It’s an astonishing statistic for Dallas, the headquarters of AT&T, but it’s true: About 42% of households in Dallas lack internet service.

In southern Dallas, internet speeds are slower, and there are fewer households that have it.

Sign up for our newsletter!

* indicates required

A grant from the 1Million Project will pay for 5,000 WiFi mobile hotspots for Dallas ISD high school students in southern Dallas. The students are at South Oak Cliff, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Madison, Wilmer-Hutchins and Pinkston high schools.

They can take the hotspots home with them and use them throughout their high school careers. The mobile hotspots are free to the students, and they contain security and content-blocking to protect students online.

Students living in households with no internet are at an academic disadvantage in the digital age because they have to finish their homework at school, at public libraries or McDonald’s and other places with free WiFi, and they often use cellular data to access the internet.

Marcelo Claure, executive chairman of the board of Sprint Corp., started 1Million Project in 2015, after he read that there are 5 million children in the United States who can’t properly do their homework because they can’t access the internet. The nonprofit’s goal is to provide internet access to 1 million homes. So far, they’ve done it for about 340,000 high school students in 35 states.