City Tries to Spread World

City tries to spread the world online

By Tara H. Arden-Smith, Globe Correspondent, 5/24/2001

In an attempt to bridge the digital divide, Boston is distributing 70 high-end computers this week to low-income families. The city will track whether the training and tools it provided helps them to get better jobs and grades.

Boston's $5 million effort, funded by grants, seeks to show how access to technology can improve the lives of poor adults and their children. As far as is known, there is no parallel to the effort in other major US cities.

The city will follow the families through a long-term study, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Darlene Harrison credits the A- she earned in her world history class at Roxbury's Madison Park High School to online research she did before taking her final exam.

Harrison, who is now 41, has gone back to high school, and is now a junior who also works full-time at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. For the past 12 weeks, she has also pursued a goal she had long thought to be a pipe dream: improving her workplace potential by joining the digital age, with her six kids in tow.

''I'm making my life better and my kids' lives better,'' she said, ''and I need to show them, not just tell them but show them, that they don't have to go through what I went through.''

Harrison heads one of 70 Boston families from six of its poorest neighborhoods who completed the technology training program. Last night, Mayor Thomas M. Menino officiated at an unusual commencement ceremony, and each family got an impressive array of graduation presents: a brand new top-of-the-line computer, cutting-edge software, a new monitor and printer, and a year of high-speed Internet access.

Harrison and daughter Lanisha, a sixth-grader who joined her in the free two-hour, twice-weekly evening program - which provided meals and child care - got their computer Monday. Together, they stayed up until midnight setting it up.

''No way is this something we ever thought we'd have,'' Harrison said. ''I know just how important it is for my kids to have it for their schoolwork, because before this class, when I was doing my own homework, I had no other way but to ask people at work to look up information for me on their computers.''

Boston's program received a $500,000 federal grant. The bulk of support came from private donors.

HiQ, a Silicon Valley-based hardware company with local headquarters in Roxbury, had already promised 1,000 new computers to the Menino-backed Boston Digital Bridge Foundation. Microsoft donated the software, Lexmark the printers, Verizon most of the Internet access.

Ed DeMore, the city official who oversees ''Technology Goes Home,'' said that benefactor interest had been piqued by Menino's 1996 State of the City address, in which he emphasized the need for better technology in public schools. ''Boston had just as big a profile as New York, LA, or Chicago,'' DeMore said, ''but much better politics to do something like this in.''

Other cities, DeMore said, were setting up programs offering limited funds, limited training, and limited promises of used computers.

''We didn't want people feeling like that's all they were worth,'' DeMore said, ''and we decided that the only way we would do this would be to make sure it happened in exactly the way we would envision as an ideal.''

This spring, the ''Technology Goes Home'' program tripled from two neighborhood technology collaboratives to six: To Codman Square and Allston-Brighton were added Lower Roxbury, Grove Hall, Mission Hill-Fenway, and Uphams Corner-Dudley.

To apply, a family's income must be below the federal poverty line; in Boston, about 20,000 households meet the criteria. In some neighborhoods, the applicant pool has outpaced supply more than 10 to 1. This spring in Codman Square, 100 families were on the waiting list before the final deadline approached.

''Boston gets it; that's what the companies out there know,'' Menino said in an interview Tuesday. ''They know we're serious about making sure our kids are able to compete.''

''And this is the real welfare reform: giving young single mothers opportunities to advance in the workplace, to move out of poverty, to have the skills to compete,'' Menino added. ''The federal government and the states talk about it, but in the end it always falls on the municipalities to make the potential.''

LaToya Washington, a 23-year-old day care assistant who received her new computer yesterday and graduated last night, says she's already hunting for a new job. She and her 13-year-old daughter, LaPorsha, have big plans for their new knowledge.

''In a couple of years, I want my family to be running our own transportation business,'' said Washington, a graduate of Hyde Park High School. ''I feel like now that's really possible, even though when I got to this class I thought the monitor was the computer and had no idea the box below was the brains.''

Washington is teaching her 7-year-old son how to use the Internet for research, and fellow graduate Luisa DosSantos, who enrolled with her 4th-grader Licinia, got a younger son so comfortable using a keyboard and mouse that he scored admission to kindergarten this fall - even though he will be just 4 in November.

''My kids are 10, 8, 3, and 2, and I knew I needed to know computers to help them with school,'' DosSantos said. ''When I first got into this program, I couldn't help them because I didn't know anything, but I feel like I can be a better mother now and make them more prepared to excel.''

Wanda Hines, coordinator of the Uphams Corner-Dudley class, estimated that about 70 percent of the families she taught are now ready to use their computers at home. ''I think most were initially lured by the idea of having a new computer at home,'' Hines said, ''but over 12 weeks the interest was really sparked, and I think they'll keep learning on their own.''

Cynthia Harris says she certainly will: She credited the class, and the computer she got with her son, Janoah, 12, for bringing them together at a time when his burgeoning adolescence was forcing them apart.

''Initially you think `free computer,' and then you change your attitude,'' said Harris, who works for an AIDS community service organization in Roxbury.