As a result of COVID-19, over 300,000 University System of Georgia students have returned home to finish their courses online. Now more than ever, I have realized the great digital divide in our state, and because of it, high-achieving students, particularly in rural Georgia, are suffering immensely. It is imperative that we all seek to use the anti-deficit perspective for the sake of students.

The “digital divide” in the accessibility of telecommunications services remains far too wide — and that current needs give urgency to closing it. A lack of sufficient Internet access is very likely keeping 12 million students from doing distance learning while their schools are closed.And the more that low-income communities are dependent on temporary grace from telecom providers, the more they have to lose when this is all over. New ideas are clearly required.

Confronting the unprecedented challenge of lengthy school closures because of coronavirus, the nation’s roughly 13,000 public school districts are scrambling to cope. Almost no district was truly ready to plunge into remote learning full time and with no end in sight. There is no one-size-fits-all remedy and no must-have suite of digital learning tools. Leaders have largely had to find their own way, spurring a hodgepodge of local innovations.

Although the city of San Jose has neither authority nor budgetary responsibility over our 19 school districts, the city has a moral responsibility to support their critical work. Among the city’s many educational initiatives, it committed to close the digital divide in San Jose by launching the Digital Inclusion Partnership last year, to build digital skills and expand broadband access.

Sen Dick Durbin (D-IL), along with 22 of his Senate colleagues, urged the Department of Treasury to increase its efforts to make Economic Impact Payments available to the most vulnerable populations—including those without access to the internet who cannot file a tax return electronically.  In a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Durbin and the Senators highlighted that at least 21 million Americans are without high-speed internet access and they face a significant barrier in their ability to file a simple tax return online if they are not eligible to receive an automatic payment.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced a lockdown of millions of people around the world, and New York, where schools have been shut down since March 16, and teachers and students have resorted to distance learning with online classes. But Larissa Rosa, an English-as-a-second-language teacher at Public School 7 Samuel Stern in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York, said at least 45 of the roughly 400 students at her school haven't logged on once.

Verizon's field technicians are now keeping their distance in regards to new installations of the company's Fios service. "Fios in a box" allows customers to self-install their services; Verizon's techs only enter a customer's home if the situation is critical. Fios in a box allows a service technician that is working outside of a subscriber's home to determine whether the fiber can be connected without needing to enter the house. If that's the case, the service tech rigs the cable from the nearest pole using crushable fiber that can be fed through a customer's window or door.

Here in Georgia, we believe in second chances. That is why students across the state are rallying to give the University System of Georgia another shot at getting the optional pass/fail policy right. Right now, we are struggling to accommodate the transition to online education. For one, home Wi-Fi rarely works. The University of Georgia has recognized that connectivity and access pose a huge issue for many students, so it has offered to distribute Wi-Fi hotspots. But in some places, cell service is so poor that sometimes texts won’t go through.

A US national probability-based survey during the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 spread in the US showed that, above and beyond respondents’ political party, mainstream broadcast media use (e.g., NBC News) correlated with accurate information about the disease’s lethality, and mainstream print media use (e.g., the New York Times) correlated with accurate beliefs about protection from infection.

CenturyLink’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Dugan said that some European regulators asked two groups of internet content providers to slow down their traffic in response to increased network loads stemming from the COVID-19 crisis. The two groups of content providers are over-the-top (OTT) video companies and gaming companies. EU Industry Chief Thierry Breton had urged streaming platforms including Netflix and YouTube to cooperate with telecom providers and temporarily downgrade the quality of video streaming by offering standard definition rather than high definition video.