Cleveland Metropolitan School District battles to heal the digital divide

Gershon Harrell

Students of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District kicked off their fall school year remotely Tuesday Sept. 8. CMSD CEO Eric Gordon didn’t look at remote learning as educational crisis due to the pandemic, instead he viewed it with optimism because the district became a one-to-one device district, where students can receive their own laptops for educational purposes.

“We will—at least for a year—have all of our families connected to the internet,” Gordon said.

Gordon said that gives them time to seek a permanent solution for the digital divide they face and continue to redefine their learning expectations.

Gordon talked about his expectations for the school year and how the district is going to handle their online learning model.

Why do you think that there is a divide among the Cleveland Metropolitan School District?

It comes from years of structural racism and the very clear segregating that’s occurred in communities across the country. This isn’t an accident and it’s not new. I can’t tell you how many people said to me, ‘oh my gosh COVID created such a digital divide.’ It wasn’t created by COVID, it’s been there. All COVID did was make people unable to pretend they couldn’t see it. I want to be clear, they saw it and pretended not to. Now they can’t pretend, so it’s calling some questions. We’re the single highest childhood poverty in the country. We’re 86% minority and all that was done by design, white flight in the seventies and wealth flight. It wasn’t just white people who moved out of Cleveland, anybody that could get out, got out, because when desegregation started, black families didn’t want to send their children into hostile white environments, any more than white families wanted to send their children into black environments. This was created by design. I don’t know that people knew the outcome. But it wasn’t on accident.

You said on the CMSD website that, “the district worked to make sure that every cmsd household had a device for student use and connect to the internet. Now the goal is to make sure that every household has a device, but every student has a laptop as well.”

Last spring when we got thrust into this closure, we didn’t the have time to buy lots of devices. We went to all of our school buildings, gathered up everything we had and made sure that every home had a device. So, if you have three brothers and sisters, you might have only had one device for the four of you. Since then, over the summer, we bought all of the extra devices to go back to that home and say, okay we gave you one, you needed four, here are three more.

What kind of devices are you offering to children and what programs are being offered that will give them an enriching learning experience?

Younger kids have iPads because of the touchscreen chip capacities. Older children have Chromebooks or Acers, or some kind of thin laptop. All of the kids then have a portal called Clever and inside of Clever, the youngest children will go into a program called Seesaw.  SeeSaw is a kind of gaming learning experience, lots of touching the screen, there’s a lot of interacting with cartoon characters that teach lessons. They’ll work with a teacher too, but it’s much more like PBS kids kind of look and feel. The older kids will use Schoology. Schoology is kind of the high school version of blackboard.

I know that you guys are collaboring with Digital C and they’ll also be giving you guys hotspots as well. I wanted to know how did this collaboration come about?

We bought 14,000 hotspots to connect families. What Digital C is is a nonprofit internet company essentially. And the partnership came about because while I have to do hotspots right now, again, from a point of view of equity, and just social justice, one of the things people kept saying to me is, why don’t you put hotspots on a bus and park it in a school that way people can have internet and I said to them, ‘Well okay, let’s have our meeting standing outside of a bus. When you do that, then my kids will do that. But you’re not doing that and so my kids aren’t going to do that.’ And I know you mean well but hear what you’re saying. You’re saying that black and Hispanic kids should be satisfied with standing against a bus in a parking lot to  have internet while you sit in your office suggesting it. So Digital C, they had a problem, in that they’re essentially creating their own internet company like spectrum, but they’re nonprofit so they don’t have to make any money. The problem is you have to have the upfront money to put the devices in to put the internet towers up. All the stuff that they got to do and they don’t have the upfront money to get it into your home. And then when you start paying for it, it’s 20 bucks a month and it pays for itself. I had the problem of I’ve got the money right now but I have to invest right now, I got to buy hotspots anyway. But when I do it with hotspots, it’s like flushing money down the drain because it’s gone. So, what we came to is, what if I was the customer, and I bought 15,000 homes, and now you got 15,000 homes cash up front to get it into the home. And then, you know, instead of paying t mobile or sprint, now we’re paying the nonprofit. So that’s kind of how the partnership came together.

How did you know what kids needed a hotspot to bring home with them?

 We surveyed all of our families twice once last spring, which is what gave us the estimates of how much need we had and then This fall, getting ready, we actually did a family care plan survey. And where we actually specifically asked, do you have high speed internet or not? And then do you have, you know, a device for every child? We gathered it at family level and school level data.

How are you going to make sure that students with IEP’s and other special needs don’t fall behind?

Every IEP has to convene and determine what can be done remotely. What extra service they might need. That’s part of why Wednesday is really important is there a dedicated time to help not just my students with disabilities, but my English language learners. I have a very large immigrant and refugee community that needs extra language support. The teacher needs time to call the translator and talk with the student or family in their own language. I have foster youth and homeless youth and so how do we make sure that they’re getting what they need at the shelter they live at. And so we’re going to convene and make sure that we have a plan.