By Joanna Gagis NJTV News
It was a constant fight for the computer, says fifth grade student Maiholy Peña, who suddenly switched to homeschooling this spring without the technology at home to do her work. It left her scrambling to finish on time. She and her sister are among the thousands of kids in New Jersey at risk of falling into a learning gap called the digital divide.
“Sometimes I wanted to study, my sister wanted to read books and my mother wanted to study English. So it was really stressful,” Peña said.
Newark’s West Side High School Principal Akbar Cook told Senior Correspondent David Cruz on ChatBox that it’s an all too familiar scene for his students.
“I have kids that have multiple siblings in one home and have one device and have no wifi. So then Altice, which is Optimum Online, they said they would give the kids the wifi, but it was just a band-aid because it only was for a certain amount of days. So here you have kids with no means of communicating with their teachers. Even the cell phones, they didn’t even have cell phones. It was just so bad,” he said.
And as districts prepare fall plans, Gov. Phil Murphy’s now giving parents the option to keep kids home for remote learning only. But parents who may want to do this for health reasons, may also not be able due to lack of technology. Recently, the Legislature and governor agreed to fund an effort to close the divide for the roughly 230,000 students in need, many of them in urban districts.
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