Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXIII): Leveling the playing field for rural K-12 students

Ever since most states send their public school kids home, numerous media outlets have renewed their attention to the digital divide.

One of the better stories I've read or heard is this one from NPR on April 24, "Even In Crisis Times, There Is A Push To Wire Rural America," reported by Kirk Siegler.  The dateline is Lockhart, Texas, population 12,698, and an excerpt follows:

As the COVID-19 crisis took hold and schools in Lockhart, Texas, had to close and shift to remote learning, the school district quickly conducted a needs assessment. 

They found that half of their 6,000 students have no high-speed Internet at home. And despite being a short drive south of Austin, a third of all the students and staff live in "dead zones," where Internet and cell service aren't even available. 

Mark Estrada is the superintendent at the Lockhart Independent School District, and the needs of his students and staff have not exactly caught him off guard.  Siegler quotes Estrada:

Students who have been historically underserved just continue to have that fate as technology becomes a bigger part of educational practices.

Siegler's report continues:

At a time when many of us are going online to do everything from work to school to shopping to health care, the COVID-19 crisis is shining a big light on the haves and have-nots when it comes to the Internet. The federal government estimates upwards of a third of all people in rural America have little or no access to the Internet, a statistic that could only worsen as the economic fallout from the pandemic continues.

Fortunately in Lockhart, Estrada and his staff were already shepherding through a plan to address this digital divide before COVID-19 hit. 

It's now being fast-tracked. 

With the help of a local Internet provider, the district is installing seven booster towers outside each of its schools. These will beam the Internet into every home that needs it across the 300-square-mile district. It will be free to families, costing the district just $30 a year per household.

A story of a less ambitious school district plan is this one, out of Elkins, Arkansas, as written about by a columnist in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.   Nevertheless, it seems this school administrator in a rural district in Washington County (which is metropolitan) was more forward thinking than most.  Elkins population is 2,648, but/and it is part of the Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Area and not far at all from the outskirts of Fayetteville, home to the University of Arkansas' flagship and land grant campus.  What this school district is doing is more common, and that is outfitting busses as hotspots and then parking them strategically to facilitate student access.  That won't work for districts whose students are more far flung, like the one I attended K-12 in Jasper, Arkansas, two counties away from Elkins, though not too far as the crow flies.  In really spatially dispersed districts covering a lot of territory, you won't be able to park busses, no matter how strategic you are, to meet all the need--unless you have a whole lot of busses. 

This bus-as-hotspot strategy reminds me that Governor Gavin Newsom announced a few weeks ago that seven busses were being outfitted as hot spots for California school students, though I don't recall him saying what district those busses would be dispatched to.

This earlier story by the New York Times, "As School Moves Online, Many Students Remain Logged Out," from April 6, 2020, is pretty urban-centric, but does briefly nod to the rural with a few paragraphs about "rural" Minford, Ohio.

In rural Minford, a town of about 700 in southern Ohio near the border with Kentucky, the district is distributing laptops as well as work packets on paper to students without internet or technology access, estimated at 25 to 30 percent of the student body by the district’s superintendent. 

Regardless of whether Minford’s students can participate in online classes or turn in work, administrators expect to promote a majority of them to the next grade, said Marin Applegate, the district’s school psychologist. “We do not feel they are in control and cannot be held accountable,” she said.

In fact, the New York Times editorial board has published two editorials about the consequences of the school shutdowns for low-income kids.  The first is from March 27, 2020, "Locked Out of the Virtual Classroom, and the second is "50 Million Kids Can't Attend School.  What Happens to Them?" published on April 16, 2020.   The latter doesn't mention rural or urban, but the former includes this information about a program that sounds like the one the Texas school district, featured in the NPR story, is using:

[FCC] Commissioner Rosenworcel’s access plan focuses on expanding the federal program known as E-Rate, which helps qualifying schools, school systems and libraries acquire broadband at up to a 90 percent discount. E-Rate program funding is based on demand, up to an annual F.C.C.-established cap of $4.15 billion. It would be a simple matter for the commission to extend the program so that schools can buy hot spots that are then distributed to needy students.

But given the dire need in poor and rural communities, it would also be right to leverage E-Rate — or something like it — to bring permanent broadband into homes for millions of internet-deprived schoolchildren and subsistence workers.

Finally closing the digital divide — and bringing all Americans into the information age — will require a momentous effort on the scale of the federal project that brought electricity to darkened regions of the country during the New Deal. And it will be similarly worth the effort.

In any event, all of these tales of scrambling to supply students with broadband reflect poorly on federal priorities, which have failed to connect the nation--all of the nation--to broadband.  Coronavirus has cast into even sharper relief the digital divide, the rift between the "haves" and the "have nots." It's also reminding us that many of the "have nots" are rural.