LAS CRUCES – The Las Cruces Public Schools maneuvered the early chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic with a variety of funding partnerships and extensive outreach to bring nearly all of its 24,000 students online at home – overcoming a huge digital divide that had previously gone unaddressed within the state’s second-largest district.
The multi-pronged effort relied upon rigorous outreach to understand families’ needs; deployed equipment where it was needed; and tapped into a variety of online connections, from cable-based internet to cell tower-based hot spots to satellite internet. LCPS’s collective efforts, combined with significant federal aid, mean that its lowest-income families are able to get high-speed internet for free – something that continues today.
Students’ reliance upon the internet at home has grown over the decades. Even before COVID-19, about six in 10 eighth-graders nationwide reported they used the internet every day or almost every day to do their homework, according to the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
(https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/tel_2018_highlights/)
The pandemic forced LCPS and other school districts to address a problem that previously had languished: that many families lacked equipment like laptops, access to high-speed internet, or money to pay for internet subscriptions. Unprecedented federal pandemic relief dollars have helped to fuel solutions to the challenge. But uncertainties remain about whether – or to what degree – the measures will continue after pandemic relief aid begins to drop off.
After thousands of New Mexico students were sent home in March 2020, school administrators realized the extent of “disconnected” families because the state-mandated lockdown forced students to attend all classes virtually – something that’s difficult without a reliable internet connection and downright impossible without a connection at all.
The digital divide in Las Cruces was of a different nature than one just 10 miles south in the much-more rural Gadsden Independent School District. In Las Cruces, broadband and cell phone tower infrastructure are much more robust than in the sister district covering southern Doña Ana County. ( https://www.currentargus.com/story/news/2022/12/19/wireless-hot-spots-yield-lackluster-results-for-rural-students/69731440007/ ) That means high-speed options are much more readily available for LCPS students. Despite better options, LCPS families can’t always afford to pay for them, or they lack adequate technology to connect. This especially matters because students lacking high-speed internet access in their homes have been found to lag behind their better-connected peers academically, according to several studies. A 2020 Michigan State University report stated that “students with high-speed internet access at home have more digital skills, higher grades, and perform better on standardized tests, such as the SAT,” the report stated, adding that “students who cannot access the internet from home or are dependent on a cell phone for internet access do worse in school and are less likely to attend college or university.” (https://quello.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Broadband_Gap_Quello_Report_MSU.pdf)
Digitally disconnected families often must drive to places with free Wi-Fi, like fast-food restaurant parking lots, to allow their kids to tap into the internet, said Jennifer Nevarez, director of the Community Learning Center, part of a statewide coalition to bring internet affordability to students and families across the state.
“There are issues of income and access to internet connectivity,” she said.
LCPS: 2,200 homes lacked internet
The problem is familiar to school districts beyond Las Cruces. New Mexico is among the worst-performing states for internet access for students, according to one study, which reported that the state has the sixth-highest proportion of K-12 students living in areas where no broadband internet is available.
A 2021 study found that 40 percent of K-12 students in New Mexico did not have an “adequate” connection and more than a quarter of them, 28 percent, did not have either an adequate internet connection nor a device to connect online, according to by the Southern Education Foundation, Boston Consulting Group and Common Sense – a research institute that focuses on technology recommendations for families and schools. Further, the report states, 65 percent of students statewide did not have affordable broadband internet available to them.
The New Mexico Department of Information Technology and the Doña Ana Broadband coalition identified in a 2022 study a host of internet issues facing families. The coalition used promotoras – bilingual community workers who serve as liaisons between governments and at-risk families – to confirm the problems.
Their in-home visits to LCPS communities found that families were using only cell phones for their internet or were dealing with landlords who prohibited wiring for internet connections because it involved “making holes in the walls.” Others dealt with slow and unreliable speeds or service that was too expensive for them. Some parents reported that students had to visit relatives to use the internet. https://www.donaanabroadband.com/uploads/1/3/6/7/136790955/dona_ana_broadband_survey_report_2022_as_approved_pdf.pdf)
As part of LCPS’s assessment prompted by the pandemic, some 2,200 addresses in the Las Cruces Public School community indicated that they did not have access to the internet. That figure did not count cell phone access, said Josh Silver, the district’s chief technology officer.
“So, that's a family that may have had a cell phone to get online but no other way to access the internet,” he said.
A new sense of urgency
Even before COVID-19, LCPS had tried to address the equipment side of the problem. Money had been set aside to equip every student with laptops and “to do a refresh of the technology we had,” said district spokeswoman Kelly Jameson.
The crisis brought on by the pandemic – which forced classes exclusively online for the first time ever, and therefore mandated reliable internet connections for students – added a heightened sense of urgency. It also laid bare how many families lacked an internet connection.
“So it was a race to see who was connected, who was not connected, and how we were going to bridge that gap,” Jameson said.
