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If we build it, they'll fund it. That's the idea behind a small
but growing movement of mostly rural schools and school districts
that have decided the best way to pay for Internet access for
their students and staff is to become Internet service providers
for their own communities.
Rural communities are often at a distinct disadvantage when
it comes to finding and funding Internet access. Not only are
high-speed T1 lines typically more expensive for schools in rural
areas, but the relative scarcity of Internet service providers
also means that teachers, students, parents, and other community
members often must make expensive long-distance calls in order
to connect to the Internet from their homes.
Some schools, however, have turned this shortage of access to
their advantage by building their own on-ramps -- and toll booths
-- to the Internet.
That's what has happened in Sisters, Ore., a quaint Western
town of just over 800 inhabitants in central Oregon. Three years
ago, when the local high school began investigating how to acquire
high-speed Internet access, connectivity options were few and
far between. In fact, the school district's predicament was typical
of many rural, sparsely populated areas: With no Internet Service
Provider (ISP) located within the local calling area, every dial-up
Internet connection required an expensive, long-distance call
to a town 20 miles distant. And the district could not afford
the Holy Grail of connectivity -- a T1 line.
"We were trying to figure out how to get Internet access to
our students and staff," says Dennis Dempsey, principal of Sisters
High School. Pondering this problem, Dempsey and four teachers
hit upon the idea of starting their own ISP -- a for-profit private
corporation that would underwrite the Internet access for the
district's schools.
With the help of a $50,000 loan from a local businessman, the
five educator-entrepreneurs leased a T1 line and bought the equipment
-- modems, routers, servers, and telephone lines -- needed to
get their ISP going. They named the service OutlawNet
-- after the school's mascot.
"Our motivation was to provide free access to students and staff,"
says Dempsey. "Selling access to the community was the vehicle
that allowed us to do that."
With the support of the local school board, Dempsey negotiated
a co- location deal with the school district: "We made an agreement
to provide free Internet access for our three schools in return
for space in the high school to run and operate the company. Our
goal was to get 100 community subscribers to make our costs."
Three years later, OutlawNet has over 400 subscribers who pay
$20 per month for dial-up Internet access. The profits more than
cover the expense of the district's three $1,500-per-month T1
lines, Dempsey says: "This venture has gone way beyond our dreams
and is now actually making money that is being used to bring more
technology into our schools."
Besides helping fund the district's technology program, OutlawNet
also provides many Sisters High School students with invaluable
experience in a high-tech field. Students who sign up for the
school's OutlawNet class actually help run the company -- installing
software and providing one-on-one training for subscribers in
their homes and businesses, selling computers to subscribers,
repairing used computers, and designing and maintaining OutlawNet's
web pages.
What's more, last year the school district hired OutlawNet students
to serve as in-service trainers, teaching district staff how to
use the Internet and e-mail. The next step is to teach the students
about networking and train them to become certified network technicians,
Dempsey says. (See the sidebar for some comments from OutlawNet
students about their experiences in the class.)
Today, OutlawNet is no longer the only ISP within the local
calling area of the town of Sisters, but residents are still signing
up for service at a record pace, Dempsey says: "People like local
service -- and they like to support their schools."
Connected co-op
Roughly 400 miles further north, just across the Canadian border,
lies the pastoral farmland community of Chilliwack. Although urban
Vancouver, B.C., is just an hour's drive away, the community was
poorly served in terms of Internet access when, two and a half
years ago, the principal and staff at Chilliwack Senior Secondary
School began to investigate how to hook their school up to the
Internet.
"We started talking about a T1 line," says Dale Halcrow, Chilliwack
Senior's principal. "But we quickly realized it was going to be
beyond our means. So we began thinking of ways to provide and
pay for the access. We knew that a T1 would give us more bandwidth
than we needed."
Their solution: Sell the excess, pay for the access. The staff
decided to form a community cooperative to provide dial-up Internet
service to area residents, dubbing the service the Chilliwack
High Internet Learning Link -- or CHILL
for short.
