Students Win in ConnectME (My Education) Approval

On April 14, 2020, the Boulder Valley School District School (BVSD) Board took a giant leap forward to ensure the digital divide, otherwise known as the homework gap, is dramatically reduced for the students of our district. They did this by approving a long term contract with Live Wire Networks to provide over the air broadband to qualifying students for free. This public-private partnership is the culmination of 5+ years of work to close the digital divide in BVSD. It has taken a broad team to support the pilot as we slowly progressed to a scalable district-wide solution.

When the major internet providers did not provide free internet to those in need, and the FCC rules would not allow BVSD to run E-Rated internet into the Boulder Housing Partner facilities, a new way to connect students was needed. As a result, ConnectME launched and Live Wire Networks leaned-in as a partner, putting their FCC-approved equipment on three schools in Lafayette, CO, allowing them to connect over 50 qualified students to free internet.

My drive to close the digital divide has always been about ensuring our district provides every student an equitable opportunity to learn. Our current situation with the Coronavirus and remote learning has shed an intense light on the homework gap and how it is real, even in BVSD. This national blog put out by SHLB (Schools-Health-Libraries-Broadband) further explains the challenges students face without internet access.

Boulder Valley School District has set a local, state, and national precedent in solving the digital divide that we hope others will use as a model to build upon. In addition to Live Wire Networks providing free internet to eligible students, BVSD will also share in the revenue generated by providing an over the air alternative for internet access to the BVSD communities in Boulder, Nederland, Broomfield, Erie, Louisville, Lafayette, and Superior.

I appreciate this tremendous team effort, and I am pleased we will now move from pilot to full implementation. As always, please share your thoughts by chiming in below.

Andrew, CIO Boulder Valley School District

   

Solving for the Homework Gap

My role as CIO has changed significantly over the 5 years I’ve been at BVSD. My first major challenge was to modernize IT practices and provide reliable technology and systems to support teachers. Today, that goal has been largely accomplished with open IT issues at their lowest point ever, and the reliability of our systems greatly improved.

This new, more stable environment has allowed me to focus on bigger picture issues. One in particular that strikes home for me is the “homework gap”.  Also known as the digital divide or opportunity gap, it is the recognition that some of our students go home to little or no Internet access.

Ironically, the homework gap is happening at a time when quality educational resources are rapidly moving online. The Khan Academy alone is a significant force in helping students learn outside of the traditional classroom environment. With thousands of tutorials on everything from basic math and calculus to classes in science, computer programming, history, art, and economics, Khan Academy and similar resources can be of significant help to a struggling student.

But what if you are a student with no Internet at home? What if you don’t have a mobile device to take to the library, Starbucks, or hundreds of other publicly available Internet access sites? This is what creates the homework gap, and it is real for many of our students.

At BVSD, we are working to eliminate the homework gap through these pilot programs:

• Providing Internet at a Boulder Housing Partner site while determining the feasibility of expanding the program.
• Promoting both the Comcast and CenturyLink $9.95 Internet access programs for students qualifying for free or reduced lunch.
• Providing Chromebooks to all freshman at Centaurus and Broomfield High Schools through our 1:Web program.
• Providing Chromebook carts to all schools to be used at the school's discretion, including taking the devices home. 

Although the above pilot programs are a start, I’m exploring additional ways to close the homework gap.

I am working with administration to find funding for a district-wide 1:Web rollout, but at a cost of $2.2 million it will take time and have to be balanced with other critical needs, all at a time when state K-12 funding is critically sparse. A more feasible first step may be funding 1:Web at the high schools for $800k.

This November, BVSD is asking voters to consider an override to SB152. An override would allow public/private telecommunication partnerships that are not available to BVSD today. New partnerships could allow the district to monetize the portion of the fiber that we are not using, giving the Board of Education new revenue to use at their discretion.

CoSN, a professional organization I belong to, is studying other ways to help resolve the homework gap. CoSN's CEO, Keith Krueger, is on sabbatical at Harvard studying the digital divide and how to address it. I encourage you to read his latest blog on bringing the Internet to our students.

As curriculum and educational tools move online, the need for ubiquitous Internet is becoming a necessity. I’ll continue to spend my time working to reduce the homework gap.

I would appreciate your ideas and comments on this topic.  Please chime in below.

Andrew

Internet Bandwidth in BVSD

The transition to online assessments is a journey for everyone. Here in IT, we know that online testing during PARCC, CMAS, i-Ready, and i-Station not only causes stress to you, but to our internet bandwidth as well.

