When the state shifted to e-learning, a rural school shifted to the copy machine | Hacker News Reader

When the state shifted to e-learning, a rural school shifted to the copy machine

propublica.org

96 pointsdanso60 comments

This article is an eye opening read. They didn’t choose paper because they were old fashioned but because their students all lived in an area without internet or any retail infrastructure. They also distributed corona virus info because the parents were (naturally) in the same boat.

I might have expected such a thing deep in the Australian bush or in rural parts of west Africa but not close to major urbanization’s like Chicago or St Louis.

I am Jacks Bias.

> I might have expected such a thing deep in the Australian bush or in rural parts of west Africa but not close to major urbanization’s like Chicago or St Louis.

tbf the lines between rural, suburban, and urban in the US can be easily blurred. I've lived in places that were relatively urbanized to middle of nowhere in half an hour of driving

I lived in a town about 13 miles from Albany, NY as the crow flies. We had a party line until 1990, and our CO was so antiquated that dial-up would connect at between 9600-19200.

Now my parents have a local company cable connection funded by Obama's broadband expansion. They were using Verizon, but Verizon basically no longer maintains copper unless there's a certain number of customers on a road.

Does bring up the question if it makes sense to practice convnetional social distancing for a place where everyone is already lives so physcially apart that it's a pain in the ass to provide them with modern infrastructure; you'd think the curve would already be flat enough for them that whatever urban hospital services the area could handle it.

To put the density in perspective the entire population of 500 sq mi Coles County is 2k less than the population of all 2 sq mi of Uptown Chicago

How much does population density matter if kids are still spending 8+ hours in the same room at school, and parents are touching the same surfaces at work?

The jobs that a low population density supports generally don't have a lot of workers touching the same thing; only so many people are going to be using a tractor or mining excavator in the span of a month. That only leaves schools as a large potential infection vector, which considering the average age & thus risk group of parents with kids still in primary school will leave the situation a lot more manageable

>The jobs that a low population density supports generally don't have a lot of workers touching the same thing

They have a separate bathroom for every employee? People on worksites never share tools?

I don't live in a rural area, but have friends who do. They all seem to have informal social networks spread through the area, family, relatives, friends - with whom they regularly meet and exchange information or goods.

Any business transaction or social activity at local events, churches, banks, schools, grocery stores - are all potential infection vectors.

Combine that with much lower and slower access to healthcare - meaning, a low threshold for overwhelming the system - makes rural areas as risky as urban centers. Well, less risky due to population density, but enough to warrant a social distancing policy (in my non-expert opinion).

This is actually normal. The US is huge, and outside of the major urban centers and their extended suburbs, it becomes very rural, very fast. And by "very rural" I mean most of the amenities that urban city/suburb dwellers simply take for granted do not exist (or are a half-hour or better car ride away).

FWIW I have a home in the rural Sierras (closest hospital is two hours away; industries are agriculture, tourism and meth) but Internet service is faster and more reliable than at my other home in Palo Alto. California at least seems to be able to get services (health care, roads, communications, power, and often water) into most of its obscure corners. Places like Montana or New Mexico may be really sparsely settled, but central Illinois seems less excusable.

According to this map the described situation doesn’t exist; not sure if that’s an artifact of county boundaries or if it’s due to carriers lying to the FCC: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/27/map-digital-divide-leaves-mi...

It might be that the cellular internet with data caps/metering counts as high speed internet by the FCC definition?

My cellular phone is capped at ~10 GB of data; over the last month my household (with five people in it) has used ~460 GB over its landline connection.

If the government is going to throw $2 trillion at the problem, this seems like a reasonably inexpensive improvement with large impact.

A CCC style nerd corps could set up a number of rural, micro ISPs. You could start with with fiber in the nearest town, go p2p microwave to each uISP, and then cantennas and mesh networking tech for last mile runs. This is all ancient off the shelf stuff.

A nonprofit could organize the design and deployment, seek grants from feds and fangs, seek spare equipment from idling manufacturers.

I love this plan. Unfortunately it helps the poor so has no chance of being funded.

Illinois & Missouri are states that look decent on paper, but both are doing poorly if you look at what's actually going on. The FCC's Broadband Map lies for half of the former and most of the latter.

Even in urban districts getting all students online is a huge undertaking. Watched part of a school board meeting a couple days ago and the local district was planning on buying 10k-ish Chromebooks and getting 3 months of internet service donated by the cable company to cover the portion of families without computers+internet at home.

