A third of Dallas families are without home internet, making online learning all the more difficult

Rocio Lopez paused for a second before heading into Dallas ISD’s Young Women’s STEAM Academy in Balch Springs.

A handful of parents had lined up on April 24, crammed in a tight vestibule outside the school’s main office, waiting to pick up a mobile hotspot — a device that can connect computers and tablets to the internet through a cellular network.

One mother propped open a door to get some fresh air; another, not wearing a protective mask, covered her mouth and nose with her T-shirt. But no one walked away. Getting a hotspot was worth any discomfort.

Schools in Dallas and the rest of the country are closed for the year. Learning, such as it is, now happens online. But logging online isn’t a given for many families in Dallas, where approximately 1 of every 3 people lack fixed access to the internet, Lopez included.

School officials and education leaders worry that the current inequities in broadband access will widen gaps in academic performance that existed before the coronavirus pandemic — disproportionately hitting the poor, students of color and English language learners.

For families with high-speed internet, children can log on to Zoom meetings with teachers and classmates, stream instructional programming and get access to a growing array of online enrichment for students — everything from virtual museum tours to coding courses. For those without, getting a few homework assignments completed each week can be a significant challenge.

And with the crisis showing no signs of abating soon, the digital divide between haves and have-nots could lead to greater inequity down the road.

“We’re basically saying, ‘You can enter the schoolhouse and you cannot,’” said Dottie Smith, the president of Dallas-area education nonprofit Commit. “That’s essentially what’s happening.”

Early efforts

In mid-March, with spring break on the horizon and the potential of school closures looming, districts across the country did their best to come up with ad-hoc digital strategies. Many distributed tablets and laptops quickly, to as many students as they could.

For Dallas ISD, that meant getting nearly 90,000 devices into students’ hands in short order.

In tandem, the district tried its best to get a clear picture of how many of its families were without fixed internet access — such as a broadband line, dial-up service, or satellite. Unlike its suburban neighbors, where a vast majority of students have online access, 30% of 6,000 respondents to a DISD survey said they were without fixed internet service. If that percentage was reflected across the district, 46,500 students wouldn’t be able to log-on at home.

That’s not too far off a figure floated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which — using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2016 American Community Survey — calculated that 42% of Dallas households lacked high-speed internet access into their homes.

That percentage, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ Jordana Barton, put Dallas as the worst large city in the state and the sixth-worst in the nation in terms of connection rate, behind only Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Miami and New Orleans.

Northern suburbs like Allen and Frisco have only 12% of households without home internet.

And in Dallas, the lack of high-speed internet access was clustered in the same communities that struggle with food deserts, high crime, incarceration and poverty rates and the lack of two-income households, DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said.

“This is not just about missing out on an education,” he said. “This is much bigger than just students.”

Jennifer Sanders, co-founder of the Dallas Innovation Alliance, called internet access “the issue of our generation,” because it affects families across the board: in education, health care and the workplace.

Driven by the obvious need, the district distributed nearly 8,000 hotspots it had on hand in March and ordered 10,000 more, thanks to a $2.6 million emergency allocation approved by the district’s board of trustees. The Dallas Education Foundation, with help from the McDermott Family Foundation, purchased another 5,000 hotspots as well.

Just in the past three weeks have those orders come in. According to DISD chief technology officer Jack Kelanic, the district is almost finished distributing its new hotspots to high schools and middle schools, with the additional 5,000 becoming available in the coming days. District officials plan to allow students to keep devices and hotspots over the summer.

In the private sector, both of the area’s two largest internet service providers — AT&T and Spectrum — have promoted 60 days of free internet access during the COVID-19 crisis. Spectrum’s deal targets K-12 and college students, while AT&T is offering two months of free internet on its Access plans, low-cost (and low-speed) offerings available to those at or near federal poverty guidelines.

But Smith, the Commit president, said that the limited-time nature of those offers, plus any requirements of a credit card, are likely big enough hurdles to dissuade many financially strapped families from signing up.

Participation challenges

Before getting her hotspot on April 24, Lopez spent a month using a variety of methods to make sure her two middle school-age daughters, Evette and Suelma, were able to complete their assignments on Google Classroom, with an occasional Zoom meeting mixed in.

