March 27, 2000

By Bernhard Warner

It's barely 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday morning in the South Bronx, one of New York's poorest neighborhoods. On the second floor of the Kipp Academy - a typical New York City public middle school where English compositions and math tests decorate the hallways - some 30 kids and their parents have formed a line, two and three wide. And, at the front of the line each family gets an envelope. Inside the envelope is a slip of paper with an e-mail address. Clutching their envelopes, the families split off into different classrooms for the morning's lesson.

The families are part of a program run by New York-based Computers for Youth , a nonprofit group working to provide poor families in the region with the tools and the knowledge to use the Internet.

Elisabeth Stock, executive director of CFY, explains that the organization chose to come to this public school composed of mainly black and Hispanic students because the kids are poor - 95 percent qualify for the federally subsidized free-lunch program. Armed with volunteers and old computers, CFY provides the kids with training to get online. "We stay with a school for the entire school year," Stock explains. "Then we move on so we can spread our good deeds as far and wide as we can."

Classes start at the beginning, with how to turn on a computer. They then delve into the ABCs of surfing the Web. Students who sit through the three-and-a-half-hour session get to keep their computers - used Pentiums donated by city law firms, banks and brokerage houses - and get three months of free Internet and e-mail access.

Incorporated in 1997 and backed by a variety of foundations, private companies and government agencies - including CitiGroup Foundation, Home Box Office and the U.S. Department of Education - CFY has assigned itself the task of equipping kids with what they need to access the Web, one school at a time.

One of the students in the CFY program is Edward Bostic. For a 13-year-old growing up in Harlem and going to school across the river in the Bronx, Edward has big ambitions. Throughout his introductory computer lesson he's been on the edge of his seat. He can't wait till they get to the part about surfing the Web. His mother, Melissa Bostic, sits beside him. She's anxious to get on the Net, too. Figuring out how to e-mail friends and relatives, she says, is her top priority. "And then that Priceline thing," she says. "I want to save money on groceries."

Melissa is also optimistic that the new computer will be Edward's ticket out of the South Bronx. "He wants two careers," she says, loud enough for her son to hear. "To be a lawyer, to defend the little people, the people who can't afford it. And to be a doctor, curing cancer."

Edward has simpler plans for his first Web foray. He wants to read more about Dragon Ball Z, the Japanese comic book that, like Pokemon, has been turned into a cartoon and a trading-card phenomenon among school kids around the U.S.

A few weeks later, with his computer back home, Edward has uncovered a horde of Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z sites. But he's also used the Internet to research and write a report about J.K. Rowling, author of the popular kids' book series Harry Potter. His Net work earned him extra credit.

Altogether Edward spends a couple of hours a week on the Web and a few more e-mailing friends. (If he finishes his morning chores early, his mom says, he's allowed to rack up as many as four hours online on Saturdays.) Edward isn't sure but he thinks he's one of the few kids in his neighborhood who has a computer at home. His evidence: "Most of them just hang out on the corner doing nothing," he says. "If they had computers I think they'd be in the house more."

Computers for Youth is one of thousands of grassroots groups across the country working to close the so-called digital divide - the difference in opportunity between those who are computer literate and those who aren't.

The widening gap between the haves and the have-nots is a worrying feature on the modern technological landscape. Those who get left behind don't only miss out on MP3 music downloads; they're cut off from the Net's huge library of information, from its communication connections and from the inexpensive goods and services it provides.

In Washington the digital divide is now an election issue. Corporate titans like Michael Armstrong and Steve Case are spending money to fix the situation. Athletes like Shaquille O'Neal and Magic Johnson are lending their names and their attention to the problem.

There have been encouraging early strides. A study conducted recently by Denver-based Quality Education Data showed school districts across the country spent $6.7 billion on technology in the 1998-99 school year, up almost 25 percent from the previous year. But the same study revealed that an equally crucial funding component - computer training for teachers - was startlingly low, rising just 5.2 percent over the same period.

Statistics like those continue to fuel debate among academics, politicians and organizations like CFY. They argue over who should pay, what works and how to turn computers into something more than digital TV sets. False steps could be costly: Any mismanagement of funds threatens to create a divide within the divide. Already some people closely connected to the effort are predicting that some efforts will fail, with kids ultimately paying the price.