My grandmother lives in a rural area and it's economically collapsed (30% poverty rate), with no realistic way to get everyone internet access, so doing something more old fashioned will probably be necessary.

What I think is sad is that stopping school for two months as a replacement for summer break and then finishing the school year and immediately starting the next without a break should be the simplest thing to do. But nobody can do it for a bunch of reasons that are more pathetic than compelling.

what reasons are those?

Things like parents already having summer plans (Disneyland, travel, etc.), or a few teachers not wanting to agree to it.

There is an interesting issue to me with the idea that access to public education becoming gated upon whether or not you agree to a legal contract with a third party (Google’s TOS).

What if you don’t want to waive your civil rights in agreeing to the Google TOS and associated surveillance? You simply don’t get the tax-funded education to which you are entitled?

This is also an issue with universities switching to Zoom. Entering into an abusive, rights-waiving contract with a third party to be permitted to graduate is a terrible state of affairs.

It worries me that “just click AGREE without reading it like everybody else did” is becoming the widespread, state-demanded default throughout society.

One good reason not to stop schools for two months as a replacement for summer break is that currently it is very uncertain that circumstances in the summer or at the beginning of the next school year will be anymore conducive to kids being in schools than they are now. Seems it would be much better to develop, trial and refine based upon real world experience remote teaching practices during the remainder of the school year and be in a much better position for the following school year if we are still dealing with this virus. Especially given that many experts seem to think there will be waves of easing and reimposing of restrictions until a vaccine is found.

At the very least obtaining and imaging all the Chromebooks and lining up all the tech looks set to delay implementation anyway. I guess the way I see it, making summer break early also means they could be more reasonably prepared for the whole remote learning thing.

I grew up in Southern Illinois near this school district and now live in Western Mass in a school district facing the same problem. We are the largest district geographically in the state and have lots of rural students with no access to the Internet. My wife is an elementary school reading specialist and can’t get in contact with many of her kids. The number one concern for the state Ed leaders is “equity” which for now, while the schools are physically closed, means no online education for anyone in our district.

We are also very rural with many families with no internet. Instead of eLearning, we have printed packets available for pickup at the front office. For those with internet, the same packets are available online.

Same. We had to hand out our first packet to students the last day we were in class (had less than 24 hours to make them, it's a minor miracle our notoriously broken copier didn't break), and then we had to put our next two weeks online, so that the principle could print out copies to have available while they're working at the school still.

I recently learned about School of the Air ¹, where classes were conducted by radio for children of rural areas in Australia. I wonder if something like that could be a temporary solution for rural America, until Internet infrastructure reaches those areas.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air

I teach in a district that has a good portion of kids without internet access (even on phones) and, as things stand, there's no 'until'. It'll never happen. The families are either too poor to afford internet costs, or they're so rural that no company will go lay line; it's just not profitable. This is exactly why the government needs to step in an declare Internet access a utility and make sure everyone can get access (not to mention it's basically the only way to apply for jobs anymore).

We need to make it affordable to live in cities via better zoning, not continue to subsidize people living in the middle of nowhere.

Rural living is a cultural choice, not a purely economic one. The "subsidies" you mention, I would bet, are far below those given to large corporations in this country who surely have the capital to expand to these "middle of nowhere" places.

The biggest corporate subsidies go to agriculture, oil, and ethanol production, all of which disproportionately benefit people in rural areas already. And that's in addition to the direct cash grants of federal tax money that rural states depend on to fund their state budgets.

I'm not sure if I agree with this, for multiple reasons; it also stinks of classicism and a superiority complex. Besides, even if you made living more affordable in urban areas, that doesn't mean people will necessarily move there. People are complex beings and aren't going to just pick up and move as much as economists, among others, tend to think for better job opportunities. There are other things that tie people to places For instance, one reason I live where I do is because my entire family is there, and being around them is something I consider important, especially with my aging grandmother after my grandfather's passing.

The USA idea of rural is different than the rest of the first world. The rest live predominately in small villages, while US rural live in spread-out individual homesteads. It's not cost-effective to provide services out there; they don't have city sewer, often wells instead of city water even. Today many can't afford to live in cities because of artificial limits, but we should fix that and let people that continue to choose to handicap themselves, pay for their own services.

> It'll never happen. It's just not profitable.

I see, thank you for the dose of realism. That makes sense, there's no financial incentive in providing Internet to rural areas.

(I'd argue that there is long-term economic incentive for regional prosperity, not necessarily profitable for a company though.)

> The government needs to step in and declare Internet access a utility.

