Cradlepoint Helps California School District Ensure No Child is Left Offline
Coachella Valley Unified School District launches LTE-based ‘WiFi on Wheels’ to rural community
Cradlepoint Case Study | Mobile WiFi for Education
It’s disturbing to think that still today five million households with school aged children are not connected to the Internet — a resource that can be critical for families and student success. The Coachella Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) in California is eliminating the digital divide with Cradlepoint NetCloud Service for mobile, including routing, a WiFi access point, content filtering, GPS and telematics integration, WiFi-as-WAN, and cloud configuration. Through Cradlepoint’s service, CVUSD delivered “WiFi on Wheels” across the second poorest school district in the U.S. to ensure no student is left offline.
Case Background
The CVUSD is situated just 30 minutes west of Palm Springs and sits on a vast and isolated desert. Its mission is to educate and assist students in realizing their full potential as responsible, productive, contributing members of society by providing an educational environment in which students are challenged, excellence is expected, and differences are valued. However, economic and geographic challenges make it very difficult for the CVUSD to prepare its 20,000 students for college, career, and citizenship.
Business Needs
Most families in the CVUSD live below the poverty line. They struggle just to pay rent, so at home Internet service is a luxury many go without.
"We have families that are very economically challenged. 100% of our students are on free or reduced lunch. Some of them are living at trailer home parks or in abandoned railroad cars. It’s just unbelievable some of the challenges they face.”
Dr. Darryl Adams
Superintendent for the Coachella Valley Unified School District
This digital divide was putting CVUSD students at a real disadvantage when it comes to connected learning and educational success. Dr. Adams continues to believe that technology is critical to families and made it a priority to get his students online — but he knew this would be a challenge.
Solution Delivered
Dr. Adams and the CVUSD decided to leverage resources they already had on hand — 100 school buses. The school district created an always-on learning environment by putting Cradlepoint’s cloud-managed LTE-enabled, in-vehicle routers with WiFi on its buses to keep students connected during
their commute. The district then parks those buses in the most rural or disadvantaged areas to provide Internet access to students’ homes. The buses cover the school district’s 1,250 square miles — larger than the state of Rhode Island.
The equipment is powered by solar panels and funded by a community-based $45 million bond measure passed in 2012 to fund the mobile learning initiative over 10 years.
"We wanted to make sure that our students have 24/7 access to the Internet — because learning does not stop at the end of the school day. We realized we had to provide this service to our students in order for them to compete in the 21st century.” said Adams.
The Cradlepoint solutions are compact, ruggedized, and highly available, making it ideal for the school bus environment. The solutions have an extensive list of safety and hardening certifications, and are engineered to protect against extreme temperatures, humidity, shocks, vibrations, dust, water splash, reverse polarity, and transient voltage.
Because the solutions can be cloud-managed, it makes it easy for the school district to scale deployments and manage the bus networks in real time.
Benefits
As a result of the “WiFi on Wheels” initiative, students are becoming more engaged with their school work and the CVUSD’s graduation rate has jumped from 70% to 80%. Additionally, Dr. Adams would like to go beyond connecting students and connect everyone in the area.
“We found some of the third-party Internet service provider companies are not willing to go into some of the areas where we serve. So, in the long run, we would like to become our own Time Warner or Cox Communication and provide this for our students. It’s too crucial for them to have this access for us not to go down this path,” added Dr. Adams.
Contact USAT
USAT is a value-added reseller of Cradlepoint IoT-enabled communications devices and networking software. USAT specializes in improving the efficiency of our clientele’s mission-critical operations by implementing wireless communication solutions for data acquisition. USAT provides, configures, and deploys durable, secure, and field-tested intelligent network devices to fit the exacting requirements and budgets of our clients' wireless connectivity initiatives.
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