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Students in the Aromas-San Juan School District will be the direct beneficiaries of a $29.5 million grant from the California Advanced Services Fund to build a state-of-the-art broadband network in western San Benito County.
Once completed, the network will provide disadvantaged families of students living in areas previously lacking service with free internet access for at least five years.
District Superintendent Barbara Dill-Varga said this broadband access is crucial to students’ academic success.
“Internet access is no longer a luxury but a necessity,” she said. “It serves as a gateway to information, education, and opportunities that can significantly enhance the lives of our students and their families, especially those in our underserved communities.”
To qualify for free internet, a family must have a student in the free lunch programs at Aromas, San Juan, or Anzar High Schools. More than 400 households have been identified as eligible so far and, pledging that nobody will be turned away, the Rotary Club of San Juan Bautista hopes to fund others below the poverty level.
The project brings together a coalition of partners, including the Rotary Club, internet provider Garlic.com and Morgan Hill nonprofit Balanced Access. The Community Foundation of San Benito County has provided an additional grant and Graniterock has also joined in the project.
The funding will help solve an issue first identified during the pandemic, when students outside of regular service areas could not attend classes held remotely.
“It wasn’t a matter of having enough computers,” said Rotary Club member Wayne Norton. “You could have the best laptop in the world and still be left out because of a lack of internet access.”
The first attempt at a solution, equipping school buses with mobile routers, proved inadequate, and club members searched for a better solution, looking for federal money earmarked for rural broadband.
“One of the first things we learned is that internet service providers were not interested in subsidizing people without access,” said club member and BenitoLink trustee Phil Esparza, “which is what we were interested in. You had to be an ISP [internet service provider] to apply for funding, and we talked to some of them, who could not hang up fast enough.”
One person who didn’t hang up was Elise Brentnall, founder of Balanced Access and the president and chief operations officer at South Valley Internet (Garlic.com). Brentnall was already involved in similar projects to bring internet access to underserved families in San Martin, Hollister’s migrant labor camps and transitional housing near Southside Road.
“When we first started looking into providing access,” she said, “I thought it’d be a $10,000 or $15,000 problem. It turned into a full-time million-dollar problem. I sat down with Phil and the Rotary Club, and they were very skeptical after talking to other ISPs. I said, ‘No, really, we can do this,’ and here we are today.”
Once built, the network has the potential to provide service to over 1,100 households in rural areas of South San Benito County. About 95% will have access through a fiber optic network, and wi-fi base nodes will reach the remaining 5%.
“There will be two nodes that will serve San Juan Valley and areas within Aromas that we’re not going to be able to get to with fiber,” said Brentnall. “If I had a choice, I would go all-fiber, but you need the right tool to solve the problem.”
Dill-Varga said that the service will be life-changing for some of her students—“like how electricity changed things for people”—and that it will have ramifications beyond providing students with valuable online resources, educational tools and remote learning opportunities.
“Engaged parents are crucial to a child’s academic success,” she said. “With broadband access, parents can stay informed about their child’s progress, communicate with teachers and foster a stronger partnership between home and school, which is fundamental to student achievement.”
https://benitolink.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Electronic-Aromas-San-Juan-Project-Brochure.pdf
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