"Digital Divide" Meets Social Divide for Shelby County Students

Hear radio story on WKNO FM (Memphis NPR station).

The COVID crisis has left many kids without access to learning, because they don’t have access to technology. Locally, Shelby County Schools (SCS) wants to bridge the so-called “digital divide” by providing every student and teacher with a laptop — by August.

Educators say that’s just the first step towards protecting the district’s most vulnerable students.

This radio story is adapted from a version previously published in Daily Memphian. 

When the pandemic hit, Latarsha Jenkins, a 35-year-old single mother of four, was laid off from her job as a home health aide and had to make some quick decisions.

“I got to pick and choose which bills I got to pay,” she says. “And Wi-Fi bill wasn't in the pick.”

So Jenkins’ kids — in elementary, middle and high school — took turns using her phone for their homework. That went relatively well, although a few weeks before school ended, one of her daughters was still having trouble accessing the website — via the phone — where her assignments were posted.

By August all of Jenkins’ children could have their own laptops if County Commissioners approve the purchase of more than 100,000 new devices. They would come with built-in Internet access, say SCS officials, and everyone would have the same type of laptop to ensure a secure network.

It’s a $53 million plan, half of which would be paid for by federal stimulus funds.

And it’s necessary, says Gini Pupo-Walker, who heads the Tennessee branch for the Education Trust, a non-profit that advocates for students of color and lower-income status.

Pupo-Walker says, right now, digital access is “a huge divider in terms of who's learning, who's not learning. Who's connected to the world, who's not connected to the world.”

Roughly one out of five American teens doesn’t have a computer or Internet at home. In some parts of Memphis, two-thirds of households have no Internet access. 

Pupo-Walker says that’s the primary reason the district froze grades when schools shut down.

“Are we going to penalize those kids whose mom has one phone between the four or five of them?” she says.

The same question could be asked of kids with special needs, who have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or whom teachers haven't able to reach at all since March? 

For School Board Commissioner Stephanie Love, the pandemic has intensified the racial disparities in Shelby County, where nearly half of children live in poverty.

“The challenges that the entire world has right now,” says Love, “our black communities have been having these challenges since conception. Inadequate health care, the food deserts, the Internet deserts.”

Love is cautiously optimistic about the district’s plan to narrow the digital divide. But she says that’s not the only problem facing disadvantaged students.

All kids typically lose academic ground when they’re not in school. It’s called the summer slide and it disproportionately affects minorities and poor students. This year’s COVID slide is twice as long. Experts predict an even greater loss of math and reading skills, which could be measured with assessment tests.

That worries Love, who says she needs more information about what exactly is being tested.

She points out that low-income students already score lower on assessment tests due to childhood traumas that disrupt development and learning. Such as poverty — or a pandemic.

Pupo-Walker thinks kids need time, not tests, when school resumes, in order to process what’s happened to them. But she says they likely won’t get it due to budget cuts.

“We are just going to have less and less ability to provide those kind of supports and routines and additional time or additional whatever that looks like to help students re-enter,” she says.

No one yet knows what school will look like in August. SCS officials expect a hybrid of online and in-person classes. But opening schools, even for staggered schedules, would come with additional costs, for safety measures like protective gear and disinfecting.

Those expenses come at the same time that SCS wants to slash $11 million from its budget. And Pupo-Walker also expects state education cuts, which would hit every Tennessee school district.

Overhauling an education system that changed overnight isn’t easy, says Pupo-Walker, but “if we aren't able to be really creative and innovate, it'll just reinforce the division that we're already beginning to see.”

A division that laptops and disinfectants alone won’t be able to bridge.