3.2 Million American Kids Are Starting School Without Internet at Home

3.2 Million American Kids Are Starting School Without Internet at Home

About 3.2 million children in the United States live in a home with no internet connection. That works out to 1 in 23 kids under 18. Most schools now assign and collect homework online, so for a student in that group, keeping up means leaving the house to find a connection. Educators have been calling this the homework gap for years. Here is what it looks like county by county.

We pulled the most recent Census data on children and home internet, table B28005 of the American Community Survey, for every county in the country. That’s more than 3,200 counties.

How we’re counting

The 3.2 million figure covers children in households with no internet subscription of any kind. The Census counts a cellphone data plan as a subscription, so families that only get online through a phone aren’t included here. That makes this number a floor. Add the phone-only households and the number of students without a connection they can realistically do schoolwork on is considerably higher.

About the Amish counties

The counties at the very top of the list all have large Amish or Old Order Mennonite communities: Holmes County, Ohio (54.8%), LaGrange County, Indiana (54.3%), Davis County, Iowa, Yates County, New York, and Adams County, Indiana. Families there are offline by choice, and it would be misleading to call that an access problem. They’re in the dataset, but we’ve left them out of the rest of this piece.

Where it hits hardest

With those counties out of the picture, the highest rates are in some of the poorest parts of the country.

Washington County, Mississippi, in the Delta, has 47% of its children living in homes with no internet. That’s more than 5,100 kids. Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, is also at 47%. Socorro County, New Mexico, rural and largely Hispanic and Native American, is at 39%.

The biggest numbers are in the biggest cities

In raw numbers, the counties with the most affected children are big urban ones. Kings County, New York, better known as Brooklyn, has 72,185 kids with no home internet, which is 12.4% of all the children in the borough. Los Angeles County has 71,770. Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, has 63,067, and Cook County (Chicago) and Maricopa County (Phoenix) come next. Broadband is available on nearly every block in these cities. The families in this count can’t afford it.

The state picture

Mississippi has the highest rate of any state at 8.1%, followed by New Mexico (7.6%), Louisiana (6.0%) and Arkansas (5.9%). New York has by far the most children affected, 254,399, almost all of them in New York City. New Hampshire (2.1%), Massachusetts (2.4%) and Connecticut (2.5%) have the lowest rates in the country.

Why it matters now

Homework moved online a long time ago. Assignments get posted to a portal. The reading is a link. College applications are online, and so are most of the forms. A kid in this count has to leave the house to do any of it, whether that means staying late at school or sitting in a library parking lot after it closes. And the counties with the highest rates are mostly the ones whose schools have the least money to do anything about it.

Methodology: Figures are 2024 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, Census table B28005 (age by presence of a computer and types of internet subscription), for children under 18. “No home internet" means children in households that reported no internet subscription of any type. County-level figures for all 3,200-plus counties are available on request.