When the pandemic hit, Daniela
Crispin was 14 years old and entering her first year of high school at the STEM
Academy at LEE High School.
She had always had a knack for
technology and remembers being excited to start at the North East Independent
School District magnet school that year.
But Crispin was forced to start her
new journey from behind a computer screen in her small bedroom rather than in a
classroom full of her peers. A lack of reliable internet didn’t help
matters.
“It was scary because immediately
everything was shut down, and I didn’t have a laptop,” she recalls. “We didn’t
have good internet, so we immediately had to switch to a better internet
provider.
The school was able to provide us
with laptops, but they didn’t really work — we had to work our way around with
these laptops.”
Crispin’s father supports their
family of four on a construction worker’s wages, she said. Their monthly
internet bill went from $50 to $80 a month, she said.
When her borrowed laptop wasn’t
working well, she would try to do her homework on her smartphone — but it was
difficult, she said.
“A lot of it was writing essays, and
it was like texting but it was a lot of having to swipe out and go to Safari or
Google to look up articles and read textbooks —
I was just going back and forward
and especially on such a small screen, it was hard,” Crispin said. “I started
failing, because I need to be in a classroom focused on the teacher and being
on the screen didn’t help me.”
With the help of her school, family
and local nonprofit Family Service, Crispin got her own laptop, which allowed
her to finish high school with an associate degree.
Now she’s enrolled at Texas A&M
University-San Antonio, studying criminal justice, and on her way to becoming
the first person in her family to graduate from college with a four-year degree.
But her story illustrates the
obstacles facing San Antonians on the wrong side of the digital divide — the
term coined for the disparity between those with access to the internet and
those without it.
Affordability and digital literacy
are still proving to be significant barriers to internet access for low-income
families, residents of multifamily housing and elderly people in San Antonio.
However, efforts across the region
are picking up steam, fueled by incoming federal dollars and nonprofit initiatives.
Both the county and city, as well as local nonprofits, have also launched
programs within the last few years to try to better tackle the divide.
Just in the past year, the city has
dedicated $8.9 million to the issue, the county an additional $5.4 million, and
nonprofits such as Methodist Healthcare Ministries have earmarked another $21
million to closing the divide.
Post a Comment