#OaklandUndivided: How Mayor Schaaf and Oakland Leaders have United a City to Close the Digital Divide for good
At the start of the pandemic, only 12 percent of low-income students in Oakland public schools had access to a computer and internet at home. Two years later, 98 percent did. That increase was no accident — it was the result of an incredible collaboration by community leaders across the city, led by Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.
“We were using the crisis as an opportunity to address a moral wrong that needs to be changed forever, not just during the pandemic,” Mayor Schaaf shared. “We can’t afford not to.”
When the pandemic hit and Oakland classrooms were forced to shift to online learning, as many as half of all Oakland public school students couldn’t get online at home. So, Mayor Schaaf and leaders across Oakland got to work. They created a public-private partnership, #OaklandUndivided, which included the Oakland Unified School District, the City of Oakland, TechExchange, the Oakland Public Education Fund, Oakland Promise, and more than 15 community partners across the city.
Their goal was simple, but ambitious: to ensure all Oakland students from Oakland public schools had access to computers, internet, and culturally competent tech support. What they achieved serves as an example for cities across the country: they raised $17+ million, distributed more than 29,000 laptops and 10,000 hotspots, and fulfilled 10,000 tech support requests in 2021 alone.
Jessica Ramos was one of those students. When schools shut down, she had only her cellphone and her family’s laptop to do lengthy assignments for her advanced AP courses — and she had to sit on a bench outside a public library to access free Wi-Fi. “My family did not have the internet, and I could not finish my work, which lowered my grades and I missed some deadlines to finish my scholarship applications,” she told EdSource.
Thanks to #OaklandUndivided and its partners and supporters, Jessica got access to a computer and to home internet, which she used to apply for and receive eight college acceptances. Today, Jessica is a sophomore at University of California, Berkeley with a 3.6 GPA.
Now, #OaklandUndivided is on to Phase II.
They’re working with the city, school district, and elected leaders along with community partners such as Oakland Housing Authority, NAACP, Greenlining, Blocpower, TechExchange, and EducationSuperHighway to leverage this generational moment in state and federal broadband funding to provide high-speed internet to the rest of the city’s nearly 37,000 unconnected households. “For too long the digital divide has been seen as a rural issue, despite nearly 3 of 4 unconnected households being in urban areas,” Mayor Schaaf explains. “The #OaklandUndivided Coalition is working to shift the narrative and ensure communities like ours — predominantly Black and Brown urban centers — too often overlooked for infrastructure investment, receive a fair share.”
According to the City of Oakland, organizations across the city will form ‘Oakland Connect’ to expand Oakland’s open-access municipal fiber footprint to enable innovative public private partnerships, deploy EducationSuperHighway’s-free apartment Wi-Fi program, and launch a citywide Affordable Connectivity enrollment campaign to “help community members from low-income backgrounds overcome the trust and enrollment barriers unconnected households face when signing up for federal broadband programs and home broadband service.”
Mayor Schaaf remains focused on broadband access — she knows how important it is for her city, especially for its youngest residents and their futures. “We are not slowing down,” she shared earlier this year. “We are doubling down.”
