Hotspots for Central Berkshire Regional School District
Overview
Central Berkshire Regional School District is the largest geographical public school district in Massachusetts covering over 200 square miles. This large district however serves a much smaller number of students, covering seven towns across two counties in Western Massachusetts and educating over 1,600 students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds.
Due to COVID-19, the district adapted to a hybrid learning model, where students were broken into two cohorts and attended classes in person twice a week with three days of online asynchronous learning. However, with home internet in these rural residential areas being either satellite or dial-up based internet connection, students had difficulty connecting and staying online in Zoom classes during the day Teachers also struggled to complete their lesson prep and grading at home in the evenings.
Because of this poor access, students had to go to extreme measures in order to continue their educations. Some students drove nearly 30 minutes into larger towns to study calculus off of the free WiFi in local coffee shops. Other students were forced to set up their laptops on the steps of their town halls, which have some of the best local Internet access. We thought this was unacceptable, unreasonable, and unfair to those who could not drive and unsafe with winter coming.
The towns CBRSD serves
Broadband providers across Berkshire County
Internet service providers, form of service, and download/upload speeds for areas shaded in light blue.
Our Project
Hotspots
Provide AT&T hotspots to students in outlying towns so that they could continue studying from home.
Our Goal
In our conversations with district officials, we heard some of the hardships that students throughout the school district faced.
One challenge the district faced was a lack of internet connectivity across many of its seven towns. While the district had already distributed nearly 150 hotspots to students in need, they anticipated a new surge of requests with the change in seasons. District officials also explained to us the struggles that district teachers face; like students, some have had to travel to larger towns on weekends in order to grade assignments and prepare lessons for the coming weeks. District provided hotspots for teachers had to be redistributed to students in need, highlighting the sacrifices that teachers make for their students. By providing funds for additional hotspots, we believed that we could help ease the burden that COVID-19 had placed on both underserved students and their teachers.
What we Accomplished
Through grants from local banks, as well as grassroots fundraising, we were able to raise enough to fund the annual costs of hotspots for over 20 students and teachers for the 2020 to 2021 school year. We would like to thank all of the individual donors who helped make this possible, as well as our friends at Adams Community Bank and Lee Bank who so generously supported the students in their local community!