According to a Department of Commerce report released last summer, blacks and Hispanics are only two-fifths as likely to have Net access at home as whites. Income and geography play a part, too. Not surprisingly, rural locales are less likely to have home Net access, followed closely by inner-city areas. The same report showed that the disparity in home Net access between households with an average annual income under $15,000 and those with an income over $75,000 grew 25 percent between 1994 and 1997. In an economy in which workers must increasingly depend on computer skills, the scenario looms of an entire generation of minorities hopelessly unprepared for the job market.

"The future is a strong technically literate workforce," says Katherine Willis, president of Cyberstate.org, a foundation-funded Michigan organization that advises Gov. John Engler on technology issues. "One of the ways you're going to be able to attract and retain business is to be able to offer to businesses very strong, very capable workforces. And we're talking about new workforces, not bang-that-metal workforces."

Washington is well aware of the implications. In February, President Clinton pledged a $2.3 billion aid package to connect the poorest areas of the country to the Net. The initiative, which awaits congressional approval, would include $2 billion worth of tax incentives doled out to companies that donate computers or sponsor technology centers in the neediest communities. The remainder would be spent on federal grants to train teachers, launch community technology centers and fund pilot projects to bring computers into the homes, much the way CFY does.

Gene Sperling, a national economic adviser in the Clinton administration and an adviser on the president's digital divide initiatives, says he expects "at least parts of [the $2.3 billion package] will be passed." But he cautions that a solution to the problem goes beyond Washington. "This has to be a cooperative partnership with private sector, nonprofits and sports heroes all doing their part," he said at a recent National Basketball Association -sponsored technology summit that addressed the digital divide.

Some companies have already started their own plans. Ford Motor and Delta Air Lines have announced they will equip each member of their workforces with computers and Net access for a nominal monthly fee – $5 per month, in the case of Ford. And Intel has pledged $20 million to fund the building of computer clubhouses for inner city kids across the country.

To be sure, corporate America has its own future in mind. Philanthropic efforts are good PR. But more important, it's in their best interest to train neighborhood kids today to grow tomorrow's tech labor pool. To sweeten the pot, plans like Clinton's dangle tax write-offs to generous corporate donors. As a result, more and more dollars are donated to the cause.

In 1997, New York City attorney Daniel Dolgin decided it would be a good idea if companies donated their old computers to poor children instead of throwing them out. Around the same time, CFY's Stock, a former White House fellow, hit upon a variation of the same notion while living in Washington. She wanted to bring computers to kids' homes, where they and their parents would have more time to use them. She shopped around her idea to numerous New York-area nonprofits, but to no avail. Finally, she was introduced to Dolgin in late 1998 and they joined forces.

CFY is a bare-bones operation, composed of three full-timers and a dozen or so volunteers. It makes up for its pint size with connections, such as its relationship with the New York Board of Education and New York Cares, a Gotham nonprofit that spreads word about CFY to individuals interested in doing charity work. Stock says she gets six or seven volunteers each week through New York Cares. CFY uses a Board of Education warehouse to store and ship computers donated by local companies. In exchange, CFY provides a workshop for city high school students, teaching skills like assembling computers and installing software. Because it refurbishes used computers and relies on volunteer help, CFY keeps costs down; its first-year operating budget is $250,000. But by leaning on its partners, "we're leveraging three times what our budget is this year," Stock says. The group expects to distribute 350 computers to students, their families and teachers by the end of the school year – that means training 260 families (at Kipp Academy and at a second Harlem school beginning in April) by June. That's 100 computers more than was originally planned for. The program has not always gone smoothly. At the Kipp Academy, where CFY is focusing most of its attention this year, a host of technical problems cropped up almost overnight. A slew of families tried to download America Online 5.0, and disabled the e-mail and browser software that had been installed on the computers. They had to lug the machines back to the school for CFY technicians to fix.

For her brand-new organization, Stock says she had to hound "the old boys network" of New York City foundations to get them to pay attention to her cause. (Once the first foundation kicked in money, others perked up.) And she had to get an OK from the New York City school board – an imposing bureaucracy, even by Gotham standards – to get the computers into the schools to train the kids. Surprisingly, the school board jumped on the idea, and CFY hit its goal of distributing the computers last October. "But that's because we worked our asses off," Stock adds.

