Could internet access in Dallas shift from a luxury to a utility?

Co-published by our media partner, KERA. Listen to the radio version on KERA’s website.

Audra Brown stands on her front porch holding her 2-year-old granddaughter, Toya. Her four grandsons are inside their home in the Buckeye Trail public housing community in South Dallas’ Bonton neighborhood.

“They are playing on their tablets,” Brown says. “Just some games that the tablet came with.”

In the spring, as COVID-19 began to spread, the boys’ school, J.J. Rhoads Learning Center, pivoted to virtual learning. Brown didn’t want her grandsons to get behind in school, so she started paying $46 a month to AT&T for broadband. But she couldn’t afford to keep it up.

“I got behind on a couple of bills so I feel like the internet can hold off,” Brown explains. “We pay lights and rent and I don’t want to get behind on nothing.”

J.J. Rhoads principal Chandra Macklin says almost all of her students are from low-income households. She understands that internet access is a luxury that most families in her school can’t afford. But now it’s turned into a necessity. Her students have made huge advances in the last two years, and she doesn’t want them to regress. So in the spring, she made sure her families knew to pick up portable hotspots. These are small devices that students can use to connect to the internet from home.

“Connectivity is important now. This is how we communicate,” Macklin says. “So, if that meant that some teachers would even go home to help a parent get online — what we did was, how can we make sure that our students are still learning?”

“I didn’t know how to use this stuff so I called the school, and there was always someone there who could help me,” Brown says.

Macklin says she’s thankful that the school district was prepared with hotspots so her students could access the internet from home. 

“I will say that I’m grateful for our superintendent and his foresight and the way that he sees things,” Macklin says. “How he projects to the future about what’s going to be needed.”  

Investing in disinvested neighborhoods

Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa says that when the pandemic began and the district closed campuses, he had to make sure he could get his students online quickly. Hotspots were the fastest way to do that. 

But Hinojosa wants a more permanent solution to the lack of internet access for Dallas ISD students — particularly those in South Dallas and other historically redlined neighborhoods.

“The same places that don’t have broadband are the same places that don’t have a Starbucks. They don’t have a grocery store,” Hinojosa says. “It’s the same places where you have high crime rates. So, all of these things are tied together.”

Texas State Senator Royce West says this isn’t a new problem.

“This issue has been going on for well over 20 years,” West says. “When you begin to overlap the census tracts that have the highest incidents of poverty, unemployment, criminal justice related issues, there’s a positive correlation between the two.”

West says the lack of proper infrastructure in Dallas’ southern sector limits people’s access and their potential.

“The fact is that you cannot function in this world anymore without connectivity.”

If it works for businesses, why can’t it work for schools?

Jordana Barton works for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Like millions of Americans, she started working from home full-time when COVID-19 hit.

“We are all working from home since March, right? I was working on my virtual private network of the FED,” Barton explains. “I get a computer and access to the virtual private network through my little code that I put in and, you know, that’s how I access the internet.”

As she typed in her code one spring morning, Barton had an “a-ha” moment. For years, she had been studying the digital divide and its impact on low-income communities in Texas. Now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, her work was receiving more attention. Cities were searching frantically for solutions as the need for reliable internet access became essential, especially when it came to virtual learning. 

“I was no longer having to explain that this is a problem,” Barton says. “So, I was working on my virtual private network and I said, why don’t we give this to students? It is an enterprising solution. Why should it only be businesses that get this opportunity?”

The Fed, like a lot of large companies, has its own private wireless network, connecting employees to a central tower. The signal travels — uses public infrastructure — from the tower to other contact points, until it reaches the employee’s home.

All Dallas ISD campuses are equipped with wireless internet that staff and students could access while inside schools. The idea would be to take that same signal and send it to students’ homes.

South Dallas’