SACRAMENTO, CA — Sacramento City Unified School District, the City of Sacramento, and Comcast today announced a new effort to provide Sac City Unified families with free internet access. The new initiative, called Sac City Kids Connect, provides Comcast’s Internet Essentials program to qualifying low income families with internet access, provided they live in a Comcast service area. As part of the Sac City Kids Connect program, eligible families will be provided with a special code to access six months of free internet. The access codes will be provided in the coming weeks.
Read press release in Spanish | Hmong | Chinese | Russian | Vietnamese.
More information including eligibility requirements and instructions about how to sign up for the program can be found at www.scusd.edu/kidsconnect. The site is designed for use with mobile phones or tablets.
“Our mission to meet our students’ academic, social and emotional needs didn’t end when schools closed,” said Sac City Unified Superintendent Jorge Aguilar. “Lack of internet access is a barrier, even during normal times. In these extraordinary times, this barrier becomes all the more evident for many of our students, but especially our most vulnerable. We continue to work tirelessly to remove every obstacle that might prevent our students from reaching their educational goals.”
“Here at the city one of our top concerns is making sure young people growing up in all of our neighborhoods have a chance to stay here and get a good job,” said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. “Unless we get them connected to the internet, this coronavirus pandemic threatens to put kids who already have a lot to overcome at an even greater disadvantage.”
“Internet access is more important now than it has ever been,” said John Gauder, Senior Vice President, Comcast California. “We are so pleased to partner with Sac City Unified and Sacramento’s visionary leadership team to help students get free access to the internet at home. For many, this will be the first time they have had that access and it is hugely meaningful.”
Sac City Unified began its distance learning on April 13 and has worked to provide its students with access to computers and the internet. Today’s announcement of Sac City Kids Connect begins a public-private partnership that will serve as a model for districts throughout the state. The district estimates that approximately 6,600 of its students currently do not have internet access.
Internet Essentials has an integrated, wrap-around design that addresses each of the three major barriers to broadband adoption that research has identified. These include: a lack of digital literacy skills, lack of awareness of the relevance of the Internet to everyday life needs, and fear of the Internet; the lack of a computer; and cost of internet service. The program is structured as a partnership between Comcast and tens of thousands of school districts, libraries, elected officials, and nonprofit community partners. For more information, or to apply for the program in seven different languages, please visit www.internetessentials.com or call 1-855-846-8376. Spanish-only speakers can also call 1-855-765-6995.
No comments:
Post a Comment