West Virginia Quickly Builds Statewide Network for Students

With its mountainous topography and sparsely populated areas, West Virginia understands this un-ideal reality as well as any state, so it created what some might call a Band-Aid solution: the Kids Connect Initiative, a unified education network with hundreds of Wi-Fi access points. The project started in early Aug, leaving little time for implementation before Sept 8, the first day of school in West Virginia. The concept was to allow any K-12 or college student the ability to use Wi-Fi from any access point within a network spread over the entire state. WV CTO Joshua Spence’s office coordinated with WV Dept of Education and the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission (HEPC) for the initiative, which called for installations at county schools, higher education institutions, libraries and state parks.  By Sept. 8, the state managed to set up about 850 locations that were ready for students. Since then, more places, such as some of the state’s national guard armories, have received installations. More access points are in the works at Division of Motor Vehicles offices, county school board offices and other easily accessible sites in every county.  “We intend to have over 1,000 [locations] when it’s all said and done,” Spence said.