In January 2021, Nevada officials made an announcement that felt almost too good to be true. Every K-12 student learning remotely in the state, they said, now had a computer and an internet connection at home. For anyone who had spent the pandemic watching children crouch outside libraries with laptops balanced on their knees, or parents driving to fast-food parking lots to steal a signal for an online class, it was more than a headline. It was a lifeline. The announcement was the result of Connecting Kids Nevada, a public-private coalition created under Governor Steve Sisolak’s COVID-19 Task Force. At the start, the coalition could not even confirm whether more than 120,000 students had any real connection to the internet. A few months later, it was declaring 100 percent coverage across Nevada’s 17 school districts and public charter schools. The scale of the challenge was staggering. Nevada is a huge, rural, and economically diverse state, and the pandemic exposed every crack in its digital foundation. School districts scrambled to distribute devices, teachers learned new platforms overnight, and families who had never needed home broadband suddenly found it essential. In the chaos, the coalition did something that had never been done before: it treated internet access as a public health issue, not a luxury. It coordinated with schools, internet providers, philanthropies, and local governments. It built systems to identify students who had simply vanished from virtual classrooms. And it did all of this while the world was still figuring out how to cope with a once-in-a-century crisis. National observers praised the effort as a boots-on-the-ground success in the fight to close the digital divide. By any fair measure, it was an impressive emergency response. But for the families who lived through it, the real story was not in the press release. It was in the late-night calls to support centers, the knock on the door from a field agent looking for a student who had fallen off the grid, and the sudden, quiet relief of a child who could finally raise a hand in a virtual classroom instead of disappearing from the roster. The victory was real, but it was also fragile—an emergency fix built in an emergency, held together by grants, goodwill, and people working overtime. It raised a question that would linger long after the pandemic faded: what does it actually mean to be connected? Not just to have a wire in the ground, but to be able to stay online, to afford the bill, to know how to use the tools, and to have a connection that lasts.
The effort behind that announcement was substantial, and it deserves to be remembered honestly. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford worked with T-Mobile’s Project 10Million to secure roughly 18,000 hotspots for students who had no other way online. In Clark County, which is home to about three-quarters of Nevada’s public school students, a virtual family support center took more than 45,000 calls from parents and guardians trying to get their children connected. Field agents went door to door, not to check boxes but to find students who had simply vanished from the system—kids whose families had moved, lost their jobs, or did not know help existed. It was, in large part, a Las Vegas story, and it showed what could happen when government, business, schools, and community organizations decided to move with urgency. The infrastructure picture has improved dramatically since then. According to UNLV’s Data Hub, by 2021 only about 1.4 percent of Clark County households lacked access to reliable broadband infrastructure. That improvement was driven by years of federal investment, and it continues through 2026, including Nevada’s share of the $416 million the state received through the federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. On paper, the infrastructure gap has narrowed to a sliver. But anyone who has ever stared at a bill and wondered whether they can keep the lights on knows that a broadband line running past your house is not the same as being able to afford it. The cable may be in the ground, the fiber may be on the pole, but if the monthly price is out of reach, the connection might as well not exist. The pandemic made that painfully clear. Families who had never subscribed to home internet were suddenly expected to be always online, always available, always ready for a video call or a downloaded assignment. The infrastructure was there, but the ability to use it was not. And that gap, once exposed, did not go away when the emergency ended.
That distinction matters more than ever. Nevada’s 2024 Statewide Digital Equity Plan identified affordability as one of the biggest barriers to broadband access. The survey behind that plan found that 64 percent of respondents were spending more than $75 a month on internet service. Even among low-income households, 54 percent reported spending more than $75 a month. Those numbers may not sound dramatic until you consider what $75 means to a family living paycheck to paycheck. It can mean choosing between a reliable connection and groceries, between a laptop payment and a prescription. The same divide shows up nationally. Pew Research Center found that only 57 percent of adults in households earning less than $30,000 a year subscribe to broadband at home, compared with 95 percent of adults in households earning at least $100,000. That is not a small gap. It is a canyon. We have made real progress on the infrastructure side, and that progress should not be dismissed. But we still have an affordability gap and an adoption gap, and for students those gaps quickly become an education gap. Research shows that students without reliable home internet are less likely to complete their homework. Students with no home internet, slow connections, or only a cellphone to work from tend to have lower digital skills. Even after researchers accounted for socioeconomic status and other factors, those students earned roughly half a letter grade lower than students with fast home internet. A hotspot can get a student online tonight. A broadband line can make a house address look connected on a map. But neither guarantees that the connection will be affordable next month, reliable during a storm, or sustainable after the grant runs out. The technology is only the beginning; the real work is making sure families can stay connected.
