In Rural 'Dead Zones,' School Comes On a Flash Drive (nytimes.com) 92
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Shekinah and Orlandria Lennon were sitting at their kitchen table this fall, taking online classes, when video of their teachers and fellow students suddenly froze on their laptop screens. The wireless antenna on the roof had stopped working, and it could not be fixed. Desperate for a solution, their mother called five broadband companies, trying to get connections for their home in Orrum, N.C., a rural community of fewer than 100 people with no grocery store or traffic lights.
All the companies gave the same answer: Service is not available in your area. The response is the same across broad stretches of Robeson County, N.C., a swath of small towns and rural places like Orrum dotted among soybean fields and hog farms on the South Carolina border. About 20,000 of the county's homes, or 43 percent of all households, have no internet connection.
The technology gap has prompted teachers to upload lessons on flash drives and send them home to dozens of students every other week. Some children spend school nights crashing at more-connected relatives' homes so they can get online for classes the next day. [...] Millions of American students are grappling with the same challenges, learning remotely without adequate home internet service. Even as school districts like the one in Robeson County have scrambled to provide students with laptops, many who live in low-income and rural communities continue to have difficulty logging on. "About 15 million K-12 students lived in households without adequate online connectivity in 2018," the report notes, citing a study of federal data by Common Sense Media, an education nonprofit group that tracks children's media use.
"[T]he pandemic turned the lack of internet connectivity into a nationwide emergency: Suddenly, millions of schoolchildren were cut off from digital learning, unable to maintain virtual 'attendance' and marooned socially from their classmates."
The technology gap has prompted teachers to upload lessons on flash drives and send them home to dozens of students every other week. Some children spend school nights crashing at more-connected relatives' homes so they can get online for classes the next day. [...] Millions of American students are grappling with the same challenges, learning remotely without adequate home internet service. Even as school districts like the one in Robeson County have scrambled to provide students with laptops, many who live in low-income and rural communities continue to have difficulty logging on. "About 15 million K-12 students lived in households without adequate online connectivity in 2018," the report notes, citing a study of federal data by Common Sense Media, an education nonprofit group that tracks children's media use.
"[T]he pandemic turned the lack of internet connectivity into a nationwide emergency: Suddenly, millions of schoolchildren were cut off from digital learning, unable to maintain virtual 'attendance' and marooned socially from their classmates."
Rural Internetification (Score:4, Insightful)
The government is supposed to step in under these circumctances
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Why the Governments won't permit in-person schooling for children and adolescents is baffling -- the 0 years to 19 years group has a 0.000028 death rate for those who contract Covid-19. The risk of death is very, very low (almost non-existent) according to the CDC statistics that I quoted.
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There many adults in those same schools, and they are in considerably more danger.
I mean, still not a lot, because they aren't 80, but more than the kids.
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She said she's the sickest she's ever been, 10 days in.
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I'm only convinced that it's not worth any risk at all, when the trade-off and the time period (they originally said 18 months for a vaccine!) are so small.
Why do you think the trade-off is so small? Schooling has suffered for kids all over the world (as in the article), not to mention the obvious social and economic costs we're paying, and those effects might be felt for years. I'm not saying that there is a right or wrong answer, but it seems strange to handwave away the costs as if what we've already paid has been trivial, not to mention all the costs that will follow.
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Isn't the education of one's children one's own responsibility?
Why the Governments won't permit in-person schooling for children and adolescents is baffling -- the 0 years to 19 years group has a 0.000028 death rate for those who contract Covid-19. The risk of death is very, very low (almost non-existent) according to the CDC statistics that I quoted.
You're right. The lives of the teachers, administrative staff, maintenance, bus drivers and all the parents and grand parents don't count. Just because the kids almost certainly won't die while passing it on to older adults means it is perfectly fine to kill off those older adults with connections to the kids.
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It's the Republicans' plan to fix Social Security funding.
Re: Rural Internetification (Score:2)
I laughed... I am not sure why though... I mean you probably aren't even joking.
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I laughed... I am not sure why though... I mean you probably aren't even joking.
Well when you consider that I have seen a Republican law maker say that the Federal government shouldn't bail out New York because if NY State was forced into bankruptcy they could get out of paying all those pensions which would do precisely what to all those people living on pensions they earned as state workers? Kill them off lot earlier I'd say. Of course that law maker will keep his much more lucrative Federal Pension so that is just fine. He should volunteer to lead the way and forego it if he want
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Are you thinking kids can't spread Covid to the general population?
