Fort Worth schools set new target date for Wi-Fi towers to fill gaps in internet access
Fort Worth school officials expect to have the first of their Wi-Fi towers online before students return to school in August.
Fort Worth Superintendent Kent Scribner said at a news conference Thursday that the first four towers will offer broadband service to families in the Rosemont, Stop Six, Morningside and Eastern Hills neighborhoods. The initial phase of the project is expected to cover 25% of the families in the district who don’t have broadband service at home, Scribner said.
District officials expect to complete the last phase of the project by the time students return to school at the beginning of the spring semester, Scribner said. The second phase of the project covers households in seven high-need ZIP codes: 76102, 76103, 76104, 76015, 76115, 76119 and 76164.
The district’s Board of Trustees approved the plan at a meeting Tuesday. Marlon Shears, the district’s chief information officer, said the first phase of the plan is expected to cost $3.3 million to $3.6 million. District officials plan to pay for the project using a combination of federal stimulus dollars and revenue from the district’s tax ratification election, which voters approved in November.
The district’s project dovetails with the city of Fort Worth’s plans to use $5 million in CARES Act dollars to expand free public Wi-Fi in the Stop Six, Ash Crescent, North Side, Como and Rosemont neighborhoods. The city plans to install receivers on streetlights, traffic lights and other utilities that will relay Wi-Fi from city buildings into the surrounding neighborhoods.
District and city officials say the plans are meant to complement each other. Where the city’s project is wide, the district’s is deep, Scribner said. The district plans to provide Wi-Fi service that’s strong enough for multiple students in a single household to do schoolwork at once, he said.
That access will be critical in the coming years, as the district helps students recover from the academic effects of the pandemic, Scribner said. Once all students return to school in person, the district plans to use online options like remote tutoring and small-group learning outside of the regular school day to help students make up ground they’ve lost. Without reliable broadband service at home, students wouldn’t have access to those services, he said.
Fort Worth school Wi-Fi project suffered delays
Before November’s election, Scribner told the Star-Telegram that, if voters approved the tax proposal, he hoped to have the first of the district’s Wi-Fi towers online within six months. When Fort Worth students return from summer break on Aug. 16, it will have been more than nine months since voters approved the proposal. During Thursday’s news conference, Scribner said he was pleased with the district’s progress on the plan. Coordinating the district’s project with the city’s project took time, as did getting board approval for the plan, he said.
“I think we’re right on schedule,” he said.
District emails obtained by the Star-Telegram through a public records request show district officials had hoped to be further along with the project by now. In a Jan. 29 email to Shears recapping a phone conversation from the previous day, an account manager with the tech company Presidio laid out details of an “Ideal Timeline” they’d discussed for the project. That timeline included presenting the plan to the Board of Trustees in March, awarding contracts in April and getting a pilot program online “as soon as possible after,” she wrote.
But in a March 25 email to Shears recapping a phone conversation from the previous day, the same account executive wrote the project was “truly in the infant stages.”
“Really no clear path where this will finish,” she wrote.
This story was originally published May 27, 2021 at 2:36 PM.
