Here’s What Schools Can Do For the Millions of Students Without Internet Access

Emergency online teaching. Remote delivery of instruction. Or just plain online learning. Call it what you will, many of the nation’s students are doing it in one form or another now that schools are closed coast to coast over the fast-spreading coronavirus. There’s just one problem: millions of students in the country don’t have a reliable way to get online.“There's a big giant access issue, both in terms of what happens when there’s no internet and then also what happens when you don’t have a device that can go on the internet,” says Beth Holland, the digital equity and rural project director at the Consortium for School Networking, an industry group for school tech directors.According to the most recent federal data, about 14 percent of households with school-age children do not have internet  in rural areas. Among those who do have access, not all have a broadband connection. A separate Pew Research Center survey found that 17 percent of adults access the internet exclusively through smartphones.