For some students, getting online means using a parking lot

For most students, getting ready for school in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic now simply involves opening up their computer and turning on their video camera. However, for a sizable group of students who do not have access to the internet, the classroom—which once was filled with a teacher, other students, and desks—is now an empty parking lot close to a reachable Wi-Fi network. Some school districts are scrambling to supply students with devices to reach online schooling. One large demographic of the digital divide is known as the “homework gap,” or the estimated 12 million students that do not have internet access. And this gap has only been exacerbated by coronavirus-related school shutdowns.