The Digital Divide Was An Emergency Before COVID-19

Before the inception of the novel coronavirus, public schools had a visceral experience of the now scrutinized digital divide.

As a public school educator, I personally witnessed this division. Over the past 4 years, I have asked my students if they had access to a laptop or a desktop computer from home. Virtually all of their responses were always an incessant, “No.” But my students were always resourceful; I only had three reliable desktops, but they would gather together, two or three at time, on the same computer.

Occasionally, they quarreled over our scarce supply of computers — but I sensed that their frustration was fueled by our classroom being their only chance of running their hands across a keyboard; most of my students would insist that I allow them to stay after school, so that they could spend extra time with our computers. After their extra minutes were up, many of them dispersed from class and lumbered up the street to the local library, to take advantage of their limited display of public desktops.

School officals have turned the ignition to plan for the ambiguous 2020–2021 school year and I suspect remote learning will become the new infrastructure of education.

According to a preliminary plan orchestrated by tasks force officials, classrooms in Columbus won’t fully resume for the first half of the school year in response to COVID-19 and it’s possible that high school students will learn entirely from a computer at home — that of course depends on whether schools have the financial leverage to purchase additional computers.

It is not a novel to me that 30% of all public K-12 students (15 million to 16 million pupils) reside in households either without an internet connection or device adequate for distance learning at home. As a public school educator, I know firsthand that the digital divide is more visible in households with Black, Latinx, and Native students. Moreover, 40 percent of families in the very district that I teach in lack access to internet connection.

While I appreciate the generous efforts some school districts — like my own — have employed to address the disparities in computer access by purchasing Chromebooks and laptops. For teachers in underinvested schools, digital scarcity has always been an imminent threat to students of color — prior to the onset of this pandemic which cast a sea of light over a stark obstacle that has hindered students success, in school and from home, in this technological era.

We don’t live in a pre-digital era, therefore, the lack of computers and high speed internet renders grave disadvantages.

Student digital divide has resulted in students who are not optimally engaged; unable to interface with teachers and online curricular assignments. This divide has been a long setback for many students and families, rendering inequality issues and lost of learning opportunities-disbarring them from connecting to online school related assignments or developing skills with the digital tools imperative for success in the professional world later in life.

There is even a digital divide across schools. Suppose your school’s student body comprise of students who mostly come from homes that are high poverty households. It can be inferred that very few students will have access to home base computers and internet connectivity.

Imagine visiting a suburban school where every classroom has an inventory of personalize tablets for each student while your public school has to share one laptop cart which can only house enough devices for one classroom, not to mention, most of the laptops have some form of technical mishaps. Let’s say, you had to make magic happen out of an inadequate distribution of learning devices as a mere adaptation to a system where computer accessibility is not doled out equitably.

These real world scenarios have resulted an impediments for my students to complete work assignments that depended on digital devices such as student curated blogs, typing, research projects and other online learning activities.

We don’t live in a pre-digital era, therefore, the lack of computers and high speed internet renders grave disadvantages.

Through an act of Congress, local, state and federal governments; must ensure that every public school entity, particularly schoolhouses that service students of color (who are disproportionately effected by the digital divide crisis), have sufficient economic stimulus/means to finance equitable technology access for distant learning, otherwise our nation’s public school system will sink further into virulent division.