Description
Coachella Valley is an area in California that spans 1250 square miles of desert, which is about the size of the countries of Samoa or Cape Verde. The Coachella Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) is considered the second-poorest district in the country and among the most disconnected areas in the United States. Some of its most precarious residents live in abandoned railroad cars. 100% of students in districts receive free or reduced lunch rates, indicating many residents live at or below the national poverty levels. These residents lack internet connectivity due to not being able to afford internet access or are in areas not wired for internet access. For them to get internet, residents need to travel outside the valley, but they often can’t due to the precarity and costly transportation.
To help their students in 2012, members voted to pass “Measure X,” a 10-year-long, $45 million school bond to fund the Mobile Learning Initiative, called Wi-Fi on Wheels. The inspiration for this came from Meals on Wheels, a non-profit organization that started during World War II in the United Kingdom, that delivered meals on bicycles to people affected by the war. Instead of meals, Wi-Fi on Wheels was created to use school buses equipped with their own Wi-Fi to deliver internet access to the most precarious residents, particularly school-age children, to increase their performance in school.
This initiative later spread to other areas of the country. In 2016, the Education Foundation in North Carolina, USA, created “Rolling Study Hall,” with the same concept of putting Wi-Fi on school buses. In those rural areas, students would sometimes take up to one and a half hours each way to travel to school. This allowed students to turn their travel time into a productive learning time instead.
While internet access inequalities existed long before the pandemic, the switch to remote work and education brought these issues to the forefront of our lives. The pandemic revealed an enormous number of communities who live in precarious situations, including those who lack internet access infrastructures. Public Wi-Fi access points like cafes, schools, and libraries provide connectivity for many students and those who rely on shared or community access to the internet. With the lockdowns, access to these shared points vanished. Access became a source of immobility, precarity, vulnerability, and insecurity.
In early 2020, the New York City Mayor, Bill De Blasio, used Wi-Fi on Buses to give internet access to an estimated 13,000 school-aged children living in the city’s 250 homeless shelters. Around this time, the Charleston County School District in South Carolina, USA, did the same for its students. They used 20 Wi-Fi buses and placed them for 3 hours at a time in publicly accessible areas for residents to drive up and use. Doing this provided basic connectivity to young people who had no or precarious internet access. The efforts made a significant difference in the quality of students’ time during commute and gave them the opportunity to expand their social networks, as well as global and local access to information.
Connection to Mobile Networked Creativity
Immobility does not always refer to able-bodiedness, although it can. Instead, immobility refers to people who experience precarity in their mobility choices. In this Mobile Networked Creativity example, it meant people experiencing a lack of public or private transportation from one place to another, people in physically remote areas, or those prevented from executing mobility choices. These initiatives came together as people connected to create relationships with each other and existing technologies to make an idea come through. These environments and the people who reside within them share in experiencing degrees of precarious mobility because they are all, in a way, stuck in place. The creative practice of coupling Wi-Fi routers with school buses offers a reprieve from their inability to do something else other than being stuck in place.
Location
Coachella Valley, California, United States
To Learn More
- Rick L. Wilson and Mark Weiser, “Adoption of Asynchronous Learning Tools by Traditional Full-Time Students: A Pilot Study,” Information Technology and Management 2, no. 4 (October 1, 2001): 363–75.
- Evie Blad, “S.C. to Send Wi-Fi Enabled School Buses Around State for Online Learning,” Education Week, March 23, 2020, sec. Education
- Rob Way, “Wi-Fi-Enabled Buses Deployed to Help Charleston County Students Get Internet Access,” https://www.live5news.com, March 24, 2020.
- PBS NewsHour, “Wi-Fi-Enabled School Buses Leave No Child Offline,” PBS NewsHour, January 22, 2016.
- Sonia Alcock, “Frontenac News – The History of Meals On Wheels,” 2015.
- Susan Edelman, “NYC Will Try Using School Buses to Provide Wi-Fi to Students,” New York Post, November 7, 2020.
- Steven Johnson, “Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation,” New York: Riverhead Books (2010).
