Digital Divide Week 2

 The truth is, most of my students face many if not all of the dividing factors we talked about in class. The biggest one that affects them on a day to day basis is their socioeconomic status. This can make it difficult for basic needs like shelter, nourishing food,  and proper hygeine. It also affects them needs within a technologically advancing world when you don't have wifi, a laptop, or anything with a modern operating system in your home. A lot of my students that have technology at home are working with technology that is usually over a decade old. Another dividing factor is the urban community they live in. A common misconception about digital divide is "well they can go to the library". I have been to the library nearest to them and one located in an affluent suburb. Both of these libraries are ran by the same entity "Columbus Metropolitan Library" and are within 20 minutes of one another. In the one on the south side or "inner-city"; its not as nice, has less features, and had ten times the homeless people as the one located in suburbia. All of this said, many of my students still face many large scale and systemic dividing factors like ethnicity, race, and education level. All of the students I teach fall into atleast one of these umbrellas of dividing factors, this makes it extremely difficult for this to even have the same level of exposure to modern hardware or operating systems.

Covid played a huge part in eventually widening the digital divide of the students in my community. As crazy as it sounds, the biggest way it did this was by shrinking the gap. The problem was, the gap shrunk really fast and with funds that were not sustainable. This cause two things to happen one of which is that money in really fast. Anyone in education knows that all money comes with a deadline to spend it by. A lot of money with a short deadline means inevitably in will be spent somewhat inequitably. That is money coming to our schools versus other schools and also how my school spent that money. The other problem for this is it takes a glaring problem and makes everyone think it isn't one. This is especially dangerous in schools because of the fact that that money has to be begged for over a long time. All the momentum to getting money for tech had gone away and now has to start back over at square zero.

I would say overall my school district does a bad job in terms of digital equity in comparison to other districts. The biggest way this is the case is not having one to one computers. I have heard some pretty wild numbers on why they couldn't have students carrying laptops back and forth from home and I can respect that thought process. However, that just means we need a computer for every student in every classroom. This points back pretty well to our reading this week from Jean Ayton(1980). While it doesn't necesarily talk about one to one technology, it talks about compliance over creativity, lack of freedom of choice, and extremely teacher directed environment. This is all immediately made better if not fixed with properly funded and properly used technology within the classroom.

Anyon, J. (1980). Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of WorkLinks to an external site.. In Learning Power: Organizing for Education and Justice. (Oakes, J., Rogers, J., & Lipton, M).  Teachers College Press. 

Digital Divide Week 1

     My name is Trent Fry and I teach at South HS in Columbus, Ohio. I teach both push in and pull out 11th and 12th graders as an intervention specialist in both math and english. I have taught in Oregon, in an affluent suburb of Portland. I also have spent a year teaching online in title one, predominately hispanic, district just north of Denver, Colorado. I am originally from Ponca City, Oklahoma and got my undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma in special education. I am only in my 5th year teaching, but have got to see a lot. I have been in situations where the struggle was spending $18,000 dollars just as a special education team and have been in situations where the struggle was getting more than 10 chromebooks in a class that averages 15-20.

    A simple definition about the community I work in is that it would be considered "inner-city". I would love to apply what I learn in this class and apply it to the students that I teach. However, I am one teacher in a district of 45,000-50,000 students. On top of that, my district is in what they have described as a budget crisis. We are currently set to run out of money early in 2027 and have yet to negotiate our contract. I am unsure of the impact I could have in this setting even in my most fervent state. While the intended beneficiary of this call to action would be the students within my school and classroom, the call to action would not put the onus on them. The true call to action I struggle with. I think it could be as narrow as the district I work in, but could go as broad as the federal government and the way it funds us to be not just have our most at risk students not just survive, but thrive. 

    Whenever I was looking to accept my current job, I did a little digging around in terms of the data of the students I would be serving, but it was much more real to do so after being there. Our school serves 873 students in grades 7th-12th. The racial break down of our school is 570 students who are black, 114 students who are hispanic, 107 students who are white, 67 students who identify as two or more races, and 8 and 5 students who are Native American and asian respectively(NCES.org). The school was built in and opened in 1924 and according to people I have spoken to, became a predominately a school with a predominately black population in the late 40's. That  social culture has become very rich and deeply embedded at this point. I think the largest showing of this is in our marching band. It has a vibe and sound of that of an HBCU band as apposed to the famous marching band of Ohio State right up the street. It is my favorite part of our school. Economically the data is very interesting. The south side of Columbus is very intertwined with gentrification. Within a couple blocks you could be in very affluent to then very poor neighborhoods. The zipcode we serve the most has a median household income of around $54,000(incomebyzipcode.com). Our academic scores are troubling at best. USnews.com has us at 7% proficiency in math and 24% in reading. 

    I love the school I work at because of the students I work with. However, I would definitely say it is my most difficult job I have had. The school is putting in a lot of effort into educating our students and giving them opportunities after they leave us. However, this doesn't change the fact that they face many hardships from many of the demographics that they fall into.