INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS WI-FLYERS
Two school districts lead in the adoption of wireless Internet technology to transform school buses into rolling classrooms
WRITTEN BY RUSS MUNYAN Tis is not your father’s school bus ride. He never attend-
ed a technology-based school, he still may not be as Internet savvy as today’s teenagers, and he certainly never envisioned riding a school bus connected to the Internet. Welcome to the new age of school bus travel, at least
for Joplin (Missouri) Schools that is introducing Wi-Fi to six of its school buses this school year. It is not hard to understand this investment in Joplin, where, for the past two years, all 2,000 high school students have been issued a notebook computer, and where all instruction, projects, assignments and homework are heavily dependent on tech- nology; similarly, all eighth-graders are issued iPads. “Joplin Schools are mimicking real life for our students,”
says Klista Rader, director of information and implementa- tion technology. “Just like in the real world, our students are finding multiple sources, solving problems and doing their work online.”
Joplin is also a geographically large school district,
encompassing nearly 70 square miles in southwest Missouri for more than 7,600 students. Tat means many students spend a lot of time daily on buses. And then there are the inter-district student competitions. “Te closest destination for ‘away’ events is Springfield [Missouri], which takes an hour and a half each way,” explains Rader. “And there are others that are a lot farther than that, like Camdenton and Kansas City.” Students’ Internet access on the bus has been stymied
until now. Tis fall, Joplin’s six new Wi-Fi buses will serve as the primary “trip buses” for student competitions and field trips. No longer will students face an “either/or” scenario, forcing them to choose homework or extracurricular activi- ties; now they can have “both/and.” “We’ll also use the buses on field trips, which will also al-
low teachers to build prior learning and post-trip reflections into the trip bus rides,” says Rader. In this age of hard financial choices, Joplin parents had lobbied for this technology. Te total cost for the six hard- ware sets was $8,740. Each bus is also equipped with two wireless cards (AT&T and Sprint), and each cost $50 per month, or $100 per bus. Tis new age of school bus travel has already been avail- able in the Vail (Ariz.) School District long enough to in- spire a second generation of bus-mounted Wi-Fi technology. Like Joplin, Vail is a technology-based district with com-
paratively few school buildings in a large geographic area (five high schools in 400-plus square miles). Some Vail students spend more than two and a half hours on a school bus every day in this low-population density area located east of Tucson.
18 School Transportation News September 2013
right between the eyes when my daugh- ter came to me at the state volleyball tournament and said, ‘Dad, my laptop battery died on the way here.’ Of course it would — it was a three-and-a-half hour trip! But we never thought of that till it happened.” And everyone knows that the best Wi-Fi service in the world is useless to a device with a dead battery. Te Internet isn’t going away, and neither are school buses.
£ Vail, Ariz., high school students complete homework on the bus using the district’s Wi-Fi capabilities.
Vail bolted in its first Wi-Fi router to a bus in fall 2009. It
later added two more hard-mounted routers, bringing its Inter- net-enabled fleet to three vehicles. “But whenever one of those buses went out of service, the students lost their Internet access until it was returned,” says John Nunes, transportation supervisor. Tat led to shifting to movable CradlePoint routers for Wi-
Fi service that is portable from bus to bus. “Te routers plug into buses’ auxiliary power supplies and cre-
ate Wi-Fi ‘bubbles’ of approximately 150 feet,” Nunes explains. Te district has sold advertising rights to local businesses
to pay for the new systems. Signs are posted on each router’s “home bus” declaring that the Wi-Fi service is provided by the advertiser; all sales and postings are consistent with school advertising requirements of Arizona law. One year of sponsor- ship costs $1,000; two years costs $1,500. So far, 18 buses have movable routers, and three still have hard-mounted routers, for a total of 21 (out of 68) Wi-Fi equipped regular-ed buses. Te district’s next challenge will be to equip buses with aux-
iliary power sources for students, because students’ devices tend to run out of power on long trips. Nunes explains, “Tis hit me
It only makes sense that the two have come together to serve students’ learning, despite the obstacles. “Our district budget is still very tight, and Wi-Fi on busses is an
expensive item, so we’re not able to install as many of them as we’d like,” says Nunes. “But it is important enough for our students that we needed to find a way to make it happen for them.” —
Russ Munyan is a freelance writer based in Olathe, Kan.
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