CFY advocates what it calls "meaningful access" to the Internet: Put computers in homes and let families keep them. There's an alternative campaign to build public technology centers in libraries and local recreation halls. But, critics claim, kids often don't get the attention or the time online they need in those places. Older community centers creak along with outdated or neglected computers. And there's usually little money budgeted to maintain computers or train staff on the latest updates.

CFY would rather train the kids and their parents first, then let them take the computers home so the entire family can learn on their own time how to use the Internet. "If you just use a computer for a half-hour a day in class, you're not going to be able to use a computer in your job," Stock says. "It's just not enough." Besides, she adds, establishing community tech centers in parts of the South Bronx or Harlem isn't practical or safe. "We shouldn't be telling a kid the only way to do your homework is to walk through the dark to get to the tools to do your homework."

Kipp teachers are part of the equation, too. Social studies teacher Marina Bernard Damiba gets the same computers from CFY that her students do, so students and teachers can stay in touch after school. Kipp students have their teachers' home phone numbers, but Damiba says since January the e-mail messages have started to catch up to the after-school phone calls.

Damiba says her classroom discussions have taken on a new tone. "I've had students ask me about Nasdaq trading or, 'What does Wall Street do?'" she beams. Damiba assigns students to use the Net for research papers and, often along the way, they hit upon the idea that computers may be the key to their future. "Now they know they're not limited to becoming a doctor, lawyer, dancer, the usual professions," she says. Instead she hears phrases like computer programmer and videogame developer. "All of a sudden you have intelligent children who didn't feel as if they had a place in society saying, 'You know what? Maybe there is a place for me.'"

Another Kipp student, 14-year-old Emily Caraballo, appreciates having a place to sound off about the news of the day. After a first-grader killed his classmate in Michigan last February, Caraballo says she went to the Internet to find out what was going on. "In the Bronx, where I live, there's not so many people who are up on current events," she says. "I can express my opinion [in online chat areas] and they won't think I'm from outer space, because we have some of the same views.

"If you go outside," she continues, "and talk to neighborhood kids about current events, they say, 'Why do you want to talk about that for?' Or they're too laid-back to care."

The CFY model isn't new. The idea of bringing computers home first came to national attention in the early 1990s.

The blueprint for making computers a vital part of a school curriculum was born in Union City, N.J., a community predominantly composed of Cuban immigrants and one of the most densely populated municipalities in the country. Bell Atlantic and education experts teamed up in an effort dubbed Project Explore to bring state-of-the art computers to middle-school-age kids in the urban school district in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline.

Faced with an alarming dropout rate and a looming takeover by the state's department of education, Union City asked Bell Atlantic for help. In 1992, Bell Atlantic donated millions of dollars in computer equipment: a computer for each seventh-grader in the Christopher Columbus Middle School that year, and a computer for each child in the district in subsequent years. The local high school's 1998 graduating class saw the largest-ever number of students go on to college, some of them attending Brown, MIT, Yale and Harvard.

Union City students were required to do their work on computers. With e-mail they were able to talk to other students and teachers after school, and their parents could talk to teachers. "Communication between parents and school administrators increased dramatically," says Andres Henriquez, assistant director for the Center for Children and Technology, a nonprofit educational foundation that monitored the Union City project and intends to follow up on CFY's efforts at Kipp. "It really changed the attitudes of the teachers about what these kids' capabilities were."

In 1996, Clinton heralded the program as a model for resuscitating sagging urban school districts. The buzz has grown from there. "Today, people call us up all the time and say, 'I want a Union City,'" Henriquez says. "But it's not a format. It's something that was done over a 10-year period."

Across the country, a nonschool nonprofit called Plugged In is looking to achieve a similar result in East Palo Alto, Calif. Like Union City, East Palo Alto huddles in the shadow of a wealthy neighbor - in this case, Silicon Valley - and it's working to inform its neighbors of the widening gulf between the tech-rich and the tech-poor. "Three years ago, nobody was really talking about the digital divide except us," says Magda Escobar, executive director of Plugged In.

Lodged in a former storefront in an otherwise neglected area, Plugged In has been operating for seven years on corporate donations from its Silicon Valley neighbors, including Hewlett-Packard , Intel and Sun Microsystems. It's not connected to the local school system; area teenagers who use the center do so on their own time, by their own choice. It serves as a teaching center to familiarize local kids with computers and the Internet. It even earns a steady income - about $50,000 in its best years - by letting kids design Web pages for companies like Pacific Bell.