"There were about nine of us who brainstormed the idea in one
afternoon," Halcrow says. "We made a presentation to the school
board and said, 'This is what we want to do.'" The district found
the money to pay for the initial $20,000 in start-up costs, and
today, the co-op is pulling in $8,000 per year in revenue.
"Our break-even point was around 80 or 90 customers," says Bill
Kempthorne, who teaches physics and computers at the school and
is one of the staff members in charge of the project. "We hit
that within 45 days."
To avoid busy signals, CHILL maintains an 8-to-1 ratio between
dial-up users and modem lines, which has capped the number of
subscribers at 160 users. The service charges $20 per month, and
there's usually just a short waiting list to sign up, Kempthorne
says.
The co-op's payoff is clear: The revenue from CHILL's dial-up
subscribers pays for the high-speed Internet access to 240 PCs
on the high school's local-area network. In fact, there's at least
one Internet-connected computer in every classroom. In addition,
CHILL serves as the dial-up Internet access provider for 13 elementary
schools in the district. And over half of the high school's teachers
use CHILL to get on the Internet at home.
As in Sisters, Ore., Chilliwack's high school students benefit
academically from having an ISP on campus. Students taking classes
in technology, marketing, and accounting help run the ISP on a
volunteer basis as part of their normal coursework.
"The students have been involved since the beginning," says
Kempthorne. "They've done marketing, support calls, server maintenance,
and web pages."
The success of CHILL also proved to be a natural stepping stone
for the school to start a Cisco Networking Academy last April,
offering students a rigorous training program in computer network
administration. In addition to providing the program to students,
the school also offers training and support to other local Cisco
academies.
In the local loop
Not all schools that decide to go into the ISP business do so
to fund their Internet access. Some do so simply because there
are no other options for community members to get on the Internet
at home without making a long-distance call.
That was the case in Williamsville, Ill., a rural bedroom community
of 800 people. When the local telephone company suddenly took
Springfield -- just 12 miles away -- out of the town's local calling
area, dial-up Internet access became an expensive long-distance
proposition overnight.
Although the Williamsville Community Unit School District already
received Internet access courtesy of the state, reselling this
access was not an option, explains Marty Benner, a board member
in the district. Instead, the district installed a leased satellite
system to acquire additional Internet access that could be resold.
After an initial investment of $33,000, the district began selling
the Internet access to the community last April. "That's really
why we did it," Benner says. "It was not meant as a money-maker,
but rather as a service to the community."
The district charges $20 per month for the service, which is
named Bullets.Net for the
school's athletic team. After six months in business, the ISP
has more than a dozen dial-up lines and about 150 customers, Benner
says. "That doesn't sound like much, but when you consider our
community's size, it's quite a lot." What's more, she adds, the
ISP is now past the break-even point.
A similar set of circumstances prompted the West
Valley Central School District in Western New York to provide
dial-up Internet access to community residents -- free of charge.
Located 40 miles south of Buffalo, the hamlet of West Valley is
so small it isn't even officially considered a town. The district's
single K-12 school enrolls just 520 students.
"The main reason we offer this service to our community is that
we are located in an area where our phone calls are long distance
to just about everywhere," says Cathie Tokarczyk, the district's
technology coordinator. "We have six dial-up lines that community
members can use any time of day. We do not charge for this service
-- the only requirement that community members have to meet is
that they have to live in our school district."
Part of the reason the district isn't charging for this service
is that the school's 56 Kbps leased line is provided by the regional
Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), Tokarczyk says.
Although it's much slower than a 1.5 Mbps T1 line, about 90 households
are making good use of the school's ISP, Tokarczyk says: "It's
excellent community relations."
Rolling your own
Although running a school-based ISP for community members can
be a win-win scenario, many school technology leaders who spoke
with Electronic School cautioned that it's not for everyone. If
you're considering whether to sell Internet access to your community,
here are some points to keep in mind:
* Evaluate the supply and demand. It's just common sense:
Unless your community is predominantly underserved by local Internet
access providers, don't try to offer this service. Small-town
schools tend to be the best candidates for running their own ISPs
because there's usually a clear need in the community waiting
to be filled, yet the number of potential subscribers is not so
large that the demand is likely to overwhelm the school's capacity
in terms of technological and human resources.
