Access granted
Community Wifi Project connects Lindsay learners at home
Over the years Lindsay Unified School District has worked to bring all learners, parents and guardians in their district internet service at all times, and one of their recent projects has connected more student families in their community than ever before.
The “Community Wifi Project” is able to provide over 1,200 homes with wifi services in the City of Lindsay. LUSD is a one-onone school district, meaning all students receive a device and get to take it home.
“We had all of the amazing tools and curriculum resources for students and many online curriculum subscriptions, but we didn’t have one key indicator,” said Nikolaus Namba, director of 21st century learning at LUSD. “We had parents come to us saying they didn’t have the money to pay for internet in their homes.”
The project was first started because LUSD staff started to notice lots of students hanging outside the fences after school trying to connect to the internet to access the content they needed to.
The district worked with the City to get strategic access to public properties in the city to get install internet towers.
“We have been creative and used existing resources in our district that we already had, from providing one-on-one devices for students to being able to also provide them with internet at school and at their homes as well,” said Peter Sonksen, network administrator. “To this date we have pretty much 100% capability of delivering internet services to our learners in the city.”
LUSD is able to provide devices for each of the more than 4,300 learners at the district, therefore they have installed LTE networks as well as wireless point to point solutions with nine towers around the city.
The district made sure the internet provided to students is filtered just like at schools to make sure they are only accessing safe networks. “I as well benefit from the proj-
ect, and I use it as a quality assurance that my kids aren't able to get to certain places of the internet I don't want them to,” said Sonksen, whose children attend LUSD schools.
The internet service is not just for the learners as it is also intended for parents and guardians to be able to have access the internet to view online progress. With the amount of homes being covered with internet,
the district has to also worry about maintenance to all of the installations. Therefore, LUSD has their own technician who specifically focuses on the community wifi.
LUSD has not asked parents for any type of fees for the service. Parents can apply at the district office and get a waiver signed to get the service.
“The only fee homes have is the tiny cost amount of powering the equipment,” said Sonksen.
“The community response has been great. We have a lot of migrant
families that haven't been exposed to the level of technology that we are asking their kids to use,” said Namba. “We have families come say they are happy the service is being offered.”
LUSD not only offers a device for each student, but they are making sure they provide the learners will all the resources needed when it comes to being able to access their materials
and resources needed all day long.
“We want to stay ahead of our need,” explained Sonksen as he remembered the beginning of the project and their internet expectations. “It's a system that is going to grow and evolve.”
Namba said the next steps are to ask local businesses, which are hubs for learners, if they can set up internet hotspots for learners
at parks, community centers and Mcdermont Field House.
“We will continue to have it as an internal ongoing project for our school district,” said Namba. “We will maintain it indefinitely at the moment.”
Namba said the district understands that many learners from LUSD schools come from lowincome families, and that is one of the reasons
they started the project to appropriate resources by pushing the boundaries to help families and learners in need.
“Our learners are our priority and we know internet is an essential need,” said Namba. “We have so much access to our content online and we are now able to provide 24/7 learning access for our all of our learners.”