Story Four: D.C. Kids Want Internet

Eight-year-old Brenna Ratliff says she’s shy, although five minutes talking to her is like making an instant best friend who wants to confide everything. Math is her favorite subject because it’s not boring, she wouldn’t mind being an actress, and she’s got a very specific request for President Barack Obama:

“We could use change,” she says. “Could he pick up all of these thugs on the street and put them in jail?”

Brenna attends the Arts and Technology Academy Public Charter School (ATA) in Ward 7 in Northeast Washington, D.C. For the 98 percent African-American and 97 percent low-income student body, ATA has become a beacon in the community. The school allows children to explore performing, visual and media arts using modern technology.

But when the bell rings at the end of the day, Brenna’s brush with the digital world ends. Like many of the students at ATA and in urban areas across the country, she does not have the Internet or a computer at home because her family can’t afford it.

Although specific data on the demographics of D.C.’s digital divide is scarce, nationally, only 31 percent of urban households with incomes below $35,000 subscribe to broadband, compared to 73 percent of urban homes with incomes above $35,000. In D.C., 34 percent of the more than 250,000 households have incomes below $35,000.

And the divide also extends to race. Nationwide, only 38 percent of black urban households are connected to broadband, compared to 60 percent of urban non-Hispanic white households. Only 35 percent of Hispanic urban homes nationwide are connected to broadband.

In D.C., two-thirds of the city’s population are racial and ethnic minorities, compared to just one-third of the total U.S. population.

Missing Out

Although she’s barely grasped what high-speed Internet can offer, Brenna can sense that it’s important, and that its absence is putting her at a disadvantage.

“I feel sad that I can’t use the Internet,” she says. “I’m probably missing out on fun, games, different kinds of Web sites, going on educational stuff.”

Like a new pair of flashy shoes, Internet and computer access is becoming a point of envy for kids.

“My friend has the Internet, and she printed her reading on a paper,” Brenna recalls. “So when I came to school, she said she printed her book report on paper. I just thought about that. I just wrote it on a plain piece of paper.”

A few grades above Brenna, 11-year-old Alexis Boyce is feeling the same disadvantage. To get on the Internet after school, Alexis has to go to her aunt’s house, an inconvenience for her family.

“I think I’m missing out on Yahoo and Bebop and Barbie Girls and stuff like that,” she says. “They say it’s fun and one day I would like to try it. Having Internet access would be a God-given gift and I would be happy because for once, I would have Internet access and I could do more homework and I could do a lot of stuff.”

Parental Concern

Kimberley Bryant spends many hours of the week camped out in the public library while her children wait for a free computer. She recently had to cancel her family’s high-speed Internet service after her husband was laid off.

“When you look at our budget and have a limited income … the rent, the food, things like that have to get done,” she says.

But Kimberley worries that her kids are paying the price. “[The Internet] is very important for our children,” she says. “We chose to make this into a technology world, but yet we’re not allowing our kids to have the access that we created.”

And while Kimberley tries to shield her children from the full reality of their financial struggles, it’s not lost on her 9-year-old daughter Erin, who says, “I feel a lot upset because we don’t have enough money to pay the Internet bill.”

Digital Divide in the Classroom

As parents deal with the after-school ramifications of the digital divide, the teachers at ATA see how the lack of Internet access at home seeps into classrooms.

“A lot of the textbooks have a lot of extension activities that deal with technology and going on the Internet using online resources,” says Ashea Williams, a special education teacher at ATA. “So we spend a lot of time at school having to go back over those different assignments and those skills because they cannot take it home to reinforce it at all.”

Ashea says it’s often difficult to pry kids from the computers, because they know they have such a short window to be online.

“[Kids] need to know how to use those resources in the real world and not having access at home and only having access for a limited period of time is not preparing them for the future.”

No longer even feigning shyness, Brenna has a follow-up request to President Obama: “I would send him a message about maybe sending computer access to my home, and I would be very excited.”