Wireless Technology Evens the Score

How the Newport-Mesa Unified School District uses wireless networking to get one school online and propel another into the future

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Steven Glyer had a dilemma on his hands. In Southern California's Newport-Mesa Unified School District, where Glyer is the director of educational technology, half of the schools were wealthy and wired. The other half were neither.

In the summer of 2000, the Newport-Mesa school board passed a bond issue earmarking $163 million for infrastructure improvements. The bond would pay to hardwire the district's school buildings that had substandard wiring or none at all. The standard established by the district called for six data drops in each classroom.

But Glyer knew it could take three to four years before the bonds could be sold to investors and the money given to the schools in need. Charles W. TeWinkle Middle School in Costa Mesa is one of these schools. At TeWinkle, 49 percent of the 1,045 students in sixth through eighth grades are on free or reduced-price lunch. While the school has two computer labs, most of the classrooms are not wired.

"Four years is a long time in a student's life," says Glyer. He began looking for a more immediate solution and found the answer: wireless networking. "This is a solution that is available right now," he says.

LEAPFROGGING THE WIRES

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District gives its educational technology department broad latitude to implement connectivity solutions, so a wireless option was an easy sell to the school board and the district's superintendent, Robert Barbot.

"With wireless, we don't have to wait to hard wire a school," Barbot says. "While technology causes the digital gap, wireless is going to deliver access to our less financially stable schools."

Glyer installed a network of wireless access points around the TeWinkle school campus. For about $3,500 — a fraction of the $250,000 estimated cost for hardwiring — the entire TeWinkle campus can now access the Web. The system consists of Apple AirPort access points that each cover a radius of up to 150 feet, depending on wall construction type. The signal passes easily through wood and drywall, though metal can cause problems.

"It's amazing what a relief it is for a teacher to have Internet access," says Katie Aiman, an eighth-grade AP History teacher at TeWinkle. "It's totally helped me out." Aiman can now find links to Web sites relevant to her lesson and pass them on to her students. In the past, to research a project, the class might have gone en masse to the library, where 40 or so eighth graders would have been crouched around two encyclopedias. Now, the students can connect to the resources on the Internet, using the iMacs in the school's computer labs.

In Aiman's classroom itself, the situation is not as high tech. The sole computer in the room is the iMac at the teacher's desk, where Aiman often lets her students take turns. It's better than no computer at all, but a much less abundant environment than in many classrooms across town — such as at Corona del Mar High School.

EXTENDING THE ACCESS

Corona del Mar High School is located in a higher-income area of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. Here, only 1 percent of the students are on subsidized meals. Because the middle/high school already had Internet access, wireless technology was used to extend this access and make it ubiquitous and portable.

Under Glyer's guidance, Corona del Mar bought four mobile laptop computer carts. Each cart holds 20 lime green iBooks under lock and key. Teachers can sign out the carts and wheel them to their classrooms. There, they can connect everyone to the Web — wirelessly.

"We get laptops now — yeah!" exclaims 12-year-old Chais Pinesett, a seventh grader in teacher Brian Tulley's life science class.

Although most of the students in Tulley's class already have Internet access at home, they are excited because the carts give them hands-on access to the Web in the classroom, at the point of instruction. Tulley integrates the wireless iBooks into the instruction by guiding his students to Web sites that enhance the curriculum.

In class, Tulley also uses the new technology for more administrative tasks. Using the wireless network, Tulley can monitor four different students' work at once by splitting his computer screen into four sections and connecting to each student's screen in real time via the wireless connection.

The district has an Internet filter to keep its students away from inappropriate Web sites, but the screen-monitoring ability enhances this deterrent. "They know their little ears will get chopped off if they go there," Tulley laughs.

Tulley also uses the Internet connection to communicate with parents. He posts homework schedules, upcoming classroom topics, and students' test scores — in a password-protected format — so that parents can easily monitor their child's progress. Tulley also finds it easy to communicate with parents via e-mail.

FULL SPEED AHEAD

Glyer's hope is for wireless solutions to be sufficiently cost-effective and reliable that a school such as TeWinkle can bridge the digital divide and catch up to schools like Corona del Mar. "What's good wiring today is inadequate wiring in five years," Glyer says. "Hard wiring may become irrelevant." It's possible that five years from now TeWinkle will have avoided the large investments other schools have made in hard wiring.

Sharon Fry — Corona del Mar's principal and the former principal at TeWinkle — has seen wireless serve the different needs of the two schools. "It filled a huge gap at TeWinkle. Teachers now have Internet access," Fry says. "[At Corona del Mar] we don't have any more space to devote to computer laboratories. We have to be creative." Wireless has so far been the solution.

Districtwide, the wireless solution has leapfrogged all of Newport-Mesa's 30 schools onto the Web. Some schools, such as Corona del Mar, are using wireless to complement their existing hardwired connections, while schools like TeWinkle are using wireless to take the place of hardwired connections.

"If we had not had wireless," Glyer says, "we would have 15 campuses in our district that would have had to wait for the bond. That is half of our schools." As it stands, only one campus is still waiting — and it won't have to wait for much longer.

Ann Marsh is a writer based in Los Angeles.

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