Pandemic underscores digital divide facing students and educators

CNN — Los Angeles Schools Superintendent Austin Beutner faces a persistent new worry each day that the coronavirus pandemic drags on. “We’re not dealing with an affluent community in a private school, so the foundation wasn’t laid over the last decade” to get students online, said Beutner in an interview, estimating that about 68% of the district’s students were connected on any normal day before the pandemic. The Los Angeles Unified School District has made a $100 million investment to buy devices for students, improve distance-learning training for teachers and address the connectivity gap since it closed schools three weeks ago. About 59% of the district’s elementary students are online, and Beutner hopes to have all of them connected by May as “devices arrive from supply lines around the world.” Beutner noted that many of the 15,000 high school students who weren’t initially connecting struggle with attendance even in ordinary times; among them are the students living in the deepest poverty or the foster care system. “We are getting the devices out as fast as we can, and are following processes to make sure our highest-need families get them first,” district officials said in a statement on their website.. California, which was the first state in the nation to enforce a statewide stay-at-home order, has the advantage of being home to some of the largest tech companies in the nation, as partnerships with private companies become increasingly important for school districts to obtain devices.