Working with low-income teenagers in Waterville, where poverty topped 20% even before the pandemic, I’ve seen families struggling to afford essentials like food, housing, utilities and clothing. And when COVID-19 compelled Maine’s schools to move instruction online in March, our community’s most vulnerable students plunged further into crisis.

Our experiment with online education at the end of last school year was a big challenge. As the Maine Department of Education now says, students “may have experienced learning losses due to the prolonged shutdown.”

The reasons are many. School districts were unprepared, teachers felt overloaded, and overworked parents lacked the time and energy to double up as teachers’ assistants. On top of all those challenges, too many families lack home computers or the digital skills to capitalize on the widely available discounted or free broadband programs available to them.

With schools likely to remain fully or partially closed in the fall, we desperately need an overhaul to update distance education and make it work for our students — especially those most disadvantaged.

For starters, we need to make sure everyone is online. Ninety-six percent of our state’s residents already have broadband access in our communities, and the $15 million bond measure approved by Maine voters on July 14 will help extend build broadband networks in communities that don’t have them. Still, only 75% of us use the internet at home, according to recent federal data.

This trend is particularly acute here in Waterville. Ninety-eight percent of households in our community have top-notch broadband options in their neighborhoods, but when this community’s junior high school switched to online learning, teachers estimated that half of their students were not online, for one reason or another.

Government agencies, education officials, and community service organizations have scrambled to get home computers and broadband connections to those not already online. Broadband providers have stepped up with offers of free service during this emergency, building on the successful low-cost broadband offerings for low-income families.  These initiatives have already connected almost 9 million Americans nationwide.

We have to figure out how to make broadband more compelling to the digitally disenfranchised. According to a federal survey, 60% of non-subscribers say the biggest reason they don’t have home broadband is because they don’t see the need for it.

This is a deep-seated sociological issue that we have to attack.

Part of the problem is digital literacy, which needs to be addressed through aggressive training. Stunningly, a majority of American eighth-graders lack the necessary digital skills for online learning.

But our tech and policy leaders also need to better understand why the internet is not stimulating a more compelling interest and curiosity in low income communities. We need deep-dive research to better understand the challenge and to build content and applications that speaks to the experiences, needs, imaginations of these communities.

This has been one of the great failures of the digital age.

Beyond that, we need to also provide better support for our teachers who are struggling with the transition. Seventy percent acknowledge they haven’t been adequately prepared to lead remote learning.

And we need to support parents, particularly single parents. Waterville Superintendent of Schools Eric Haley notes that families in the community are all different. One family may have a parent who works and another who stays home and is available to assist their children with assignments. Other families consist of a single parent, some who even work night shifts, with children who attend different schools. In these households, it’s impossible to expect that parents can play the role of teacher without more support for childcare, for starters.

Government agencies, tech and broadband companies, and community organizations like mine can team up to provide digital literacy training, recruit free or low-cost computers, and facilitate a home broadband connection through one of the discounted broadband programs. But that’s only a start.

We need to engage the entire community — school districts and teachers, parents, business and government leaders — to figure out not just how to get everyone online but how to keep everyone online with more relevant and compelling content, including distance learning curricula.

We need to get this process moving with a sense of urgency.

Ryan Kneeland has worked with youth in the Waterville area in several capacities over the years in the prevention, education and social service fields, including teaching, mentoring, and tutoring.