A teenager on Chicago’s West Side sits at the kitchen table most weeknights, laptop open, finishing a reading assignment before a parent gets home from a second shift. None of that homework gets done without a home internet connection, and until a few years ago, that connection was far from guaranteed. The Chicago Connected program has kept it running since 2020, and this fall the city just made sure it isn’t going anywhere.
Mayor Brandon Johnson announced that Chicago and Chicago Public Schools will fully fund the Chicago Connected program for the 2026-27 school year, covering free home internet for roughly 28,000 students. The city and district now shoulder the entire cost themselves, after years of splitting it with internet providers and community organizations who helped launch the effort during pandemic-era remote learning.
The Chicago Connected Program Goes From Emergency Fix to Permanent Fixture
Chicago Connected started as a stopgap. Schools shut their doors in 2020, kids needed to log on from home, and thousands of CPS families simply didn’t have a reliable way to do it. Six years later, the program has reached more than 60,000 students total, and city officials decided the need never really went away, it just stopped making headlines.
That decision comes with a price tag: about $2 million a year, funded in part by savings the city found elsewhere, including a shift to cloud-based IT systems that trimmed technology costs across CPS. Johnson framed the choice in plain terms, saying that making sure young people have Wi-Fi access is critical to their development.
The South and West Sides See the Biggest Gains
Ninety-three percent of the families in Chicago Connected qualify as economically disadvantaged, and the sharpest improvements in home connectivity have landed in roughly 20 community areas concentrated on the South and West Sides. Those are the same neighborhoods where community solar savings have started reaching residents, and pairing cheaper power with free internet gives working families two fewer bills to juggle.
For a parent managing a tight budget, that math matters. A laptop only helps if there’s a signal to connect it to, and $2 million spread citywide costs far less than 28,000 separate internet bills would run families who often can’t absorb them.
More Than Homework
Families in the program don’t only use the connection for schoolwork. CPS surveys found parents relying on their home internet to email teachers, search for jobs, and simply keep in touch with their kids during the day, turning a school subsidy into something closer to a household utility. It functions as a safety net, too. A parent who can text a teenager after school or check in through a shared app gets a small dose of peace of mind that has nothing to do with grades.
That everyday usefulness lines up with what other Chicago-area programs need. Tools like Edia’s AI attendance alerts depend on families having steady internet access just to reach parents in the first place, so Chicago Connected quietly props up other digital tools the district already relies on.
Chicago isn’t alone in wrestling with this problem, but few cities have committed to picking up the full bill themselves. For 28,000 students and their families, that commitment means one less thing standing between a school assignment and a finished one. WBEZ first reported the funding extension, noting that the shift keeps a pandemic-era lifeline alive well past the emergency that created it.