When her grandchildren’s Pittsburgh school
moved to online learning in March of 2020, Janice
Myers and her four grandchildren shared a single
laptop. One month, she struggled to afford the
internet bill on her fixed retirement income.
She tried to access the company’s $10 monthly
rate designed to keep low-income kids
connected during the pandemic, but said she
was told she did not qualify because she was
an existing customer.
This school year, the children were adjusting
well to in-person learning until a quarantine
sent them home for a week, Myers said. Around
Thanksgiving, the school shut down in-
person classes again, this time for nearly three
weeks. Both times, the school did not send
the children home with tablets, leaving them
with little instruction except a thin packet of
worksheets, she said.
“To my mind, you had an entire school year to
learn how to be better prepared, and how to be
proactive and how to incorporate a Plan B at the
drop of a hat,” she said. “There was no reason why
every student, when they returned to school,
didn’t receive or keep their laptop.”
Among the districts using some of their federal
relief money to boost home internet access is
California’s Chula Vista Elementary School District,
which is incorporating the cost of hotspots and
other internet services into the budget for the
next three years. It gives priority for internet
hot spots to kids who have the most trouble
connecting to school, such as foster children and
youth experiencing housing instability.
Assistant superintendent Matthew Tessier said
the district found many low-income families may