Digital connectivity still out of reach for some Spanish-speaking families in LCPS
This story was published in partnership with the Southern New Mexico Journalism Collaborative.
Despite an extensive outreach campaign during the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown, the Las Cruces Public Schools has not been able to provide high-speed, at-home internet to some of its most vulnerable families because they faced language barriers, fears of immigration raids, and – for those who wanted to participate — a confusing process that kept them from applying.
“(LCPS) told me that I could get the internet for free because we were low-income,” said mobile home resident Maribel Cruz in an interview. “But I don’t have the phone number to call, and I’m not sure who to talk to.”
Continued Cruz: “I tried to get onto the internet, but I wasn't sure what to do exactly. And I did not want to put in any information about myself, because I was not sure if I was on the right site, so I just stopped.”
Cruz is a Spanish speaker with a high-school-aged son, and she has lived in the Las Cruces mobile home park for more than 20 years. She said she has asked an English-speaking relative to assist with her internet inquiries but has not heard back from that relative.
LCPS does have an outreach program to Spanish-speaking families, but some may not be aware of it or connecting to it.
Student: ‘They stay away from it’
Several high school students visiting Apodaca Park in Las Cruces said their parents were hesitant to provide information — names and addresses — on any internet site because of concerns that other family members might be tracked online by immigration officials.
“Anything that has to do with the government, they stay away from it,” said 17-year-old Gabriella, who declined to give her last name because of concerns related to the family’s immigration status. “I use my uncle’s internet, and it works fine for school.”
Santiago, among the group of five students at the park, also said his mother did not want any information about the family provided to anyone outside of the school district. “We used to use my dad’s information, but they divorced,” he said, adding that his father has since moved out of Las Cruces.
The students also said they were able to check out computers from their school — Las Cruces High — but that often their phones had a better internet signal.
Fear about possible deportation among families with undocumented or mixed immigration status has posed a challenge for local schools previously. In February 2017, an ICE raid that took place under the President Donald Trump administration was carried out in a Las Cruces mobile home park, sparking widespread worry among immigrants of possible further enforcement activities. That led to significant absences within LCPS in the days afterward, as parents kept students home over concerns about possible deportations, even though the arrests in question didn’t take place at, or even involve, school grounds or property.
Seeking to reassure migrants, the LCPS board passed two measures in the weeks afterward aiming to protect families from immigration enforcement measures involving the schools. Those include requiring schools to not ask families about their immigration status and to not provide any known information about it to federal authorities, unless they have a search warrant.
Landlord hits dead-end seeking internet for tenants
New Mexico is among the worst-performing states for internet access for students, according to one study, which reported that the state has the sixth-highest proportion of K-12 students living in areas where no broadband internet is available.
A 2022 study in Doña Ana County found that one hurdle to families' connectivity was landlords opposing holes being drilled in building walls for internet-related wiring. But not all landlords resist those efforts.
Jimmy Michael is the owner of a mobile home park in Las Cruces — the old “El Patio No. 2” at the corner of Alameda Boulevard and Three Crosses Avenue. He told the Southern New Mexico Journalism Collaborative that he tried hard to get information on programs he could tap into so he could connect the park to low-cost internet for low-income residents living there, some of whom have school-aged children.
He said he was willing to pay for the installation if a government or school program could assist with monthly bills for the residents. But he said he gave up after not being able to find anyone who could address his questions.
“I was hoping they could set up like a tower, or whatever else they could do, so that people here could have the internet, but I never could find anybody to get any answers,” he said, adding that he visited local internet provider storefronts to inquire about options.
“You don't have a lot of local representation here, from these companies,” he said. “Before, you used to be able to go into a store like Comcast or Xfinity, and just walk in there and you could talk to someone who could give you answers. But now they just pass you on to an 800 number, and you call that and of course you get nowhere.”
Comcast Xfinity is a major cable TV and internet provider in the Las Cruces area.
