Education Policy, Business and Technology

How our district is narrowing the digital divide

eSchool News: The digital divide and the opportunity gap. These are two of the closely related and defining issues that educators and administrators are grappling with today. At DeKalb County School District in Georgia, we set out to create a plan that narrows the digital divide our students are facing at school, in the community, and at home.

By providing our students with the digital technology needed for modern learning, we’ve started closing the opportunity gap caused in part by digital and technological inequities. Throughout this process, we learned important lessons and discovered key takeaways along the way that all schools can integrate into their own initiatives.

We started by creating the Digital Dreamers Program, an initiative to reaffirm our commitment to technology. The first step in this program was to install 25,000 hotspots in our schools and throughout the community. We created these connection points to diminish the digital divide and give our students the chance to access digital learning resources outside of school.

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