Two county officials are working on a program that will give
residents in rural areas access to high-speed Internet at their
schools.
Hollister – Two county officials are working on a program that will give residents in rural areas access to high-speed Internet at their schools.
County Superintendent of Schools Tim Foley and Supervisor Reb Monaco envision a program that would make high-speed Internet access, which county schools already have, available to residents in rural areas during scheduled times in the evenings.
“So many of those remote areas have no high-speed Internet access, and we have brought it to the school houses,” Foley said. “So, those being the center of the communities, we can reach people most effectively through there.”
Though they are still hammering out the details, including when the program might begin, Foley and Monaco see great potential in the prospect of making schools’ high-speed Internet available to rural residents, especially those who aren’t computer-savvy.
“If we can get them connected to the opportunities of the Internet, that can be a life-changing event,” Foley said.
Since county schools’ computers already have high-speed Internet access, the program would only require a staff member to be on-hand to assist people in using the computers, Foley and Monaco said. This detail is also being worked on.
Foley and Monaco are planning to use Tres Pinos School and Jefferson Elementary School, which are in rural south county, as locations for a trial run of the program. If it’s successful, the program could be expanded to include more of the county’s nine rural schools. Monaco said one of the reasons they chose those schools was because Tres Pinos School, while being in a rural area, is less remote than Jefferson.
“We want to use those two as trials, because they represent the extremes of what we’re talking about,” Monaco said. “If it works out successfully I think it has room for expansion, probably to most of the rural schools.”
Monaco said that he and Foley have had preliminary talks with board members and staff at both schools and they are receptive to the idea. However, school officials were slightly concerned about how the program might affect their schools’ daily operations.
“We took a ride out to Jefferson and also Tres Pinos School to talk to some of the people out there about the feasibility of that, and we were received rather warmly with the idea,” Monaco said. “We certainly don’t want to infringe on the curriculum or the financial concerns of the districts.”
While at first the program will allow rural residents to use schools’ Internet for research and possibly making online purchases, Monaco said that it may eventually expand to offer even more.