There are signs that Nevada is beginning to wrestle with this affordability problem, but they also reveal how fragile the progress can be. In early 2025, Clark County received $10.7 million to promote enrollment in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program in high-need communities. The county brought together community organizations, workforce programs, and county agencies to prepare for implementation. Its broader plan envisioned more than 20 partners providing services that went beyond a discount on a bill: device distribution, technical support, digital literacy programs, and help navigating the enrollment process. That kind of ecosystem is exactly what a real digital equity strategy looks like. It recognizes that access is not just a wire; it is a web of support. It means having someone who can explain the application form in your language, someone who can show you how to set up the device, someone who can help when the connection drops. But then the program ended when its grant did. The Affordable Connectivity Program itself ran out of funding, and Clark County was left to find other ways to pay for promoting broadband adoption. This is the pattern that keeps repeating across the country: a burst of energy, a splash of funding, a few heartwarming stories, and then the money fades and the problem quietly returns. Temporary funding can expand access in the moment. It can connect a child for a school year. But it cannot guarantee that a family will be able to afford and maintain broadband service over the long term. It cannot promise that the device will still work in two years, or that a parent will have the digital skills to help a child navigate an online assignment. When the grant ends, the support ends, and the families who needed it most are often the ones who never had the time or the voice to demand that it continue.
If Nevada is serious about closing the digital divide, it needs to change how it measures success. The goal cannot be simply whether high-speed internet reaches a family’s home. It has to be whether that family can afford the monthly bill, whether the children have reliable devices and the skills to use them, and whether those connections last after temporary funding disappears. That means publicly tracking affordability and adoption alongside infrastructure. It means asking families—not just school districts—whether the programs actually reached them and whether the help was enough. It means planning for sustainability before the grant money runs out, not scrambling for a new grant after the old one is gone. This is not an abstract policy point for me. I grew up around families like the ones in Clark County who are still struggling to stay connected. I now work alongside them. They are parents who work multiple jobs, who may not speak English fluently, who do not have the time or the institutional access to advocate loudly for themselves when a program’s benefits quietly stop reaching them. They are not going to show up at a public hearing and demand an accounting. They are going to assume that if the help disappears, it was never meant for them. They deserve more than another declaration that the divide has been closed. They deserve an honest accounting of who is actually connected and who can afford to stay that way. They deserve to be asked, and listened to, and believed. A map of broadband lines cannot tell you whether a child is doing homework on a phone propped up against a cereal box. A press release cannot tell you whether a mother is choosing between an internet bill and a doctor’s visit. Only the families themselves can tell you that, and only if someone takes the time to ask.
Unfortunately, Nevada’s track record on follow-through with digital equity is thin. We announced victory once already, in a press release, without ever taking a rigorous look at what “100 percent connectivity” actually meant for learning outcomes in the years that followed. Did those students graduate at higher rates? Did they complete more homework? Did they feel less anxious about falling behind? We don’t really know, because we didn’t ask. The dramatic difference in broadband subscription rates based on income tells us plainly that infrastructure access alone was never going to be the whole fix. If it were, the gap would have closed when the lines were laid. But we have a chance to do this differently. Nevada’s ongoing broadband investments and new education pilots are still young enough to be shaped by real accountability instead of by another press release proclaiming success. That means funding evaluation alongside implementation, not treating it as an afterthought. It means asking families, not just school districts, whether the help reached them and whether it was enough. It means being willing to say publicly when something is not working, instead of waiting for a pandemic to force our hand again. I studied the Connecting Kids Nevada initiative as part of my graduate work on global technology and development, and I have seen how easy it is for well-intentioned programs to become stories we tell ourselves instead of systems we build for the long run. The families I know do not need a miracle. They need consistency. They need a system that shows up, that stays, and that tells the truth. The internet is not a luxury anymore; it is the classroom, the library, the job application, the doctor’s office, the connection to everything else. If we are going to declare the divide closed, we need to be ready to prove it—not with a map of broadband lines, but with the lived experience of the families who depend on them. That is the only kind of victory that will last.