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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

America's second-poorest school district is also home to a surprising IT program that has won it national acclaim.

The Coachella Valley Unified School District [cvusd.us], located east of Los Angeles in California's Riverside County, encompasses around 1,250 square miles of largely rural areas. It includes 20,000 students, most from hard-up families and many so far removed from large cities that the daily bus ride to school can take up to two hours.

In such areas, internet connections can be few and far between. When the district began equipping students with tablets as part of a mobile learning initiative, administrators found that getting the devices online outside of school wasn't always easy for the children.

"We looked at the poverty in some of our areas – some of them were not connected," said Dr Darryl Adams, district superintendent.

"Parents were going out and sitting in school parking lots, or at McDonalds and Starbucks."

To address the issue, the district looked at a valuable resource it already had: school buses equipped with LTE antennas and Wi-Fi hotspots [theregister.co.uk] were already able to provide access to students on their daily commutes.

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