In remote Alaska, broadband for all remains a dream. So a school got creative

About as far west as you can go in the US before hitting Russia lies a string of remote Aleutian Islands. It’s where the Discovery Channel show The Deadliest Catch is filmed and where most fish destined for restaurants in the continental US are processed. 

A tiny school system in the region, the Aleutians East Borough School District, educates 230 students across four different sites, and about 85% of the kids are Alaska Native. To get between the four main schools in the district requires flights on twin-engine planes, and in one case, a flight followed by a helicopter. The towns — Sand Point, King Cove, False Pass and Akutan — have stunning views and plenty of seafood, an industry that employs most of the residents. 

What the Aleutians East Borough School District doesn’t have is COVID-19. No one in the four towns or the large Trident Seafood fish-processing plant has the novel coronavirus, and fewer than 5,000 people have been infected in all of Alaska. But that doesn’t mean the district isn’t preparing for quarantines. When the Spanish Flu swept through Alaska, it devastated the population of some villages, with one out of every 20 Alaskans dying between 1918 and 1919. The state can’t let that happen again. 

Reliable internet service would help the islands keep COVID at bay by allowing people to communicate and learn at safe, social distances. But the few home connections that exist in the area are accessed through satellite delivery, which leads to delays and stutters. Cell service, even in the more urban areas, can drop 10 times a day, estimates AEBSD Superintendent Patrick Mayer. And service is pricey.  

“There’s very, very limited access to the internet out here,” Mayer says in an interview. “Most families just don’t have it here. It’s tremendously expensive.” 

To get around that, the AEBSD has gotten creative. It’s building its own digital content delivery system that doesn’t need internet access. AEBSD will be able to beam signals to students’ homes, sort of like setting up a TV station and equipping homes to tune in over an antenna. 

The US has wrestled with a digital divide for decades, but the pandemic has exposed some of the most vulnerable populations: Students from poorer urban areas and remote rural districts. Minorities, including people who identify as Alaska Natives, are disproportionately hurt. The worry is the disconnected students, many who are already disadvantaged, will fall even further behind their more affluent peers.

An estimated 18 million people in the US don’t have a broadband connection with download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second, according to a US Federal Communications Commission tally from 2020. Experts say the official figures are almost certainly lower than reality because of faulty maps. About 16.9 million children don’t have the home internet access necessary to support online learning during the pandemic, according to a joint study from the Alliance for Excellent Education, National Indian Education Association, National Urban League and UnidosUS. Black, Latino and American Indian/Alaska Native households are even less likely to have adequate connectivity, with one out of three lacking access at home, that study said. 

Many of those kids won’t have the connectivity that’s needed to attend virtual class, even as the novel coronavirus pandemic keeps schools closed for in-person study. In the past, this so-called homework gap led students to stay late at school to finish their assignments or to study in libraries and Wi-Fi-connected restaurants. During the pandemic, none of those are an option. Nearly six months after the first schools closed because of COVID-19, there’s still no comprehensive solution to get everyone online. 

“If you don’t have an adequate internet connection, you’re locked out of the virtual classroom,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who coined the term homework gap well before the pandemic, says in an interview. “When it comes to education, closing the homework gap might not seem like a big thing, but it has huge impacts on our nation’s students.”

Rural struggles

Building out high-speed internet networks is prohibitively expensive when there’s only one customer every mile or so. In many rural areas that have some sort of connection, there are often just one or two internet providers, and service is pricey and spotty. Hospitals, schools and other critical groups have long lacked fast-enough internet to function, and it’s now heavily impacting students who will be learning from home. 

In a place like Alaska, building out broadband is daunting. The AEBSD spreads across 15,000 square miles, of which only 7,000 are land. 

“There’s always talk about dropping a fiber line, but I’m not expecting that next week,” AEBSD’s Mayer says.

Across Alaska, about 31% of students don’t have adequate high-speed internet connections at home, and about 19% don’t have devices, according to a study by nonprofit Common Sense Media.

The AEBSD itself has 25mbps broadband, thanks to a federal assistance program called E-Rate and a satellite internet provider, and all students have their own Chromebooks. E-Rate, which is run by the FCC, provides schools and libraries with internet service that’s discounted by 20% to 90%, depending on the poverty level of the area. 

When the pandemic started, the AEBSD, like many other districts around the US, asked for a waiver to use its E-Rate-supported internet in the broader community. The FCC said no.

In the spring, AEBSD delivered paper assignments to students along with their free lunches, something it knew wasn’t sustainable. Steps taken by other school districts, like setting up Wi-Fi-connected parks or distributing personal hotspots to students, weren’t feasible or realistic for Alaska, where winters are long and cold. 

“This has just been a decades-long problem that now has been elevated to No. 1,” Nicol Turner Lee, an expert on connectivity at the Brookings Institution, says in an interview. “We still haven’t figured it out, and it’s hurting kids.”

Because tapping into its E-Rate discounts wasn’t an option, the AEBSD instead set to work building its own wide area mesh network using unlicensed radio frequencies. It set up large beaming radio towers in the town and installed a series of small, wireless access points on the top of locals’ homes. 

All of the content is housed on local school district servers, and it’s beamed to the different access point around the district. So far, AEBSD has wired two towns. The remaining two will follow soon. 

“This is kind of the freebie way to do this that doesn’t involve the internet,” Mayer says. “When you get into the internet and E-Rate, you run into all kinds of landmines.”

A national plan?

There have been some efforts to extend the E-Rate system to students’ homes now that many schools around the country are having virtual-only classes this fall. The FCC’s Rosenworcel has pushed for schools to be allowed to use E-Rate funding to distribute hotspots to students with unreliable home internet. 

“We should be using every tool we have right now to solve the homework gap,” she says. Since E-Rate is a program schools know well, they would be able to easily navigate the system to get more funding. And because the program is already in place, funding could be distributed quickly.

“There’s so much of this crisis we can’t fix,” she says. “But the homework gap is something we can solve.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the rest of the panel have resisted expanding E-Rate, saying the program can’t be used for distributing hotspots or broadening connectivity to students’ homes. “Current law specifically allows E-Rate funding only for ‘classrooms,’ not student homes,” the FCC said in a statement. “That’s precisely why since March, Chairman Pai has repeatedly called on Congress to establish and fund a Remote Learning Initiative so that more students can get connected and stay online.”

AEBSD’s program costs students nothing. The school is funding the purchase of the wireless access points and other technology. Mayer estimates equipment, travel to install the radios and other expenses have totaled under $20,000 — likely far less than it would cost to hook every home up to satellite internet for the school year.

Members of the community will also be able to register for “learner accounts” to access the educational content.

While AEBSD is currently offering in-person, socially-distanced school for the first week of classes, it will be able to use open source software like the BigBlueButton conferencing system to broadcast lessons from teachers to their students’ Chromebooks if the area goes into lockdown.

Kids will be able to complete their homework and take tests and quizzes, much like they would in person. 

“Using BigBlueButton [an instructor] could teach her class a lesson, face-to-face, just like Zoom, with a whiteboard in the background,” Mayer says. 

And it would all work without the students getting internet access at home.