Chromebooks, Worcester, and civil rights

Regarding today's T&G article from Thursday's Worcester School Committee meeting, as I've noted on Twitter:

• A. You are reading correctly that the Worcester Public Schools are starting Chromebook distribution this Friday, two months after we left school buildings.

• B. During that time, a single packet of material was mailed to students early on. This was followed by a second one this past week. All other material was accessible only online.
  
• C. I don’t think I need to run through our Worcester stats, but our information on where our kids are at on access has been...slow to create. Beyond individual teacher and school efforts, the district didn’t push til about three weeks ago. This despite a report on access in October of last year which noted that more than a quarter of our students lack access at home (and that report didn’t differentiate how much of that access was via data on a cell phone).
  
• D. As I have mentioned here and elsewhere, the lag has much less to do with the city—who it seems simply were unhappy with whatever the plans were to distribute—and much more with it simply not happening at all for weeks and weeks. Thus my example on grass clippings—and yes, Worcester *has* opened our yard waste sites—isn’t a critique of public health but is expressing my disbelief that somehow no-contact device distribution is being barred. In short: I doubt that was what was barred.
  
• E. Finally, yes, access to education is a civil rights issue. Providing that access is our job. If that couldn’t be done through technology, it needed to be done otherwise. But providing it only or largely via technology without providing that technology *creates* an equity issue.
  
• And PS: while my district has just made itself the example of this, this is a much bigger issue than Worcester. Running our K-12 “public” education system on Mom and Dad paying Spectrum and anteing up for a laptop isn’t our Constitutional mandate.