The one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic recently passed, but lessons learned from the experience will endure. In the Yakima School District, insights about leadership, equity, and how to accomplish the impossible will benefit all of us for years to come.
After the pandemic caused school closures statewide, all instruction had to move online. But to get online, many students relied on the very school buildings that were now closed. In response, the Yakima School District distributed mobile hotspots and strengthened existing Wi-Fi networks, but this wasn’t sufficient or sustainable. To get online, many students had to confront darkness, hunger, bad weather, or other unsafe conditions as they crossed town or found an opportunity to get in range of the district’s free and secure Wi-Fi.
Uneven access to broadband internet is one of the most glaring 12 inequities highlighted by the pandemic. To fix the problem, the district had to find a way to get the entire community online, without relying on the traditional solution of bringing students into school buildings.
A Call to Action from the School Board
“When we all went into pandemic mode, the board and superintendent had a number of discussions about how we would connect with our students and our families,” said Martha Rice, chair of the Yakima School Board. “We knew that many of our students didn’t have access to a laptop or even a smartphone, so the first thing we did was approve the purchase of a lot of laptops so that at least the students who had internet, or could get to a place that had internet, could access their remote learning. And then the next step was to ask what else we can do. That’s when Andy started researching how to create a mesh network over the district.”
“From the tech perspective, there is a want to have a singular solution that encompasses all,” said Andy Gonzalez, director of technology for Yakima School District. “But when you’re looking at a project of this scope, you have to let go of the dogmatic approach and really look at what’s available.”
Flipping the Script
Yakima Superintendent Trevor Greene likened the situation to America’s moonshot. He said that going to the moon wasn’t something that NASA engineers had been planning on, nor did they have a way to get there, but the president at the time was confident they could do it. “You have to find a way to get to ‘yes,’” said Superintendent Greene. “Don’t look at the impossibility of something; instead, look at the possibility of doing it. That approach will open a window onto what can be.”
And so began a search for the grand solution. In short, the solution was crowdsourcing, or, in other words, decentralizing service delivery. Before the pandemic, the district provided buildings that offered internet access, and students had to come to those buildings. Once the pandemic started, that model no longer worked since school buildings were closed. So instead of making itself the center of Wi-Fi access for students, the district used “the crowd” of community partners to broadcast district Wi-Fi citywide.
“We began pushing into our community and leveraging our partnerships,” said Gonzalez. “So, some of our faith-based partnerships, some of our nonprofit partnerships, we began pushing out instead of drawing the students and parents in.” Taking this new approach, Yakima flipped its service delivery model on its head.
Another example of this approach is Airbnb. Airbnb is a company that changed the concept of a hotel. Instead of building a space that people came to, Airbnb made the whole world into a hotel. The Yakima School District did something very similar. They stopped relying on school buildings (hotels) to provide Wi-Fi access. Instead, they leveraged technology and relationships to turn the whole city into a district internet hotspot.
“We were trying to leverage crowdsourcing in this very unique way. If we had just limited it to ‘we have buildings in this area that can probably broadcast Wi-Fi this far,’ it would have been a very limited solution,” stated Gonzalez. “Where we deviated is putting service delivery at the forefront. We started saying ‘Okay, here’s where I am at work, but what other networks are available? What can we do to leverage that resource?’”
With the vision set, district staff began contacting community partners. “When we were looking for outside places to augment our current bandwidth, it just seemed natural to reach out to those with whom we already had established relationships,” stated Greene.
“We can do so little alone,” he continued. “But together, we can do so much. When you’re part of a team, you do your part in bringing people together. You realize the strength and talents of others and involve others in finding opportunities. Why would you not leverage that in a leadership position, to really see the potential partnerships that are out there?”
When asked how these partnerships were initially made, Greene extended his gratitude to those who had made these connections before his arrival at the district. “I won’t pretend that these [partnerships] were developed in the last year-and-a-half that I’ve been here. One of the great things to happen when I walked in the door was that there were already existing partnerships providing resources and services for our students.”
The request was fairly simple. “We explained to our partners that we weren’t asking for money or a handout. We were asking for something that would be a service to our community, and it was something easy to provide,” said Greene. “In many cases, it was using the building to add Wi-Fi equipment or using their existing internet to create a wider online reach for the entire community.”
As the district worked at creating a crisscrossing mesh of Wi-Fi signal throughout town, Superintendent Greene reflected on how to keep the school board engaged and how to make room for staff to tackle the problem.
The Power of Partnerships
“It begins with having strong relationships with your leadership team. You then can see where opportunities are and frame those for the board. You bring in the others involved and have a conversation with the board in a way that makes everything as clear as possible,” said Green.
Greene also noted that being a successful leader includes letting members of your team shine. “I realize that I’m in a role of positional power, and with that, it becomes very easy to not service ideas you don’t come up with. In this instance, it was really allowing [Andy] to use his creativity and brilliance to create opportunity; partnering together first internally, and then externally with our community to make this a reality.”
And there lies one more takeaway from this story—partnering together. The Yakima School District succeeded in building a mesh network of Wi-Fi signals, but it wasn’t the first mesh network they had built. The first mesh network they created was a human one. Weaving together partnerships within the district and then between the district and community-based organizations, that’s what made it possible to solve the technical challenge.
“The broader concept lies in the power of partnership,” said Gonzalez, “and how that is a parallel path to accomplishing anything that we want to do on a broad scale.”
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of Direct. Visit wssda.org/direct to see past issues of WSSDA’s newsmagazine and learn about advertising opportunities.