Schools face digital divide with Wi-Fi buses as they wait for state solutions

The lights of a Duncanville school bus flotilla lit the street at dawn just after the spring semester began.

One turned onto Fouts Avenue and parked and the others continued on their way to take the children from their homes to school.

The bus that was parked stood outside Renaissance Village Apartments for 10 hours, creating a kind of bridge between the students and their school.

It was one of several vehicles that broadcast Wi-Fi signal to neighborhoods in southern Dallas County.

“There are a lot of kids in Dallas who don’t have cable,” said Eugene O’Neil, a bus driver that parked outside another Duncanville apartment complex.

“Because of this pandemic, they need the internet for their online classes.”

Duncanville is one of many Texas school districts that have been applying makeshift solutions to bridge the digital divide.

Many schools in the state are dispatching Internet-equipped buses to the areas of their communities that have the lowest connection rates. Others extended their signal to parking lots.

And some districts, like Dallas, are installing their own cell phone towers to reinforce signal from schools to neighborhoods.

All of these are short-term solutions to help families who do not have the internet or the money to hire the service.

Texas must invest in infrastructure and plan on a large scale to really close the gaps in the long term, activists say.

Expanding access to broadband is one of Governor Greg Abbott’s five emergency priorities for this legislative session, making it more likely to be one of the few areas where lawmakers agree to spend more.

“In fields like medicine, education and business, broadband is not a luxury,” said the governor. “It is an essential tool that should be available to all Texans.”

Activists hope that Abbott’s attention to this issue will lead to strategic planning to expand broadband access.

Texas does not have a statewide plan or office overseeing such an initiative.

Children across Texas need a strong internet connection, as about 45% of public school students in the state were still taking classes from home as of Oct. 30, according to the most recent information reported by the Education Agency. of Texas (TEA).

Parking a bus outside an apartment complex for an entire school day isn’t the perfect solution, teachers say, and the signal can fail.

An apartment may be out of signal range, and the child would have to go to the parking lot to pick up a signal strong enough for a Zoom session.

“That makes it difficult for them to learn, it makes it difficult for them to keep up and do all the work that would be routine under normal circumstances,” said Duncanville Superintendent Marc Smith.

“If they can’t maintain connection and interaction with their teachers, many times we will see children disconnect.”

Education Commissioner Mike Morath told the State Board of Education meeting last month that the first phase of Operation Connectivity is “now almost complete,” and that the state and its schools have purchased 4.5 million electronic devices such as laptops, tablets and hotspots.

But Audrey Young, a board member, said gadgets aren’t always the solution.

For example, he said, the hotspot his district deployed did not work in the middle of Davy Crockett National Forest, east of Lufkin.

Morath stressed that the next two parts of the plan will be more problematic because the state will have to serve areas where there is no internet infrastructure and because of the barriers that prevent parents from subscribing where there is infrastructure.

The Governor’s Broadband Development Council, a body established by the Legislature in 2019, estimated that as of July 2020 nearly one million Texans, or about 3.4%, did not have broadband at home, and that 90 % of that group are Texans living in rural areas.

Not having broadband at home is “a problem especially for those who need to take their classes remotely, consult the doctor online or work from home, either due to the pandemic or other factors,” council members wrote to end of last year.

The council recommended that Texas institute an office and plan to push broadband in the state during the 2021 legislative session.

With both, the state could manage more federal funds to close the digital divide, according to the council.

The council determined that Texas is one of six states that do not have a state plan for that purpose.

Texas is also one of the few states that does not have a state agency or office to push broadband forward and implement a plan on a large scale, says Jennifer Harris, Connected Nation Texas program director and council member.

Rep. Charles “Doc” Anderson, a Waco Republican who has been advocating for greater access to broadband, noted that this year there are more favorable conditions for legislative action on the matter.

“I’m optimistic,” Anderson said. “The pandemic exposed this whole problem and they no longer look up when you talk about broadband.”

In the last legislative session, the House of Representatives approved a bill to create a broadband office, but the Senate never put it to a vote.

Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, introduced a measure in November to create such an office, and Harris expects more proposals to come in the next few days.

Once the state fixes the infrastructure aspect, it will continue to be difficult to overcome the barriers that prevent many families from subscribing to internet services.

The 2019 American Community Survey reported that 67.6% of Texas households subscribe to fixed broadband service, below the national average of 70.8%.

Money is often the biggest impediment, Morath acknowledged at the board of education meeting.

“Those are the most difficult problems to solve,” he said.

Andreson pointed out that an office in charge of obtaining more federal funds would solve part of the problem.

The state could use those federal resources to assist families who need financial help to subscribe, and it could open new avenues of collaboration between the public and private sectors, he said.

Until the state does something, school districts like Duncanville will continue to tailor services to students who don’t feel comfortable taking classes in person or who don’t have a stable WiFi signal at home.

–