As lockdown upends California schools, state forms group to close rural ‘digital divide’

Sarah Supahan doesn’t like to identify Trinity County in far Northern California as “rural.” She describes the mountainous terrain as a frontier, a county so remote and off-the-grid that it has no incorporated cities or towns. There are about four residents for every square mile of land.

Supahan, the county superintendent of education, said her school districts are relying on paper packets for distance learning because the internet is so unreliable and inconsistent where her students live, like many other places in the north state.

“For a lot of our area, it (the internet) doesn’t even work,” she said. “There’s some of our districts that don’t have cell service at all.”

More than a month into a state lockdown of California, education officials are moving to address the persistent “digital divide” that has stymied online learning in remote areas like Trinity County.

A new task force will try and close persistent gaps in internet access that could undermine the education of California’s most isolated students. The California Department of Education said the group of lawmakers, industry and education leaders will focus on getting internet access and devices in the hands of students who need it.

The issue attracted more attention after the threat of the new coronavirus shuttered most schools, a reality that could linger into the summer. For millions of students, that means distance learning on a computer except for places where quality internet access is either unaffordable or unavailable.

The new task force held its first fact-finding meeting Monday with five of the nation’s largest internet service providers. Representatives from Cox Communications, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Charter Communications, which owns Spectrum, each attended the meeting that was streamed live on Facebook.

Tony Thurmond, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, said the changes in response to COVID-19 have spurred the task force’s mission. He estimated that nearly 200,000 students across the state do not have access to the internet based on an ongoing survey conducted by the education department.

“We see this as an opportunity to go even further, to say that once and for all we will close this digital divide that has separated our students between those who have and those that do not,” Thurmond said. “We have to let (the) internet flow like electricity and make sure students throughout our state have access.”

‘Screaming from the top of our lungs’

The education department said the task force will focus on students enrolled in special education, English learners, low-income and rural populations. They will also work to encourage donations like those of the tech giant Google and other companies that gave the state Chromebooks and free WiFi to 100,000 rural households.

But experts and education leaders in rural areas say the challenge cannot be alleviated with a laptop and mobile Wi-Fi devices alone. State legislators that represent rural areas say the attention given to the internet issue is long overdue.

“Rural California has been screaming from the top of our lungs about the digital divide for years. A few hours north of San Francisco (and) up Highway 101, folks literally step back in time,” said state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, who is a member of the task force.

“Lack of cell service, lack of high-speed internet and high rates of poverty is impacting our kids. And we’re looking at generations of impact.”

The Sacramento Bee recently profiled the River Delta Joint Unified School District where the superintendent said some places cannot even get access with a WiFi hotspot. The small, rural district at the tip of Sacramento County covered one of about 500 census tracts in the state where there were fewer than 600 internet connections for every 1,000 households, an analysis of federal Communications data showed.

The Bee’s analysis was limited to places with fewer than 1,000 people, so many tracts in far north counties were not included in the final results. But lawmakers and education leaders say the challenge is even greater in those places.

“We are facing a huge disadvantage, a huge inequity,” Edgar Lampkin, superintendent of the Williams Unified School District in Colusa County, said during the meeting. The small, agricultural community only has one internet service provider, he said.

“If they (families) have purchased any internet...what that provides in terms of accessibility is very limited,” Lampkin said. “It doesn’t work to meet the slightest educational need.”

Students need more bandwidth

Similar undertakings have been launched by nonprofits and the federal government; their efforts largely focused on improving the reach and quality of the internet in schools. Now California’s students are learning at home where individual circumstances play a bigger role.

Niu Gao, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who studies education technology issues, said it’s too early to compare what the task force is doing to other electronic infrastructure programs.

She said in the past the bar has been relatively low for expanding the internet to rural areas since online testing does not require very high speeds.

“With the coronavirus school closure, things are quite different because in order to deliver instruction online they will need a lot more bandwidth,” Gao said. “Rural areas are probably one of the most challenging areas because the problem has been in existence for decades. This is not an overnight problem so there probably isn’t going to be a very easy solution.”

Many schools have already adapted enough to offer at least a minimal amount of bandwidth. It became increasingly necessary when the state moved to online testing. The effort was heavily subsidized by the federal and state governments.

The two main challenges for schools — and may hold true for households — are infrastructure and affordability, said Evan Marwell, CEO of Education Superhighway, a nonprofit that consults with school districts nationwide to improve their internet connectivity.

For remote learning, Marwell said the amount of data available is more important than speed.

“If you have data caps, you can’t do Zoom classes because you’ll use up all your data in a couple days,” he said. “But once you’re back in school and it’s only homework, then a wireless connection can be OK because then you’re not using so much data, although they are more costly.”

Marwell said most homes that do not have internet can’t afford it; and the places that don’t have internet often face a larger environmental challenge. Although the organization said it has reached its goal of making sure 99 percent of school districts have minimum internet access, he said there are still gaps left behind.

“For sure, there are some schools out there that do not have the internet access that they need,” Marwell said.

“They’re largely in very rural areas where there is no real commercial internet infrastructure; places like Northern California where there just isn’t enough population that service providers are ever going to build out their networks to there because they haven’t been able to make a business case.”

The disadvantage couldn’t be more real for Supahan and other education leaders in Trinity County — home to nearly 1,600 students. The difficulties extend to testing, too, which is all online in California, she said.

“What it means for us is everybody else has to shut everything down so that a class can test,” Supahan said. “When you’re dealing with 20 or 30 megabits (per second), there just is not the capacity. It’s just very slow.”

This story was originally published April 21, 2020 at 2:23 PM with the headline "As lockdown upends California schools, state forms group to close rural ‘digital divide’."