What Stanislaus districts are doing, what families can, to ensure they’re wired for school
Like pretty much everything else that distance learning involves, ensuring internet connectivity requires a partnership between schools and student families.
That means that in addition to teachers and principals working to welcome kids to a richer distance-learning environment, tech staffs are getting devices into student hands and making sure families can use them and get online.
For most public school districts in Stanislaus County, only two full weeks remain before teaching resumes the week of Aug. 10. A handful of districts start Aug. 5 and 6.
In the roughly 14,000-student Turlock Unified, which starts Aug. 12, Assistant Superintendent Barney Gordon identified 400 students in need of internet. There likely are more, and staff is continuing outreach to find and assist those families.
In Modesto City Schools, which serves about 30,000 students, between 1,200 and 1,500 didn’t sign on when the 2019-20 school year ended with remote instruction. Schools have been reaching out to those families, said Russell Selken, MCS’s chief technology officer, and there are fewer than 1,000 who haven’t been contacted.
The district is in a good position to start, especially with high school students, who for several years have had take-home devices, Selken said. “They’ve been dealing with this connectivity issue and so they pretty much had that nailed down.”
Families that don’t have internet are being assisted through informational handouts and a help line, 209-574-8600. What the district is finding is that some families “just don’t know where to start,” Selken said. “Even with us giving them the phone numbers (of internet providers), they just didn’t feel comfortable getting on the phone with Charter or Comcast or AT&T.”
When such a family lets the district’s help desk know it’s foundering, district staff is willing to get on a call with the family and the service provider to help, he said.
If money is the issue, Selken said, the district also can provide income-qualifying families with a letter they can provide to a carrier for a service like Comcast’s Internet Essentials, a $10-a-month plan.
Districts expanding hot spots at schools
For households newly connected to the internet or have had upgrades but still face problems, Modesto City Schools has created WiFi hot spots at 11 schools and will expand to more. “That’s just meant to be kind of an interim Band-Aid, because we don’t expect our students to be sitting in their parents’ cars in the parking lot to do their education,” Selken said. Neither does the district want students sitting around outdoor tables on campuses, which would go against the governor’s order that schools on the state’s COVID-19 watch list, like Stanislaus County, not reopen schools.
“But if something happens at home and they’re waiting for the repair or they’re waiting for this upgrade and they need to get connected, they can drive to any of these 11 school sites and get internet access.”
Turlock Unified, too, is expanding wireless networks to provide increased coverage in parking lots and other outdoor spaces on its campuses. Again, the intent is not for students to go work at school, but more for things like needing an internet boost to download a video or other large file, Gordon said.
The outdoor service expansion primarily is being done with the return of students when schools physically reopen, he said. “When students return, we have an expectation that we’re going to have social distance to the maximum extent possible. So we are increasing our outdoor wireless so that, weather permitting, you might see more classes or more students in the outdoor environment.”
TUSD also is working with internet service providers to get high-speed connections to families in need and has 700 mobile LTE hot spots for student checkout. Half the hot spots are from Verizon and half are from AT&T, Gordon said, and will be issued to students based on which carrier has stronger service where they live.
“We’re also working with Charter Home Internet to identify specific families that maybe we can better serve them by getting internet set up at their houses,” he said. “We should have a good chunk of those 400 students set up with home internet.”
Not every apparent problem has an answer, though. Gordon said the district has some rural area students who don’t have providers or good cellular coverage. “We’re working on solutions for them, but we don’t have anything set for those kinds of folks yet.”
Another tool is the purchase of three LTE wireless access points to extend the district’s wireless networks through what it’s calling “community partner locations.” In layman’s terms, those access points create a “very robust hot spot, Gordon said.
Those locations that could get the access points have not yet been identified, he said, but they could be places where a number of students are getting day care while parents work and the facilities need an internet boost.
Be proactive about checking bandwidth
Even some families with OK service worry the demand of having multiple students studying at home, perhaps on top of adults already working remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic, could strain their connections to the breaking point.
A retired teacher whose grandchildren will be studying from home shared with The Bee an email she sent to Turlock Unified, asking, “Will Turlock bandwidth support every household signing on for six or more hours on multiple computers? My older home only has 3G, it hardly supports one computer and an iPad.”
Modesto’s Selken said this is one of the areas in which the family/district partnership is important, and households should be proactive in determining if their bandwidth is adequate.
There are three basic things to do, he said:
- Especially if experiencing speed issues, ask your internet provider to do a network speed test. “What we’ve found anecdotally is some of this equipment, especially if they had it installed prior to COVID, is outdated,” Selken said. One parent was told his equipment was outdated, and the provider replaced it at no cost, doubling the speed.
- Make sure your computers are updated with the best virus protection — malware scanners like Endpoint, Norton or AVG. “It’s not just speed and network, it’s also a security aspect for your personal information,” he said.
- Make sure your wireless access point is password protected. The district’s help-desk staff has taken calls from families saying how slow their Internet service is, and when asked further, it turns out they’re not using passwords. Again, not just for speed but for information security, it’s crucial to have password protection so neighbors don’t intentionally or unintentionally get onto your bandwidth, Selken said.
It might be a lot for some families to wrap their heads around. “Yeah, it’s a brave new world,” Selken said. “It’s not just about how much my Netflix chokes. ... It’s past that now. It’s can I get my work done for my job and can my children get adequate speed for their education?”
From Stanislaus County Office of Education
The Stanislaus Office of Education provided this statement to The Bee: “SCOE has and will continue communicating with the school districts about bandwidth requirements for their distance learning programs. The Technology & Learning Resources Division provides technical support and teacher training to districts as they prepare for the start of the school year.
“As families assess their home Internet needs to access distance learning programs, we recommend keeping the following information in mind. Expectations for a 3G Internet connection allow one device to participate in an online video streaming lesson. Some suggestions for maximizing an Internet connection is to use an Ethernet connection instead of wireless, adjust the video quality from High Definition to Standard Definition, and avoid using any other Internet-based services while participating in a video streaming lesson.
“If a family is looking for ways to increase its Internet bandwidth, some options are posted at www.stancoe.org/internet.”
This story was originally published July 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
