These days, the internet is as vital for students as books and pencils. 

“When the internet goes out, our work comes to a halt,” says John Worst, a mechatronics teacher at Forest Grove High School. Mechatronics classes draw students interested in robotics, various forms of engineering, semiconductors and other careers in advanced manufacturing.  

Students rely on software programs to write code to feed to their 3-D printers so they can print tiny replicas of tugboats, puzzles, pyramids, mailboxes and of course — because it’s high school — toilets. They learn about 3-D modeling and practice coding. 

Students in an advanced mechatronics class at Forest Grove build a Robinson puzzle, which includes a set of six special tile shapes that produce an infinite but non-repeating pattern. Julian, right, is an aspiring aerospace engineer, who loves learning how to get a computer to do what he wants. Photos by Tracey Goldner. 

“There is no way to do this work without the internet,” says John, who built the program at Forest Grove in partnership with Portland Community College. There is such a demand in this region of the country — dubbed the silicon forest — that students regularly get job offers before they’ve even finished their associates’ degrees. 

Undergirding all of this training and skill-building is the internet or what Stuart Long likes to call educational plumbing. 

“Unless it’s broken, you don’t really think about it,” says Stuart, who leads the Cascade Technology Alliance, a consortium that coordinates information technology services such as cybersecurity, student databases and network services for 28 school districts with nearly 500 schools in Clatsop, Columbia, Multnomah, Tillamook and Washington counties. 

The change meant there was now money on the table to vastly improve internet speeds and reliability at schools around the country. 

Eric approached a few of the larger school districts in Washington County to ask whether they’d be willing to provide some seed money so he and his team could look into how to capitalize on this change. 

Beaverton, Hillsboro and Tigard-Tualatin kicked in a few thousand dollars each — representing just a tiny fraction of a percentage of their yearly budgets — to support his endeavor. A few months and dozens of hours of research later, Eric had a concept for the project. 

The premise is this: What if instead of connecting schools through a hub-and-spoke concept at the district-level, the schools were connected to each other in a ring with the ability to flow service one way or the other?

Just like a string of lights that doesn’t go out if one bulb is faulty, the internet continues to flow if one connection point goes out.

The hub and spoke was how it had always been done, but the clear downside is there isn’t any backup. A car driving into the wrong power pole or a backhoe digging in the wrong spot can take a school or even an entire district offline for hours. 

There were a lot of naysayers for his concept. “The designs we put in place historically, everyone was afraid of doing,” he says. After all, it can be quite scary making fundamental changes to critical infrastructure. 

Plus people also told him the rules wouldn’t allow it, but he was convinced they would. He wrote detailed plans with various scenarios and explained how the concept would actually bring better service for a lower cost. 

The gamble paid off. 

It started as a pilot project interconnecting Beaverton, Hillsboro, Portland Public and Tigard-Tualatin school districts and the regional offices of Multnomah and Northwest Regional education service districts. The following year, the team expanded out to a 100 sites in key locations such as high schools with interconnections to Centennial, David Douglas, Gresham-Barlow, Parkrose, Reynolds and Riverdale school districts and Clackamas education service district. 

In March of 2020 as COVID-19 was barreling toward the United States, the team was in the process of connecting over 300 sites including every school in Beaverton, Hillsboro, Multnomah County, St. Helens and Tigard-Tualatin. 

Two-and-half years later, the project was complete. If a car hits a pole with an internet cable that serves a community school and takes out that connection, the internet would instead draw from a different direction. 

Since that time, Eric has set his sights on smaller cities and towns farther west all the way to the Oregon coast. There are nearly 250 schools that could potentially be connected this way. 

The project is optional, but the more districts that opt in, the more resilient the system will be. “We’re not forcing anybody,” Stuart says. But the business case is clear. 

Participating districts are getting faster internet, a more resilient system and ownership of their network all for the same price or slightly less than what they are paying third-party vendors now.  

The next round of schools to sign on included Astoria, Forest Grove, Gaston, Neah-Kah-Nie and Yamhill-Carlton. 

An advanced mechatronics class at Forest Grove High School teaches students about computer science, math and science all in one. Students use coding programs to solve puzzles and print 3D objects. The course isn’t possible without a good internet connection. 

