The Fort Worth Independent School District is testing out a plan to offer high-speed internet to students who don’t have it at home.
The district is in the middle of a pilot project to provide private LTE access to students without home internet connections. District officials say the program is the latest step in its years-long efforts to ensure every student has broadband at home.
Under the program, students use district-supplied LTE routers to connect with transmission towers and rooftop antennas at two dozen campuses. Private LTE allows network administrators to place restrictions on which devices can connect to the network. All tablets and laptops the district provides to students can connect to the private LTE devices, allowing students to work on homework and school projects after they leave school for the day.
LTE, which stands for “long-term evolution,” allows the user to connect to the internet via a cellular network. Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Fort Worth ISD’s chief technology officer, told the district’s school board this month that over the past few months, his department provided private LTE routers to 27 students who didn’t have internet access at home.
Once the pilot project is complete, district officials will take stock of how it went before looking to expand the program to more students, he said. The technology department is working with campus leaders to identify students who don’t have internet access at home and would be good candidates for a private LTE device, he said. Krishnamurthy described the project as “one of our top accomplishments in the past four months.”
“I’m extremely excited about this project because it’s directly and positively impacting our students,” he said.
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FWISD expands home broadband efforts
Jessica Becerra, a spokesperson for the district, said the devices allow students to access the district’s network. That means they’re subject to the same content filters they would have at school, so they can’t access illegal or inappropriate material using the devices. The project is intended to be a next step in the district’s efforts to give all of its students access to high-speed internet at home, she said.
Fort Worth school officials have been working to expand home broadband access for students since the beginning of the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, as schools across the country began to shut down and move instruction online, Fort Worth ISD, like most other districts nationwide, scrambled to get Wi-Fi hotspots to students who didn’t have internet access at home.
Although those hotspots provided access to students who wouldn’t have had it otherwise, district officials acknowledged it was an imperfect solution. Families who had more than one student at home told the Star-Telegram that the connection the hotspots provided wasn’t strong enough to support multiple students in online learning at once.
In 2021, Fort Worth ISD embarked on a project to install public Wi-Fi towers in underserved areas of eastern, southern and southeastern Fort Worth, blanketing entire neighborhoods with broadband service. The plan, which was based on a previous project in Castleberry ISD, ran parallel to an effort by the city of Fort Worth to bring free public Wi-Fi to the Stop Six, Ash Crescent, North Side, Como and Rosemont neighborhoods. District and city officials said they launched those two plans separately, but coordinated their efforts to avoid duplicating service.
Even after COVID shutdowns, Digital Divide remains a concern
Since the beginning of the pandemic, education leaders and policymakers have become increasingly concerned about the so-called Digital Divide. Nationwide, between 15 million and 16 million students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade don’t have access to reliable high-speed internet service and tools for learning, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s most recent National Educational Technology Plan, which was released in January.
The report notes that Black, Hispanic and Native American students made up a disproportionate share of those without broadband access at home, and Black and Hispanic students are less likely than their white peers to have a computer at home. The plan recommends several steps states and district leaders can take to bridge that gap, including partnering with private companies to bring broadband access to areas where it doesn’t exist and taking advantage of states’ purchasing power or regional consortia when buying tech devices and software.
Besides the lack of home internet access, the report points to two other gaps affecting students: the digital design divide — not every teacher has the training or resources to use classroom technology to its full potential — and the digital use divide — even some students who have access to high-speed internet and digital learning tools don’t make the best use of them. States, districts and campus leaders will need to deal with all three of those gaps if they want to take full advantage of the opportunities that instructional technology offers, the report says.
Broadband access is a big factor in school performance
Research suggests that access to a high-speed internet connection at home can be a big factor in how students do in school. In a report released last year, researchers at Michigan State University’s Quello Center for Media and Information Policy found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that students with better internet connections had fewer problems during remote learning.
But the divide between students with broadband access at home and those without is still a major concern, even after nearly all students are back at school in person, said Keith Hampton, a Michigan State professor and lead author on the paper. School curricula, particularly at the high school level, are increasingly based around content that students access online, he said. That means students without strong, reliable internet access at home will have a harder time reaching that content outside of school hours.
That lack of access makes it harder for those students to work with classmates on group projects and communicate with teachers about questions, Hampton said. In many cases, it can even prevent students from doing their homework, he said. And because homework completion is a good predictor of other metrics like classroom grades and state test scores, he said, a lack of internet access at home can be a major hindrance to students’ academic success.
“If we’re interested in providing the best opportunities to young people, internet connectivity is everyone’s concern,” he said.
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