Lopez drove to the school’s parking lot and McDonald’s to use their Wi-Fi networks. She expanded her MetroPCS service, paying an additional $5 per line to add more data, allowing her to use the phones’ wireless hotspots until the data ran out. And she took her children to a friend’s house, bringing one at a time to use the friend’s wireless network for a few hours before heading home to get her other daughter.

Those types of stories haven’t been uncommon for students at the school, said YWSA principal Gabrelle Dickson.

All of Dickson’s teachers, from reading to band, have created online classrooms and are doing some sort of face-to-face instruction with students every week, she said.

“The parents and students have really been trying; they really have,” Dickson said.

But those types of results aren’t universal for students across the district.

While Hinojosa has touted during news conferences and board meetings that the district’s teachers have reached nearly 99% of students during the hiatus, there’s a significant difference between contact and participation.

Two teachers, from high-poverty campuses on opposite sides of the district, told The Dallas Morning News that participation in their online assignments has consistently been below 50 percent. Both teachers declined to share their names publicly, for fear of reprisals from administrators.

One of the teachers, who teaches science, said participation rates in his classes were below 25 percent, despite a barrage of calls and emails to students and parents.

“I feel like DISD is always putting that information out there, and I ask myself, ‘How do they justify this?’ It boggles my mind,” the teacher said.

Access to the internet was among the reasons the teachers gave for why they thought participation was so low. Other theories included students’ unpredictable home lives, a lack of language skills necessary to do online work, and the absence of any teeth to the district’s grading policy throughout the pandemic — where students aren’t given failing grades for any submitted assignment and grades are left blank when work isn’t turned in.

“District policy is that we can’t fail students, so it doesn’t really matter if [devices] don’t work,” one teacher said by email. “Everyone will pass. This makes it less important that students get hotspots.”

DISD’s chief of school leadership, Stephanie Elizalde, said the district is tracking attendance for students twice a week, but hasn’t run districtwide reports on how many individual assignment grades are being left blank.

She disputed that district policy was to pass everyone along. Students who were failing before the district moved to online learning, and who didn’t improve their standing from that point, would still receive failing marks.

But for students in good standing who stopped doing work in mid-March, Elizalde said she’d have to rethink how the district would address them — perhaps having those students make up some of the work over the summer break.

“There has to be some modification, but you shouldn’t be able to attempt nothing at all and be promoted or get credit for that course,” Elizalde said. “That’s a concern to me.”

In addition, unlike many of its neighbors, Dallas ISD did not initially roll out online instruction for its elementary students, because it didn’t have enough devices for every student at that level.

The district’s teaching and learning department said that it provided weekly plans in three different formats — for families of various levels of technology at their homes — and distributed packets at each elementary school for pick-up. Dallas elementary schools with available devices distributed 26,000 devices and 500 hotspots, and deployment efforts are continuing so that all elementary students will have a device over the summer break, officials said.

By contrast, Richardson ISD distributed devices to third- through sixth-grade students in mid-March. Mesquite ISD had its families check out one ChromeBook per household in early April.

‘Unfinished learning’

These differences between digital haves and have-nots worry experts and educators, who see the COVID-19 crisis as a potential accelerant to existing learning and opportunity gaps.

In truth, said Susan Crawford, a Harvard University law professor, author and WIRED columnist who focuses on tech and telecom policy, the inequities in broadband access were already causing problems.

“Three-quarters of American teachers assume that their students have access to the internet, and hand out homework accordingly,” said Crawford, who served as former President Barack Obama’s special assistant for science, technology and innovation policy during his first year in office. “Families were already scrambling to cope with this gap in internet access, and the pandemic has shone a bright light on the terrible state of internet access in America.

“We have all these poor kids in America, all these kids who deserve an opportunity, not being able to exist above a subsistence level. And from the beginning of the Republic, access to education has been a central tenet to the American experiment. And here we are denying that access to potentially half of American schoolchildren.”

Mike Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools — an organization of the nation’s largest urban school districts — said he believes there will be a huge amount of “unfinished learning” for schools to deal with coming out of the 2019-20 year, either to be wrapped up through summer school or in the following school year.

