To Connect More Young Students, NYC Upgrades Internet Access At 50 NYCHA Centers

The lack of reliable internet access has affected many students grappling with remote learning this year, with the city comptroller’s office estimating that nearly a third of all New York City households, or more than 2 million residents, lack high-speed internet access.

With education shifting out of the classroom setting during the pandemic and the city’s public schools relying heavily on online learning, improving internet access for students has become even more important.

Through a new public-private partnership, the city has installed wi-fi and broadband upgrades at 50 community centers and buildings in NYCHA complexes around the five boroughs. All of the locations host students on their remote learning days in Learning Lab programs or offer childcare in NYCHA’s Cornerstone youth programs.

“The primary goal of all the Learning Labs is really to support young people who are remote learning that day from their DOE schools so it's absolutely essential to have internet because many of them are logging on to various different video conferencing platforms like Zoom or Google Classroom, either for live synchronous learning or for getting their homework that they need to work on. So, the internet access is absolutely essential,” said Kadidja Diallo, Deputy Director of Cornerstone Community Centers at the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development [DYCD], which runs the Learning Labs program.

The upgraded free internet access will benefit more than 12,000 kids and adults, according to Mark Zustovich, DYCD spokesperson. About 30 of the sites offer wi-fi internet connectivity for anyone within range of the network, as a boon for the larger community as well.

The sudden urgency to improve internet infrastructure was an opportunity to jump into long-needed improvements, said Peter Hatch, the city’s COVID-19 Public-Private Partnership Czar.

“(It was) this unique moment in which we had this second remote-learning setting where we needed to serve DOE students, make sure children could access learning. So many city dollars have been focused on responding to crises born of the pandemic, here we had a chance to respond to an opportunity for improvement,” Hatch said.

The city has pledged for years to improve internet access to underserved neighborhoods, and in January 2020 Mayor Bill de Blasio released an Internet Master Plan which included a $157 million capital investment in telecoms infrastructure in more than 30 target neighborhoods. De Blasio has said the capital project will improve internet service for 600,000 New Yorkers, including 200,000 public housing residents, and on Wednesday he announced the city is making 7,500 city street poles available for mobile carriers to build out the 5G network in underserved neighborhoods.

But most NYCHA residents still lack affordable wi-fi, according to Bronx Representative Ritchie Torres, who told The City in January, "The failure to bring broadband to NYCHA is the latest example of something we’ve long known about the mayor and his administration. The incompetence of city government is failing all of us, but most especially poor people of color."

Jessica Vides-Hernandez, DYCD’s Senior Director of Cornerstones, hopes that in addition to internet access, the Learning Labs will give children some stability during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

“I think it is really important that the young people see familiar faces” at the Learning Labs, she said. “I think it is a relief for many parents and on top of that they have internet access they can get the school support, but it's really the connections that they've been able to make with the staff that I think is really the mental wellness aspect of it.”

The city worked with a number of partners on the upgrades, including the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center which donated the wi-fi and network equipment upgrades, The Rockefeller Foundation and Zoom which donated funding, the Cielo Scholarship Foundation, and EducationSuperHighway which advised the project.

The internet upgrades will remain in place even after schooling returns to normal and the Learning Bridges programs end, Hatch said.

“We are expecting that one day in the not so distant future, we won't need Learning Labs because so many more of our kids are back in school full time,” he said. “But we wanted to leave in the communities that have been so hard hit by the pandemic, this permanent digital equity asset and leave that behind.”