Bandwidth in BVSD

Less than a year ago we had only a 700Mbps connection from the internet. Last April 2014 we increased that capacity to 1Gbps because we were bumping up against that ceiling. And now, just 8 months later, we are again exceeding our new 1GB ceiling.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as calling our Internet Service Provider (ISP) and telling them to give us more bandwidth; we have to upgrade the equipment and software that runs our network, and that is a big project.

With resources made available from the bond, we will spend this spring and early summer designing and implementing a bigger pipeline that will accommodate our needs for years to come. By the start of the 2015-16 school year we will have at least double, and up to quadruple, the internet bandwidth we have today.

Short-Term Solutions

Until we have a long-term solution to our bandwidth constraints, we may use several temporary measures to ensure that testing goes as smoothly as possible. These could include:

• Rate limiting—restricting the amount of bandwidth that any one person can use.

• Traffic shaping—limiting the type of traffic that bogs down our internet, such as smartphone updates.

• Quality of service—giving priority to certain types of traffic, such as PARCC testing

What can you do?

Based on our analysis of traffic coming into BVSD from the internet, we know that a measurable amount of it is not directly related to instruction or school district business. March Madness is one example of a time when it might be tempting to check the game during the day, but when many people stream video simultaneously it can use a lot of bandwidth, to the detriment of instruction and testing.

I ask that we all be considerate of our personal internet browsing and limit it to what is essential during school hours.

Our network is indispensable to the education mission of BVSD—it’s a responsibility that IT takes seriously. With your help, I’m confident we can maintain a stable and responsive network environment now and in the future.

Comments?  Please log in to chime in below.

Andrew

Extending the Learning Day

Kids have been doing homework around the kitchen table for generations without the internet, but times are changing. Now they can work on a Google doc from their laptop in the basement or watch a video lecture from their tablet in the car. Internet access makes it possible for students to extend their learning day—they can access online educational tools anytime, anywhere.

But students without internet access at home can’t take advantage of these opportunities; this situation creates what is known as the digital divide and contributes to a general opportunity gap. As more teaching and learning is done online, this gap grows.

To mitigate the digital divide within its student population, BVSD has formed a partnership with Boulder Housing Partners (BHP), Impact on Education, and the City of Boulder to pilot a program that provides free wireless internet service to students in one of BHP’s housing developments.

"Extending learning time and opportunity through home BVSD internet access is a key way to increase student success. BVSD appreciates community partnerships like this, which are needed to expand capacity and enhance educational opportunities for all students.”  Dr. Bruce Messinger, Superintendent, BVSD.

Here’s how the program will work: BVSD will provide access to the fiber network and internet that it already pays for; BHP will install wireless infrastructure in the buildings. Since students will be accessing BVSD’s network, the connection will be filtered and authenticated (meaning that students must use a password to get online).

The pilot will run from Feb - May. Based on our learnings from this pilot, we hope to extend the program to other housing developments both in Boulder and east county.

I’d like to hear your comments about this partnership with BHP to bring wireless internet to BVSD students extending their school day. Please chime in below. (remember to login first)

Andrew

Dual Internet Connections Come to BVSD

Having a backup plan is always part of life: we buy insurance to guard our assets; we use GPS to find detours; we carry jumper cables in the car. Having a backup plan is even more important when the cost of failure is high. Until now, BVSD has not had a backup connection to the internet, and the cost of an outage—in terms of lost productivity and instructional time—is significant.

Many of you may be wondering, "What about the big fiber network upgrade that BVSD did a few years ago—didn't that create the backup we need?" That's a great question that requires some clarification. The internet connection is not the same as the BVSD network. The BVSD network consists of the fiber that connects the schools within the district. It’s basically a closed circuit with its own backup plan (called “redundancy”). Even though we had redundancy within the BVSD network, this network had only one connection to the internet. 

Our internet connection is the pipe that links the BVSD network to the internet. In January 2013, the Board of Education approved a second pipe to the internet that will provide redundancy.

Creating a backup plan simply means that we create a second internet connection. The diagram below represents this concept.

Why is it important that we maintain a connection to the internet? Simply put, BVSD staff and students rely more and more on the internet to be successful. Within the last year, BVSD moved email, calendars, payroll, finance, HR systems, and several educational tools to the cloud; next year we plan to move even more applications to the cloud. Cloud-based tools have many advantages (such as mobile access) but they require a reliable internet connection. (Not clear on what “the cloud” is? Read my post: The BVSD Move to the Cloud.) When our internet connection fails we can’t access our essential, district-wide tools: this is a high-cost failure.

Most of the time you don’t need to think about IT infrastructure-level projects like this one. In fact, if our infrastructure works seamlessly then you shouldn't notice it at all. 

If you have any feedback about the dual internet connection coming to BVSD, please comment at the bottom of this post.

Andrew