In the days and weeks following the state-mandated lockdown, the district had to engage all of its gears to ensure families were connected and had the resources they needed for remote schooling, Jameson said. It started with a massive outreach and information-gathering effort. Often, teachers were on the front lines of understanding families’ needs.
"I have worked in a number of organizations, and I have never seen anybody mobilize as quickly as the public school district did," she said. “This was teachers spending hours upon hours making phone calls, going down a checklist to see what students needed, and then taking that and putting it in a spreadsheet for schools.”
LCPS’s IT department then pulled together spreadsheets from all of the district’s campuses, 40 in total, and coordinated the distribution of laptops and hot spots to students who needed internet devices. Hot spots, which communicate with cell-phone towers, allow students to use their devices like laptops to access high-speed internet from their homes. Some families lacked transportation to schools to pick up equipment and related items, so district staff volunteered to hand-deliver them to homes, according to Jameson.
The district had to find ways to pay for the extra expenses on the spot, LCPS officials said. It couldn’t wait for the usual bureaucratic processes – like placing formal requests for new funding – to pan out. “We had to do it and figure out how to pay for it later, because the need was immediate,” Jameson said.
"In the beginning of the pandemic,” she said, “the district was absorbing the cost to get students connected.”
Where did the money come from?
In April 2020 – a few weeks after the pandemic closed schools – the city of Las Cruces allotted $1 million to “support local non-profit organizations and other essential service providers being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic,” setting aside $150,000 for LCPS to use to connect students to the internet. (https://lascruces.civicweb.net/document/6512/A%20RESOLUTION%20AUTHORIZING%20THE%20CITY%20OF%20LAS%20CRUCES.pdf?handle=99D95F9CE06B4E89B4643268F264B06E)
“We are fortunate that the city of Las Cruces has substantial savings that can be used during emergencies such as this,” said Mayor Ken Miyagishima.
More funding eventually rolled in, including:
- With money from the federal pandemic relief measure called the CARES Act, the state of New Mexico launched its GEER fund – the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund. LCPS received $407,871 for internet services from that in November 2020.
- LCPS received $6.6 million in federal funding in 2021, including $77,000 for wireless hot spot services, according to Carla Ragan, LCPS executive director of federal programs for students. (These hot spots tend to work better for students in urban areas than in rural districts due to more robust cell tower infrastructure that exists in cities.)
- In November of 2022, the district spent another $54,085 on hot spots, according to Ragan.
Another development that helped LCPS families get connected happened around the start of the pandemic. Comcast, a multinational telecommunications company that offers cable TV and internet, offered a low cost monthly “internet essentials” package to students who were enrolled in the national school lunch program, received housing assistance, Medicaid, SNAP or other financial assistance programs. The cost is $9.99 per month.
Then, LCPS tapped into another federal pandemic relief program, the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides $30 vouchers for low-income households to pay for internet subscriptions. (Notably, this federal program is available to homes without students, too.) Paired with the Comcast program, the lowest-income households ended up with free cable-based internet – accommodating many of the households who were offline at the pandemic’s start.
In addition to helping families plug into what’s essentially free cable internet, LCPS has issued some 230 mobile hot spots to students. Another two students are using Starlink internet because they live in very rural areas. Starlink is a high-powered, satellite-based internet provider that’s effective in remote places, but it’s also relatively expensive.
According to a New Mexico Public Education Department news release, the department “purchased 800 devices to provide satellite-based internet access to families in remote parts of New Mexico and has received nearly 700 requests for them,” the release stated.
“The Starlink devices cost about $500 apiece. The department is also paying for one year of service for each family at $99 per month.”
https://webnew.ped.state.nm.us/news-releases/)
The end result of the LCPS’s combined efforts is that officials believe they have provided internet services to every student who has requested assistance – whether it is through government assistance programs or hot spots – closing a so-called “homework gap” that had long existed. That’s believed to be most of the student population. But some who’ve not expressed their need for online access from home may be falling through the cracks.
Silver said it is difficult to state precisely whether all students are connected because “it is a very fluid situation that is changing all the time.”
The number of hot spots checked out to students is generally interpreted by the district as meaning that a student does not have high speed internet at home, he said.
“That number continues to go down,” he said, which probably means more students are using the Affordable Connectivity Program through the district and accessing cable-based connectivity.
Statewide, $31.4 million of the Affordable Connectivity Program – went to 50,333 New Mexico students to help pay for high-speed internet. (https://webnew.ped.state.nm.us/news-releases/)
An additional $10.5 million provided 87,569 New Mexico students with digital devices, either hotspots, laptops, or Chromebooks. About 10,000 students needed both high-speed internet and a digital device.
“We are down to the absolute hardest-to-reach homes and families, but we haven’t given up,” said New Mexico Public Education Secretary Kurt Steinhaus in a statement he released last July. “If we can’t get fiber there, we try hot spots. If hot spots aren’t powerful enough, maybe we can get them up on satellite. We are working with every New Mexico family to be sure every child has the 21st century tools they need for learning,” Steinhaus said.
