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Oklahoma's Norman Public Schools Aims to Give Internet Access to All Students

The district’s technology staff are working to use the federal e-rate program to give students equitable access to the Internet.

(TNS) -- High-speed Internet is quickly changing from a luxury to a necessity.

Norman Public Schools is trying to make sure this utility is available to all students, no matter their income level.

Nationally, households with a college graduate are over 46 percent more likely to have high-speed internet than those with less than a high school degree, according to the Council of Economic Advisors.

Oklahoma as a whole lags behind the rest of the country in access to high-speed internet, as well, according to multiple sources including a study by Oklahoma State University.

Lack of access is especially a problem in rural communities, but NPS Assistant Superintendent and Chief Technology Officer Nick Miglirino said he knows even Norman students still are not equitable in their access to the internet.

He and the rest of the district’s technology staff are working to use the federal e-rate program to change that.

E-rate is a federal rebate program created to help school districts pay for updates to telecommunication hardware and software.

The reimbursement rate for the program is based on how many students are in the free and reduced lunch program in the district. At Norman, that is 60 percent.

Miglirino said two categories of updates are covered by e-rate.

The first is technology equipment that reaches outside of the district, like telephones. This once was the only kind of technology covered by the e-rate program.

“The second category, which is pretty new, is internal systems, which you have seen a lot of at our board meetings. We are doing a lot of infrastructure updates in our district and we wouldn’t be able to do them at the level we are doing them without this reimbursed rate of 60 percent,” Miglirino said.

Few school districts with Norman’s demographics receive Category 2 e-rate reimbursements, so school representatives didn’t think NPS would qualify. In the e-rate program, NPS only applied for money for projects it planned to completely fund itself.

“We’re going in with a no-lose attitude on this,” Miglirino said.

That is because each school district has to apply for the e-rate reimbursement with line-itemized lists of every update the district will do for the project.

In Norman’s case, this covers all technology updates for a five-year time period.

“And, in our case, we have to move forward with that implementation not knowing if our application is approved or not,” Miglirino said.

Miglirino came to Norman in 2014 and was soon joined by NPS Director of Technology Services Jack Green.

Green said they knew Category 2 e-rate reimbursement could be a “game-changer” for the district because they would be able to do more projects.

A national consulting firm helped NPS throughout the application process and talked with the district about all possibilities, from their application being entirely rejected to only partially accepted or fully approved.

When Norman’s application was accepted, it was one of the first 60 percent free and reduced districts to be fully approved.

“Any time there is an opportunity, we are going to jump in and try to invest in that opportunity for our students,” Migliorino said. “This was one where we needed to invest some human resource time into it, but it paid off.”

Since then, other districts that would not have applied for the program before have been accepted.

“It really is a game changer, not just in Oklahoma but across the country,” Green said.

As the district moves forward on a program providing each student with a technological device, Miglirino and Green both said they have two goals: ensuring student equity and making sure the products work.

“Our job is just to make sure they have everything they need, when they need it and that it works,” Green said.

©2016 The Norman Transcript (Norman, Okla.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.