The audacious goal: Get all of KC digitally connected, 'whatever it takes'

Advocates for digital equity for all of Kansas City are advancing a resolution now before the City Council. Photo of students by Connecting for Good.

UPDATE: The resolution before the City Council to make a plan to end Kansas City’s digital divide was voted out of committee Wednesday to be sent to the full council with the recommendation of “Do pass.”

Remember the heady days of Google Fiber’s big Kansas City launch some eight years ago?

To have so much high-speed broadband rippling into the metro’s digital infrastructure spurred high expectations of vast and revolutionary connectivity as the nation’s first Google Fiber City.

A resolution now before the City Council wants Kansas City to dream big again.

This is the “audacious goal” that Tom Esselman of Connecting for Good, the Kansas City Public Library and other digital advocates want — that City Hall and a partnership of public and private forces resolve to do “whatever it takes” to get all households connected and functional on the Internet.

A map in MySidewalk’s KC Connectivity Report shows the digital divide across lower-income neighborhoods. See the full report here.

“Wireless access alone is not enough,” said John Horrigan, a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and Senior Advisor to the Urban Libraries Council during a recent virtual forum with connectivity advocates in Kansas City. Neighborhoods need “wire-line broadband at home.”

Horrigan authored a 2019 report, funded by the Kansas City Public Library, that showed Kansas City was lagging behind the national average in advancing broadband into more homes.

The consequences of digital gaps exploded on Kansas City, as it did across the nation, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools, set teachers and administrators scrambling to put education online, and sent millions of workers home.

Suddenly the disconnections throughout Kansas City laid bare the unequal opportunities for learning and working and networking.

The KC Connectivity Report recently published by MySidewalk found that nearly one-third of the households in the 3rd Council District in east Kansas City lacked internet access and one-fourth lacked a computer.

Thousands of school children were not connected, and the gaps fell heavily among low-income households and minority households.

School systems scrambled with the help of foundations and other philanthropic support to rush computers and hot spots into homes and neighborhoods, but inequities remain.

LeanLab Education, a Kansas City non-profit organization that promotes education innovation, helped coordinate emergency technology efforts and surveyed the struggle among many area districts and public charter schools.

Despite heavy funding campaigns by foundations in support of schools, LeanLab reports, many gaps remain either because homes haven’t been reached, hot spots sold out and couldn’t meet the demand, or there is not enough tech support for families that received connections.

Hot spots, while important, are a limited, often poor-quality substitute for broadband, LeanLab founder and CEO Katie Boody said. The challenge ahead is marked by a lack of capital among schools, especially charter schools, that will be exacerbated by pandemic-caused cuts in state funding. The disruptive shift in how to deliver education is also a challenge.

The Urban League of Greater Kansas City and the Kansas City Coalition for Digital Inclusion are teaming up to spur what the proposed city resolution says will be a public-private effort headed by the Kansas City city manager’s office.

The resolution calls for digital equity so that all residents, students and small businesses will have services including:

• The ability to subscribe to reasonably priced, reduced-cost or free internet and/or wireless services providing not less than the Federal Communications Commission’s (“FCC”) broadband definition of 25 mbps download and 3 mbps upload speeds.

•  Have access to free and/or low-cost personal computers, laptops, tablets and related hardware.

•  Have access to training, education and technical support necessary to achieve economic mobility through distance learning, remote work, and entrepreneurship.

 The resolution calls for the city manager to report to the City Council on the progress of the the effort by Sept. 1.