Or kids sitting in fast food restaurants and doing their homework with a side of fries.” Jessica Rosenworcel, an attorney who has spent years working on connectivity issues on Capitol Hill, coined it after hearing “the same stories over and over again: Kids sitting in the school parking lot with school laptops they had borrowed late into the evening, trying to peck away at homework because that was the only place they could actually get online. While pundits have invoked the phrase “homework gap” thousands of times since last spring, it actually describes a very specific phenomenon. It even has a name: the homework gap.īut what Styles and other school leaders have done in the year since could serve as a model for schools as they contemplate an era in which distance learning endures after the pandemic fades. The median household income? Just $39,000.Īs in many districts with a high proportion of low-income students, unreliable or nonexistent internet access loomed as yet another risk factor. His small urban district-about 6,200 students, 100 percent of whom are eligible to receive free and reduced-price lunch-sits midway between Cincinnati and Dayton. In those first weeks, the dilemma “was really accelerating, and intensified by so many people advocating closing, us included,” says Styles, superintendent of the Middletown City School District in southwestern Ohio. But he also knew this: To do so was to sentence kids, in many cases, to spending school days in homes that weren’t set up for even rudimentary distance learning. It was clearly best for their health and safety. A year ago, the coronavirus pandemic wedged Marlon Styles between a particularly heavy rock and a very hard place: He had to send his students home to learn, with little warning.
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