The coronavirus pandemic exposed a weak link in our statewide access to high-speed internet, and complicated or made it impossible, for some students to learn remotely.
"If you can't connect, you can't learn which is tantamount to dropping or having hundreds of thousands of students, if not millions of students suddenly dropping out of school across the country and across the state of Texas, Gaby Rowe, Project Lead for Operation Connectivity, said.
It's been four months since Governor Abbott announced the launch of Operation Connectivity alongside the Texas Education Agency and local education agencies.
Since that time, the task force was able to secure more than 1 million personal devices and WiFi hotspots to keep kids learning and connected this fall if they can't be in the classroom because of the pandemic.
Gaby Rowe is the project lead for Operation Connectivity. She brings 20-plus years of education experience to the table.
"We were talking about the importance of connectivity 25 years ago, so this has been an issue for a really really long time, but it is an issue that has struggled to rise to the forefront and what that means is to get funding," Rowe said. "So, when you get into communities that are not densely populated, like the rural communities you find all over Texas, it's been very hard to get anyone to justify the the infrastructure costs that are necessary."
Rowe believes the pandemic is finally making the conversation about equal access in connectivity a priority for everyone, but there are still some students who don't have laptops to learn, let alone a hotspot heading into late September.
"Well, and our answer to that, and I think it was, I don't think it was the best we could come up with knowing the constraints —supply chain, huge constraint. There is a global demand for technology devices, particularly keyboard enabled e-learning devices and that has been that the supply chain has been hampered by the fact that many of those factories were closed in China for months at a time due to COVID."
Rowe says another big constraint — small school districts that never had the technology before and didn't know what to buy and how to put it all in place. The third constraint — it was just too expensive.
"The governor and the commissioner and a group of legislators got together and said we can take out a group of funding that came from CARES dollars and put that against this program and that was the $200 million and that really allowed us to jump-start this massive triage across the state because instead of going and buying 1,000 or 2,000 devices, we're able to buy over a million devices and that covers a lot of children across the state of Texas. We have close to 900 districts out of the 1,200 districts in the state of Texas participating in this buy and we got them devices that we pre-tested that we knew would work for distance learning."
On top of that, they negotiated deep discounts. "It allowed the devices essentially to be 50% off, which was a huge discount for that and because we were ordering it as a bulk purchase for the state, we were already able to get significantly discounted pricing that was between 20 and 40% discounted for the district before the 50% off."
That includes more affordable hotspots for schools and better connectivity.
"We got hotspot plans that were extremely low priced and everyone was exactly the same so that school districts were not choosing a hotspot provider based on which one was the cheapest, but instead, which one was going to work in a particular part of their district. So, we had districts who were buying. I'll take a few T-Mobile and I'll take a few AT&T. I'll take a few Verizon, because in different parts of my district, they'll work and they've never had the ability to negotiate or separate contracts that way and we did that," Rowe said.
Just over 100 East Texas school districts participated in the program in some way.
"The only sort of appropriation clarification we put in there was that you could not buy more devices than you had economically disadvantaged students in your districts. So for example, if you had a district with 1,000 students, and you had 75% economically disadvantaged students, that meant you could buy up to 750 devices of each kind, so you could get 750 keyboard devices and you could get 750 hotspots and you could still buy the other but you wouldn't get the 50% matching on them, you'd still get the discounted price, you could still buy them, but you wouldn't get the 50% matching."
Their goal is to have all those devices to schools as soon as possible. For Apple products, that's by September 21 and hotspots by the end of September, but that doesn't mean the work is over in narrowing the digital divide for millions of Texas children.
"And so we have to answer the question, now that we've done this, who's left? And then we're going to have to look at innovative technology. We're going to have to look at the cost of things like, fixed internet and come up with a solution that works across the state. You know, one of the things I love about this bulk purchase effort has been an amazing collaboration between legislators, the government, TEA, the school districts, our industry partners, and the families themselves have all had to come together to engage and participate in making this success," Rowe said.
Moving forward, Rowe believes the collaboration between industry and government will be essential in creating new solutions for broadband infrastructure where it's considered a utility, not luxury.