Totally agree, and a good argument for it. Internet access is (becoming) fundamental to communication, education, labor market, and myriad other social functions - everyone deserves access to it, as much as water and electricity. The current situation is unfair for people in rural areas, especially children "without internet access (even on phones)". They're cut off from a wealth of information that people in cities take for granted.

There is literally no excuse for this in 2020.

Funding for rural telecom has been part of every budget for decades. Write a proposal and get it funded.

https://www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/all-programs/telec...

And then get sued into oblivion by frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit from the big names, who have the budget to wear yours out.

The Daughters Bell have failed rural America. It's decades past time when FCC should stop holding back progress in these areas by doing the bidding of ATT/VZN. We are not served by spectrum monopoly regulatory regimes.

The government and ultimately the voters who vote them in failed rural America. Fiber internet should be a utility. I still see voters opposing municipal fiber internet, for the sole reason that they are “anti government”.

How much would it cost to run fiber to the rural home?

4G cellular seems more efficient and good enough if websites wouldn't be so wasteful.

The USA did this for electricity. It is mind boggling it hasn't been done for internet access.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act

The REA also basically killed the low-energy appliance and home electric generation industries (which were growing in the 1920s), and greatly accelerated suburban sprawl, all of which dramatically contribute to carbon emissions. There are always unintended consequences to the blunt instrument of massive programs.

As an alternative, if the government reduced the monopoly power of the telcos and allowed things like municipal internet, that might be a good solution.

I think we should seek first to remove the barriers and obstacles to progress before we use scorched earth to accomplish a goal.

I think the vast majority of areas "without internet access" are an artifact of modern software.

I recently went over my "unlimited" cellular quota and was throttled to 128Kbps. I was amazed that I could literally not load the web page to upgrade my plan! 128K used to be high speed internet.

Trying to upgrade everyone so they can pipe the same amount of garbage as everyone else seems like it will always be a receding goal.

How about pass laws that say, not only must sites be accessible to the disabled, but they must also be accessible on low bandwidth connections?

Sure, you just tell Zoom to make a video conference with 40 people in a class work over a 128K connection.

What if you haven't got 40 people? There are towns I've been to with an entire population barely larger. They need fiber?

Also, I just don't take seriously the difference between being connected to the internet and high quality videoconferencing for people who are extremely isolated. It's being connected at all that matters. You may be video conferencing lately, but I haven't even bothered to webex, just conference calls. And I don't myself see the worth compared to instant messaging.

Does zoom really use more bandwidth the more people in the meeting?

Seems to me with more people each image becomes smaller and the total bandwidth shouldn't change.

Article points to twitter post: https://twitter.com/LDLOVEL/status/1239368178435833856

This is the same situation in the Caribbean and other areas that BookFusion was also built to address.

We allow schools and districts to launch their digital initiatives by allowing them to launch their private digital library and give options to distribute and give access to content for students and teachers both offline and online.

Students would be able to read and complete activities while offline which is later synced backed to the platform when internet connectivity returns.

https://www.bookfusion.com/education

Please send us an email at education@bookfusion.com if you know a school in a similar situation that could benefit from complimentary access to a platform like ours.

Copy machines were too expensive to use for school work. I remember some machine that used a hand powered roller to spit out copies in a pale, blue ink. This was late 70’s/80’s.

A stencil machine. We used it to print the school newspaper. Just by writing this I can smell it.

Ah, the memories! I did a spell of that, too, when a few of us launched a (short-lived) school magazine.

We had two options to create the stencil: there was a special machine that used some kind of electrical process (I don't remember details) to scan a printed sheet and "burn" a stencil from it, so you could copy arbitrary originals; or you could cut the stencil directly on a typewriter (with no ribbon), which gave a sharper result -- but you really didn't want to make too many typing errors, there's only so much you can do with stencil correcting fluid.

Mimeograph.

Yep. I was impressed when our school bought its first electric mimeograph. Until then, they were hand cranked. If you were one of the well behaved students and arrived early enough, a teacher sometimes would let you go with her to the office to crank the machine to produce that day's worksheets.

I can smell this comment.

They were widely used in offices too. Roneo and Gestetner were two common brands in the UK.

Ah, I still remember the sweet smell of methanol.

The teacher my 1st grader has 4 days a week printed and organized packets ahead of time, and is using the digital tools to provide instructions on what to do with the paper. The one-day-a-week teacher is all digital. The tech-support pain, missing shit, links to the wrong things, and so on this first week have been 4:1 the other way. Paper doesn’t get janky or not work or change out from under you.

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