With 141,000 Laptops Distributed, CT First in Nation to Close the Digital Divide Among Students

 Within in next two weeks, Connecticut expects to have delivered a laptop or internet connection to every Connecticut student who didn’t have one when the pandemic – and distance learning – began across the state’s school districts.  Every Connecticut student. 

Connecticut is the first state in the nation to make that statement, following through on an initiative, and a public-private partnership, that Governor Ned Lamont said earlier this year was a priority.  Within the coming weeks, a total of 141,000 laptops will have been delivered to local school districts for students throughout the state.

The town-by-town, district-by-district laptop numbers provide a glimpse of the enormity of the need.  In Bridgeport, the state’s largest city, a total of 15,256 laptops will have been put into the hands of students.  In New Haven, there have been even more - 17,631.  In Hartford, 11,140 laptops were provided to students; in Waterbury the total was 9,021. 

But it wasn’t only the big cities where students did not have a laptop at home to participate in the remote lessons that their local school districts were offering in lieu of in-classroom education.  There were 400 students in Orange, 175 in Wethersfield, 360 in North Branford, 934 in Derby, 1,840 in Southington, 1,050 in Newington, 2,242 in Manchester, as well as 26 in Norfolk, and 27 in Sherman.  Laptops were needed by at least a dozen students in nearly every community in the state.

A laptop, without an internet connection, is of limited value.  So the state’s efforts have extended to providing internet service for students who did not have internet access.

There were 3,000 internet connections provided to students in New Haven, nearly 2,000 for students in Bridgeport, 800 in Hartford and just over 300 in Waterbury, Meriden, New Britain and Enfield, among scores of Connecticut communities where internet access was provided to students to enable them to connect remotely to their schools. 

Governor Lamont announced  this week that Connecticut is the first state in the nation to provide a learning device to every PK-12 student in need, achieving a major milestone in the fight to close the K-12 digital divide in Connecticut, particularly as many schools turn to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Ensuring that every student in need has a learning device is a significant step forward in ensuring an equitable education to every child in Connecticut,” Fran Rabinowitz, Executive Director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, told CT by the Numbers. “In our present world, It is an essential learning tool for all modes of learning- in person, hybrid and remote. In a post-Covid world, every student will continue to need a device to be engaged in 21st century learning.”

Added Bridgeport Superintendent of Schools Michael Testani: “Bridgeport Public Schools is extremely grateful for all those responsible for providing our kids with much needed devices. This has been critical for our ability to educate our students during this crisis. I would like to say thank you to Governor Lamont for his tremendous leadership!”

Since the outset of the pandemic earlier this year, every local school district has been sharing data with the State Department of Education (SDE) on the number of students who indicated that they were without a learning device or internet connection in their homes, highlighting the digital divide in Connecticut which threatened education opportunity across the state, in communities large and small.

Using this data, the nonprofit organization Partnership for Connecticut spent $24 million in March to provide 60,000 laptops to high school students in need. In July, Governor Lamont launched the Everybody Learns initiative, which included a $43.5 million investment from the state’s portion of the federal CARES Act, to purchase 82,000 laptops and 44,000 at-home internet connections for Connecticut students.

Combined, these two initiatives have invested more money per student in remote learning since March than all but two other states in the nation and makes Connecticut a leader among Northeast states, officials announced. SDE expects to deliver the last laptop in Stratford in mid-December 2020.

“One of my top priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic has been to minimize learning disruptions for Connecticut students and see that every K-12 student has the educational technologies they need to thrive in school,” Governor Lamont said.

“Over the past eight months, we made significant progress in closing digital divides, especially for students of color and those in low-income communities. The work does not end here,” Lamont added. “My administration will continue to fight to ensure every last student in Connecticut receives a high-quality education, whether in person or remotely. I also want to extend my warmest thanks to Barbara and Ray Dalio for their partnership with the state and generosity in ensuring our neediest high school students received 60,000 laptops at the outset of this pandemic.”

“I applaud Governor Ned Lamont and the State of Connecticut for their extraordinary fight to provide internet access and devices to all students in the Nutmeg State,” Adam Safir, director of the Office of Education Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, said. “The innovative public-private partnerships and bulk purchasing models they developed to help Connecticut students learn anytime, anywhere are great examples of putting CARES Act funding to its best use.”

Connecticut Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona emphasized that Connecticut is now “leading the nation in removing the tech barriers that stood in the way of every child receiving a world-class education. While today’s milestone is one to be celebrated, we need to continue leading with a laser-like focus on accelerating learning and prioritizing equitable access to high quality content, especially for our most vulnerable students.”