Bringing High-Speed Service to Remote Areas

Superintendent Karen Couch with Bill Poore, technology supervisor in Kent County, Md., School District. PHOTO COURTESY OF KENT COUNTY, MD., PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Jordyn Cox-Pemberton, a high school junior in the Kent County Public Schools on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, remembers her days in middle school when computers were kept on roaming carts and her internet at home was spotty at best.

Today, she takes home her school-issued laptop and enjoys lightning-fast internet service of 1,000 megabits per second at both school and home.

“Now I can take my homework with me — my classwork — so I can look up everything I didn’t understand in class earlier,” she says.

Kent County, which hugs the Chesapeake Bay, is subject to two key causes of the homework gap: families that can’t afford high-speed internet at home and those who live in rural areas where it is simply not available. But that situation is changing fast.

Bolstering Bandwidth

In 2013, a county government committee decided creating a broadband infrastructure would be the key to boosting the local economy. The effort got an unexpected boost as a company running fiber optic cable to the Atlantic coast reached a deal to extend the cable through Kent County. The county completed the 110-mile fiber backbone in 2018.

Officials worked from that backbone to wire public buildings, including the schools, which were already embarking on a one-to-one technology program. The fiber supercharged the district’s technology offerings.

“If you have a classroom of 25 or 30 students who are viewing virtual reality environments, that typically will bog down your bandwidth and you’re not going to be able to have a full class of students doing that,” says Bill Poore, technology supervisor of Kent County School District. “Now, with the fiber, that’s not a problem.”

Karen Couch, superintendent of the 2,000-student district, says student interest has soared with the growth of technology camps, makerspace and hackerspace clubs, coding courses in the middle school and two Advanced Placement computer science courses.

If the county hadn’t spearheaded the fiber project, Couch says, “it would have drastically crippled our ability to move forward as quickly as we have.”

Still, the district’s ultimate solution to the homework gap remains a work in progress. Connecting cable and Wi-Fi from the backbone to distant parts of the county is a slow process. Some of Cox-Pemberton’s high school friends still aren’t connected and not all residents can afford the installation and service charges.

Rural Reduction

Scott Boone, director of information technology for Kent County, Md., tirelessly shepherded the fiber project and thought he was on the fast track to closing the homework gap with Wi-Fi and hotspots that would be affordable to low-income families.

But last summer, in a blow to rural school districts across the country, the Federal Communications Commission chose to auction licenses for the Educational Broadband Service spectrum on the open market rather than favoring schools. That has created a “battle for the airwaves” with private companies that makes it more difficult to connect rural families, Boone says.

The nonprofit Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition says if the FCC had assigned the broadband service licenses to schools and tribal nations, it could have reduced the homework gap nationally by nearly 30 percent.

“What could have been the silver bullet for closing the digital divide, especially in rural areas, was just taken away,” says Boone, a coalition board member.

The county’s project continues, though. It has rolled out some ambitious fixes, including 70 anchor sites with fiber access in gathering places across the county such as public libraries, community centers and even beaches. Cox-Pemberton says she makes use of one of those sites when she wants to study with friends who don’t yet have fiber at home.

“We head to the Kent County library, and they have great internet access there,” she says.

— PAUL RIEDE