Wifi Gap Worries Waverly As Fall Looms

Kyasia Parker is a wanderer who loves Justin Bieber music, dancing, and is dyslexic. She likes to sing her math problems and has a hard time focusing when other students are around. But the biggest challenge she faced when she had to take online classes during the pandemic was the unstable internet at home.

Kyasia, who is 7, is one of 23 kids living at the Waverly Townhouses, a public-housing complex on Day Street that is less than half-occupied now as the units are undergoing remodeling. Residents said that the property-provided Wifi is too slow. If you step off the porch, you lose internet connection.

The company that manages Waverly, 360 Management Group, does not allow residents to install a satellite dish, which would help them improve their internet speed, or do anything that would involve drilling a hole in the roof.

New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) students face a fog of uncertainty about the fall, with resumption of either part-time or full-time distance learning a real possibility. Superintendent Iline Tracey has stated a preference for a hybrid model, which will involve some home-based distance learning, although the Board of Education has yet to decide.

Tynicha Drummond, the volunteer youth advisor at Waverly Townhouses, said she worries that students like Kyasia who live in public housing and those who lack reliable internet access at home will struggle if school moves online again.

The sudden shift to distance learning in March highlighted a ​“digital divide” amongst New Haven public school students, with 15 percent of 12,500 respondents in an NHPS-administered survey saying they did not have an internet connection at home.

A recently-released school reopening plan makes reference to a ​“series of activities” to ensure that the school district becomes ​“one-to-one” with technology, which means that every student gets one computer. Students have questioned the logic of giving them a device when they have no internet. 

NHPS Chief Operating Officer said Michael Pinto told the Independent that they are in the process of installing Wifi hotspots on top of 13 public schools in the Hill and Fair Haven neighborhoods, with negotiations for internet providers to give basic internet packages to students underway. Some students may be able to access these Wifi hubs to do distance learning at home, giving them a much-needed reprieve from the internet drought at home.

Ray Dalio’s philanthropic group Dalio Education also announced last Monday a new collaboration with the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities to provide students with internet access and bridge the ​“digital divide” in the state. 

In the Spring, Kyasia’s mom said said, Kyasis would sit at the kitchen table from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. to take classes on her mother’s small black laptop. Her mom, Nikiniyia Cooke, noticed that every time she turned on the television, which also runs on Wifi (because cable was too expensive), Kyasia’s online classes would stall.

“It was kind of hard, because it didn’t work,” Kyasia, her braided hair adorned with pastel-colored beads, told the Independent one evening this past week. The second-grader attends Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School.

Five or six times while she was completing an assignment, the website would hang. It could take anywhere from 15 seconds to 10 minutes to refresh the page, Drummond said. It would disrupt the flow of her online lesson, making it even harder for her to focus.

Drummond noticed that the internet was too slow for her to even get to the next question on her assignments. ​“She was getting frustrated, hitting the keys a little harder than she needed to,” she said. Kyasia still managed to turn every single one in.

To boost the property-provided internet, which Nikiniyia said is very slow, she had to buy a Comcast modem, which she installed in the laundry room, to boost the connection. Comcast provides internet service for $9.95 a month to qualifying individuals — those eligible for public assistance programs such as the National School Lunch Program, rental assistance assistance, and Medicaid.

But even then, the ​“affordable high-speed internet” plan isn’t really ​“high-speed,” Nikiniyia said.

Drummonds said that families she works with found the access provided under the Internet Essentials package far too slow to do home-based learning. ​“Even if it’s affordable, it’s slow,” said Drummond.

Rising sixth-grader Nazir, who also lives at Waverly, took many of his classes at his cousin’s house instead of at home at Waverly housing project. The internet was better there.

Disengaged, Disconnected

Rashanda McCollum, the executive director of the youth-led organization Students for Educational Justice, saw how some student members in her organization became disengaged from school as class moved online in the spring. Many of them did not have internet access for home and could not take classes, even with the Chromebooks that the school district provided to every student.

Some of these students told the Independent how it was frustrating that the school district provided laptops to students without providing access to internet. They hope the schools will not repeat this mistake if learning moves online again in the fall.

“They went under the assumption that everybody had internet access, when the reality was different,” said Brycyn Thompson, a fresh graduate from the Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School. “The New Haven public school district can dish out a million laptops everyday for the rest of their life, but if there’s no internet the laptop is useless.”

One in five households throughout the public housing authority’s system currently have no access to the internet, Elm City Innovation Collaborative Director Michael Harris said in April. (Some 6,180 families with 14,159 individuals in total lived in low-income public housing or participated in housing choice voucher programs in 2018.)

Thompson had no Wifi in his home, so he relied on his phone’s unlimited data plan to take online classes. Doing all his work on a phone was challenging. He had to toggle between tabs to read articles, write essays, answer questions, listen to Zoom classes, and take timed assignments, sometimes simultaneously.

“The work was stressful. I knew that if I didn’t do it I wasn’t going to graduate,” said Thompson. He finally applied for and installed the Comcast Internet Essentials plan in the fourth week of online classes and could do work on a Macbook provided to him by Students for Educational Justice. 

“Looking back, it’s not fair because, who has the advantage now? Who has the advantage of being able to afford Wifi?,” said Thompson.

Although many students applied for the Internet Essentials Package, McCollum said that Comcast faced backlogs on orders as many students clamored to get online. Some of the students in her organization waited for weeks before they even received notifications that they were approved for internet access.

In the meantime, they stopped taking classes. McCollum said about 10 students in her organization of 40 became disengaged from school because they lacked internet access.

