According to the Colorado Department of Education’s needs inventory, more than 65,000 students in Colorado lack internet access at home. Eagle County School District Superintendent, Philip Qualman shared results from a survey the district did during the extended COVID closure last spring which found that “8% of ECSD students don’t have access to reliable internet. In a district of about 6300 students, that’s about 500 kids.” That aligns with CED’s estimate that across the Northwest Region that cites 9% of school kids lacking internet. For Eagle County, Qualman says “of those 500, many have internet, they just didn’t consider it high quality.” The district’s solution since March has been to make Wi-Fi hotspots available free of charge to families. Those were “pretty good” according to Qualman “as long as you live within range of AT&T cellular signals.” The district distributed 50 of those devices last spring, and he says they are likely to distribute even more “as we discover the need.” This week the state announced a similar work-around solution.
Wednesday, September 2nd Governor Polis announced “100Million,” a public private partnership to expand access to broadband services for students for the upcoming school year. The partnership with T-Mobile makes students on the National School Lunch Program eligible for free mobile hot spots for up to 5 years including devices. For students in the deal, their data is capped at 100GB per year. The deal leverages a settlement agreement between the State and T-Mobile. It also includes $2M from the Colorado Department of Education from CARES act funding to “help school districts provide broadband access to low-income families.” The Colorado Sun quotes Education Commissioner Katy Anthy who says broadband access is “a non-negotiable.” The Sun also notes that a public fiber project that is managed by Delta-Montrose Electric Association connected 400 homes and upgraded everyone to 1 gig service in response to the COVID exposed digital divide “no matter how little they were paying.”
Northwest Colorado Council of Governments where I am Executive Director serves local governments, across much of the Northwest Region identified in the CDE report. The Digital Divide is no surprise to our Broadband program which has been providing technical assistance to local governments who have recognized the issue and met it with public solutions to broadband deficits for more than seven years.
For years, our member jurisdictions heard a business here or a person there working from home complain about the lack of internet service; how inconsistent it was; how slow it was; how embarrassing it was to be on a video conference with colleagues across the globe only to lose a connection; and then, how long service would be out during a fiber cut. Since March, COVID has made all those problems a shared experience.
What has been revealed? Many workers, students, and businesses had good-enough residential broadband service to suddenly turn work from home and be on-line all day. For those in that situation, the internet isn’t the impediment, juggling parenting and work is. LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index cited parents’ current top three challenges since COVID. Those are keeping children occupied (67%), providing for their education (59%), and being unable to focus on work while children were in the home (53%). The fact that it is coming from LinkedIn may provide a demographic clue as to why broadband didn’t make the top three.
What else was revealed? Income inequality leads to significant digital inequity. Coverage follows the money. This is how the marketplace works. For much of Colorado, the populations are small and distances between customers vast which doesn’t make an attractive market for the private sector. This leaves two weak spots in the “WIFI hotspot” temporary solution. One, if there is no cell coverage, the hot spots will not work. Two, if there is no cell coverage in low-income areas it is also likely there is no broadband, or it is not affordable to many. Again unlike public utilities, cell service and fiber are only installed where there is a robust Return on Investment. If as Qualman says, “even without being in a pandemic…students are doing more and work on-line,” then this temporary aid will only underscore the problem, not solve it.
A digital divide has been exposed, and education in the time of COVID has many of us peering over the viewpoint at the chasm. It matters if a family has internet, not for fun, but to attend school in any meaningful way. Who are those first responders attempting to bridge the digital divide in this crisis? School districts and educators; As of Wednesday, the Governor’s office. For a structural shift to occur following this response that extends broadband as a utility to all will require much broader policy changes, and will elicit opposition from industry.
