BANGOR, Maine — Bangor is weighing whether to install free public Wi-Fi in one of its lowest-income neighborhoods to ensure students have adequate internet access after school.
The city has proposed installing public wireless in the areas around Downeast School in Bangor’s Capehart neighborhood in time for the coming school year. The city’s Finance Committee will take the idea up during a meeting Monday night.
Maine recently ranked fifth best in the nation when it came to equipping schools with reliable, high-speed internet, according to a report released last year by education nonprofit EducationSuperHighway.
Nearly every Maine school has a high-speed fiber-optic internet connection through the Maine School and Library Network, which today represents nearly 1,000 schools, universities, libraries and other institutions across the state.
But the same isn’t true for many low-income students when they go home. As more homework, research projects and learning opportunities move to the web, students without home access can fall behind their peers when they leave school.
Experts who deal in education and technology call that the “homework gap,” and they have been grappling with ways to close it for years. One of the strategies has been to create public Wi-Fi corridors in impoverished neighborhoods.
The Bangor project is expected to cost around $27,500 in its first year, plus around $6,000 for the network, according to Tyler Collins, a community and economic development officer with the city. The money would come from Community Development Block Grant funding and would allow the city to install a high-speed wireless network and repeaters throughout the neighborhood. Downeast School staff would assist in administration of the network.
Downeast School serves students in pre-kindergarten through third grade, many of whom live in the city’s Capehart neighborhood. That’s among the lowest-income areas in the city, according to U.S. Census data.
The signal, however, will be available to all eligible enrolled students in the neighborhood, not just K-3. Students who qualify for free-and-reduced lunch can obtain an access code, allowing them to use the wireless on their school-issued computers or tablets.
Nearly 95 percent of the students who attend Downeast School are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch under federal poverty guidelines, according to the Maine Department of Education. That’s the highest percentage of low-income students of any school in the district.
The Finance Committee meeting is scheduled for 5:15 p.m. Monday night at Bangor City Hall. The committee likely will take a vote, passing a recommendation supporting or opposing the idea before it goes on to the full City Council.
The Downeast School project has been billed as a pilot, signaling that, if successful, it could serve as a model for spreading public wireless connections to other neighborhoods in the city.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.