They can. But they aren't likely to. Children are not significant spreaders.
If kids live with their grandparents or a sick relative, or their mom is pregnant again, then they should learn from home.
Otherwise, they can be in school.
"Learning from home" has been a disaster for many school districts, especially for low-income kids who need education the most.
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Re:Rural Internetification (Score:4, Informative)
Why the Governments won't permit in-person schooling for children and adolescents is baffling -- the 0 years to 19 years group has a 0.000028 death rate for those who contract Covid-19. The risk of death is very, very low (almost non-existent) according to the CDC statistics that I quoted.
First, what statistics that you quoted? Is this just copy and paste spam?
Second, what's baffling to me is how you people can't seem to understand that, in a pandemic, it's all about preventing the spread of the disease. The problem is that those kids at school become a vector to transmit the disease around the community. You can pretend as hard as you want, but there's clearly an enormous spike in cases and deaths happening now, and the timing of it looks very much like it's caused by the return of kids to school.
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It doesn't require a cough/sneeze, regular talking and even breathing spreads it. Can you cite a proper medical study that isn't preliminary or from a policy think tank or that isn't actually just saying that kids only show light symptoms or no symptoms while they spread it?
Also, when I discuss coronavirus with someone who insists that it doesn't kill people, I ask the fundamental question of what's killing all these excess people. After all, if Coronovirus isn't doing it, then doesn't that mean that there'
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You actually misread what I said. I was saying that the attitude of people who insist that coronavirus doesn't kill people was _similar_ to your attitude that children don't spread it. I said that there's a particular question I ask them and that I was posing a similar question to you.
Anyway, for sources, you appear to have the AAMC, which is, in fact, a Washington DC policy think tank. It's a more respectable one than most. But it's worth noting that, aside from saying that the "emerging data" merely "sug
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Isn't the education of one's children one's own responsibility?
It used to be - then everyone valued it. Now that its mandated, it's become an unpleasant chore.
But isn't this article about the taxes/fees tacked on to my phone bill that are supposed to provide communications to rural areas?
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"the 0 years to 19 years group has a 0.000028 death rate for those who contract Covid-19"
Do they also have teachers, parent and grandparents between 0 and 19?
Re: Rural Internetification (Score:1)
The purpose of closing schools is to degrade the youth of the country and destroy its future. Anybody can see that.
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The purpose of closing schools is to degrade the youth of the country and destroy its future. Anybody can see that.
Of course that is why all the home schoolers keep their own kids home to teach. So logically home schooling should be banned and all kids forced to go to schools with at least as strict a curriculum as the public schools. Not many religious schools would make the cut either.
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Government throws money at the problem and figures that will solve it.
What government fails to realize it this: just throwing money around without adequate oversight & enforcement of how it's spent will solve nothing.
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The government is supposed to step in under these circumctances
Government is not the solution.
StarLink is the solution.
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Starlink isn't the solution, it's too slow. Today it's usable for most stuff, in a few years as fibre becomes more common it will put people stuck on it at a disadvantage. Same as people stuck on 5mbps DSL are today, that was great back in the early 2000s but modern services need more.
Fibre is the only solution. Rural areas have phone and electricity service, it's not the first time cables have reached those areas.
Re: Rural Internetification (Score:2)
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StarLink is the solution.
No, the "off" switch would effect too many people. We need a multipath connection that is more difficult to disable. StarLink with municipal service provision would be ok. Should always have a backup.
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It's been months and we've done fuck all (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not expecting rural folk to wise up on their own, the blue side needs to do a better job making it clear which side is looking out for them. But it's still frustrating. Left wing politicians have been trying for 30 years to wire them up an we keep getting shot down by the pro corporate clowns these people vote into office. And since the right wing took over their churches and their TV & radio stations I don't know how to even reach them.
During national elections there's money to go around to every home (which is how Georgia went blue) but lefties don't have the resources to do that in a mid term, so we do this "one step forward, two back" bullshit where the right wing takes Congress and the State Legislatures, blocks everything good the left wing tries to do and then blames *us* for nothing getting done. [duckduckgo.com]
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... oh, and this Jeff Rubin completely misquotes Bernie Sanders too. That's hilarious.
