April Tidwell, principal of West High School in Sioux City, Iowa, has added a new chore to her job description over the past few years. Two or three mornings a week when school is in session, she picks up students at their homes on her way to work so they can get there early. In the evenings, well after the last late buses have come and gone, she carts them back home.

That extraordinary personal touch is an unexpected — and hopefully temporary — byproduct of the digital revolution. All middle and high school students in the 15,000-student Sioux City Community School District have laptops that they take home each day for homework and study. But nearly a third — including some 400 students in Tidwell’s school alone — have no high-speed internet at home.

Students need the internet not only to do research and complete their assignments, but to submit their work via the school district’s learning management system. “We’ve moved to that blended learning model where we want teachers to put things online and use the resources that are online,” Tidwell says, “but it can be an inhibitor when students don’t have access at home.”

That’s where the principal’s volunteer chauffeuring gig comes in. She and several other school officials get at least a few eager students to school early to finish or upload assignments and enable them to stay late for more internet access. That’s especially important for seniors, who not only must pass their courses to graduate, but need the web for college applications, financial aid forms and more.

Students who have competing responsibilities, such as part-time jobs or caring for younger siblings, might not get to their homework until 10 or 11 p.m., Tidwell says. If it requires the internet, they may be out of luck.

“I think they feel frustrated,” she says, “because when they have time to do homework, they can’t.”

Virus-Exposed Inequities

That lack of equity — dubbed the “homework gap” by Federal Communications Commission member Jessica Rosenworcel — has come into even starker relief with the COVID-19 virus epidemic and the forced shutdown of school operations across the country. When the Sioux City district closed its doors because of the virus on March 16, it was unable to require remote learning for students because that is not allowed in Iowa. But even if it was, Tidwell says, the inequities in home access would stand in the way.

“If we were allowed to deliver online instruction, I fear a huge equity gap because so many of our students do not have home internet access,” Tidwell says. She calls the public health crisis, which brings the need for online teaching and learning front and center, “a huge wake-up call for everyone in education.”

Kim Buryanek, Sioux City’s associate superintendent, agrees. “We have the capability of providing devices and high-quality lessons,” she says. “But if we moved forward with online learning, we would be widening the homework gap. The homework gap would increase our achievement gap.”

Keith Krueger, CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Consortium for School Networking, or CoSN, says the lengthy school closures caused by the spread of the COVID-19 virus have highlighted the necessity of broadband internet at school and at home, calling it a “fundamental requirement.” He says the crisis, as horrendous as it is, provides an important learning moment for schools nation-wide.

“While many school districts have been doing online learning for years, no one has tried to do online learning for all grades and all students for two to three weeks straight, or possibly until the end of this school year,” he says.

“Right now, this is about a pandemic, but we will also face hurricanes, snowstorms and fires,” Krueger adds. “We must ensure that learning continues no matter what.”

Bridging Gaps

Sioux City began phasing in its one-to-one technology program in 2011, joining a rush of districts across the country to personalize the instructional process with digital devices and curriculum.

Sixty-six percent of the nation’s high schools, 69 percent of middle schools and 43 percent of elementary schools have implemented one-to-one teaching and learning programs, according to a 2020 survey by CoSN. But while that has decreased the digital inequities at school, the gap at home is still a wide gulf. The CoSN survey found 95 percent of responding school districts cited it as a concern.

Low-income families are hit hardest. A 2019 report from the Pew Research Center found that 44 percent of households earning less than $30,000 do not have broadband access at home, compared to 19 percent of middle-income families and just 6 percent of families earning more than $100,000 a year.

Beth Holland, director of CoSN’s Digital Equity Project, notes that the gap impacts children well beyond their homework.

“Most learning happens outside of school,” she says. “What happens when a kid reads something in a book and goes, ‘Wow, that’s so cool, I wish I knew more’? If they have internet access, that moment of curiosity can turn into deeper learning.”

The Right Questions

The ultimate solution to the homework gap, Holland says, is to make broadband available to all, just like electricity. But that seems a long way off, and school districts aren’t waiting. “There’s a lot going on,” she says. “People are trying all kinds of different strategies.”

Implementing those strategies can be trickier than one might imagine. Sioux City started focusing hard on the issue in 2017, after all of its middle and high schoolers had begun taking home laptops, Buryanek says. The district began asking families if they had internet access at home, and some 90 percent said yes. Based on that, it purchased 67 Wi-Fi hotspots that students could check out from school libraries, with plans to expand to 200.

The district also placed hotspots on its buses — particularly those that take students on long trips to athletic events or other school-sanctioned activities. And it extended school hours, enabling students to use the internet into the evenings and on some Saturdays.

In addition, it contacted community businesses, including McDonald’s, Starbucks and the Hy-Vee grocery chain, to allow students to use their seating areas to access their Wi-Fi, whether or not they purchase something.

But all that was not sufficient. When the school district’s director of equity education interviewed high school students last year about why they weren’t turning in their homework, a common answer was that they lacked internet access at home. District officials realized they had to ask families who said they had internet a follow-up question: “Is this high-speed, reliable internet or is it your phone?” This time, they learned that fewer than 75 percent had the access they needed.

The district now is pursuing a grant from the 1Million Project, an independent charity supported by Sprint and others that would bring 1,100 hotspots, complete with internet service, to its three high schools next year. Every student without reliable internet at home would get one. If the district were to purchase the hotspots and service on its own, the cost would be about $726,000, Buryanek says.

