By Grace Berry (@gracevberry)

District Technology Services Supervisor Rudy Gomez came up with the idea to start having wifi accessibility on the some of the white activity buses. He presented the plan to the Forest View planning team and they loved the idea.
“We wanted to start increasing accessibility to students in anyway possible and a lot of other school districts have already done it,” Gomez said.
There is a small pilot of the program at Prospect and Elk Grove. Two small white activity buses at each school have wifi.
Gomez explained for kids in sports and other activities bus rides to competitions and meets can be 45 minutes or longer. He figured it would be helpful for students to have wifi so they can get some assignments done.
Senior Teddy Eckhardt is on cross country and he rides the white buses to go to meets almost once a week. He thinks wifi accessibility on the buses is a good idea. The cross country often takes those buses on longer trips too and he thinks the wifi would be really useful to have.
After one semester the district will evaluate the program to see if it’s worth expanding.
“It’s really crucial that we get feedback from students and staff that drive the buses,” Gomez said. “[People] saying students are taking advantage of [of the wifi] and they’re not just surfing the web for no reason [will continue the program] because it does cost us money and we want to make sure our resources and investments are being put to good use.”
The next step if the program is a success is to put wifi into the rest of the small white activity buses in both Prospect and Elk Grove. Then Gomez will look into expanding this across the district. If that is successful next Gomez would look into the big yellow buses that students take to school to be equipped with wifi.
Gomez is very excited about this program and the accessibility it can give students.
“I think [this program] is really cool, and I mean why not?,” Gomez said.