“And it’s not likely to be closed up through digital learning all by itself,” Casserly said. “I’m hugely concerned, because there are learning gaps and inequities in the system, even as it is. This is likely to exacerbate those and make it very much harder for school districts to ensure that everybody is prepared for college and career after they graduate.”

While calling Dallas ISD’s efforts in the past few months “praiseworthy,” Smith called the current situation a clarion call for policymakers.

“The silver lining of this needs to be that internet is considered to be a basic utility, and all households need to have access to it,” Smith said.

Down the road

While mobile hotspots will help parents like Lopez for now, they are likely just a short-term solution, DISD’s Kelanic said.

With the district paying $20 to $30 per month per device to provide data, getting mobile hotspots to scale could be expensive, costing DISD between $250,000 and $300,000 per month.

Another issue, Kelanic added, is bandwidth: Current plans provide 10 gigabytes per month at 4G speeds, with data rates throttled down after reaching that point.

“There’s a lot of streaming that goes in digital classrooms,” he said. “The 10GB cap, we’ll need to see how that aligns with our digital learning. The bandwidth needs could be high if we’re going to do this on a sustainable basis.”

Over the past week, Hinojosa has spoken out about how affordable and accessible internet access is a social justice issue that he’s being called on to tackle.

The first step, he said, is to have a consultant evaluate the logistics and the cost of providing broadband service to all DISD families.

In April, two Texas school districts — Fort Worth’s Castleberry ISD and Lockhart ISD in Central Texas — made waves by purchasing their own network towers to provide wireless internet access across their attendance boundaries.

Perhaps a similar plan might work for DISD, Hinojosa said.

He said that he’ll play the role of “a connector” once there’s more clarity on the issue, and harangue officials with whom he has regular communication with — such as Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, Dallas County Community College District Chancellor Joe May and Dallas Area Rapid Transit chief Gary Thomas — until movement is made.

“Advocacy is going to be my role,” Hinojosa said. “I’m going to be a loudmouth. I’ve already put people on notice: local officials, state officials, philanthropy. If the president comes up with an infrastructure bill, this needs to be top of mind, where we are getting towers all over.”

Sanders, the co-founder of the Dallas Innovation Alliance, said that while advocates in Dallas-Fort Worth have been working on this issue for years, having Dallas ISD take a leading role could serve as a catalyst.

“For someone like the school district to put a stake in the ground and say, ‘We’re going to do this,’ it is so critical to getting all the agencies moving together,” Sanders said.

Joint initiative

While it's early, Hinojosa is finding some traction.

On Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott announced a joint initiative, Operation Connectivity, with DISD and the Texas Education Agency aiming to provide internet connectivity to students across the state. Hinojosa and TEA commissioner Mike Morath will co-chair a task force that will include influential members on education policy from the state Legislature: Sen. Larry Taylor, chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Education, and Rep. Dan Huberty, who chairs the Public Education Committee in the House.

"As Texas students continue their education at home through virtual instruction, it is essential that we provide them with the resources they need to connect and communicate online," said Abbott in a release. "I applaud Dr. Hinojosa and DISD for developing this innovative initiative for Dallas schools, and look forward to expanding Operation Connectivity statewide so that we can implement reliable and effective solutions that will close the digital divide for students across the Lone Star State."

Getting affordable internet connectivity to all parts of Dallas — much less the state — won’t be easy. Developing and executing a plan in an area that’s so complex will take significant partnership and investment to get it done, Sanders said. There are communities to look to for inspiration, though, like Chattanooga, Tenn., which built its own citywide gigabit-per-second fiber internet network a decade ago.

Harvard’s Crawford said entrenched telecom powers likely won’t cede their ground without a fight. The gap in internet access isn’t too dissimilar to America’s electrification efforts during the 20th century, she added.

“It took a lot of work and advocacy and political will to make sure that electricity was overseen and made available at reasonable prices to everybody,” Crawford said. “We were able to do that for electricity and telephone service, and there’s nothing different about internet access. It’s just that we have believed in the magic of the private market in the United States, to deliver us everything we need. And that is not the case.”