Groups like Plugged In should take advantage of corporate largess while they can, observes Karen Chandler, project coordinator at CTCNet, a Waltham, Mass.-based network of 350 community technology centers across the nation. "There's so much more funding now because there is much more attention being paid to it. But that means there's a lot more competition among centers." As a result, smaller centers are often overlooked when they go up against established groups like the Boys and Girls Clubs or the Urban League, which want to add computer facilities to their operations, Chandler says.

CTCNet, a nonprofit organization that grew out of a Harlem-based community center called Playing to Win, helps new community centers get off the ground by providing counseling and tips on where to attain funding. Last year was the best ever for the 10-year-old organization, Chandler says, when more than 100 new centers joined. She expects this year to be even better, especially if Clinton's package is passed.

CTCNet members vary greatly. One, in Chandler, Ariz., operates out of a federally subsidized housing project called Chandler Village. CTCNet helps fund a computer center in Chandler Village where 15 PCs serve 127 families, most of whom are Mexican Americans who speak little English. Debbie Weaver, property manager at Chandler Village, says the computer center's goal is to teach residents skills useful for a job hunt or for returning to school. The most pressing need, though, says Weaver, is to keep Chandler Village "gang-free, crime-free and drug-free."

"We're against some really strong obstacles," Weaver says. "The first is to bring the community together." She hopes one day to put a computer with Net access in every unit.

Washington's proposals are laced with good intentions. But will they do much for Chandler Village? There's almost complete agreement that Net access is a worthy handout for the nation's poor, but the debate continues in other areas: Sure, we can identify high-need areas, but how do we distribute the machines to those places and who's going to pay for it? Then there are the issues of training and replacement computers. Even Clinton's top advisers acknowledge these issues can't be resolved without people on the front line taking on the problem, day in, day out.

Not everyone agrees. Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, says state governments, not Washington, should take the lead. Levine argues that federal strategies give too much weight to local groups that, though well intentioned, lack a cohesive strategy to take on a massive social imbalance. "One of the things that scares me about grassroots groups, particularly in the name of classroom reform, is they are disorganized," he says. "We need an organization to go beyond any one grassroots group."

In reality, grassroots organizations like Computers for Youth can't fix the problem by themselves. CFY's main drawback is its size: By the end of the school year it hopes to have donated some 700 computers to school kids, their families and their teachers in a total of six schools throughout New York City. That's a mere fraction of the 1.1 million school children in New York public schools.

But if CFY isn't the answer, at least it responds to some of the criticisms. CFY relies on computer donations from firms like Bear Stearns and D.E. Shaw, not on taxpayer dollars. It depends largely on volunteers, most from tech companies such as iVillage and Microsoft , that donate their time and expertise. This private-sector support has attracted attention from one of New York's most reputable education organizations, the Center for Children and Technology, which intends to follow up with students to assess what works and what doesn't.

In the short run, the future looks promising. The economy is humming, corporate philanthropy is in ample supply, and the divide is a cause celebre. Few activists want to consider their deepest, unspoken fear: having to scrape around for private donations should the economy sour or, worse, should Washington fail to follow through on its promises.

But what happens when the funding eventually dries up? For some, like Plugged In's Escobar, it will mean spending more of her time fundraising and less time teaching, a relatively pain-free trade-off. But the new crop of technology centers and grassroots organizations that are sure to pop up this year won't have as strong a local support system to fall back on.

Activists agree that the battle can be won only by thinking and acting locally. Logistics are an important consideration; a program such as the South Bronx's CFY, with access to an ample supply of used computers, may not work in South Dakota. Likewise, an Indian reservation in South Dakota may benefit more from a community technology center where kids and educators can meet to get online.

And getting onto the Net is half the battle. Once we teach children the ABCs of the Net, says Escobar, "then we can start dealing with substantial issues. We have kids designing Web pages but [who] can't spell. I get pissed off at that. I think, 'What the hell are the schools teaching?'

"Hopefully, the interest in technology will lead to an interest in the broader issues," she continues. "For me, the digital divide is not about whether you have an Internet connection or not, but whether you have the tools to reach your potential."