On Monday, April 20, 2020, I woke up at 7:58 a.m. to the blaring ring of my best friend’s FaceTime call on my “home iPad.” With just two minutes before my first Zoom of the day, I rolled out of my warm covers and took the dreaded six steps across my hardwood floors to get to the janky Amazon desk at the end of my bed. My feet were so cold, it was as if I were trekking across the Arctic. I quickly situated myself in the dining room chair my mom had brought up to my room five weeks ago at the start of lockdown. At 8 a.m., still in my pajamas, I logged onto my French class Zoom. My teacher immediately filled my screen wearing a massive Mona Lisa costume with her head in a giant cutout where the portrait’s subject should have been. Laughter flooded the call, and I muted myself on Zoom to tell my friend over FaceTime what had happened.
Every day of lockdown, my teachers at Latin worked hard to make online learning fun, and I was able to appreciate their dedication and creativity. Not every kid in Chicago was that lucky, though.
Latin provided every student an iPad and charger during the pandemic and gave them free memberships to Zoom; however, many kids citywide didn’t have the same infrastructure, especially regarding WiFi and internet access at home.
This disparity reflects a broader national trend. According to the National Library of Medicine, preexisting educational inequalities only worsened during COVID. Students with little to no access to the internet couldn’t participate in online learning. While Latin students like me attended Zoom classes from 8 a.m. to 3:20 p.m., other kids sat at home with no way of learning. This hindered state of public school education continued until August of 2021, when Chicago Public Schools fully reopened. That was over 17 months after the initial lockdown in March of 2020.
Families with a lower annual income were far more likely to suffer from inequities in education. According to a research paper from UCLA, families in the United States that made under $50,000 annually were 44% more likely to have limited computer or internet access.
According to the Census Reporter, 34% of Chicago Public Schools families earn under that threshold. At this income level, affording food and housing is hard enough, let alone all the extra resources required by online learning. For these families, limited computer and internet access was real, and over one third of Chicago Public Schools families were likely to experience it.
According to national statistics from the same UCLA research paper, during COVID, Black households were 36% more likely and Hispanic households were 37% more likely than average to experience limited access to computers or the internet, demonstrating yet another facet of this technological split.
I remember sitting down for dinner one night during lockdown and talking to my mom about this digital divide. She would talk about how some parents had to drive somewhere they could access free WiFi, and how most families had one device, if any, to share among their children, but the parents also needed their devices for remote work. I specifically remember her bringing up an article she’d read about a family who had to drive to a public library every single day and sit in their car to do their school work, just so that they could access free WiFi.
But wasn’t the whole point of online learning that you could work from home and not expose yourself to COVID? The system just wasn’t fair.
While online learning was less than ideal for everyone, each child and family had a different experience. My own family was fortunate enough to have the resources we needed during COVID. We often talk about how our experience was amazing, and how lockdown was somewhat of a blessing for us—not because of the pandemic, of course, but because we got to spend so much time together.
My dad, in particular, always reminds us of our positive experience, because prior to COVID, he traveled for work every week, and was gone Monday through Thursday most weeks. As horrible as the pandemic was, our family spent every day together at home in a way we hadn’t ever before. We’re all grateful for COVID bringing us closer together as a family.
But my COVID experience, filled with little to no hardship, is worlds different from what other children experienced. Some kids completely lost two years of their lives—not only in terms of education, but also socially and emotionally. They’ll never get those crucial years back.
