Monday, Jan. 18, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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Recently, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published a guest column by Elaine Wynn and Jim Murren highlighting the herculean efforts by our education, business, community and government leaders to increase broadband internet access to hundreds of thousands of students and their families across the state in the midst of economic times not seen since the Great Depression.
Their efforts, along with the work of volunteers, involved tracking down every student and their family to check if they had access to broadband and other essential services. They deserve our state’s highest gratitude.
The column concludes by describing virtual learning amid the pandemic and school closures as a giant first step and saying, “in the coming months and years, they (students and their families) will need us to come through again and again.”
Wynn and Murren are right. Prior to the pandemic, Pew Research reported that 14% of U.S. households with school age children did not have high-speed internet access. Since the pandemic, that figure has more than doubled to 16 million, or 3 in 10 public school students. A large share are Black, Hispanic and low-income students and families. As the column points out, school districts in Nevada went into the 2020-21 school year unable to confirm whether more than 120,000 K-12 students had access to reliable internet and a device.
We should not fool ourselves into believing that because the COVID-19 vaccine program will soon be accessible to the wider population, and a subsequent transition back to in-person learning will begin, there will no longer exist a need to ensure broadband access for every student.
Like it or not, remote learning is here to stay. School districts, administrators and teachers have had to adapt and use tools that while alone are not as effective as the classroom, in conjunction will make education more interactive and accessible. That is only possible if students have access both to the internet and the right device.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Nevada’s workers have been unemployed since March. Just to access benefits online requires both a device and internet access. And that’s not to mention job listings and applications, which are mostly online these days with networking opportunities either not happening or also online. Five years ago, nearly 54% of Americans reported they went online to find a job. According to Statista, a market and consumer data company, in 2018, 84% of job applications were posted on online job boards and career websites. Today, we can assume both of those numbers are much higher with many of us having to stay home.
Here are some suggestions to help prevent more students, families, and workers from falling further into the digital chasm and help our economy get a leg up in the coming years:
• Use the rolls from the free and reduced lunch program to continue to offer subsidized broadband service for students and their families while they qualify for the program. For example, in Chicago, philanthropic and business stakeholders raised $50 million to fund free broadband internet access for all low-income families with children for the next four years. Nevada should expand on the initial work that has already been done and make free or reduced broadband a permanent program for these qualifying families.
• Help rural and low-income communities by getting rid of caps on municipal broadband networks. Nevada is the only state in the union with a population cap limiting which municipalities and counties can build their own public broadband networks, according to Broadband Now, a company dedicated to increasing consumer internet access. This could explain why the internet connection in Churchill County is faster and more reliable than the connection in Elko County. State lawmakers should consider amending or getting rid of this cap and incentivize rural communities to build broadband networks that provide high-speed access at affordable rates. Chattanooga, Tenn., did so over a decade ago and its municipal service is consistently ranked as one of the best providers in the country, with fast speeds and affordable rates.
• Last, work with libraries and higher education institutions to strengthen their workforce training and job search centers. These community resources will help the unemployed and the underemployed connect with employers and find jobs. While many jobs similar to those that were lost will eventually return, businesses are finding ways to increase efficiency such as through automation. We need to be actively retraining and upskilling Nevada’s workforce. If workers do not have access to a computer or the internet, the chance is greater that they will not reenter the workforce. This would be a missed opportunity for Nevada’s workforce and our economy.
We need to keep the conversation going not only on how we revitalize the economy but also how we make it better by ensuring our working families do not fall into the chasm that is the digital divide.
Andrew Woods is the CEO of an elections, business analysis and policy firm based in Las Vegas: www.WSNevada.com. Emily Zhang, a second-year student pursuing a master's degree in computational analysis and public policy at the University of Chicago's Harris School, helped with research for this commentary.