The drumbeat is getting louder on this matter. Jabari Simama, a columnist at Governing.com August 24th published, “America’s Moral Obligation for Universal Broadband.” Having written the book Civil Rights to Cyber Rights in 2009, some of his arguments are having their moment, not the least of which that America having a “head start in the development of the internet” has just been revealed to be “unprepared” as a nation for “universally accessible” internet. To be clear, America does not look at broadband as a utility which every citizen has a right to, but a commodity. Simama cites that 35 % of black households and 29% of Hispanic households are still without an internet connection.
As this school year opened with social distancing protocols, the need to provide access to the internet has a new urgency. In a headline that captures the story (and is nearly as long as the story), Chalkbeat Colorado reports in the Colorado Sun (August 30, 2020), “Why thousands of Colorado students disconnected from school despite hotspots and internet deals: some lawmakers and Superintendents and education advocates are calling for a fundamental shift in the way Colorado thinks about internet access.” The reporting that claims “tens of thousands of Colorado Students still don’t have internet access at a time when half the students statewide are starting the school year virtually.” The extended story is at Chalkbeat.
Responses to the COVID health crisis have prompted progress and changes in nearly all sectors, and as many of us have observed first-hand that many schools, districts and teachers had the tools and tactics readily available to deliver on a remote learning platform. As Qualman notes, public schools were tracking towards on-line service delivery for years. Some districts adapted better than others, often their solution was better than those provided by their peers at the collegiate level. For many districts, the migration to assignments, homework and information tracking as well as some instruction being delivered through a web portal was already standard practice. Students were using electronic devices to perform work in the classrooms. Many, like Eagle County Schools, quickly assigned those devices last Spring to students who lacked devices at home to take with them. Suddenly the IT department wasn’t just a value-added part of instruction, it was the lifeline to any and all instruction.
Even before COVID, some energetic and innovative teachers were delivering a “flipped” classroom where instruction was provided via video watched at home, while in-class time was spent in groups and in one-on-one assistance for “homework.” This was the exception, and it took considerable effort. Overnight in April, a version of that concept quickly became the rule as students, parents and teachers adapted to virtual learning to finish out a school year. Some content, some age groups and some instructors adapted smoothly. For others, the flip was a struggle that painfully underscored the important role schools and teachers play in a student’s development when it was delivered at a distance. This digital divide challenge can be met at a civic level to meet those making it work in classrooms, it just takes a flip in thinking.
Bringing robust broadband to all is far from impossible, even in rural areas like the one NWCCOG serves in Western Colorado. Places as rural as Rio Blanco county and Red Cliff have proven it is possible to deliver to every residence with a public commitment to it. To do so just takes a different kind of thinking, a belief that the public sector has a role to play when the private marketplace isn’t delivering, and often involvement from a champion in the public sector who commits to putting the pieces together to make it happen.
At NWCCOG, we have seen success when the public sector creates partnerships to make better service a reality. We have provided technical assistance to many local governments to help them scope and implement broadband projects. Those efforts have met with success in communities as dispersed as Meeker, Craig, Kremmling, Steamboat Springs and Aspen. Each of those plus 7 other communities, NWCCOG has recently connected with redundant, affordable middle-mile fiber through Project THOR. In 2020, Project THOR, a bold 400-mile middle mile fiber initiative connecting public entities across that region to internet POP in Denver using leased CDOT fiber and fiber from a number of other carriers went live. One million dollars of the $2.5M project was funded by a grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA). In developing Project THOR, we learned that the local champion (meet-me-center host) was a different champion that cobbled together other partners, and those local champions were not all towns. They include a rural electric co-op, a rural hospital district, a few towns, and a county that pulled other partners. Translating that middle mile resource to last-mile residents who need it only takes political will and local resourcefulness, often including willing private partners that could not do it alone.
COVID and the schools are providing a teachable moment in real time as to why such efforts from the public sector are necessary. For any school plan that involves remote learning, which is now the case broadly and widely for the Fall 2020 school year, the weak link in the chain was not at school, but with the holes in our cellular and broadband services that unequally leave a patchwork of unconnected homes and children. That is something we can fix if it matters enough to us.
It can be done.
