Digital Divide Week 1
My name is Emma VanBuskirk, and I am a second-year 4th grade teacher at St. Jacob Elementary School in St. Jacob, Illinois. St. Jacob is a small rural community within the Triad Community Unit School District #2 in Madison County. The students and families that live in the community where I work face many problems outside of the classroom. From this course and learning about digital equity, I hope to be able to take away ideas that I can bring into my own classroom, school district, and community. Every student should have equitable access to resources that they can use to learn and be successful. My Call to Action is that students and families in St. Jacob need equitable and consistent access to reliable high-speed internet at home, in town, and within the school building. This Call to Action will serve students, families, and teachers at St. Jacob Elementary School, but there are also other families and neighboring towns within the Triad Community Unit School District that could benefit from this as well. The need for consistent internet access is crucial because students, families, and teachers all need it for academic support and educational resources. Students can use technology at home to connect with their peers and support each other academically. Families can support struggling learners at home through online tutors and other resources. Teachers need access to high-speed internet every day because of the educational shift to taking assessments online rather than paper and pencil. The Triad School District is 1:1 with devices. My school requires students to keep their devices at school overnight for safety reasons, unless given permission by their teacher. My classroom has very unreliable and spotty internet connections. My students and I often can’t use certain educational websites due to this. With this being said, there are educational tools my students are not getting access to because of the school’s internet.
The town of St. Jacob also only has one cell phone tower through AT&T. As a Verizon user, as soon as I get to work, my cell phone will not work. I have to be connected to my building Wi-Fi to be able to use some of the apps on my phone. I miss many phone calls during the day due to not being able to make phone calls within the building. For example, I have missed many phone calls from doctors' offices because phone calls will not go through to my phone while in the building. Now, this is not necessarily an academic problem, but there are days I see this as a safety problem. There are teachers at my school who have children and family members outside of the building who may need to get hold of them in an emergency. And unfortunately, with the world we live in today, we may need to make an emergency phone call to first responders or the police department, as we share an SRO with another elementary school that is 20 minutes away, so they are not always in our building.
According to the United States Census Bureau (2026), the village of St. Jacob is home to about 1,300 residents, with about 530 total households within 0.8 square miles, and a median household income of $107,188. 99.1% of the residents within St. Jacob speak English, and caucasian in the predominant race. Of the adults that are 25 and older living in this village, 31.8% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher. Looking at this data and then thinking about the families and students that have all been in my classroom, I believe these numbers tell a very small portion of a bigger story in each household. Every family is different, so I take this data with a grain of salt and try to remember the real situation I know is going on with my students’ homes.
The challenges of the teachers, students, and residents of St. Jacob strongly align with those who live in Staunton, Virginia. Turner (2018) mentions that even though Staunton is located close to Washington, DC, those who live in Staunton do not have a reliable broadband connection. Some of the biggest news comes from just a few miles away from where they live, and they do not know of it because of the lack of internet connection in rural areas. St. Jacob is also located within a few miles of a big town called Troy, Illinois. Families have the devices and phones, but do not have access to the internet needed to stay connected with the town just a few miles down the road.
Regardless of income, housing, parent education, race, or sex, all students should have equitable access to functioning internet at home, at school, and within the community to be able to strive academically. Without it, we are just throwing a tool in the students’ hands without the appropriate environment to use it to its fullest potential.
References:
Turner-Lee, N. (2018). Closing the digital and economic divides in rural America. Brookins Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/closing-the-digital-and-economic-divides-in-rural-america/
Emma,
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that internet connection is the issue. I am living in a rural area, and my internet runs slow at times. The children know they have to finish their homework at school because sometimes will be very long to send their videos to their teachers. For a while the only cellphone company providing cellphone services here was the ATT company which was pretty expensive. We got lucky when Cricket started to provide services. Their family plan is very affordable. We paid extra ten dollars on the two of the phones to make them hotspots.
i am agree with you that we must keep communication via internet and every family is different.