Community partners to broadcast free Wi-Fi for schoolchildren from top of Cathedral of Learning

Students in New Kensington, Coraopolis and Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood will soon have access to free, at-home internet.

Four community partners — Meta Mesh Wireless Communities, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and the Keystone Initiative for Network-based Research (KINBER) — have formed Every1online, a program to provide high-speed internet for school-aged children in the area. The source of the signal: the top of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning.

“It seems extremely appropriate to me that the hub that’s making this sort of crazy sci-fi idea work is literally called the Cathedral of Learning,” said Ashley Williams Patton, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Pathways Programs.

The goal is to bridge the digital divide — an issue that’s existed long before the pandemic, but has been exacerbated by the advent of widespread remote schooling. Four antennas will be mounted to the top of the Cathedral. Bandwidth provided by KINBER will be relayed out to local towers in Every1online’s three pilot communities of New Kensington, Coraopolis and Homewood.

“It’s a perfect tower,” said Sam Garfinkel, development coordinator at Meta Mesh, a nonprofit internet service provider. The Cathedral of Learning is, after all, the highest educational structure on the Western Hemisphere, standing more than 500 feet tall with 42 stories.

Nonprofit, colleges team up

Garfinkel said Meta Mesh has been working to provide more equitable internet access for about seven years. The nonprofit’s executive director, Adam Longwill, has been using low-cost mesh networking (a type of internet infrastructure) to produce public Wi-Fi block-by-block.

Carnegie Mellon, meanwhile, had grant funding available after its annual computer science summer camp was canceled in the pandemic.

Patton heard about what Longwill was doing to expand internet access to communities in need. She reached out to see if CMU could put that funding to use in his cause.

Soon after, Pitt got involved through its partnership in KINBER, a statewide network provider and research organization. From there, the 12-month pilot program for Every1online was formed. The collaboration is also supported by the Hopper-Dean Foundation and the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

In New Ken-Arnold, 1 in 7 don’t have internet

The first three communities to receive the free signal each have documented issues with internet access among their student populations. For example, data from the National Center of Education Statistics indicates that roughly 12.5% of households in the Pittsburgh Public Schools don’t have a broadband subscription; in the New Kensington-Arnold School District, the figure is 16%.

Garfinkel said Meta Mesh and other partners worked closely with local school districts and the Homewood Children’s Village to connect with eligible families.

While the pilot program is prioritizing households with students, any household within the service areas can sign up to receive equipment and connect to the network. If the pilot program is successful, she said, the project could expand to other neighborhoods as early as the spring.

And by not constructing any new cell towers at this point, cooperating with community institutions, private businesses and landowners to use only existing structures, she said the program is more cost-effective and can be replicated in more areas.

Pandemic worsens access gap

Equitable access to the internet is not a new problem — but the advent of remote learning during the covid-19 pandemic has made the issue even more glaring, especially for “high needs” districts, said Maggie Hannan, a learning scientist and associate director of CMU’s Simon Initiative. Those are the districts that tend to serve more racially diverse students, more students who qualify for free and reduced-priced lunch and have more obstacles for providing internet access outside the classroom.

School districts, libraries, nonprofits and other organizations nationwide have been working the past eight months to address internet connectivity issues, specifically for K-12 students. Many districts in the region have purchased internet hot spots for students, partnered with local libraries and set up access points in parking lots of schools and other public areas so students can do their homework.

But those solutions are intrinsically limited, many of the partners said. Libraries only have so many hours, and not all students have transportation or time to find their local access point.

Try doing homework in your car

“The learning environment in the home is probably going to be a lot more conducive to remote learning than in a car trying to balancing your laptop,” said Jay Graham from Pitt’s Office of the Chief Information Officer. “We know we’re stuck in this remote learning environment and probably going to be there for a while.”

Members of the collaboration echoed hopes that the pilot program would expand and continue long after the covid-19 pandemic, after students return to classrooms full-time.

“The pandemic is pointing this out in a really pressing way for schools and kids and families, but there’s tons of data about the lengths that students who don’t have broadband access at home have to go to complete homework,” Patton said. “We’re asking kids to sit outside of places to access community Wi-Fi, to go to a library that may or may not be close to their home or on a bus route … or visiting a neighbor or a variety of hoops to jump through.

”(Meanwhile) students who live in homes that do have broadband access can just sit down at a computer.”

Not perfect, but a tool

Institutions of higher education have a unique ability to collaborate and serve the communities and regions in which they’re located, said Lina Distilio, Pitt’s assistant vice chancellor for community engagement, especially when it comes to improving educational outcomes for the region’s children.

“This is a great example of how communities can lead the change that most impacts their residents and enlist higher education institution to help really produce something that’s totally unique,” Distilio said.

Garfinkel, at Meta Mesh, noted that the connection provided by Every1online may not be the strongest signal — “we’re not claiming to be as fast as Verizon or Comcast” — and Patton noted that reliable internet access won’t be the “silver bullet for learning during covid-19.”

Every1online is meant to be “another tool from the arsenal” to meet the basic need of internet access, Garfinkel said.

“It comes down to quality of life,” she said. “Internet should not be considered a luxury.”