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There is nothing white-supremacist about Quillette.
Re: It's been months and we've done fuck all (Score:1)
Let's stop calling them "the Left". Instead let's call them what they are: Totprogs. Totalitarian Progressives.
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But why do you think rural folks are not aware of which party is out to get them?
Members of which party are likely to call the cops if they see kids playing in the park with no adults around?
Which party is continuously coming up with more ways to harass people exercising their Second Amendment rights?
Which party uses environmental law to destroy the rural economy? (I got hit with this one myself, and had to change careers. And even NPR admitted that Clinton, Gore, and Babbitt 's policies to protect the spot
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'ER' both of them, just one branch of the Corporate Party, has a different style to the other branch and the corruption at various levels in the USA, Federal, State and County are different and party affiliations are pretty arbitrary, more which branch of the corporate party is dominant at that level.
The reality is, if you can afford a road into a town even a compacted dirt road, then ignore the lies, you well and truly can afford a fibre optic cable in a conduit, which is a small fraction of the cost of c
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Which party is continuously coming up with more ways to harass people exercising their Second Amendment rights?
You should ask that Castile guy.
For anyone wondering who Castile is (Score:2)
TL;DR; gun rights may not apply based on the shade of your skin.
Re: For anyone wondering who Castile is (Score:1)
Totprogs sure are obsessed with pushing racial division...
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Last time I saw that it was a conservative white woman in a MAGA hat complaining about black kids.
Which party is continuously coming up with more ways to harass people exercising their Second Amendment rights?
I haven't seen Democrats harass people over "exercising their second amendment rights" yet... though I've seen the NRA make that bullshit claim to sell more guns pretty constantly.
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I haven't seen Democrats harass people over "exercising their second amendment rights" yet... though I've seen the NRA make that bullshit claim to sell more guns pretty constantly.
Well a lot of Democrats were pretty upset about those people "exercising their second amendment rights" by bringing their loaded assault rifles into the gallery of the state capitol, although I don't think they really "harassed" them. When some of those same people later tried to exercise their second amendment rights by attempting to kidnap the Governor so they could summarily execute her in the woods, you might be able to interpret their arrest as being harassed, but I think it's possible that they may ha
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the blue side needs to do a better job making it clear which side is looking out for them.
I disagree. The problem is not the message, the problem is that so many people have become entranced by propaganda outlets that run under the guise of being news outlets. You can trace most of our problems regarding politics and the media back to the dissolution of Fairness Doctrine.
If you repeat a lie enough times, people will believe it. If you then use that lie to drag them further into twisted and insane logic, demonize your political opponents and while declaring you wage war for the oppressed, then
While that's true (Score:2)
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It's an uphill battle alright but there are so many hills you can choose to climb because I put a lot of thought into how one might address the issue.
The realistic plan is to wait until Democrats get control of the senate and pass a law(s) that would
- qualify "opinionists" (people paid to present an opinion) as advertisers and thus allow people to sue for false advertising. (not great)
- reinstate some or part of the fairness. (could get struck down in the supreme court)
A plan with largely unpredictable resu
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I'm a strongly in favor of teaching kids how to recognize deceptive rhetoric in school. My main reason for that is so that they can avoid scams and deceptive advertising, not to mention people who need help "finding a lost puppy". That would also help them deal with propaganda as well.
You think they suck THAT bad?! (Score:2)
> Left wing politicians have been trying for 30 years to wire them up
And still haven't managed to? The Dems had absolute control of Washington - Senate, House, and Presidency, and still didn't get shit done?
Heck Biden's been in the Senate longer than most any of us have been alive, 47 years. You think he cares about that and is just totally inept?
You could be right. Or they don't give a shit. Or they are telling the truth in hot mic moments when they say lower unemployment is bad for them because pe
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Ps, your claim is that Democrats have been trying to get broadband to rural areas since seven years before DOCSIS 1.0, seven years before broadband *existed*. But don't let little things like reality and facts get in the way of your hate.
Satellite? (Score:5, Informative)
Photo in the article shows a nice house with expensive (Apple) laptops.
Can't they afford satellite internet? It costs a little more than cable in the US, but think of how cheap their house must be out there!
And isn't that a mobile phone in the picture? Why are schools having to distribute expensive " internet-equipped iPads" instead of using cheap wifi-4G modems, or just adding some data to the existing mobile phone plan, and using that as a hotspot?
