Decoding the Digital Divide: 29 Million Disconnected Families Remain a 'Known Unknown'

This article is the second in a four-part series exploring the digital divide's impact on K-12 education in the United States. To view other articles in the series,please click here。

Jason Bell pulls his car to the side of the road on his drive to Copper Basin High School in the southeastern corner of Tennessee. His phone rings because he knows that for miles ahead, there will be no cell signal.

"It's a daily struggle," says Bell, the secondary instruction supervisor for Polk County Schools. "Some kids live in areas without cell signal or internet service, and we have to make adjustments for those students as much as we can."

When schools closed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bell's district was among the many that scrambled to equip and distribute 1:1 devices and hotspots to students with limited or no internet access. But in some places, no amount of grants, partnerships, devices, or hotspots is enough.

"We're putting Band-Aids on a huge problem that we can't stop the bleeding from," Bell says. "But we're trying to slow the bleeding down as much as we can."

'Known unknowns'

Before the pandemic, the digital divide—which encompasses the roughly 29 million households in the U.S. with school-aged children (out of 121 million total) that lack home internet access—was narrowing by about 1% per year, according to Evan Marwell, CEO and founder of EducationSuperHighway.

The homework gap, a subset of that divide, refers to school-aged children lacking sustainable home internet access—and it remains a huge question mark.

"It's kind of a known unknown," says Amina Fazlullah, policy advisor for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that advocates for improving students' digital lives.

"Even the numbers we have, we know aren't completely accurate," adds Lydia Logan, executive director of the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program at Digital Promise, a nonprofit working to close the digital divide. "What's often not counted are those who are 'under-connected,'" rather than completely disconnected.

Before the pandemic, Marwell says, there was no available data or political will to understand and address this issue.

"Whether it was the federal government, state government, or school districts, they felt that internet access was a choice that families would make on their own," Marwell says.

However, since the pandemic forced learning online and made internet access crucial for districts to provide free public education, Marwell estimates that between 10 million and 15 million students were found to lack reliable home internet.

Who those students are is almost entirely tied to poverty, Marwell says, with over 90% qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. As such, it's also tied to race.

The urban-suburban affordability gap

In California's Oakland Unified School District, 90% of students are people of color. The city's chief information officer, Andrew Peterson, mapped out the households most in need—including those with unemployed individuals, English as a second language speakers, or students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch.

"Often, the highest percentage of students most in need are also in these underemployed households," Peterson says. The lines on the map cut right through the city center, and Peterson allocated $7.7 million from CARES funds to install radio equipment on streetlights, using their power to set up public Wi-Fi access points.

Previously, students might have had to go to the nearest public library, coffee shop, or other public facility. "But what if the environment isn't safe or there's no car?" Logan says. "What if a student lives in an area that might have gang territory, and the facility is on the other side?"

"A lot of urban communities have been digitally redlined, where even if one neighborhood is served well, another might not be," Fazlullah says. "Because those parts of the community haven't been upgraded by providers or policies."

Since the Oakland project went live on January 1, network traffic has doubled each month, exceeding 40 terabytes of data by April, with over 35,000 unique devices. "Now, maybe you just have to sit on your porch," Peterson says. "You don't have to leave your home."

"Oakland isn't the only district doing this," Marwell says. Districts nationwide have mobilized their own resources—from buses equipped with hotspots to installing towers on school rooftops to broadcast internet signals to the community.

The complicating gap: bandwidth limits and housing changes

On the other side of the country, Ryan Schettler bikes from his home in Louisville, Kentucky, to Newburg Middle School, where he is the IT lead for the school's Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program. Since the pandemic began, his bike routes have often included home visits to troubleshoot devices, follow up on lost devices, or deliver new ones to students.

Newburg was already a 1:1 school before pandemic closures, thanks to a Verizon Innovative Schools grant. But despite having significantly narrowed its own homework gap years ago, not all Newburg students had equal access during remote learning.

"During the pandemic, home situations changed," says Nicole Adell, principal of Newburg Middle School. "Some adults had to work, and now your cousin is almost like a brother because they're living with you every day."

So Schettler often helps, sometimes filling in for other schools when students live with three or more siblings or other school-aged children and need 1:1 devices or laptops.

When identifying these children, surveys often fall short, Logan says. "Most surveys ask, 'Do you have internet access at home?' They don't ask, 'Do you have enough devices and bandwidth to do what you need to do?'"

Households identified as having limited or no internet access typically receive district support through grants and partnerships—with providers like Verizon and T-Mobile, as well as companies like Kajeet, all becoming familiar names over the past year.

The rural infrastructure gap

In some places, however, grants or partnerships supporting hotspots and devices aren't enough. "We can't put up towers, we can't lay fiber," Bell says.

In these places, teachers go to great lengths to regularly prepare and distribute paper learning packets, with some choosing to distribute them weekly alongside meals. "Paper packets are terrible," Bell says. "Nobody likes them. It adds a huge amount of extra work for teachers, and it's not what we should be doing."

Some hand-deliver learning packets to students' homes, upload instructional content onto devices so students can access it without Wi-Fi, or upload teaching videos to YouTube in hopes that students can access them with minimal data plans.

Other creative solutions likedatacastinghave also been adopted by states or districts over the past year with federal relief funds. This technology bypassesthe need for cellular networks or internet service, using TV broadcast signals to distribute information to wireless-capable devices like smartphones, tablets, or Chromebooks.

Yet, perhaps due to unique geographic and infrastructure obstacles, rural schools were among the first to reopen campuses in the 2020-21 school year, with some even opening during 2019-20.

For example, Tennessee's Polk County has been teaching 100% in person since Labor Day, aside from short-term quarantines triggered by positive or suspected COVID-19 cases within schools.

Even before the pandemic, rural districts were advocating for local leaders to support building the necessary connection towers. "Essentially, for rural Americans without access, the solution is that we need subsidies to build more infrastructure," Marwell says.

'We're trying to fix it, but we can't'

Over the past nine months, Marwell says, of the 10 million to 15 million previously disconnected students, about 3 million have crossed out of the digital divide, making the divide narrow at least twice as fast as the pre-pandemic rate of 1% per year.

However, federal aid or other funding used for purchases or subscriptions is drying up in many cases.

For example, Newburg's iPads have a lifecycle of about five years, and the school's partnership with Verizon ends this school year. Schettler says Jefferson County Public Schools has stepped in for maintenance, replacing 25% of iPads annually.

Yet, scarce district resources mean simultaneously tracking and trying to recover every lost, missing, or damaged device. For example, one Newburg student ran off to another state, leaving her iPad behind. "That one we're not getting back," Schettler says.

"Solving this isn't the job of schools and districts," says Bell, whose Tennessee district is hoping to secure more funding from future grants to fill existing gaps. "I feel like we're trying to fix it, but we can't. We've done the best we can."

"The reality is, districts don't have the money to sustain this on their own," Marwell says. "(Federal) funding runs out in 2022, and we'll face a digital cliff where millions of Americans we helped get online will suddenly fall off."

His organization is currently working with the Biden administration, Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and internet service providers to secure long-term funding and support data sharing and collaboration between ISPs and districts.

"We gave all the internet service providers a list of student addresses and asked, 'Who's connected, and who's not? For those not connected, can you serve them?'" Marwell says. "That was a game-changing idea because previously people relied on surveys and other informal ways to find out."

However, the federal government has not yet committed to permanent funding. "You can't solve a long-term problem with a short-term solution," Marwell says.