St. Vrain Valley School District in partnership with Longmont’s NextLight internet service were awarded a $1.3 million grant to expand quality internet access for low-income students.
The public-private partnership will use the grant from the Colorado Department of Education to improve access to free Internet for students and educators across the school district who might not have it due to the economic challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Valerie Dodd, executive director of NextLight.
NextLight will reactivate a decommissioned mesh network at approximately 68 sites, with speeds of approximately 50Mbps, providing free internet access to many of the 6,200 students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, according to a news release.
“Our fiber footprint covers over 90% of the city but there are some pockets where apartment managers or mobile home parks would not allow access from NextLight into those areas because they may be getting door fees or payouts from another carrier,” Dodd said.
The funds come from the $20 million Connecting Colorado Students Grant Program created during the Colorado Legislature’s special session in December to “increase access to broadband services for students, educators, and other staff who lack stable, reliable internet access for online learning.”
The expansion of NextLight service will continue supporting families in the district as well as the Longmont area in more than one way, Dodd said.
“We will fortify and revisit our existing wireless network. And then we're also going to be able to build some fiber into some new areas that we haven't reached before,” she said, adding the grant also will help expand the Sharing the NextLight program, which, in partnership with the Longmont Community Foundation and Longmont’s Children, Youth, and Families, that provides internet service to qualifying families through community donations.
“We can immediately start recruiting more people to participate in the (the) program,” she said. “(The grant) gives us the funding to sign up a lot more families.”
As schools transitioned to remote and hybrid learning in March, the city and the school district started working on solutions to ensure greater access to technology at home.
NextLight launched the Share the NextLight program in 2019, and in 2020 expanded it to include pre-K and Pell-Grant eligible college students, according to Scott Rochat, Longmont Power & Communication public relations and marketing specialist.
In late March, the city also introduced reduced pricing for qualifying households and introduced discounts for families dealing with economic hardship.
The district also has had to learn to navigate the challenges brought on by COVID.
As part of SVVSD’s Learning Technology Plan created in 2012, every middle school and high school student was given an iPad to bring home and to use in school, and every elementary classroom had sets that stayed in the classroom, according to Michelle Bourgeois, SVVSD’s chief technology officer.
“When the pandemic hit we had to figure out how to ensure that every elementary student also had a device to bring home and to use, regardless of whether we're hybrid or remote,” she said. “How do we make sure that students can not only have access to the device but have access to resources online and their classroom?”
At the end of March, SVVSD established the Community WiFi Project in partnership with Cisco to bring 10 Wi-Fi hotspots so families could drive up and get access to the Internet, Bourgeois said. Those access points are still available for use.
The district also purchased an additional 260 hotspots in the spring to provide to the highest need families who cannot get to a drive-up spot or who don’t have Internet access at home, she said.
TMobile also gave SVVSD 790 hotspots with 100GB of data for students who live in areas not served by a high-speed internet provider..
“We knew we could do better. Basic internet access is an important part of education, which is a human right,” Bourgeois said.
The city and SVVSD in the next few weeks will be talking to better define the project’s plan and timeline.
“We’re excited to work with St. Vrain in this partnership that will benefit all our community’s students and educators,” Dodd said. “High-quality internet access has become vital to our daily lives, particularly in the way our children learn. This allows us to further strengthen Longmont, helping us to meet our residents’ needs today and into the future.”