For example, although the Los Angeles Unified School District
is one of the largest ISPs in Southern California, the district
does not plan to offer dial-up service to community members because
"the district is too big to undertake it," says Doug Williams,
an instructional systems specialist in the district. "We have
750,000 students and 60,000 employees, who are all eligible for
accounts," Williams says. As a result, the district's ISP already
supports 80,000 registered users and maintains 500 dial-up modem
lines, and the capacity is stretched to the limit.
"We need more of everything -- staff, bandwidth, equipment,
and monster routers," Williams says. "There is no unused capacity,
and we wouldn't dream of selling service to anyone outside the
district. No sane group of individuals would do that [in a situation
such as ours]." And, of course, a metropolitan city like Los Angeles
is already well-served by a host of local ISPs.
* Look for in-house expertise. Does your school have
at least one talented and motivated techie who is willing to take
on this responsibility? If not, you might be facing an uphill
battle.
"I think any school that has a person on staff who is technically
competent and has business experience could pull this off," says
Jon Renner, who teaches the OutlawNet class at Sisters High School.
"Without both of these elements, the downside risks are too great
for everyone concerned, both because the skills are essential
and because they're expensive if you have to buy them."
In Chilliwack, the high school already had "a core of six solid
people who really knew this stuff," says CHILL's Bill Kempthorne.
"The principal had the foresight to hire technologically savvy
teachers. If you had to train staff to do this, you wouldn't have
much hope of succeeding."
* Talk to a lawyer. Publicly funded schools that get
into the business of selling Internet access for profit are venturing
into uncharted legal waters. Consider it prudent, then, to get
sound legal advice from your school board's attorney before you
order even a single modem.
"The smart thing we did was to talk to the attorneys before
we did anything," says Sisters High School principal Dennis Dempsey.
As a for-profit corporation located in the school but neither
owned nor controlled by the school, Sisters High's OutlawNet neatly
sidesteps any legal murkiness.
"To stay legal, this kind of program must not derive any financial
support from the school," says OutlawNet's Jon Renner. "If it
is located in the school, as ours is, it must pay rent for the
space it occupies through a regular lease agreement and provide
its own phone service, copy service, and so on."
But even if the ISP is owned and operated by the school district,
as Williamsville's Bullets.Net is, that's not necessarily an invitation
for a lawsuit, says board member Marty Benner.
"Our lawyer said this was a bit of a grey area, and we did go
a little out on a limb," she says. But the main issue to consider,
she adds, is whether the school district intends for the service
to compete with other local businesses that offer Internet access,
or whether the service is intended only as a way to share the
school's resources with the community.
In fact, all the school-based ISPs mentioned in this story do
their best to keep a sensitive public profile, declining to advertise
and avoiding direct competition with commercial ISPs that have
since moved in to their areas. That's both a sound legal move
and good politics, these school technology leaders say.
* Use kid power. Selling Internet access is one thing.
Answering support calls from community subscribers who need help
configuring their modem settings can be quite another. Here's
where the kids can be of great benefit, says OutlawNet's Jon Renner,
whose students help take support calls as part of his class.
Enlisting the aid of students for technical support is also
great PR for the school district, he says: "The kids are seen
as professional and competent instead of dour and uncommunicative,
and we're seen as heroes for starting them in this direction.
You'll also find that this is perhaps the most productive part
of the program from an educational standpoint."
Although starting a school-based ISP is not a project to be
taken lightly, the benefits -- to students, staff, and the community
alike -- are clearly quite powerful. OutlawNet's Jon Renner puts
it this way: "The program is growing as fast as we can stand,
every classroom in the district and most of the offices have a
free Ethernet connection to a T1 and the world, my OutlawNet classes
always run out of time, and we have money in the bank. What more
could one ask? Well, there is more: I've got students who can
actually get a good job immediately after graduation -- and some
that already have such a job."
Lars
Kongshem is an associate editor and
the webmaster of Electronic School and The American School Board
Journal.
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