In an effort to narrow the so-called “homework gap,” telecom company Sprint is giving out tablets, mobile devices and internet hotspots to students across the country. On Monday, a big batch of tablets came to the Tolleson Union High School District.
Eight hundred tablets arrived with built-in internet hotspots.
The upshot is that students at Westview and Copper Canyon high schools can now more easily do their homework when they’re not at school. The Pew Research Center estimates 5 million households with children in school don’t have high-speed internet.
Paiman Matin is a freshman at Copper Canyon and originally from Afghanistan. He said this will help him learn English with an online program called Language! Live.
“Language! Live is just an application for who’s a freshman and who doesn’t know English at all,” he said. Before now, Matin had to borrow his father’s phone to get online at home.
In addition to the tablets, Sprint will provide an internet connection for up to four years. Each tablet gets three gigabytes a month of high-speed data for free. If the student exceeds that, there will be unlimited free service at a lower speed.
Applications are open for other schools to get a piece of the company’s 1Million Project. Other Arizona districts that have won are Phoenix Union High School and Flowing Wells Unified School District.
