Challenging the digital divide during the pandemic.

When COVID shut down our schools and libraries in Spring of 2020, I knew something had to be done to give kids screen-free alternatives to reading. Through multiple calls with parents, school leaders and Scholastic, Inc., I got 446 new books mailed to the homes of 160 middle school students in a low-income neighborhood, to keep them reading through the summer.

This was an experiment of sorts. As the parent of an 8th grader and 5th grader in NYC public schools, I was hoping at least 80 kids in my son’s middle school would express interest, to see if young adult readers who live for cell phones and screens would be interested in reading real books. It was also a challenge to technology as the de facto learning solution.

I also wanted to see how a diverse school with an underfunded PTA, where the majority of students qualify for free lunch, could manage to sponsor a book give-away without asking anyone to qualify their need. I wanted to give away new books to anyone in need of resources with out having to qualify their need or feel ashamed to ask.

In normal times, kids would have access to school and public libraries to find free, age-appropriate books for daily reading assignments. That changed on March 16. Now reading has become a bigger chore, and not just for my kids.

In April, following the New York City-wide school shut down, my 8th-grader’s teacher asked her students to read a book a week from a list of suggested titles. She included links and tips for downloading. That’s when I decided to make it my mission to challenge our dependency on screens.

Don't get me wrong, I like what’s possible on the internet. But I rarely get frustrated with real books and paper and pencils and basic learning tools that still function well and don’t create friction. Okay, I may occasionally nag my kids to put down the paperback they’re engrossed in, but it doesn’t compare to the nagging to get off their screens.

My family is fortunate to have several electronic reading devices at home, along with high-speed internet. We've logged into all the free apps for downloading and sharing books online. But I realize that depending on new apps and devices is a bigger burden on some families than others.

Besides, my kids still prefer to read books they can hold and pages they can flip by hand. And I’m glad they do. They spend too much time as it is sitting 12 inches from screens for so much of the day.

My son’s middle school has an economic needs index of 62% averaged over the past 5 years. And that’s only going to get worse with job losses and escalating living expenses.

So far, most of the proposed solutions to education during COVID-19 involve screens and technology. That has become the de facto solution to learning from home. And it assumes that all families have the same facility with technology.

Kids need learning opportunities that don't require screens and that don't increase the gap between the have’s and have not’s or the savvy and not so savvy adults. And as parents and teachers, we can't allow reading literature on phones to become normalized. Public school is supposed to be there for all of us, to provide access to education regardless of financial status. Schools may be closed but kids still need access to affordable, frictionless learning tools.

We couldn’t have done this without our Principal, staff, and parent leaders at Tompkins Square Middle School, a diverse community school in District 1 on the LES who were willing to support the idea.