Native American teachers, entrepreneurs seek new ways to close digital divide

Mark Sorensen and members of the Navajo-run nonprofit Protect Native Elders wheeled squeaky metal carts stacked high with boxes of digital tablets along the winding gray sidewalk toward the STAR School.

On this humid August day, the STAR School, an acronym for “Service to All Relations,” is receiving a shipment of devices for their 130 students who are now spread out across the reservation, learning virtually.

When Sorensen co-founded the school in 2001 to serve Navajo students, there were no utilities — water, power or phone — for miles.

Even now, 30 percent of families in the school lack running water at home and 60 percent have no internet connection, Sorensen said.

That has made distance learning during the pandemic extraordinarily challenging for many in the Navajo Nation.

Our challenge is how to help our parents by providing them with internet access, by providing them sometimes, actually, with the power to run those, because 30 percent of our parents actually don’t have reliable electricity either,” Sorensen said.

And in 2018, 60,000 K-12 Native students attended federally supported schools “that do not have the broadband infrastructure required for digital learning in the classroom,” according to the latest available data from the nonprofit Education Superhighway.

Bleu Adams, who is Hidatsa, Mandan and Diné (Navajo), co-founded Protect Native Elders, which helped secure the donation of tablets for the STAR School.

For Adams and Protect Native Elders, which works to deliver donations of personal protective equipment and educational devices to the Navajo Nation, a huge barrier is the reservation’s remoteness and lack of physical addresses for those living there.

But she’s working to open learning and business centers where students can have access to technology, internet and even classes.

“I think our broadband saturation here on the Navajo Nation is at 8 percent,” said Adams, whose process of building IndigeHub has been mired by red tape that is almost inherent with trying to open a business on the Navajo Nation.

At the Casa Blanca Community School, the majority of families had no devices or internet access to enable distance learning.

On the Navajo Nation, Sorensen is powering ahead with sustainable energy and on the lookout for more direct means of getting lasting resources into the community