that government-subsidized home internet service and device purchase programs should be universally available, such as school lunches – and that efforts should be stepped up to reach families that traditionally do not depend on the internet to learn and work.
Liliana Madrid, from Los Angeles, is one of those parents. She found help from iFamily, a technical support program from the parent advocacy group Speak Up. But even with high-speed service and access points provided by the district, Madrid’s daughters have trouble submitting their assignments. His grades fell.
“Zoom gives me the kick-off for no reason,” said 10th grade student in Madrid, Itzel Godoy. She is not alone. Routinely, during remote classes, students disappear from the screen. “Some of my friends send me a message: ‘Can you tell me what we are doing?'”