KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The COVID-19 pandemic is shedding light on the digital divide in Kansas City.
When the pandemic hit, several schools had to switch gears and go virtual. Getting access to high-speed internet and having enough devices for students who couldn't afford them were very big issues when the pandemic hit.
However, those weren't new issues due to the pandemic, but problems several people faced for years.
"COVID did a very good job of highlighting something that's been around since the technology has really been brought into school districts and really has emerged since the early 2000s," KCPS Technology Director, Joe Phillips said. "So what COVID really did, was when we had to shift our school district to digital learning or distance learning or virtual learning, we were not prepared. We did not have students with our devices, and what we also didn't have is just regular internet access at home for a lot of our families. Our families didn't have computers at home."
The district currently has a plan in place where each student will have a device for the upcoming school year.
Phillips said it's an issue that sometimes can be taken for granted in other areas.
"It's a given and it's thought of like a utility, like having water or electricity for those families. But for our families, for a lot of our families, it's not that second nature kind of thing to have high-speed internet at home," Phillips said. "It's an extra expense to add. You're measuring, you know, do I buy food or do I buy internet? And that can be very difficult to make those decisions."
He said educational systems really highlighted the differences in the suburban areas versus the rural and urban areas, and also shed light on the issue of some internet providers not building infrastructure in certain neighborhoods.
"And so even if you want to get some high-speed internet, there might not be any coming to your house because those companies didn't seem to see that as a great value proposition to build out that infrastructure because people were unlikely to purchase it," Phillips said. "And the volume needed to afford to build out the infrastructure, it's kind of this, you know, exponential issue in our urban area here in Kansas City, where we don't really have a lot of affordable options for internet, and in some cases in our real digital deserts, there's no providers really providing internet there."
Joe Phillips is also apart of the Kansas City Coalition for Digital Inclusion, which works to provide internet access and digital readiness and is working to close the digital divide in the city.
In an effort to keep students on track during distance learning, the software is downloaded on devices to tell district leaders a number of different things, such as who's logging in, what sites they're going to and how much they're using their devices for educational use.
"How much of this is deep learning, how much of this is entertainment, how much of this is games, who's not logging in," Phillips said. "And then what we've done here in our district is built in some intervention. So we take that information, I give it over to Dr. Sheppard, and then she gets her teachers, her principals and her assistant superintendents involved with reaching out and working on those specific issues. If a student is not doing schoolwork or spending 80 percent of their time on games and not education, we have interventions that we can put in place we can reach out to the family, see if they need some extra support."
There is also software that can help with wellness and mental health checks.
"If we look for things, especially big warning signs, we have that software that alerts us," Phillips said. "And that will go to our mental health providers, who are social workers."
Phillips said they then can reach out to those students. This software was in place before COVID-19, but Phillips said they've really seen a need for it after COVID-19 hit, as students were becoming more isolated.
