It's not just individual households. There are whole school communities predominantly comprised of households like this.

It's been challenging even for the IT departments of technologically advanced companies to adapt to a remote workforce, so schools serving poor communities face daunting obstacles to continuity of education at the moment.

This problem is exacerbated by the existing digital divide.

As an example, I serve on the technology volunteer committee of a public school at which less than 5% of children are technically classified as being in poverty, yet the school had to lend out computers to 20% of the students. The lending program was managed by our volunteer committee so the administration and teachers could focus on ramping up the distance learning program curriculum.

So our school is one of the lucky ones. However, in the same area there are schools where 95% of the students are in poverty, and they have no volunteer committees to help solve these problems, therefore it is left to the already overstretched staff. Some of these schools actually have computers they could lend, but no community knowlege capital to draw upon to organize adapt to the situation.

Where I live, the school district sent equipment home for kids to use if they didn't have anything else. They fully expect to not receive a certain percentage back.

Isn't this a good thing though? I have friends with two middle school children and a $2mil house and they have one laptop to share. It works great and they aren't addicted to screens.

They have to take turns or share or use cheap phones?

Before industrialized schooling, mixed age classrooms were the norm.

Have you considered that maybe the implicit social planning idea here is "these folks really don't need to know about calculus"? All this reminds me of throwing babies and books on top of electrified floors in Brave New World ..