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For traditional satellite Internet, the theoretical minimum ping time is about half a second. Most of them have pretty miserable upload rates as well. They also usually have pretty low data caps. That makes two way video pretty tricky.
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Boo hoo. When I was a kid, we did not even have dialup, we relied on these things called books.
And we did OK. Have educational outcomes improved dramatically since then? No.
Internet is nice, but hardly essential.
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Of did you have a teacher in the room to guide the lesson and answer questions when they arose?
Are you trying to tell me your schools are closed? Sorry about that. Our schools re-opened back in late April, as it turned out the kids were not spreading it.
And we must have done something right: Zero daily cases now.
But the article does not sound like schools are closed: " Some children spend school nights crashing at more-connected relatives’ homes"
It says nights, not days. How many schools in the US are still closed? It seems like something TFA should have mentioned.
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Boo hoo. When I was a kid, we did not even have dialup, we relied on these things called books.
Way to shift the goalposts there. The point of the article is that they don't have Internet suitable for online schooling. You proposed that they could just use satellite Internet and I pointed out that existing, available satellite Internet access isn't suitable (Starlink and the like may well be, but not yet). Then you come back with this "boo hoo, just read a book nonsense". You're just trying to reframe the discussion. We're perfectly aware of the existence of home-schooling. Some parents simply can't d
Re: Satellite? (Score:1)
But you had schools. Under the boot of the Covid tyranny, today's children and youth are being denied an education.
I'll say it now: this is what deregulation costs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some rural zones tried to set up public utility co-ops, but then conservatives at the state levels came in and made those illegal out of fear of major cities doing the same thing and proving how much price gouging cable companies like Comcrap, AT&T and worst of all, SuddenLink (seriously, ask anyone in southern Louisiana how crappy their internet is... and thank their republican legislature.)
Maybe with that lying Idiot Pai kicked out by Biden, this can get fixed.
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or crappy satellite internet with lag measured in tens of seconds and throughput that makes you wish you had crappy legacy DSL.
Fortunately Starlink is coming.
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It's disingenuous to then take the problems caused by these government-granted monop
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There is a desirable monopoly in the last mile, if you have ever traveled to Asia and looked at a telephone pole you will understand why.
Now that said it's a very strait forward thing to fix, CWDM shared fiber is completely passive no powered devices that runs on the same fiber we had 40+ years ago (Yes we have gotten it clearer but that changes attenuation). That's within a muni's ability to not screw up and a perfect fit for a bond issue.
I lived in the country between two towns for 6yrs (Score:1)
Taking care of my grandfather. No fiber available, no cable, no DSL. Satellite was available, but I opted for a WISP with a line-of-sight antenna mounted on the roof, and it worked fine most of the time. If they have em in the middle of no-where Texas, they probably have em in other rural Southern areas.
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WISP with a line-of-sight antenna mounted on the roof, and it worked fine most of the time. If they have em in the middle of no-where Texas, they probably have em in other rural Southern areas.
Eh, I'll take a risk at generalization here but large swathes of Texas is prairie. Practically all of North Carolina (the subject of the article) is very heavily wooded. Line of sight there is about 20 yards for most homes.
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Not really prairie in East Texas. It's mostly wooded, with small areas of open farmland and grazing area for small-herd livestock. It rolls a bit as well, so it isn't ideal for wireless coms. In fact my grandfather's tiny community was and is still a cellular dead-zone.
"First world country" (Score:3)
Sounds like rural Africa to me ...
Whatever you may think or been made to think... There are your people, aren't they? They too, are your pride or your shame. And mine too, just for the record. (After the sand-eating child soldiers with ebola-AIDS of course.)
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I meant to say "TheSe are your people". Forgive me, it it very late here.
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They are skipping the landline stage because it's expensive and slow to deploy physical wires..
But mobile doesn't scale, the more users you have the slower it will get. Radio spectrum is finite, and you can't add more once it's used up.
Mobile will work in the early stages when there's few users, but it will become over congested at which point it either becomes useless or the price increases significantly to reduce demand to more manageable levels.
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I half agree with you,,, but tell that to the 5G folks. They plan on taking over everything - even getting rid of the need for home WiFi and having all devices in the home directly on 5G. Time will tell.