Silver said that, as critical as LCPS has been in helping to fund and coordinate high-speed internet access for its students and their families, the real goal is to “empower families to have this access beyond the public schools.
“This is really a community opportunity,” he said.
Internet access a fluid situation
One of the biggest lessons learned as LCPS sought to understand the connectivity needs of students and families during the pandemic, Silver said, was the realization that “internet access is a very fluid situation that is changing all the time.”
Sometimes barriers to access stem from geography – living too far away from infrastructure to pick up a signal. Sometimes a family is too poor to purchase an internet package or is experiencing temporarily difficult financial times. Other times, families have no access to an affordable internet provider.
“It is very hard to categorize a home or a family or a student as having permanent internet access or not,” Silver said.
His advice for school districts is to continuously research the Affordable Connectivity Fund, be aware of affordable satellite internet technology options, and to always have wireless hot spots on hand to help address the fluidity of students’ internet access.
“Even if we had 100 percent connectivity out there, we would still have hot spots in our building because there is still a need for those” because of students visiting relatives, or other unforeseen factors, Silver said.
Jameson added that a strong effort is needed to reach every family, and that, in a crisis like the onset of the pandemic, letters and advertisements alone don’t work.
"The biggest takeaway that we've had is that nothing can replace personal communication,” she said. “Getting on the phone and calling families and asking them what they needed, going out there, and assessing how we could move technology quickly to families."
It’s unclear whether LCPS has assessed any academic impact from its large-scale efforts to connect students to high-speed internet. Officials have not responded to a request by SNMJC for information about this.
In Michigan, an in-depth study compared students with adequate internet access at home to those without, which included access through a cell phone only, and found that students with stronger access have significantly higher GPAs; finish more of their homework; have stronger digital skill sets; do more educational work outside the classroom, like reading books and articles online; and have better access to support from their peers, like seeking help with assignments.
The collective educational impacts that arise from a lack of high-speed internet at home could harm students’ future academic and career prospects, according to the report.
( https://quello.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Broadband_Gap_Quello_Report_MSU.pdf )
Spanish-speaking families missing out
LCPS’s massive effort to get students online was not without its hurdles. Early on, those challenges included a number of “lost students,” who district officials could not locate once they no longer were attending in-class instruction. Across Las Cruces schools, those students numbered about 300, according to Jameson. They may have enrolled in other districts or charter schools, sought GED’s, or started working to pull in extra income for their families. After plenty of investigation, the district has been able to account for all except “a couple of dozen” students who have not communicated with LCPS since losing touch with the schools, officials said.
In addition, families that speak primarily Spanish have encountered hurdles in understanding the options for internet assistance that are available to them or in communicating with district officials if they have questions. Other families who include undocumented migrants are fearful about signing up for internet assistance programs because they worry about their status being discovered.
Academics, looming funding ‘cliff’ pose challenges
Even with the large-scale efforts by school officials across New Mexico to get families online, concerns remain that students nationwide fell behind academically during the pandemic.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the Nation’s Report Card,” tested hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders across the United States last year. It was the first set of tests given since 2019 and, as noted by Fortune.com, is “seen as the first nationally representative study of the pandemic’s impact on learning.” Test scores dropped throughout the country, but New Mexico fared the worst. (LCPS’s data was not specifically included in the report, due to its focus upon larger urban districts.)
Though Las Cruces students have returned to in-person instruction, the extensive measures that equipped their homes with high-speed internet remain in place, at least for now. But looking into the future, LCPS officials see a cliff. They understand that the unprecedented amount of federal and state emergency funding during the height of the pandemic may not be sustainable.
“When that funding ends, the district is going to have to figure out how to sustain itself, or dial things back,” Jameson said. “In education, once you give students programs and resources, it is difficult to take those things away. So the district is now shouldered with a dilemma of: How do we continue this without the funding that we’re used to?”
As a part of securing that funding, Jameson said that the district has met with state lawmakers to see how the future might look for district funding.
The Southern New Mexico Journalism Collaborative reached out to state Reps. Nathan Small and Doreen Gallegos and New Mexico Sen. Willam P. Soules.
Soules, a member of the state’s senate education committee, said he was teaching part-time when the pandemic started, and “it was the hardest teaching I had ever done” because of the unexpected tasks of making sure students were online, in addition to the regular course preparation. He said he understands school districts’ concerns about future funding. He’s optimistic about funding for schools in the upcoming budget.
“There is a real commitment, and we now have the opportunity, so let’s do education well and right,” he said.
Neither Small nor Gallegos returned phone calls requesting comment.
Reyes Mata III is a freelance journalist working with the Southern New Mexico Journalism Collaborative to cover COVID-19 and pandemic recovery from a solutions-reporting lens.