Local residents, particularly rural and low-income families, face plenty of challenges to getting online, including lacking the means to pay for internet, according to a 2022 study by the New Mexico Department of Information Technology and the Doña Ana Broadband coalition.
But internet access is increasingly recognized as an important aspect of racial and economic equity. Public school districts in New Mexico are required by a landmark case, the 2021 Martinez-Yazzie consolidated lawsuit, to “immediately provide at-risk students in 23 New Mexico school districts with digital devices and internet access needed to learn remotely.” This includes the Las Cruces Public Schools district.
At the pandemic’s start, LCPS district officials found that about 2,200 addresses in LCPS communities did not have access to the internet at the onset of the pandemic. That count excluded those with cell phone internet, said Josh Silver, the district’s chief technology officer.
Most LCPS students are believed to have some form of high-speed internet at home, thanks to the influx of federal funding and the district’s large-scale efforts to get families connected at the onset of the pandemic, LCPS officials said. Many families are accessing free internet as the result of a low-cost subscription program offered by Comcast Xfinity that’s paired with a federal subsidy known as the Affordable Connectivity Program.
Aside from the Comcast program, some 230 students in the district are using mobile hot spots, an easily deployable technology used by school districts across the nation to help students connect online from home.
The number of hot spots checked out to students is generally interpreted by the district as meaning that a student does not otherwise have high-speed internet at home, Silver said.
But he acknowledged there may still be students lacking high-speed internet, only because they have not notified the district about their lack of connectivity at home.
Mother of two: Process unclear
Maria Panyagua, a low-income resident who has two elementary-aged children, said she also experienced difficulty trying to qualify for the free or reduced-cost internet programs available through LCPS.
Panyagua — who was sitting with her husband, Juan Manuel Mancera, as they watched their two sons and a group of children playing in a Las Cruces park near Three Crosses Avenue — said her family tried to take advantage of the LCPS program for reduced or free internet. But, she said, she encountered too many obstacles and stopped trying to register.
“It's very hard to use the program to qualify. They said that I didn't have something that I needed. And I needed to fill something out on the internet, but I'm not sure what it was,” she said in Spanish.
Eventually, someone visited her home to talk to her about the internet program, but that conversation did not get far, she said, because the man only spoke English. Her son was the one who spoke with the man, who she believes was from an internet company. The only thing she could say definitively about that conversation was: “We didn't qualify, and I don't know for what reason.”
“We do have internet now,” she said. “But we're paying for it. We're not part of that program, and I'm not sure why not. And we needed it for our sons because they needed it for school.”
LCPS, the second-largest district in the state, has an enrollment of nearly 24,000 students. This necessitated an ambitious campaign to address students’ internet needs when they were confined to at-home learning, thanks to a pandemic lockdown that started in March 2020. Students have since returned to in-person classes, but access to high-speed internet is still viewed as a necessity for schooling.
Disconnected, at-risk students face steeper challenges
Even with the extra efforts to connect students digitally, challenges to students’ education remain. The pandemic’s interruption of student learning might have a big impact on students’ future success, according to a Stanford University economic study reported in The Hill, a news site dedicated to coverage of the U.S. Congress, the presidency and the executive branch of the U.S. government. The report is looking at students broadly and is not focused upon minority students exclusively.
“Children’s learning loss during the pandemic could reduce their lifetime earnings by $70,000,” reported the article.
Still, Eric Hanushek, a researcher involved with the study, wrote in a separate article that at-risk students will face an even steeper obstacle from the pandemic interruption of education.
“The economic losses will be more deeply felt by disadvantaged students,” he stated in a Stanford University publication, “The Economic Impacts of Learning Losses.”
“All indications are that students whose families are less able to support out-of-school learning will face larger learning losses than their more advantaged peers, which in turn will translate into deeper losses of lifetime earnings,” he wrote.
