One town’s quest to join tech revolution – and what it says about digital inequality

Greeley (CO) offers a lens into how wide the digital divide in the US has become, how much it is contributing to a two-tiered society, and, perhaps most important, whether it can be bridged.

In wealthy school districts around the country, parents and teachers talk often about keeping computer use to a minimum. The students live in homes with multiple laptops, iPads, tablets, iPhones – iEverything. The adults worry about the students’ excessive time spent online, about the distractions of the virtual world replacing interaction with the real world. But for hundreds of poor districts across the United States, especially in modernizing agricultural communities like Greeley, the struggle is entirely different. It’s about helping students with limited tech skills be prepared for a global economy that is becoming increasingly digitized. Yet these are often the districts with the fewest resources, the districts flailing to move somehow beyond the era of the floppy disk.