By Daryl Moore – Special to the AFRO – (www.afro.com) – “The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the challenges digitally disconnected students face like nothing else,” Student Internet Equity Coalition Founder Donna Rattley Washington told the AFRO. “With the closing of some 118,000 public and private schools across the country, a large majority of the 55 million K-12 students have had to rely on some form of online distance learning through the 2020-2021 academic school year. The country’s eyes have been opened to the reality that low-income, Black, Brown, rural and Native-American students are disproportionately disconnected from the technology they need to learn, which has devastating consequences for their academic and workforce success. The biggest difference now is that the ‘homework gap’ has turned into the ‘learning gap.’ We literally had millions of students in this country and worldwide who could not learn at all because they were not connected to the internet at home or their child didn’t have a computer.”