Lake Worth free Wi-Fi is a matter of social justice

Lake Worth, smack in the middle of prosperous Palm Beach County, has a poverty rate of 32 percent. Its median household income is a modest $35,400. Its public schools tend to rate D or worse on the national ratings site schoolgrades.org.

All of which are strong arguments for the city to make internet access as available as possible.

Lake Worth’s Community Redevelopment Agency has a plan to do just that. It is pushing for free public Wi-Fi citywide, particularly in the city’s poorest areas, to help school kids get ahead.

“Kids do everything on the internet,” Joan Oliva, the CRA’s executive director, recently told the Post’s Kevin Thompson. “How do kids even do their homework when they’re not in school and they don’t have a computer, or they can’t get on the internet?”

Although the internet may seem ubiquitous to most of us by now, there are still large segments of the population on the short end of the digital divide. The Pew Research Center reported this year that 99 percent of adults with household incomes over $150,000 are using the internet. But that’s true of only 78 percent with incomes of $30,000 or less.

And while internet usage is practically universal among college graduates (96 percent), the net is used by only 61 percent of adults with no more than a high school education, Pew said.

Modern society is so deeply networked that to live outside it is a very steep obstacle to ever getting ahead. It is, as Oliva told the Post Editorial Board, a question of social justice.

That’s why, she said in an email, the CRA, which started thinking two years ago about a school-based network for the redevelopment area, now wants to cover the whole city. Its uses would be limited to doing homework, schoolwork, searching for a job — not for movies or other adult pastimes, Oliva said.

The CRA estimates that covering the entire 6.5-square mile city would cost $860,000. The city government would pay $640,000 and the CRA $220,000.

Don’t mistake free public Wi-Fi as an amenity only to help the poor. It would also be a boon to a economic development.

“A free Wi-Fi network in the city automatically creates the perception that the city is connected and technologically advanced,” Kelly Smallridge, head of the Palm Beach County Business Development Board, told the Post Editorial Board in an email.

Dozens of cities across the United States and around the world already have public internet to some extent, some going so far as to consider it as much of a civic right as clean water, sewer and electricity. The city of Delray Beach, for instance, makes free Wi-Fi available in city buildings, and its network is available across the city for municipal workers, such as building inspectors, as they do their jobs. But a short-lived program that made Wi-Fi generally available downtown foundered over vendor issues, according to the city manager’s office.

While we’d like to see internet access extended all over the county, we applaud Lake Worth for taking the first step. With city residents just having passed a $40 million bond issue for extensive road repairs, this would be the perfect time, while the streets are torn up, to lay fiber-optic cables.

And with the passage of a 10-year sales tax hike, Palm Beach County government, cities and school district all are poised to receive millions for infrastructure projects, including making schools more networked.

We have the means. It’s time to make sure all our residents can get on the information superhighway.