A lack of internet, particularly during the school shut-down, has been linked to poorer academic performance. As noted by the National Center for Education Statistics, “students who do not have access to the internet at home may be at risk for negative academic outcomes.”
A New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee report on the pandemic’s impact on learning found that the pandemic is “potentially widening the existing achievement gap and setting New Mexico’s children even further behind academic norms.”
“Only 31 percent of New Mexico elementary school students are now learning at grade level,” stated the report, “compared to about 37 percent pre-pandemic.”
Schooldigger.com, a website that crunches each state’s Department of Education performance data, shows that the academic performance of LCPS has fallen from a recent high in 2015 of ranking better than 59.6 percent of the state’s other districts, to a 2019 low of 36.2 percent. The data from 2022 shows LCPS had a slight increase to an academic performance better than 39.6 percent of the state’s other districts.
‘Beyond difficult’
Cheryl Carreon — a retired LCPS educator who serves in a number of state and national education roles, including a liaison position with the New Mexico Public Education Department’s Ed Fellows initiative — said she believes LCPS made every effort it could to reach disadvantaged populations.
But with the state’s history of ranking “highest in the nation of at-poverty level students,” the task to reach all students was “beyond difficult.” She contended teachers’ pay should have been boosted before the pandemic, but district officials were hampered by limited state funding.
“I think the district did the best that they knew how to do,” she said.
Carreon said families’ resource inequities make student needs greater than in other states, posing challenges for students and teachers alike.
Reaching Southern New Mexico’s at-risk students means increasing funding for schools and teachers, recruiting more teachers familiar with the backgrounds of language-challenged students, she said.
“We need to recruit teachers that represent the kids they teach,” she said. “So having bilingual teachers is critical. But it’s hard to do that when you don't even have enough teachers.”
The state has recognized the need for more funding, Carreon said, adding that she was encouraged by statements from New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham who “has spoken in support” of increasing the state’s financial investment in educators.
At the federal level, two grants totaling about $5.7 million have recently been awarded to New Mexico “for broadband infrastructure and digital equity programs to help connect families to affordable, resilient, and secure broadband across New Mexico,” according to a Jan. 10 press statement from U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-New Mexico.
Aside from the funding issues, Carreon said she believes that a stronger effort is needed to understand the deep issues that affect the lives of poorer New Mexican students. Those obstacles have always been present in the state, she said. She recalled an incident with a young student early in her teaching career.
“Many years ago, I was student-teaching in Mesquite. A little boy wanted to check out a book, and it had an audio cassette,” she recalled. “I asked if he had a cassette player at home, and he said, ‘Miss, we don’t have any lights.’ That was a learning moment for me. We make a lot of assumptions every day, from a position of privilege.”
District resources for Spanish speakers
LCPS officials from the district’s Bilingual Education, Translation, Interpretation and Community Outreach division (BETICO) “are not aware of any families having difficulty” accessing district information on internet assistance, Jameson said.
For those families who are having trouble, Jameson said their best option is to reach out directly to their child’s school administration.
“All schools know to reach out to the BETICO team if a family needs assistance to set up any community support, like internet access,” she said.
LCPS offers an information hotline staffed with bilingual speakers. That number is 575-202-0802.
When called after business hours, the number did not feature a recorded message — either in English or Spanish — assuring callers that they in fact reached the district’s hotline. It did offer an opportunity to leave a voicemail.
Additionally, the school has a bilingual community outreach webpage at https://www.lcps.net/page/parent-outreach and a Spanish-language webpage with information on school services, including internet assistance. That web address is: https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_file/2256/LCPS/2303487/DIRECTORIO_DE_APOYO_FAMILIAR_Y_COMUNITARIO_RECURSOS-1.pdf.
Reyes Mata III is a freelance journalist working with the Southern New Mexico Journalism Collaborative to cover COVID-19 and pandemic recovery from a solutions-reporting lens.
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This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Internet access still out of reach for some Spanish-speakers in LCPS
