GeekWire: Funding Efforts Aim To Help Get Students Online And Bridge The Digital Divide Amid Pandemic
Now a few weeks into remote back-to-school, some of Washington’s K-12 students and educators are finding that internet connectivity is a digital divide that they still can’t span as COVID-19 has forced much of life online.
The fraction of kids without digital devices like laptops and tablets has shrunk to about 6% in Washington state. But roughly 11-to-17% of students, or between 121,000 to 194,000 kids, don’t have a reliable connection to the internet, according to new data from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).