As public schools in Chicago have shifted their focus to online learning, the benefits have been blunted by the fact that home access to the Internet costs too much for some students, leading districts to look for different approaches to bring Internet access to the city’s poorest families.
“We believe many of our students have computers at home, but that doesn’t mean anything if they don’t have Internet,” said Todd Yarch, principal of Voise Academy High School.
“The whole idea for online blended learning” — with the curriculum online, students on computers in the classroom, and teachers serving as coaches — “is to allow students to continue at their own pace,” he said. “If you give them that ability to move at their own pace at home, that would be huge.”
Voise Academy, in the Austin neighborhood, is the district’s first high school to use this blended model.
Each student has a laptop, but the computers are kept at Voise Academy because of concerns that they will be stolen by thieves outside of the school. But even if they were taken home, the laptops would be useless for many of the Voise Academy students. More than 95 percent of them qualify for the federal free-lunch program, and Yarch estimates that only half of the school’s 500 students have Internet access at home.
Some possible help emerged in May when Comcast, the phone, cable television and Internet provider, began offering low-cost broadband service to every family with children in Chicago public schools who qualify for the federal lunch program and who have not recently subscribed to the company’s web service. Families who qualify get Internet access for $9.95 per month, roughly one-fifth the cost of Comcast’s basic Internet-only plan. They can also buy a computer from Comcast for $149.95.
Comcast would not say how many families had taken advantage of the offer, citing potential competition. The company began offering the program across the nation in July.
A phone survey commissioned by the City of Chicago in 2008 found that home broadband use in wealthier North Side neighborhoods often exceeded 80 percent, but that in many areas on the South and West Sides, fewer than half the homes had broadband service. Results of a similar survey taken this year have not been released.
Amelia Tsang, who works on such issues for the Gads Hill Center, a community group in the Pilsen neighborhood, said the so-called digital divide is a significant problem for schools that rely on technology to educate students.
“It is apparent in the communities that we serve that a lack of access to technology hurts families,” Tsang said. “Without Internet access, these families don’t have access to basic services, don’t have ways to find jobs or help their children with education.”
Teachers at Voise Academy and other schools where technology is central to the curriculum said the Comcast plan is a way to help remove a family’s low income as a barrier to educational success.
Brenda Alexander, whose son and granddaughter attend Voise, said the offer helps level the playing field. Her son has Internet access at home; she made it a priority and pays full price. Her granddaughter, who lives with Alexander’s daughter, does not yet have access.
“It’s about breaking down the dollars,” Alexander said. “Families always have to decide what is more important. Of course, this program will help my family.”
Sharnell Jackson, an online-education consultant who formerly led such efforts for Chicago’s public schools and helped found Voise Academy, says it is important that the Comcast program seeks to address the digital divide by making home Internet affordable but not free.
“It’s a better opportunity because people have to have skin in the game,” Jackson said. “If you give people Internet for free, they will never get a sense of a return for investment.”
Some people, though, are concerned that a corporation is playing such a large role in providing a basic tool of the public school curriculum. “We don’t want corporations to be filling in the gaps for what should be provided by local, state and federal governments,” said Jackson Potter, staff coordinator of the Chicago Teachers Union.
Comcast’s promotion of the initiative, he said, turns students into tools of the company’s marketing campaign.
“We don’t want to brand students,” Potter said.
But Jackson said having Internet access “opens up educational opportunities, giving students access to classes they wouldn’t otherwise have.”
“It would better differentiate instruction for each individual student,” she said.