Enrique Piñon, the technology director in Forest Grove, says he’s been pleased with the progress so far. 

Internet speeds in the district will increase 10-fold at all 15 Forest Grove schools and sites starting this summer. Smaller programs that have been operating on a fraction of that will see their internet speed grow significantly. 

Whether it’s in the classroom or the business office, he anticipates that everyone will be able to operate faster online. And the changes will also help the district navigate growing demand into the next decade and beyond. 

“Long-term this is going to be good for the district,” he says. 

Right now, whenever they need to upgrade a school or a facility, the process is cumbersome and requires a new contract with a third-party vendor and at least a $5,000-$10,000 investment. 

But after July 1, Forest Grove and NWRESD will own the network, the switches and the cables. Whenever they need more bandwidth, the upgrade will be as easy as flipping a switch.  

“We are future-proofing the district,” he says. 

For districts still mulling over their options, Enrique says he relies on Eric and team for the heavier lifting. But he advises districts to make sure everyone involved is on the same page. 

After about a year of planning — which entails identifying vendors who can upgrade switches and lay fiber optic cables, determining where to lay cables and getting approval from all the appropriate parties — the project has now begun in earnest with a go-live date of July 1.

Stuart Long, chief information officer of the Cascade Technology Alliance holds the fiber optic cable that brings internet to Northwest Regional Education Service District’s regional office.

In terms of the cost, Enrique says the district is recouping 100% — the federal e-rate program is reimbursing 80% and a state matching grant is covering the rest.  

In the neighboring Gaston School District — about 14 miles southwest of Forest Grove — where there are about 480 elementary, middle and high school students compared to Forest Grove’s 6,100, the project has been similar but simpler. 

With just one campus for all students and staff, there are fewer logistics to handle, but the concept remains the same. The district now has new circuits and along with NWRESD owns the lines. Internet will flow to Yamhill-Carlton to the southwest and Forest Grove to the east. 

Dave Heineck is the new technology director in Gaston and says he’s been impressed so far. 

“It’s a really clever project between the Cascade Technology Alliance and the school districts to keep the costs even while adding this resilient functionality,” he says.

The project is now complete in Gaston and will go live any day now. 

Dave says it’s hard to estimate the cost of a school losing internet access these days. Of course teachers are expected to have a plan B, and students can always switch over to paper and pencil, but it might not always match up with what the computer can do. 

If there is a power outage or some other outage at the same time, the district would have a hard time communicating with families. He said they’d have to rely on cell phones to make calls or distribute closure notices. So having that built-in backup brings peace of mind. 

“It took a lot of foresight to be able to come up with this idea,” he says. “And conviction to follow through on it as well.”

Education runs on the internet these days — the faster and more resilient the system the better. Dave Heineck, technology director in Gaston School District, says the only real physical change the upgrade brought to his district is that his router now uses two SFP ports instead of one. 

Levi Nugent, who has overseen technology for the Neah-Kah-Nie School District for the past 16 years, agrees that the actual physical changes taking place in his district this year are not that noticeable even though the work that is happening is bringing about some big changes in terms of speeds, ownership and resilience. 

He echoed Stuart’s sentiments about how this type of work tends to cause people’s eyes to glaze over. 

“It is not so sexy when you are replacing infrastructure,” he says. “It’s locked in a cabinet.” But it’s a big deal when it doesn’t work. That’s when people notice. 

Other benefits of being connected to Seaside to the north and Tillamook to the south are that they’ll have more ownership of the equipment and will be able to upgrade more seamlessly during the next decade. 

The next round closes at the end of March and is expected to add resilient interconnections to Clatskanie, Knappa, Rainier, Seaside, Tillamook and Vernonia school districts. 

For districts across the region, state and nation, the e-rate subsidy is crucial. During 2024, schools requested $3.2 billion in reimbursements, according to K-12 Dive. But there could be change afoot. Last July, the 5th Circuit Court ruled the funding mechanism for e-rate is unconstitutional. The case was appealed and will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this spring with a final ruling expected in the summer. 

Stuart says the rulings so far indicate the program is at risk but not catastrophically at risk. 

“We are very much paying attention,” he says. But the program is safe for now and schools should continue to request reimbursements until they hear otherwise.