BERNALILLO, N.M. – Nearly a third of New Mexico’s public school districts don’t have adequate access to high-speed Internet, and Gov. Susana Martinez wants to change that situation.
Martinez visited an elementary school in Bernalillo on Thursday to outline plans for bolstering broadband access for schools statewide. Her announcement comes as districts face new testing requirements and other changes that have pushed online learning to the forefront.
“If we want New Mexico students to compete and succeed, they must have access to the limitless resources the world has to offer, and in 2015 that means access to high-speed Internet,” she said.
The state is partnering on the project with the nonprofit Education Superhighway and will be leveraging $49 million in state funding and seeking additional federal money over the next couple of years.
The goal: Bring high-speed Internet to every classroom by the start of the 2018-19 school year.
“I’m telling you, this is a game-changer,” Martinez said, acknowledging that she’s no fan of the spinning wheel of doom that appears whenever connections are slow.
The project will include the installation of new fiber-optic lines to enable faster, more affordable connections, the upgrading of equipment and other infrastructure and helping schools to go wireless.
Officials called the plan ambitious, but they also pointed to progress made nationally in addressing the technological divide within public schools.
Only about a quarter of schools had enough broadband to provide the access students and teachers needed in the classroom in 2012. Now the federal government is funneling an extra $1.5 billion a year toward equipping classrooms for digital learning.
About 30 percent of New Mexico districts are without adequate high-speed access and 12 percent lack the necessary fiber optics, officials said.
Evan Marwell, CEO and founder of Education Superhighway, said New Mexico is slightly below the national average when it comes to broadband access, but the gap still has to be closed.
New Mexico’s rural nature complicates the problem, but Marwell said affordability is another concern that his company hopes to address. Schools around the state are paying providers between $10 and $15 per megabit, and he hopes that can be trimmed to less than $3.
“The affordability of broadband is something we see over and over again holding back schools from buying enough and having the amount they need,” he said.
For example, one elementary school within the Bernalillo district is operating on the same amount of bandwidth that would be found in a single cellphone.
Aside from Bernalillo, Education Superhighway is already working to identify the challenges faced by schools in Artesia, Bloomfield, Deming, Espanola, Gallup, Las Vegas and elsewhere.
