The next step was getting hotspots. At that time, Sprint launched its 1Million Project Foundation, trying to get hotspots to students who need connectivity. We applied, and received hotspots starting in 2017. Sprint provides us about 375 devices a year.
That was great for our high schools, but we didn’t have support for middle school students. Fortunately, we found another partner through the Kajeet Homework Gap Grant. We have to purchase hotspots, but Kajeet gives us an aggressive discount. With Kajeet, we have about 150 for our middle schools.
If we had more hotspots, could we use them? Probably. It is challenging to identify all the high school students who needs the support. We don’t want the message to be that we are providing hotspots only to our poor kids. But if parents are challenged socioeconomically, students struggle with that too. We have to work hard to reduce the stigma. We’ve had assemblies in school and told students about this great opportunity with the hotspots.
EDTECH: What’s next on your digital-equity roadmap?
Langford: Continued community outreach and raising awareness of the digital-equity issues and how they can help. That never ends. Our digital-equity group is having other equity discussions and asking, are there differences by school in how teachers are using or not using technology? What kind of professional development do we need to put in place to make sure students are getting a consistent educational experience?
For example, you can’t go to college now without using a learning management system. In college, you do everything through a portal. We have some schools that are all in: 100 percent of teachers are using the LMS. But, say most teachers in another high school are not using it; then we’re not preparing all students in that high school for the college experience. That relates to teacher practice, training and comfort level, and support as they use those tools.
We’ve also started analyzing data around discipline incidents related to technology misuse, such as cyberbullying and inappropriate communication. Do we see differences connected to race, ethnicity or gender? What does it look like at each high school? We are just beginning the discovery process, and that data can inform professional development needs.