For students at Burton Middle School in Porterville, California, a small city at the southeast corner of the massive and rural San Joaquin Valley where the poverty level is 30 percent, a Wi-Fi signal outside of the school is hard to come by.
In a nation where an estimated 70 percent of teachers assign homework requiring a broadband connection, internet access is often inaccessible for poor people and minorities, and a quarter of the students in Porterville lacked home internet access as recently as five years ago.
Then the school partnered with Mobile Beacon, a Rhode Island-based nonprofit that offers low-cost broadband and Wi-Fi hotspots to schools and libraries in struggling communities. It provided Burton with 150 mobile hotspots and broadband connectivity to families for $10 per month, far cheaper than a commercial provider would charge.
Read the full article at RollCall.com.
