Six-year-old Heaven has spent most of her school life at home.

Her desk is a TV-dinner-style folding table pushed up against the window. An iPad propped up on the table is her portal to teachers and classmates. She enjoys her lessons, especially art and chess, but is not a fan of sports – she has to relocate into the more spacious hallway whenever it is time for her daily exercise of squats and jumping jacks.

Learning from home is routine for Heaven and, with the help of her mother Juanita, she is making progress at school. But the pair have been hindered by one seemingly intractable problem: their perpetual battle for decent internet access. Their poor WiFi connection has led to difficulties with hearing teachers, submitting work, and joining classes. These issues have been so consistent that Heaven, like many children growing up in the Bronx during the pandemic, has become an expert internet troubleshooter.

“She knows how to fix it from watching me,” said Juanita. “But sometimes it just goes out. Then there is nothing we can do.”

According to a 2020 report from the Mayor’s Office, over 1.5 million New Yorkers have no home or mobile broadband. Across the city, and especially in poor, majority non-white areas, this has meant children struggling to attend remote classes. Where only low-quality streaming is available, students have had to deal with fragmented audio and lag. In households that cannot afford the internet bills, some children have simply dropped off the map.

Now, community groups have decided to take matters into their own hands. In chronically underinvested areas like the Bronx and Harlem, coalitions have come together to fight for equitable access to the internet. Disillusioned with expensive internet providers and ineffective public interventions, some are attempting to create community-owned, affordable alternatives that will boost their children’s access to education during the pandemic and beyond.

When schools were ordered to shut on March 16th last year, even institutions that were well-positioned for remote learning faced big problems. Comp Sci High, a newly launched charter school in the South Bronx, has digital literacy built into its DNA. Every student had been issued a Chromebook, the teachers were well-versed in Google classroom, and principal David Noah dashed from home-to-home to hand out extra devices to any students who needed them. But straight away, they found online learning immensely challenging.

“For most poor kids, remote learning is an educational disaster,” said Noah. “What would take one lesson under normal circumstances takes a week with Covid.”

Students in crowded households would join classes from underneath blankets in an effort to block out noisy families. Others disappeared for days at a time only to reappear from halfway across the country, forced to relocate due to housing insecurity. And when parents’ internet bills went unpaid, it became a effort to even stay in contact. At schools with fewer resources, the problems have been even more pronounced.

“Students who don't have access to the internet, or don't have a device that can connect to the internet, just haven't been to school,” said Rose DeStefano, a Senior Director at Children's Aid. These students are overwhelmingly from poor neighborhoods – data from the Department of Education (DOE) and the Mayor’s Office shows a firm correlation between poverty and broadband adoption in New York City.

No borough has felt the pressures of remote learning quite like the Bronx, where over a quarter of households lack internet access. Students there can scarce afford more disrupted learning – over a third of students in an average Bronx school are already “chronically absent” in a normal year, according to DOE data. And with average incomes the lowest in the city, paying for broadband has become yet another obstacle students must overcome in order to participate in school.

DeStefano points out that even in households that do manage to pay their broadband bills, a limited income can mean that students struggle to access online learning in other ways. When the pandemic struck, the Department of Education tried sending iPads out to children without their own devices so that they could join in with lessons. But in households where parents were suddenly required to work remotely, they often needed to use the new devices for work.

“You're going to prioritize going to work so you can pay your rent and buy food,” said DeStefano. “You don't want to have to decide between that or your kid going to school. It's just not a decision that people should be forced to make.”

Households with several children sometimes faced a similar dilemma – when there is only one device available, DeStefano said, the question becomes “who gets to go to class that day?” With schools closed, many older students have also needed to help their parents with childcare, reducing the time they can spend on their own classes.

The Bronx has suffered from some of the highest rates of Covid in the city as well, exacerbating the area’s economic pressures. Many of its residents are key workers and were therefore especially susceptible to catching the virus.

This has led to a perfect storm in the borough – precisely where students are least able to engage online, they are most likely to need to quarantine and learn remotely.

Unlike in rural America, the difficulties poor New Yorkers face with internet access are not usually technical. There are some areas in the city where the infrastructure for high-speed internet does not exist and connection cannot be purchased for any price. However, low internet adoption in the city is almost always due to high prices, driven by lack of competition. Huge areas of the city are served by only one or two internet service providers (ISPs), meaning that consumers cannot take their business elsewhere if service is bad.

Online tutor Levi Jennings experienced this firsthand while living in East Harlem. Alongside his business partner, he would broadcast free SAT lessons from his makeshift basement studio. The videos included characters like medieval knight (and math star) Sir Cumference, and were an attempt to make learning fun and accessible to kids who could not afford private tuition. But problems with his ISP, Spectrum, were a constant source of frustration.

“Regularly, we could not stream and we couldn't help the kids who were expecting us to help them with their test prep,” said Jennings. “It sucked the life out of me for the whole time.”

Sometimes, their video would drop out in the middle of a stream. At others, the audio was so choppy that viewers could not understand what they were saying.

“I called Spectrum so many times that I knew exactly what questions they were required to ask me,” he said. “We wanted to move to another ISP, but there was no other provider in that area. So, there was no incentive for them to change.”

Jennings was paying $65 per month for his internet access. By paying for internet several times faster than he actually required, he was able to get semi-reasonable service, but even then the problems never stopped entirely. “The only thing that fixed it was moving,” said Jennings.

In New York City, it is often the poorest neighborhoods that have the least options available, locking the residents who need it most out of reasonably priced internet.

