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BURKE — Like all schools across Vermont, the Burke Town School closed its doors in mid-March to help stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. But nearly every weekday, fourth- and fifth-grade teacher Tracie Surridge makes the commute to school anyway.
Sitting in the front seat of her Dodge in the school’s parking lot, Surridge cracks open her laptop and, at 8 a.m. sharp, sends her fifth-grade class an invitation for a Google Hangout.
“As soon as the invitation goes out, kids are popping on,” she said, speaking from her car on Monday morning. “We talk about their weekend, and things that they’re doing. When everybody’s on, then we try and do some sort of a game for team building to hold us together.”
So start most of the veteran educator’s workdays in the era of Covid-19. Surridge’s house can only get satellite internet, so, for anything requiring more bandwidth than emails, she makes a trip to the school to hop on the district’s public Wi-Fi.
Several of her colleagues are in the same boat. When it’s time for an all-staff school meeting over Zoom, Surridge has noticed many of her fellow educators drive back to the school to log on from the parking lot.
Surridge is one of the thousands of Vermonters who still lack access to basic broadband at home, and her school district is one of the worst-served in the state. According to data collected by the Department of Public Service, more than 2,000 addresses in the seven-town Kingdom East School District can’t connect to the internet with minimum download and upload speeds of 4/1 megabits per second.
More than 20,000 addresses in Vermont don’t have access to the internet with download and upload speeds of 4/1 Mbps. The FCC, meanwhile, doesn’t even consider those speeds broadband anymore. In 2015, the federal agency raised the bar to 25/3 Mbps. By that standard, nearly 70,000 addresses don’t have access.
Darren Allen, a spokesperson for the Vermont-NEA, said the union had heard from many members that they were working from their cars to access public Wi-Fi. He said while these situations certainly weren’t the norm, they were nevertheless “happening enough that it’s concerning.”
Public Wi-Fi spots have been an explicit part of the state’s response to the epidemic, and DPS has publicized a map of available hotspots.
But the pivot to remote work and learning amid the coronavirus crisis has revived the debate in Vermont about providing connectivity in rural areas. The DPS is also pitching a plan that would provide subsidies to companies to build out broadband in the state’s most remote corners, and lawmakers are considering using a portion of the state’s $1.25 billion federal bailout package to pay for it.
Forrest Matthews, a fellow Kingdom East teacher, who teaches middle school math at the Sutton Village School, hopes the state follows through.
“Access to the internet is basically like a utility now. On par with electricity,” he said.
Matthews travels from his home in Kirby most days to sit in the nearby Lyndon Town School parking lot. It’s where he uploads YouTube videos he’s shot explaining how to solve different math problems, and where he logs on to staff meetings. At home, he uses a hotspot on his phone to answer student emails. The setup works “tolerably well,” he said, but it’s far from ideal.
He also thinks internet access is necessary if Vermont hopes to retain young people. And he bristles at the suggestion that those who live in rural areas should consider a lack of connectivity a fact of life.
“I’ve seen comments online, where people say, ‘Well, if you want the internet, you shouldn’t live out in the middle of the woods.’ I live 5 minutes from (Lyndon Town School). It’s not like I’m in the middle of the woods,” he said.
Kingdom East Superintendent Jen Botzojorns said connectivity is a widespread problem in the district, for both students and educators. The district, she said, even tried to work with VTel to get families connected using boxes that rely on a wireless connection from cell towers. Initially, Kingdom East thought the technology could get more than 60 households connected. But after providing addresses to the company, they found it could only work for two.
“Our problem is infrastructure,” she said. “People say, well, what about a hotspot? Well, if you don’t have a cell tower, you don’t have a hotspot.”
Mary Lahar, a teacher in Charleston, has long used public Wi-Fi spots – including at the libraries in Barton and Orleans, or Lake Region High School – to compensate for poor connectivity at her home in Irasburg.
But before the outbreak, Lahar could actually go into the library to distract her children with books and puzzles while she caught up on work and emails. Now, the third grade teacher spends several hours a day in a cramped car – her back often aches when she gets home – without access to a bathroom.
Still, Lahar later followed up with a reporter to add that she considered herself one of the lucky ones. While her internet is poor, Lahar said, at least she had reliable transportation.
“Many students in this area do not have reliable access to high speed internet,” she wrote in an email, “nor do they have families that are able to drive to public Wi-Fi regularly to keep up with their daily school work.”
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