WiFi buses and parking lot learning: Schools adapt to teaching kids without internet

Nearly every school in the United States is closed to slow the spread of coronavirus, an unprecedented time for students to be away from classrooms.

The pandemic is revealing the stark disparity between students who don’t have internet at home and those who don’t.

It’s forced schools to get creative in providing access to children. Some schools have deployed WiFi buses to neighborhoods while others boost the internet signal inside campus buildings to reach students in parking lots.

“Know those kids doing schoolwork in the library parking lot and fast food places? They don’t have internet at home,” Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel tweeted on March 17. “With coronavirus they have a whole new set of challenges as schools close and classes migrate online. The FCC can fix this—and it should.”

School closings by the numbers

About 89 percent of students in the world are affected by national school closures, while millions more are impacted by local closings, according to UNESCO.

In the United States, about 124,000 schools are closed, affecting 55.1 million students, according to Education Week. There are about 132,000 public and private schools educating approximately 56.6 million students, the education website says.

Using these estimates, about 97 percent of kids in the U.S. aren’t going to school.

Internet access for students

That means many districts are relying heavily on online education to teach students. But a lot of kids don’t have internet access at home.

About 15% of U.S. households with school-age kids didn’t have high-speed internet access in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center.

More recent data show a similar digital landscape. Federal Communications Commission statistics show one-third of American homes don’t have high-speed internet.

Lower-income families are even less likely to have quality internet access. This is often referred to as the “homework gap.”

In households earning less than $30,000, 1 in 3 families didn’t have high-speed internet, according to the Pew study in 2015. Meanwhile, about 6% of families earning $75,000 or more did not have internet access.

In 2017, a Senate committee estimated about 12 million children don’t have broadband access at home.

How schools provide internet

The lack of internet access has forced schools to adapt in creative ways.

In South Bend, Indiana, the district deployed 22 school buses with WiFi to different sites across the city. Students aren’t allowed on the buses. Rather, the drivers park near benches and covered areas where students sit.

Other districts across the country also are doing this.

Charleston, South Carolina, schools boosted the internet signal inside campus buildings to reach nearby homes and parking lots while also providing WiFi buses in the city, according to U.S. News and World Report. About 4,000 of the school district’s 50,000 students don’t have internet at home, the news outlet reported.

“It’s crucial,” Thomas Nawrocki, executive director of information technology for the Charleston County School District, told U.S. News and World Report. “Any student who doesn’t have that access is losing out.”

In Phoenix, high school students camped out under a blanket near an elementary school to complete homework, the school board president told USA Today.

Philadelphia schools initially banned online instruction because only about half of the district’s high school students have a computer or tablet and internet at home, The Associated Press reported. With the pandemic dragging on, the district now plans to buy Google Chromebooks, according to the AP.

“What we’re seeing is a widening of the achievement gap, so that children who are in well-funded districts were able to immediately pivot to online learning strategies, because the infrastructure was already in place,” Maura McInerney, legal director of the Education Law Center, told the AP.

Efforts to close the ‘homework gap’

Last week, 35 senators sent a letter to congressional leaders urging them to approve $2 billion for schools and libraries to provide WiFi hotspots and devices to students without internet connectivity, Newsweek reported. Funding for this initiative was left out of the $2 trillion stimulus package passed in late March.

These proposed funds would go to the FCC E-Rate program, which provides internet discounts to eligible schools, Newsweek reported.

Rosenworcel, the FCC commissioner, said the agency has authority to provide students with technology that will give them internet outside the classroom, such as WiFi hotspots, according to an editorial she wrote for The Verge.

“With schools closing and learning migrating online, this is the right moment to adjust FCC rules to expand how we think about internet access and the traditional classroom,” she wrote on the news site.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrote in a Brookings Institution blog that he believes the coronavirus pandemic should be used as an opportunity.

“The long-term benefits of closing the digital divide are incalculable. Long after the coronavirus is gone, vulnerable students who get sick can keep up with their classmates,” Duncan wrote. “Low-income children without computers at home can experience the same benefits of technology as higher-income kids. Bringing technologically isolated segments of society into the digital mainstream will help dismantle cultural barriers at a time when that has never been more important.”

This story was originally published April 6, 2020 at 12:42 PM with the headline "WiFi buses and parking lot learning: Schools adapt to teaching kids without internet."