The two largest residential ISPs in New York City are Spectrum and Verizon. The city government has given both companies franchise agreements, which allow them to supply large areas of the city in exchange for 5% of their revenue and some obligations to extend internet access to poorly served areas. But both companies have been sued in the past five years for failing to meet those obligations.

Version promised to wire up every household in the city with broadband by 2014. Three years later, they were sued by the city for failing to do so. Last year, Verizon finally agreed that it had not fulfilled its contract and has now promised to wire up a further half a million households by 2023 – nine years after the initial deadline.

The company has also been accused of pressuring landlords to accept exclusive deals, which would make Verizon the only option for their tenants.

Spectrum was almost kicked out of New York State in 2018 for failing to comply with its contract (and for allegedly falsifying how many buildings it had connected). It has since been sued by the city for lying about its broadband speeds, advertising them as up to five times faster than they could actually deliver. Spectrum paid out $174.2 million to settle the lawsuit.

New York City has recently tried to reduce their reliance on the big ISPs with something called the Internet Master Plan. The idea behind their plan is to open up public infrastructure – rooftops, poles, cables – to private companies, allowing them to share city assets to provide broadband. This is intended to lower upfront costs, allowing smaller ISPs to compete. But after decades of patchy progress, community groups are skeptical that another public-private partnership will help them.

“It’s something that should be community-based and not, for example, how Verizon can solve our problems,” said Hillary Kolos, coordinator of the Bronx Digital Equity Coalition. The coalition, made up of dozens of local community groups, was formed by the Bronx Community Foundation in April 2020, when the pandemic highlighted urgent problems with schoolchildren’s internet access. For the past year, members of the coalition have been distributing laptops, providing digital literacy training, and sharing ideas for closing the digital divide.

“Everybody's kind of used to fighting for their own stuff in the Bronx,” said Kolos. “There's been historic, systemic racism and disinvestment by both the private sector and the city.”

Data about the master plan suggests that its impact may indeed be limited in the Bronx. Although it has been identified as an area of particular need, the borough has some of the fewest public assets available to help with the rollout of broadband. The city has identified the most assets in Brooklyn, where 65% of residents already have the choice of three or more ISPs, according to the FCC.

Instead of pinning their hopes on more partnerships between the city and private ISPs, members of the Bronx Digital Equity Coalition have started coming up with their own ideas to improve internet access. Some are in favor of internet as a public utility. Others want to see community ownership of ISPs, with residents able to vote on issues of data use and price.

Troy Walcott is the president of People’s Choice Communications, a cooperative established in summer 2020 to do exactly that. Walcott is a prominent member of the Spectrum union and has been on strike for the past four years, ever since Spectrum threatened to take away employees’ retirement and health benefits. He had planned to set up a community-owned competitor to Spectrum for some time, and the pandemic accelerated his plans.

“We built out the city over the last forty years,” said Walcott. “The customers are tired of their service and keep getting their rates raised. Why don't we join with the customers and own the service? Then we could just kick Spectrum out.”

So far, People’s Choice has built multiple rooftop antennae on schools in the Bronx, aiming to provide free or inexpensive WiFi to all the schools’ students. Walcott says that their coverage now extends from upper Manhattan to Fordham Heights – and ownership of the new networks has passed to their customers, meaning they get to decide the rates.

Walcott argues that these types of community networks are essential to making broadband available to poor people in New York City. Spectrum’s “main goal right now is strictly profit,” he said, “and there is no profit in trying to help those people.”

He is also not confident in the city’s ability to hold the major ISPs to account. He points towards their handling of Spectrum’s broken contract: “They had them dead to rights on that. And what did they do? The city settled with them,” he said. “They made billions of dollars by cheating the people and just gave them back a small portion of the money they took from them.”

People’s Choice is not the only alternative to the major ISPs that is gaining traction. Hunts Point Community Network was founded in 2017 as a way of helping residents keep in contact with each other during an extreme weather event. It relies on a “mesh network,” in which households are all connected to several other households, which are ultimately connected to the global internet. This network now connects up hundreds of residents for free – and during the pandemic, they have trained over 150 New Yorkers in how to set up other networks elsewhere in the city.

In Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, a group called NYC Mesh have been building a similar network. They have connected up close to nine hundred rooftop routers using money from donations. Each building added to the network by volunteers or homeowners can act as a node to spread the internet connection further.

It may be too early to tell if these groups will form a viable long-term alternative to the billion-dollar companies they seek to compete with. Many operate based on donations and are dependent on volunteer labor. And big ISPs are not going to give up their profits easily – a recent law signed by Cuomo that aimed to force providers to offer a low-cost option was immediately opposed by Verizon and other ISPs, and has been struck down in the courts.

Nevertheless, the pandemic has shined a light on students’ problems with internet access, and advocates for digital equity are adamant that progress will continue. $600,000 has been carved out for the Bronx Digital Equity Coaliton in Biden’s infrastructure plan. The money is intended to sustain the group long after the pandemic wanes and children are back to school.

“Covid and remote learning helped to lift up why this issue is so important on a kagillion levels,” said DeStefano. “But it has always been so important. It’s been one of the things that have kept historically divested neighborhoods from moving ahead in the world.”

For Juanita, her daughter’s struggles with remote learning have been difficult but not surprising. She sees them as one more example of private companies and the government failing to take the struggles of poorer, non-white majority areas seriously. The growth of community organizations like the Bronx Digital Equity Coalition has given her fresh hope that children like her daughter will be able to overcome the educational challenges of the post-pandemic future.

“They’ve tried to keep our community down for a long time,” said Juanita. “But lots of flowers have grown out of the concrete in the Bronx.”

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Header photo credit Lars Kienle