#AfterThought: Caprice Young on Universal Student Broadband
A discussion on new education models in a pandemic-impacted world and why broadband should be basic infrastructure
a CSG East | Learn4Life feature
“Several thousand of our kids are actually parenting teens, so their kids, kids raising kids, and you know that this pandemic has been especially hard on them,” says Caprice Young, National Superintendent of Schools for Learn4Life. “Their parents have lost their jobs. They're living in profound overcrowding. It's not uncommon for our kids to be in apartments where they've got two families in a two bedroom apartment, one family for each room. That's that's, that's pretty common. And what we discovered on March 13, that was the day that we decided to close our centers and move to totally remote education. And we discovered that 85 percent of our kids did not have access to broadband at home. And that that was absolutely profound. We could get laptops into their hands, but without broadband, they were paperweights. And that has been a huge challenge. Unfortunately, the telecommunications companies have very little understanding of the challenges that our kids face.”
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