Cutting The Cost of Logging In to Learn

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As public schools in Chicago have shifted their focus to online learning, the benefits have been blunted by the fact that home access to the Internet costs too much for some students, leading districts to look for different approaches to bring Internet access to the city’s poorest families.

“We believe many of our students have computers at home, but that doesn’t mean anything if they don’t have Internet,” said Todd Yarch, principal of Voise Academy High School. “The whole idea for online blended learning” — with the curriculum online, students on computers in the classroom, and teachers serving as coaches — “is to allow students to continue at their own pace,” he said. “If you give them that ability to move at their own pace at home, that would be huge.” Voise Academy, in the Austin neighborhood, is the district’s first high school to use this blended model. Each student has a laptop, but the computers are kept at Voise Academy because of concerns that they will be stolen by thieves outside of the school. But even if they were taken home, the laptops would be useless for many of the Voise Academy students. More than 95 percent of them qualify for the federal free-lunch program, and Yarch estimates that only half of the school’s 500 students have Internet access at home.


Cutting The Cost of Logging In to Learn