Also, in areas that do not and likely never will have a dense population, scalability isn't the issue. The issue will always be the cost of delivery, and running wires miles for a few customers is rarely a good cost decision.
Broken antenna (Score:4, Informative)
"Service is not available in your area."
I don't know where they were getting their broadband before the antenna broke*. But if broadband was regulated as a utility, once a company signs you up, service cannot 'go away'. It might cost a utility millions of dollars to build out a new fiber optic line. But once service is established to an address and (regulated) payments are kept up, it's the obligation of a utility to maintain it.
*It's possible that they were piggy-backing on someone's WiFi signal down the road that was disconnected. But then they aren't the broadband customers to whom this service obligation belongs to.
Re: Broken antenna (Score:2)
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That is a strange thing to say.
Almost nowhere in the USA is broadband regulated as a utility, and especially not in the Southern USA.
Piggy-backing on a neighbor's Wifi in an area like rural NC is unlikely for two reasons. One is that the houses are just too far apart.
The other is that if you can't get cable, fiber, or DSL service, then neither can your neighbors, so there's no one to piggy-back off of.
If they had an antenna, what they probably were using is satellite internet, and it's probably Hughnesnet.
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You can get a dedicated fibre connection anywhere if you're willing to pay (sometimes a huge amount) for it...
If there are enough people within wireless range, it might be practical to pay for the dedicated connection and then sell access to nearby users.
Fuck the telecoms (Score:2)
Those assholes have been chomping at the public feedbag for years.
Sprint / comcast promised and then sold me unavailable DSL service.
It took 2 months to get my money back, I'm still On dialup.
The people need to take over the telecom networks and kick the lying fucking cunt/prick suits in or to the outer regions.
Would you live without electricity?
Thank jebus for starlink, Got my invite, waiting for a order form.
Anybody know what the wait from invite to order form is?
Not new (Score:1)
It's correspondence school, "with computers."
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Right.
Why, exactly, do kids need a computer to learn basic skills like reading, writing, science and mathematics?
Maybe they need one to learn programming or typing skills, but the rest of it should be available in written form, just like it has been for the past few hundred years. 2x2 still equals 4, doesn't matter if it's on a 21" screen or a 4x6 pad of yellow paper.
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Hicks vote Republican because (Score:1)
they are too ignorant to understand their culture and everything in it is backward trash.
Watch how many still vote GOP after this is over.
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"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
So based on your statement block all of your posts should automatically be marked "-1 Troll"?
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Hicks vote republican because the smart, city-dwelling kids go to college, and then get indoctrinated in suicidally perverse leftist insanity by their humanities professors.
Hicks have the common sense to recognize that women don't have penises, and men don't menstruate. You have to get a college education to be able to wrap your brain in that much of a pretzel.
Socialists killed 100 million of their own citizens through starvation and enslavement. Only a college-educated moron would consider socialism a good
Re: Hicks vote Republican because (Score:1)
Totprog midwits sure are self-satisfied and full of hate for the rural working class.
Check out kolibri (Score:2)
Essentially a raspberry pi that establishes a WiFi hotspot that serves up the content on its storage card. Kids with a phone or a tablet can see the content without needing a usb device.
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so you need to send a rpi home every week instead?
not really improving things there
Re: Check out kolibri (Score:2)
Or wire up the RasPi to the family TV: use that as the monitor. Let the kids use a tablet/mobile as a combo wireless keyboard + mouse + secondary display (when dad's game is on). The RasPi has a Micro SD slot: snail-mail weekly Micro SD cards to students, and they snail-mail back homework assignments, video queries, and presentations, on 'completed' SD cards.
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Does the teacher need to write comments and/ or corrections on the homework then return it ot the correct student. Who nee
Flash Drive Kids (Score:2)
I explained exactly this in a comment almost two months ago on the story "In Internet Dead Zones, Rural Schools Struggle With Distanced Learning"
The teachers and students in my county have a name for these students: "Flash Drive Kids". The school system delivers and retrieves USB Flash Drives to students with no or poor internet. The drives are used with the Chromebooks they issued, and have the assignments on them and operate totally off-line. In fact, some teachers are starting to recommend kids go that route because they are more organized than the online learning, which is using a big hodge-podge of online software (a lot of which is used improperly - like sharing a Google Present document that the student has to edit to answer questions - it's a travesty).
So anyway, these students are called Flash Drive Kids around here.
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