San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
REMOTE AREAS LACK ONLINE ACCESS
County school leaders work to set up hotspots, satellite links for students
Weeks into the new school year, San Diego County school leaders are working to get online access to thousands of students whose families lack reliable Internet connections.
The lack of reliable Internet acutely impacts rural areas, but schools and county officials say they are working to fix the problem.
In the last two weeks, the San Diego County Office of Education has distributed roughly 5,000 Internet
hotspots to 15 school districts and six charter schools. The county office is working to fulfill another 6,000 hotspot requests by schools.
The pandemic has made Internet access an essential utility, like water and electricity, not just for distance learning but for doing business in general, said Patrick Keeley, superintendent of the rural Mountain Empire Unified School District in east San Diego County.
Yet at the start of the pandemic, about 100,000 of the county’s roughly 500,000 public school students lacked reliable Internet, said Terry Loftus, chief technology officer for the county education office.
Loftus said that number has likely decreased significantly since the spring as schools bought and delivered hotspots to students and got them connected to cable Internet services. The county education office doesn’t know how many students in the county are currently under-connected, partly because families need to self-report to their schools if they lack Internet access.
Low-income families are much more likely than higher-income families to lack Internet. An April USC study found that only half the state’s lowest-income K-12 families had a computer and high-speed Internet, compared with more than 90 percent of the highest-income K-12 families.
In San Diego County, the problem of insufficient Internet has been concentrated in South County, which has high numbers of low-income students, and rural East County, where data and Internet coverage is spotty and not available everywhere, Loftus said.
It is taking months to get every student connected, partly because it has taken a long time to fill orders, especially for small school districts.
Many districts said they ordered Chromebooks and hotspots in the spring but didn’t receive the deliveries until months later, due to high demand and low supply worldwide for such items. Some districts, like Bonsall Unified and Alpine Union, are still waiting for Chromebooks.
The effort to get students connected got a boost last month when the County Board of Supervisors
allotted $2 million to the county education office to pay for Internet access for low-income families. The San Diego Foundation also donated $1 million.
Internet hotspots alone, though, won’t solve connectivity problems for all of rural East County, where data coverage is insufficient in areas containing valleys, mountains and deserts.
So the county education office is working with two providers to provide satellite Internet access to students in those areas. One of the providers, Viasat, could be deployed within the next month or two; the other, Starlink by Spacex, won’t be available until 2021, Loftus said.
“We’re trying to find solutions that meet the need as quickly as possible,” Loftus said.
In the meantime, for students who don’t have Internet access, districts have been distributing paper packets and materials at school meal distribution sites and delivering them to students’ homes.
Alpine Union, where roughly 10 percent of students lacked Internet, has offered free Wi-fi at all of its schools and offered “learning pods” on campus for students to learn together.
Alpine and Mountain Empire also offer a home school option for families where live online classes are not needed.
“Zoom meetings are important, obviously, but we’ve got to work with each student where they’re at individually,” Keeley said. “It’s certainly not perfect, and we’re certainly looking forward to going back to some in-person instruction very soon.”
Mountain Empire Unified committed to distance learning through Oct. 9. It can’t open sooner, partly because, as a small district of 1,700 students, it has taken a while for supplies to arrive. For example, the district ordered touchless hand sanitizers in early May and just received them this week, Keeley said.
The district has been working to provide Internet for about 150 families, or roughly 10 percent of Mountain Empire Unified’s students, who lack Internet access. That’s not including families who may have insufficient Internet speed or data.
The district bought 170 hotspots using money from the federal CARES Act but is still waiting for 20 of them. The hotspots won’t help all of the district’s families, though; for some families, the only way they could get
Internet is by satellite.
“We have to do our exploring of this problem person by person, student by student, and family by family,” Keeley said.
At Jamul-dulzura Union School District in East County, 131 families asked for hotspots. But another 17 families live in outer valleys where hotspots won’t work, said Superintendent Liz Bystedt. The district has 559 students.
“Through the entire pandemic, it’s been difficult,” Bystedt siad. “If you’ve ever been out to Jamul, we’re very rural . ... High-speed Internet
is either not available or it’s super expensive for people.
“I had my IT guys literally driving through our community, trying to figure out where those hotspots would work and where they wouldn’t.”
The district ordered 90 hotspots at the start of the pandemic, and it took months for them to be delivered, Bystedt said.
In the meantime, the district opened its learning center and allows families to use the guest Wi-fi there.
kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com