The Town of Chapel Hill, AT&T and Google are trying to get internet access into the homes of low-income residents. But just how important is broadband in the home for local students?

Brothers Job Mbaihiguimang, Moustapha Miambaye and Prosper Mbaigon crowd around a Dell laptop in their home in Chapel Hill. They’re using Google Earth to get an aerial view of the summer camp they’ll be attending in a few days.

The laptop is a new addition to their household. The boys’ mother, Berthe Mairounga, received the computer as a donation from the Kramden Institute, a Durham nonprofit that provides computers and training to people in need. Mairounga brought her four sons and two daughters to the U.S. five years ago to escape the civil war in Chad. The laptop would have been a luxury in the village where she grew up. But in her new home, a computer and a web connection are necessities for a family with school-aged children.

Darren Bell is manager of the Community Connections Program for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.

“Not only will students need to do their homework over the internet using Google documents and things like that that we have within the Chapel Hill Carrboro City School district, but it also allows the students to be able to access more resources,” Bell said.

Resources, Bell says, students need for researching papers and homework, studying for tests, and practicing math or language skills. Irene Noudjigoto is Mairounga’s second-oldest daughter. She says having a computer and internet at home has helped her improve her grades in math.

“My math teacher, she posts up a video on what you learned in class on YouTube, because she has her own YouTube channel,” Noudjigoto said.

Elodie Deneassembaye, Mairounga’s oldest daughter, says it has helped her with her language skills.

“If you’re reading a book and you don’t know a word, you can look in the dictionary on the internet, look it up and find out what the word means. I used to have a lot of trouble with that, and I read a lot of books,” Deneassembaye said.

Before her family got the laptop and training, Mairounga’s kids would miss recess or stay late after school to work on assignments they needed the internet to complete. And since the web is the main way teachers communicate with parents about assignments, grades and activities, Mairounga was often out of the loop. Now with broadband, a computer and training, she can keep tabs on her kids’ grades and help them with assignments.

“Sometimes they have homework they don’t know how to do, and every single day they come home and do their homework on the computer. And I said, ‘I need to know how to do the computer and help them,'” Mairounga said.

Mairounga is still learning how to operate a computer. But a course she took through a partnership program with Kramden and the Town of Chapel Hill brought her a long way. The town is also partnering with AT&T to bring free broadband to more than 300 public housing units in Chapel Hill. Google is getting on board as well. The tech giant announced its plans last month to bring free internet access to portions of the town’s public housing. But Darren Bell says public housing is only one piece of the puzzle.

“It’s a very very small first step,” Bell said. “Within our public housing community, I believe we have 350 students. But within the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City school district, what we look at is the number of kids who are on free-and-reduced lunch; we have over three thousand students who qualify. To really solve this problem, we have to figure out how we can grow and expand outside of the public housing community, too.”

The school district is developing a program to get broadband and laptops into every student’s home. But Bell says, without adequate funding, the process is slow-going. Meanwhile, the stakes continue to climb as the state approaches 2017, the deadline set by the legislature for all school textbooks to be digitized.

“They’re saying that it’s going to save costs and things like that. But they’re not making the provisions to be able to support all the students,” Bell said. “So now you can have situations where a student may not have access to their textbook when they get home, because they do not have internet access.”