How In-Home Connectivity Is Shrinking the Digital Divide in K–12

Managing Device Deployment at Scale

What does it take to oversee such a large device deployment? Sixteen EBR Schools high schools were part of the initial 11,500-Chromebook rollout. The district worked with a local vendor that managed installing the T-Mobile SIM cards into the devices after they shipped from CDW. The process went school by school, with devices shipped to a staging warehouse before being delivered by Jamison’s team to individual schools.

“I had the first school’s devices shipped to me,” says Jamison.

“We received and connected them, we checked to make sure that all connectivity was active and working correctly, and we did that with each device, each pallet, before it shipped out to the school. It was very structured and required a lot of coordination. But once we had our system down, it worked.”

For other districts looking to improve digital equity among their students, Jamison says to think through what an ongoing, sustainable deployment would look like, then work toward that as a goal.

 “You definitely need to be detail-oriented. You also need to have a sustainable plan,” Jamison explains. “You don’t want to do it for one year, and then the next year you can’t afford it.”

Click the banner below to see how schools are integrating artificial intelligence into workflows.

Educator preparation is another area where districts can get ahead of digital equity challenges.

“We need to be preparing future­educators and administrators to identify and address digital divide barriers, including affordable broadband, in-home and at school,” says Robert McLaughlin, executive director for the National Collaborative for Digital Equity.

“We also need to be training educators to determine their students’ home access status without fatally embarrassing them,” he says. “This is an indirect contributor to the digital divide.”

Building a Free Mesh Network in East San Jose, Calif.

East Side Union High School District, located in East San Jose, Calif., serves more than 24,000 students across 19 high schools. Despite its proximity to Silicon Valley, the district faces the same digital divide challenges as other school districts.

To address the lack of at-home ­connectivity among the economically disadvantaged students in the district, ESUHSD came up with a radical idea: Build a mesh network that would extend the district network and deliver free Wi-Fi access to the student neighborhoods where it was most needed.

“Our goal was to provide Wi-Fi for our financially impacted students,” says Randy Phelps, CTO for ESUHSD. “We began designing with the city’s engineers and a wireless integrator and quickly determined a mesh network would be best. The mesh network worked with the city network — using the power poles, light poles, buildings, you name it — and connected where we have fiber connections.”

DIG DEEPER: Strong lifecycle management plans support one-to-one success.

The district had a strong and effective one-to-one program in place. But Phelps understood that in-home connectivity was needed to deliver ­equitable ­educational value to all of its students. Phelps and his team focused their efforts on extending Wi-Fi access into eight economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, starting with the James Lick neighborhood, which presented the most geographic and technical challenges.

“We had to solve every single engineering problem there,” Phelps says. “But once we got those solved, the rest of the neighborhoods would be easy. We got it done in about eight months.”

The district’s creative approach to financing the mesh network allowed the project to move forward quickly. The district passed a technology-only bond with 77% approval among voters. This financing, along with a strong relationship with T-Mobile and a $1 million grant from Sprint, provided the initial support to begin. Since then, ESUHSD has continued to win public support for technology-supporting bonds.

“We built the network so we could sustain it for 12 years, initially,” Phelps says. “Then, two years ago, we passed a bond extension. Our community Wi-Fi is safe until around 2040 now. That bond also pays for our student machines, our teacher machines and lots of our software. We can offer all kinds of great programs that we could not if we were just relying on general fund dollars.”

EXPLORE: Strategically optimize your device ecosystem.

Phelps’ advice for his educational technology peers is to not be afraid to tackle big projects and to always keep the end goal in mind.

“You’re providing something as valuable as water and power,” he says. “If students are not on the internet, they are not living in the same world as everyone else. To have a real device where you have access to your schoolwork and you can work whenever you want to — students learn new things. That’s our motivation.”

Murray City Schools Solves the Challenge of In-Home Connectivity

When Jason Eyre, technology coordinator for Murray City School District, joined the district, he was already ­thinking about a problem that many one-to-one device programs face: how to support in-home learning. He recognized that there was a digital equity challenge in the district, which serves 6,000 students in Salt Lake County, Utah. Many of the students come from low-income households or large families with crowded Wi-Fi networks.

“There were a lot of students that were struggling economically, and one of the decisions they had to make was whether they had internet at their house or not,” explains Eyre. “Although we have a variety of internet providers here, the pricing really wasn’t affordable. That economic barrier was what started this journey for us.”

His previous district was a more rural area with poor access to bandwidth, and he had been exploring a newly available technology — Citizens Broadband Radio Service — to set up a private cellular LTE network for that district. Digging further into the challenges at MCSD, Eyre determined that CBRS might help address the in-house Wi-Fi access needs of impacted students.

“We modeled our district to see where our low-income students were, and then we superimposed them with our families with a large density of students per household,” explains Eyre. “As we rolled out the network, we triaged and focused on the intersection of those two variables, delivering some relief to those that needed it most.”

Once the radio transmitters were set up around the district with help from the local government, families were provided Cradlepoint routers that allowed students to access the cellular network at home.

“We preconfigured the gateways so they only work with the students’ issued Chromebooks, so we’re not providing internet services into their home,” says Eyre. “We’re just providing a connection that’s filtered, like at school. It follows all of the same rules and only allows connections to the Chromebooks that we sent home.”

While student in-home access is top of mind, a parental digital presence can also have an outsize positive impact on student behavior. “Those parents who are able to engage digitally with the school system are going to become more confident and more proactive,” explains McLaughlin. “They become more effective in supporting their kids in being safe and smart online, and that’s crucial for supporting students struggling to connect at home.”

MCSD took advantage of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to cover some of the initial expenses, such as setting up the cellular transmitters around the district. The operational expenses for the LTE cellular network delivering Wi-Fi for in-home use are manageable.

“The ongoing costs include the technology that allocates the spectrum, the CBRS licenses, and we have about 28 radios we support,” says Eyre. “Our monthly costs for all of this are less than $300 a month. This allows us to support access for 40 school buses, 25 to 30 families and about 120 Chromebooks. That’s pennies per device versus the cost of a typical hotspot configuration. For all we get out of it, it’s a smart investment.”