Future Ready Learning

participate in our increasingly connected society.
BRINGING CONNECTIVITY TO THE POOREST COMMUNITIES: COACHELLA VALLEY,
CALIFORNIA
When Coachella Valley Unified School District made the decision to implement a plan
to transform learning through technology, the plan’s architects quickly realized that
round-the-clock access to high-speed Internet was essential to create connected
learning opportunities in and outside of school. However, because of broad socio-economic
diversity in the district, equity of access was a challenge.
Geographically, the district draws from Riverside County, California, and serves the
city of Coachella, the community of Thermal, portions of the city of Indio, and Salton
City in Imperial County, educating more than 18,000 students across 25 schools. The
local cable company refused to run fiber through Native American reservations in the
area or through a local mobile home park, leaving some of the district’s highest need
students on the outside looking in when the school day ended.
To answer the challenge, the district equipped 100 of its school buses with wireless
Internet routers with rooftop solar panels to supply power. This enabled students to
connect to the Internet on the way to and from school and while traveling to sporting
events and extracurricular activities. In addition, at night the Wi-Fi–equipped fleet
parked in some of the poorest areas of the district, making high-speed Internet available
to students virtually anytime and anywhere.
The initiative was not without challenges. Leadership needed buy-in from the community
and the teachers’ union, whose members draw salary and benefits from the same
general fund. District leaders obtained community buy-in through high-touch outreach
that included committee meetings and focus groups as well as speaking directly with
or sending e-mail to individual community members. Superintendent Darryl Adams
focused on building a bridge between the vision of success that everyone deeply
desired for the district’s students and the concrete means to realize that vision.
Buoyed by the success of this initiative, Coachella Valley now has a long-term plan
for the district to become its own Internet service provider, breaking its dependence
on commercial telecom companies.
BRINGING BROADBAND TO NEW COMMUNITIES: OKLAHOMA CHOCTAW NATION
TRIBAL AREA CREATES PUBLIC-PRIVATE COLLABORATION
Because of the high cost of installing and maintaining the infrastructure required for
high-speed connectivity, many sparsely populated areas of the country lack access to the
Internet, widening the digital divide for people living in rural areas. The Choctaw Nation
Tribal Area has demonstrated how—through a combination of grants, loans, and donations—private
industries can bring critical access to these underserved communities.
In 2009–10, Pine Telephone, the service provider offering voice, video, cell, long- distance,
and high-speed broadband in southeastern Oklahoma applied for and received
four American Recovery and Reinvestment awards totaling $56 million to build the
infrastructure to provide Internet access to the 10 unserved counties encompassed by
the Choctaw Nation. 6
Prior to this investment, the Choctaw Nation Tribal Area lacked access to reliable
broadband service. The low population density (8.3 to 19.7 people per square mile),
the high poverty rate (25 percent of the population below the poverty line), and the
rugged terrain made the economics of broadband infrastructure very challenging.
Initial capital costs to deploy broadband meant that broadband service was limited to
commercially viable areas. 7
Today, more than 1,700 customers have access to high-speed connectivity over both
fiber and wireless networks, as does every school in the Pine Telephone service area.
OFFICE OF Educational Technology
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