North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

The State Library of North Carolina, in partnership with the N.C. Broadband Infrastructure Office and the Department of Public Instruction, will design and implement a model to enable North Carolina's public libraries to demonstrate the role they can play in promoting broadband access to address the K-12 homework gap in their communities. The project partners will hire a digital inclusion librarian to lead the project and partner with up to four library systems across North Carolina to provide Wi-Fi hotspots, digital literacy training, and support. The collaborators anticipate two project outcomes. The first is a toolkit outlining best practices for implementing the model to bridge the homework gap in communities across the U.S. The second is a compilation of existing digital literacy training programs curated into a set of resources. For participating K-12 households, the project seeks to encourage an understanding of the relevance of broadband and increase digital literacy skills and rate of broadband adoption.