New York Schools Get Connected
A promising partnership between high-tech companies and federal and local governments provides students in New York City's public school system with new e-learning opportunities.
Introduction
The New York City Board of Education combined local and federal funding and formed a partnership with high-tech companies Cisco and IBM in an ambitious project to provide high-speed Internet access to all its public schools. And the project is well on its way to connecting every individual classroom in the school system as well. Though the program has faced uncertain funding and debates about its choices along the way, it has also seen great success, as students and teachers increasingly make the Internet an integral part of classroom learning.
The history of the Internet, which is filled with remarkable achievements, can now add one more milestone: The wiring of the New York City public school system.
In a little more than a year, the school system has provided high-speed Internet access to almost all of its 1,200 schools. But that's just the beginning. The system is well on its way to wiring every one of its 48,000 classrooms and 300 offsite programs by the end of the 2003 school year.
It hasn't been easy. Many of the systems' buildings are old, and the numbers alone are daunting. With more than 1.1 million students, New York's public school system is by far the largest in the country. Funding, coming mostly from the federal government, has been unpredictable. And along the way the agenda has been challenged by debates about which direction to take.
But throughout the process, the importance of ensuring equitable access to technology has remained paramount. By wiring its classrooms, the New York City public school system is giving its students the opportunity to actively participate in the information age, providing enhanced educational opportunities through e-learning and encouraging students to be technologically literate. One of the primary benefits of online learning resources is their ability to increase students' learning opportunities. Providing students with access to the Internet increases the usefulness of computers as learning tools by putting libraries, museums, and other research and cultural resources at students' and teachers' fingertips. In turn, learning computer skills in the classroom helps ensure tomorrow's workforce is technologically competent and competitive in an increasingly high-tech world.
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Project Connect
The initiative to provide Internet access for the New York schools is called Project Connect. Before it started, most of New York's public schools had just one or two computers with dialup Internet connections—meaning the Internet wasn't much of a classroom tool. Now, with every public school in the city getting T-1 or partial T-1 access, the Internet is on its way to becoming as essential — and as ubiquitous — as a chalkboard.
But for all the work that's already been done, a great deal more still remains. "It's a lot more difficult to do than people realize," says Joseph Salvati, chief of staff for the New York City Board of Education's Division of Information and Instructional Technology. "We're talking about more than 1 million kids and 1,200 buildings, and many of those buildings are more than 60 years old. We have schools opening and closing and moving — we have a lot of movement in a system this size — so the playing field is constantly changing. And then there's the inconsistent and insufficient funding we've had to deal with."
Most of the money comes from the federal E-rate program, which pays a large portion, but not all, of the costs. The New York City Board of Education pays the difference. It also has to maintain the systems it's installing. "We're building a house that we must be able to afford to live in," Salvati says.
The E-rate program has supplied approximately $300 million, and the city's school system has come up with about $100 million. Items not covered by federal funding include salaries for people needed to maintain the system, added electrification of buildings, asbestos testing and removal, training for staff, and computers. The program has also benefited from partnerships with high-tech companies, including Cisco and IBM, which have provided equipment, service, and support.
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A Computer in Every Classroom — or in Every School
One of the early debates within Project Connect, Salvati says, was whether to wire every classroom in each school before moving on to the next.
"But that meant some schools would be years away from Internet access," Salvati says. "What do you say to parents who live in that neighborhood? An entire four years of high school would have gone by had we not done it this way."
Instead, it was decided to move quickly into all schools, only wiring 7 to 12 classrooms, and then come back to fully wire the schools as time and money permitted. The downside is that some schools will have to be rewired, so there will be some additional expense and delay. "But we don't regret that," Salvati says. "We wanted to meet our issue of equitability."
And it's clear that the new high-speed connections are making a difference in the city's schools. "We see a growing number of schools that are really doing extraordinary work, from research to sharing work assignments with other schools, like migration research on butterflies — working with kids in other parts of the country," Salvati says. "Now you take a walk though a school and you see there is a quiet revolution going on in how they are using technology in the classroom. It's not a cute distraction in the library. It's becoming a common part of many lessons. But we have a long way to go before we fully integrate technology into the curriculum."
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Funding and the Future
The future, as always, is uncertain. Salvati says it's not clear how fully the program will be funded. And that's a concern that has shaped Project Connect from the beginning. Rather than counting on future funds, the project has been built around conservative estimates of funding and an emphasis on the basics. "We didn't get the fanciest bells and whistles right off the bat," Salvati explains. "What we got was what we thought was reasonable at this point in time."
The private sector and other school districts can learn a great deal from the New York City Board of Education's experience.
"The equity issue was a value issue," Salvati says. "We had no guarantees about funding, so we wanted to get Internet access to all schools quickly, across the board. We also learned that we really needed big partners in this venture, and this is where Cisco and IBM primarily come in. We needed a lot of different vendors, but we needed a couple of primary partners — and these partners had a lot to gain, but they also shouldered a lot of the responsibility. They had to put their reputations and their resources on the line. This program is so complicated that unless you have substantial, reliable partners, it's very hard to get things done within the timeframe provided."
Salvati says school officials have learned that it's critical to have very clear goals and to avoid the distraction of debates about which direction a program should take. For example, he says, some people wanted Project Connect to examine and embrace every new technology that came along. Wireless looked interesting, but it simply wasn't ready at the time.
"We found that when we got distracted, it slowed us down substantially," Salvati says. "We had to stay very determined and focused. We understood that things change, but we didn't have the luxury to deviate from our carefully worked out plan."
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