This year, though, April Tidwell’s staff was juggling the lending of 12 take-home hotspots maintained in her high school’s library.

“We try to prioritize who gets to take them,” she says. “We ask teachers for input, like does a student have a big project coming up? It is hard to manage because the need is so great.”

When COVID-19 closed the schools, Sioux City directed its hotspots to students taking dual enrollment college courses online, which are permitted by the state.

School district buses in Vancouver, Wash., Public Schools have Wi-Fi to allow students to complete homework.

Relationship Building

Officials in Oak Park Elementary School District 97, in Chicago’s western suburbs, learned that a key step in ensuring digital equity among students is maintaining strong relationships with students and families.

Even as the district rolled out its one-to-one program in the 6,100-student preK-8 district six years ago, it consulted with staff, families and other community members on what devices would most benefit students at different grade levels. Officials initially settled on iPads for all students in grades 3-8. Three years later, after technology director Michael Arensdorff convened focus groups with students and staff, they switched to Chromebooks for the middle schoolers.

Arensdorff recognized that providing all children with the right devices was a big step toward digital equity, but that the next step had to be ensuring they could use them fully at home. Inviting them to stay after school or spend their lunch period on the school’s internet was not enough, and ultimately not fair to students. “They were taking a lot of social experiences or social time away to just be able to use internet in our buildings,” he says.

Three years ago, after extensive research, the district discovered Digital Wish, a charitable organization in Milton, Del., that provides hotspots for free in partnership with Mobile Beacon, which provides the internet service for $10 per month per hotspot. The hotspots are available to students in grades 3-8 who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and have no internet at home. During the first two years of the program, 40 to 50 families participated. Still, Arensdorff says, “We knew we weren’t hitting everybody.”

Like Sioux City, Oak Park found that identifying students who don’t have home access can be a tricky challenge, as can contacting each of those families and getting them to sign up for hotspots. Arensdorff realized the district had to build relationships with people who were not eager to “call themselves out” by acknowledging they had no internet, usually for economic reasons. He met with social workers and educators at the building level, who estimated that even after the hotspot distribution, about 200 children didn’t have home access.

As the current school year began, families of children in grades 3-8 were asked during registration whether they had internet at home beyond a cell phone. Seventy-eight families said they did not.

As of the end of February, 49 of those families had hotspots and two more were on the way. The district continued to inform families, but some still hadn’t been reached. Arensdorff is hoping that with improved communication and a streamlined sign-up process, the district will be able to hand out all the needed hotspots during fall registration next year.

More work remains to close the gap for students. Arensdorff is working with village leaders in Oak Park on a joint fiber project that he says would be a game-changer for both the district and the first-ring suburb. He’s also planning to “light up” the parks out-side school buildings so students will have digital access there in the warmer months.

“Once you get there one year, you’re not done,” Arensdorff says, while stressing that all communities are different and have to find their own solutions. “You have to continue to be better and just focus on how we can serve kids in a better way each year.”

A 100 Percent Goal

Steven Webb, superintendent of the Vancouver Public Schools in Washington, across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore., calls his system “a mature digital transformation district.” The district, with its 24,000 students. started scaling up its one-to-one pro-gram in 2013, powered by public support for two major technology levies in the past seven years.

As the first computers went home with middle schoolers, the gap in home internet access became clear, says Zach Desjarlais, Vancouver’s director of instructional technology. The district’s first move was to put Wi-Fi on buses. Then it introduced programs from companies that offered low-income families reduced-cost or free internet in their homes. Then the district secured a grant from Sprint that provided hotspots for students.

“At this point in the game we have enough of those devices and that service to provide high-speed access to the internet so any-one can get it who doesn’t already have it at home,” Desjarlais says.

Just over 400 families now have the Sprint hotspots. Even so, Webb says his colleagues estimate that some 200 students — less than 1 percent of the district enrollment — still do not have high-speed internet in their homes, even though the district is eager to deploy the hotspots.

Christina Iremonger, chief digital officer in Vancouver, says the district is working closely with the Family Community Re-source Centers housed in the schools to locate and serve those families with access needs.

“We are trying to determine the reasons why people might not ask for it,” she says. “We want to make sure that we do close that homework gap. We’ve narrowed it, but we want to close it 100 percent.”

PAUL RIEDE is a freelance education writer in Syracuse, N.Y. E-mail: psriede@gmail.com

Additional Resources

Here is a sampling of resources available for school districts looking to narrow or eliminate the homework gap.

»Center for Digital Education: This research and advisory institute produced a 2019 handbook, “Closing the Connectivity Gap."
»CoSN: The Consortium for School Networking prepared a 28-page toolkit titled “Digital Equity: Supporting Students & Families in Out-of-School Learning.” It shares strategies for closing the homework gap and collaborating with the community to increase digital access.
»Eliminate the Digital Divide: A grassroots organization in Charlotte, N.C., teamed with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District and local companies to provide students with decommissioned (and repaired) corporate computers and digital literacy workshops and mentoring.
»EveryoneOn: The nonprofit works with organizations and internet service and device providers to connect low-income families with low-cost home internet service, computers and tablets, and digital literacy training.
»Future Ready Schools: This is a project of the Alliance for Excellent Education, which works with school leaders to target inequities among students in technology inside and outside schools.
»International Society for Technology in Education: This organization has published a book series, “Closing the Gap,” on achieving digital equity in education.
»Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition: This group advocates for open and affordable broadband connections for schools and libraries. It hosts webinars, among other services.