Northwest Arkansas School Districts Embrace Technology Without State Internet Resource

STAFF PHOTO DAVID GOTTSCHALK 
Candace Reed, right, Prairie Grove Middle School fifth-grade math teacher, looks over the work of Jackson Sorters, center, and Knox Laird, left, as they work Jan. 22 with a multiplayer online math game Tug Team in class. The school bought Google Chromebook laptops for all of its fifth-graders to raise the district’s Internet access and use of technology.

STAFF PHOTO DAVID GOTTSCHALK Candace Reed, right, Prairie Grove Middle School fifth-grade math teacher, looks over the work of Jackson Sorters, center, and Knox Laird, left, as they work Jan. 22 with a multiplayer online math game Tug Team in class. The school bought Google Chromebook laptops for all of its fifth-graders to raise the district’s Internet access and use of technology.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Candice Reed quieted her energetic fifth-grade math class with five claps, then asked them: Who wants to go to multiplication.com?

Everyone’s hand shot up. The 30 Prairie Grove Middle School students, each with a small Acer laptop computer in front of them, chattered excitedly, thrilled at the chance to test math skills against other students through the website.

After a moment, Reed said with finality, “All right. You may go.”

The cries of “Yes!” and fist pumps were immediate.

“You see their enthusiasm, and they’re self-motivated,” Reed said happily. She and her class unanimously agreed the computers and math games make the students better and faster at multiplication and division — and it’s fun. Every Prairie Grove fifth-grader gets a laptop, connecting them to study tools through an Internet connection that has more than doubled in speed in the past few years.

Likewise, schools across Northwest Arkansas are embracing technology as they rush toward a future increasingly reliant on online classwork, research and testing. To get there, however, schools can’t tap what might be the state’s biggest single Internet resource.

UNTAPPED RESERVE

Arkansas university and hospital campuses are tied together by a statewide, high-capacity backbone of fiber-optic cables called the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network, or ARE-ON. Among 42 states with such a network, Arkansas is the only one that prohibits its K-12 schools from plugging in.

“I’m fairly confident we have sufficient (capacity) to meet any needs of the state, universities, colleges, public schools and so on,” said David Merrifield, ARE-ON’s executive director, though he added an assessment hasn’t been done to prove this. “An enormous amount of bandwidth is available.”

The state allows districts to piggyback on much slower state contracts with private providers, which local school officials said is often a costly and inadequate option. They largely have turned to their own contracts with companies like Prairie Grove Telephone or Cox Communications.

This has left an uneven, often deficient patchwork for students and potentially higher costs for the schools. Arkansas’ broadband costs are the third highest in the country, 40 percent higher than the national average, according to Ookla, an international broadband tracking company.

Large school districts such as Bentonville and Springdale are paying annual Internet costs between $50,000 and $100,000 as a result, most of it reimbursed with federal money.

ARE-ON, which was paid for with about $140 million in state and federal money during the past several years, provides superior connections at comparable or lower prices.

“We owe it to our kids to be better than that,” said state Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, who introduced the Digital Learning Act of 2013 and said internet costs are “all over the board” around the state. “We’ve got to get some uniformity in the rate structure there, and ARE-ON might be a way to do that.”

“We do not want to take away private business,” Douglas said, “But this is education, and we want the best education at the most cost-effective price.”

MEETING THE FUTURE

The need for broadband is increasingly urgent, not least because of the Internet’s ever-expanding role in daily life. Arkansas high schools must provide digital courses this school year or the next, for example, while Common Core and other education programs also require schools to switch to online tests for all students.

The problem of access was even featured in Tuesday’s State of the Union Address, when President Barack Obama announced a deal with private providers to connect 20 million students in the next two years.

An Education Department report from 2013 found the average Arkansas school district had one-fifth the connection speed the department says students will need, prompting state officials to look into extending a high-speed Internet connection to even the most far-flung schoolhouses.

Districts have made progress on their own. Lincoln Consolidated School District, for example, upgraded to 50 megabits per second, or Mbps — a measurement of information flow speed. In comparison, a typical Cox home internet connection is two or three dozen Mbps, according to its website.

“We’re all just kind of doing what we can,” said Adrian Risley, Lincoln’s technology director. He said he hopes to double that connection next year to handle laptops provided to most students, because the district’s Internet use has been bumping against that 50 Mbps ceiling for more than a year.

LEGAL LINGO

The Digital Learning Act of 2013

6-16-1402: “It is the intent of the General Assembly to:

(1) Provide for the expansion of digital learning opportunities to all Arkansas public school students; and

(2) Remove any impediments to the expansion of digital learning opportunities.”

6-16-1406.a.2: “Beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, all public school districts and public charter schools shall provide at least one digital learning course to their students as either a primary or supplementary method of instruction.”

Source: Act 1280

Web Watch

ARE-ON

A map of ARE-ON showing the hospital and college campuses it connects with can be found at http://www.areon.ne….

Bentonville, meanwhile, quadrupled its bandwidth this school year to 1,200 Mbps. Springdale plans to boost its connection ten-fold this summer. Fayetteville Public Schools quintupled to 1,000 in January.

“I’m not sure if we’ll be able to sustain that,” said Susan Norton, Fayetteville’s information systems director, adding this year’s increase more than doubles the monthly cost to about $7,300 and won’t be the last. “It’s going to hurt a lot more.”

Even with the bandwidth increases, most local schools don’t meet the state’s recommendation of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and teachers. ARE-ON, meanwhile, offers its clients connections with 10 times Fayetteville’s speed.

“It’s just tremendous capacity that’s not being utilized right now,” said Richard Abernathy, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators and a former Bryant Public Schools superintendent. “Which kids have an opportunity to learn? My kids at Bryant or those kids there? Kids that have learned how to go and research and learn how to solve a problem are going to be ahead.”

CALL FOR CHANGE

Fast Access for Students, Teachers and Economic Results, or FASTER, was formed by Gov. Mike Beebe last summer as part of an effort to increase access particularly for rural schools. In a report in December, FASTER’s engineering and infrastructure task force said the state could use a kind of hybrid — essentially relying on private companies to connect schools to the ARE-ON backbone.

“Right now what we are looking at is a public-private partnership,” said Douglas, adding anything would have to pass through the Legislature.

Private providers generally oppose the idea.

“We’re obviously not going to be supportive of a solution that uses our own network to compete with us,” said Len Pitcock, Cox’s director of public affairs, pointing out nearly all of ARE-ON’s cable is leased from providers like Cox. “If the network is made up almost entirely of private providers, that kind of dispels that theory that the private sector is not doing the job.”

Pitcock suggested the state could help districts pay for the private contracts, or take over for the few districts providers can’t reach.

“I think the private sector stands willing to work with the state of Arkansas,” he said.

Merrifield Norton said the Fayetteville district and others would have to upgrade to be able to handle ARE-ON as well.

“It’s not that you can just hop on,” Norton said, suggesting the state be more cautious in the demands it places on schools. “I think the more people talk about it the better off we’ll be in the future.”