In 2015, FWCS developed a one-to-one (1-1) plan, which called for ensuring that every student in the district would have their own device, be it laptop or tablet, by the start of the 2020–2021 school year. By February 2020, FWCS was only 700 devices short of the 1-1 goal, which still gave the district plenty of time to achieve it by the start of the next school year in August 2020. The notable caveat here is that the 1-1 device plan did not assume that all students would have remote connectivity; the goal at this point was to simply ensure that all students had a digital device that they could use for their in-school learning and optionally at home. Not wanting to wait an additional seven months to obtain the remainder of the devices, the school superintendent at the time, Dr. Wendy Robinson, gave the go-ahead to purchase the remaining 700 devices immediately. Little did any of the officials at FWCS know how fortuitous that decision would be. Less than a month later, in March 2020, the Coronavirus was declared a global pandemic.

By the time May 2020 came around, it became evident that the restrictions of the pandemic were shifting from what most people thought was going to be a temporary change to traditional on-site learning to a more permanent, remote learning scenario. This meant FWCS needed to look beyond the 1-1 device goal and more toward the 1-1 connectivity gap. Sure, maybe every student had a device they could use for classroom attendance, but did every student have the connectivity they needed in order to attend virtual classes every day?

Jack Byrd, Chief Systems Officer of FWCS, states, “You also have to define what is internet connectivity. Some of the stories we heard were that when we were shut down in Spring of 2020, kids were using their parents’ cell phones.” When parents started to return to the workforce in the fall of 2020, students who were once connected would no longer have that resource.

By the time the decision was made in mid-July regrading the attendance plan—in-person, blended or virtual learning—for the 2020-2021 school year, Byrd and his team had a mere two weeks to preconfigure and distribute the first batch of 7,000 MiFis to families, in addition to creating training videos on how to set them up. It was not an easy task—each device had to be unboxed, turned on, configured with MDM software, and repackaged—but one that together, FWCS and Verizon were able to accomplish.

“And despite the fact that we had shipments coming in from multiple warehouses and shippers, Verizon was still able to track it all and ensure every device got to where it needed to be,” added Mark Resor, Senior Technical Support Specialist for FWCS.

And even when there were problems, by being in constant communication with Resor and his support team, Verizon was able to work quickly to resolve any issues. “We never felt like we weren’t going to make it,” says Resor. “There was always a confidence that we would.”

On the importance of picking a lasting partner, Byrd emphasizes, “The two-week notice is what solidified our relationship with Verizon; they were in the trenches with us and that’s what meant the world to us.”

Going national: Reaching students everywhere in the U.S.

Due to the unique nature of this new and unusual school year, many students had to temporarily move out of the school district, and even the state. FWCS speculates that one of the reasons for this kind of student displacement could have been a result of students needing to stay with relatives (such as grandparents) while parents had to return to work and couldn’t be at home for their children during school hours. Because of Verizon’s nationwide coverage, this challenge was easily overcome by shipping hotspots to students at their remote locations, a solution that would not have been possible had FWCS opted to use a land-based or local Wi-Fi infrastructure. “We had students who were participating from California, Texas, Upper Michigan, east coast, west coast, all over the United States,” begins Resor. “We would have never had that opportunity with a landline provider.”