“We had others who had all but given up, so I had to reach out to schools and principals. We had a couple of graduating seniors who were almost in jeopardy of not graduating because they didn’t have internet access,” said McCollum.

Advocates: State Needs To Do More

With grant money that her organization applied for, McCollum distributed 50 smartphones and tablets bought through the NHPS system at a discounted price under an arrangement with AT&T.

Students who reached out to her organization for help could use the devices as Wifi hotspots to take their classes. But as recently as mid-June, right before school closed, McCollum was still receiving calls from families whose kids had been without internet since March.

Now, the grant money meant to pay for the data plans is drying up. McCollum expressed concern that the district will not be able to step in, that she won’t be able to continue to pay for the internet that students rely on for taking online classes, and that the 50 hotspot devices that the students have will become obsolete.

McCollum said that the state needs to do more to provide resources to the cash-strapped New Haven public school district and others like it so that every student can have access to Wifi this fall. New Haven was already operating at a deficit prior to the pandemic, she noted, which puts a further strain on their ability to provide a high quality education for students now.

Her students either could not get transportation to or were unaware about the day in March when they could collect free Chromebooks to take classes on, she said. The district worked with her to deliver laptops to her students.

“I think we need to look at this issue on the state level and recognize that Connecticut already has the highest disparity in income and educational achievement and Covid-19 is exacerbating that,” she said.

She pointed to the vast diversity and inequality across Connecticut’s 170 school districts, and said the state needs to address each district’s unique difficulties. “The kids in Wilton are not having the same challenges as the kids in New Haven. The kids in Madison are not going without laptops and Wifi,” she said.

Abdul Rahman Elrefaei is a 16-year-old rising junior at Regional Career High School who designs and drives robots in his school’s robotics team. He loves science and is spending the summer studying for the SAT to go to college.

When his school suddenly announced one day in March that this would be the last day of in-person classes, he was left in the lurch. He has bad internet service at his home in East Haven, and the Wifi was so slow that he couldn’t connect to it properly from his upstairs bedroom. Elrefaei took all his classes upstairs because he couldn’t focus with his family around downstairs.

At least twice a day, his Zoom meeting would crash, and he’d have to rejoin the classroom. With three siblings and his parents also using the internet in the house, there just wasn’t enough bandwidth for him to do his classes online.

Elrefaei also did not have a laptop. His fingers would cramp up typing long essays on his small phone screen. He was not aware that the school was distributing laptops to all students and only found out five days after that he was meant to collect one. Rashanda McCollum ended up asking the school district for a Chromebook on his behalf and drove it to Elrefaei’s house.

“I just needed to do it because it’s cutting close to my end of the year for high school. I’m a rising junior and its an important year. I wanna make sure I get a good score on it.”

In late May, he received one of the hotspot-providing tablets ordered by the Students for Educational Justice and was finally able to take his online classes without unstable internet connection disrupting his learning.

For now, he’s frustrated by how little information his school and the district has given about what form classes would take in the fall.

“I don’t even know what is happening next year,” he said. ​“They should tell us what is happening. They should tell us whats happening.”

He just wants to get back to building and driving robots.

Mesh Network Planned

The district’s reopening team acknowledged in the recently released NHPS reopening plan that inequities in access to technology and Wifi connectivity were a primary concern during school closures in the spring.

“New Haven Public Schools has engaged in a series of activities to ensure that we become a one-to-one district with technology, which includes partnerships with the State Department of Education, City of New Haven, philanthropists, and local businesses. Additionally, we have also repurposed funds to ensure that we begin the 2020 – 2021 academic year as a district that is one-to-one,” according to the reopening plan.

The school district is in the process of installing 13 Wifi hubs on top of public schools in the Hill neighbourhood and in Fair Haven, which some students may be able to access to do distance learning at home.

The thirteen schools are Lincoln-Basset Community School, Truman, Betsy Ross Arts Magnet, Hill Central, Hill Regional Career, Fair Haven, Clemente Leadership Academy, the school that was formerly known as Christopher Columbus Family Academy, John S. Martinez, Strong, King/Robinson Magnet, John C. Daniels, and Riverside.

Students living within two and a half to three blocks from these hotspots will be able to pick up the Wifi signal and reliably use the internet to take online classes, said Michael Pinto, based on a test conducted at the first Wifi hub, at Lincoln Bassett School.

Pinto said the goal is to create a ​“mesh network for coverage” that will serve students in the Hill and Fair Haven. The two neighborhoods were selected because the highest density of NHPS students live there. Many families in those areas also lack internet access, said Pinto.

The whole plan costs $350,000, which will come from the district budget. Pinto estimated it would take about two weeks to complete installation of the Wifi hubs.

“We recognize there will be areas that are not covered. This is the first step in ensuring students have wifi access that are not currently,” Pinto told the Independent. He also said the district is in negotiations with internet providers to give at least a basic internet package to all public school students.

Back when schools closed in March, the school district worked with Comcast to make access to Xfinity hotspots across the city free for two months, but it is unclear whether this arrangement will continue for the Fall, should students transition again to distance learning.

In the long term, the city is working to implement a two-year ​“Digital Inclusion” plan which would provide free public Wi-Fi across the city. The plan is in its early stages. In April, the city initiated a pilot project to implement free WiFi in Newhallville.

Thompson, having graduated from high school, now works at Walmart and as an organizer for Students for Educational Justice. He celebrated his graduation at East Rock Park. He said that schools need to find a way for students to overcome internet access problems.

“Internet should be free,” said Thompson. ​“Internet should be a right that everyone has access to.”