For most Tallahatchie County families, getting a child ready for the school year means supplies and a laptop that gets online without a second thought.
For 589 children in the county, that last part isn’t a given.
According to a recent CompareInternet analysis of the latest census data, those 589 children — representing 23.6% of the county’s kids, nearly one in four, and well above both Mississippi’s 9.6% rate and the 5.1% national rate — have no internet at home.
The gap here is mostly a connection problem, not a device one.
Figures show 542 of those children live in a home that has a computer but no way to get it online, and 47 have no computer at all. Most of these families have the hardware. What is missing is service they can get or afford.
And most assignments now assume a connection. Homework gets turned in through a school portal, research starts with a search bar, and college and financial aid forms live entirely online.
For a student without a reliable connection at home, that means finding a signal somewhere else, whether at a library, a parking lot, a relative’s house, or through a parent’s phone. None of those holds up once the workload picks up.
The gap hides in plain sight. A student who falls behind because the connection dropped looks on a report card like a student who didn’t try. That is part of what makes the homework gap easy to miss and worth putting a local number on.
The problem is not dispersed evenly across Tallahatchie County. The gap tends to follow household income more than geography, so a rate that is already high countywide runs even higher in some communities.
For some families, the monthly internet bill is often the first thing cut.
