Mellon Foundation grant aims to add low-cost Wi-Fi to high-need communities

As covid-19 cases increase in southwestern Pennsylvania, educators are just one of the groups struggling to see what their future may look like.

School districts across the nation are looking at the myriad forms that fall classes could take, and it is just one of the areas R.K. Mellon Foundation officials aim to address through $5 million in recent grants to 37 organizations.

That money — dubbed the Economic Impact and Recovery Initiative — represents a third of the foundation’s $15 million covid-19 response funding, and was awarded by soliciting proposals and choosing from a group of 235 submissions and, ultimately, 80 finalists.

“I should know better than to be surprised,” said foundation Director Sam Reiman. “This impressive response is yet another compelling demonstration of our region’s creativity and compassion.”

School districts throughout the state were tossed into the deep end of the education pool when schools were shuttered in March, and educators are assessing the shortfalls in their respective online learning models.

One big stumbling block, particularly in lower income areas, is internet and Wi-Fi access.

“We learned pretty quickly that the transition to online learning looked very different depending on the community you live in and the school your family can afford,” said Maggie Hannan, a learning scientist at Carnegie Mellon University.

The university’s School of Computer Science and its partners received a foundation grant to create Wi-Fi “bubbles” to bring low-cost internet service to families in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood as well as the New Kensington-Arnold School District.

It is an expansion of an existing effort. Hannan and Ashley Patton, director of CMU’s Computer Science Pathways program, already were working with local company Meta Mesh Wireless Communities on a pilot program to expand local Wi-Fi access in the Coraopolis area.

“As we saw this growing in Coraopolis, we thought we might have something here,” Patton said. “We’re really doing something that we think is the first of its kind in the nation. A lot of this is ‘building the plane as we fly it.’ ”

The program works by installing a broadcast tower at the proper spot within a community, and using high-speed radio waves to beam a Wi-Fi signal that homes can pick up using a small outdoor radio device. Working with KINBER (Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research), a Pennsylvania education and research nonprofit that provides broadband connectivity to more than 135 organizations, Hannan and Patton said they hope to keep costs low enough that they can be covered largely through business sponsorships and community donations.

“We’re partnering with KINBER to help us provide internet access, basically, at cost,” Patton said. “We’re working with communities to figure out how to best treat (cost) as nonprofit maintenance. We’re hoping we’ll be able to make that free for most residents, whether it’s through donations or neighbors helping neighbors.”

Patton said the program’s impact could last well beyond the pandemic.

“The shift to remote learning has caused schools across the board to make unprecedented investment in education technology,” she said. “So, we’re betting that this will be a real system shift in education.

“Even when the pandemic has gone away, this (digital) divide is still going to exist. So that’s why it’s important for us to build something that’s durable, rather than a temporary solution like a Wi-Fi hotspot,” Patton said.

For more on the technology that is part of the program, see Kinber.org or MetaMesh.org.