Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, February 9th. Here's what you need

to know today. Former President Trump's second impeachment trial begins, and how a

showdown over real estate commissions could upend the industry. But first, today's one

big thing, the widening digital gap among students.

For year into virtual schools, but the digital divide when it comes to our students still

hasn't been fixed. Consider this, 12 million students in this country don't have internet

access or the proper devices needed to do school online. Axios' tech policy reporter,

Margaret Harding McGill, has been reporting that, as some schools start to reopen for in-person

classes, there's a danger that the digital divide will again be ignored.

So Margaret, this is something people were talking about at the beginning of the pandemic.

I'm remembering images of kids outside places like McDonald's trying to use that Wi-Fi for

school. Why has this not gotten any better?

This is a really hard problem, and it was a really hard problem even before the pandemic.

The pandemic really just put a spotlight on it. It's a scramble, and each school district

is trying to figure out on their own what they need to do and how they need to connect

their kids. And internet service is also expensive, and there hasn't been up to this point.

There hasn't really been a solution on the federal level.

Do you think it's such a big problem because it involves so many different stakeholders?

Is that why it's so complicated?

I think there are a couple of different problems, and one of them is making sure you know who

has the connections and who doesn't. So one way that school districts have tried to tackle

this is by partnering with their local internet service provider, where the districts like

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