Technology is all about opportunity and innovation convergence. In a poor, rural, Southern California school district, officials saw an opportunity to meet a critical need for internet access and came up with an innovative solution, using one of its most plentiful resources.


The Coachella Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) has installed Wi-Fi routers on its buses. In the evenings after drop-offs, drivers park the buses in neighborhoods where students don’t have internet access. The buses remain there overnight, providing access to students who live within a 100-yard radius of the parked vehicle.


The routers are installed behind a mirror inside the bus and rely on the vehicle’s battery for power to send and receive signals until the morning, when they revert to their traditional role of getting kids to school. To keep the batteries charged, the district also installed solar panels on the top of the buses. To limit access to students only, the district gave students laptops with a special code.


The CVUSD is a sprawling, 1,200-square-mile district in a poor, agricultural region near the interior Salton Sea, itself a vast body of water that is slowly wasting away. Its days as a tourist hotspot have long passed. Most of the students in the district are the children of migrant farm workers who live below the poverty line and speak English as a second language. For many of these families, internet access is not a given.


The district launched the project in 2014 on two of its buses. The number of equipped buses has since grown to eight. Eventually, the district plans to equip its entire fleet of 100 buses at an estimated cost of about $290,000.