Dot-com Desert Perry’s home isn’t wired for broadband access. The school district, where Perry works as an education assistant, gave the family a hot spot in August 2020, but it didn’t function well. Cellphone access is also spotty on the Perry property. On some days she and her grandsons, ages 5 to 13, would pile into her white Chevy Trailblazer to find places with more reliable cell service. On other days, they just missed school. Perry’s home isn’t connected to the electrical grid either, so the family was also missing reliable electricity to power their devices. By the time school restarted in person in the spring of 2021, Perry estimated her grandsons had missed out on almost a full year of academic learning due to their lack of reliable broadband, which provides the infrastructure needed to access the internet.
The nation’s broadband infrastructure is spotty, especially in rural states like New Mexico, but the pandemic might be the crisis to change that forever BY WILLIAM MELHADO w i l l i a m @ s f r e p o r t e r. c o m
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HOREAU—Even when clouds blanket the expansive skies of western New Mexico, the red sandstone of Owl Springs Mesa behind Sadie Perry’s home stands out. Every morning before she wakes the kids, Perry steps outside for a moment of quiet and prayer. “I think that’s the only thing that keeps me going, is praying,” she said. An enrolled tribal member, Perry lives in the southeast corner of the Navajo Nation on a property with three buildings, two horses and 11 family members, including her six grandsons and one of her daughters, who is ailing. When the coronavirus began sweeping across the world last year, Perry quickly loaded up on pandemic supplies, including food to feed her family, diesel to power her generator and water to fill her tank. But there is one essential that has always been scarce in this part of the country and that she couldn’t stock up on: broadband access. “The only time that [my grandchildren] get on computers is when they come here, to school,” Perry said in the principal’s office of Thoreau Middle School, which sits 4 miles from her home. “Because we don’t have internet at the house…where we’re at there’s no service at all.”
In New Mexico, 77% of households have a broadband subscription, according to a Census report released in April, though some industry observers say the numbers are lower. That compares with 85% nationally. And even for those who are connected, the service doesn’t come cheap. Just 13% of New Mexico’s population has access to a low-price internet service plan, according to Broadband Now, a research group. The state’s rugged landscape, its patchwork of state, federal and tribal land ownership, and the minimal coordination between internet providers and government agencies combine to keep New Mexico consistently near the bottom on national surveys measuring internet access in homes. During the period of remote learning, New Mexico’s Public Education Department made testing optional for
Thoreau Middle School, where Sadie Perry works and some of her grandchildren attend classes, effectively closed in March 2020 for the remainder of the school year.
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districts given the challenges of administering assessments during the pandemic. According to the department’s assessment participation data, only 30% of schools administered the state test. The education department explained, with the limited data, it’s difficult to measure the extent to which learning gaps widened across the state. When New Mexico’s children were suddenly required to attend school via the internet in March 2020, it went badly for many of them. Families spent the school day in fast-food parking lots, outside libraries or on top of mesas trying to catch a signal. Some students were never heard from for the rest of that school year. And those who could connect were often plagued by slow download speeds and frequently interrupted service. Versions of the same story played out across rural America, making the problem impossible to ignore. “It’s not so audacious to sit here and say that as we come out of this pandemic, we are going to decide that every student in this country gets the internet access that they need to fully support their education and succeed in school,” Jessica Rosenworcel, the acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates US interstate and international communications, said in an interview. Under pressure to finally achieve the goals outlined in the 2010 National Broadband Plan, the FCC continues to roll out programs and dollars to get the whole country online. The most recent funding, $7 billion available to schools and libraries, came from the FCC’s Emergency Connectivity Fund and targets the “homework gap” that will persist long after kids return to in-person schooling. The Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure bill would invest an additional $65 billion, less than the $100 billion President Joe Biden initially proposed, toward the expansion of high-speed broadband across the country. Just this week, the House said it would vote before Sept. 27. Getting everyone online seems far off in Perry’s community, which also lacks universal access to running water and electricity. The absence of broadband access effectively ended the 2019-20 school year in March of 2020. By August 2020, the Gallup-McKinley County school district, where Perry works and her grandchildren attend school, had provided students with one-to-one devices and T-Mobile hot spots. But Perry said the hot spots worked only when the matching cellular network covered that area. Where she lives, a Verizon hot spot would probably have
