The Arkansas Department of Education veered from a consultant's advice Friday by issuing a request for bids to provide broadband Internet access to school districts that the consultant said would cost the state more money.
A detailed report from the nonprofit consulting group EducationSuperHighway was released early Friday, recommending that the state take a two-part approach to getting high-speed broadband access to school districts.
The nonprofit recommended a short-term goal of reallocating $11 million spent by the Education Department on antiquated state-supplied Internet services to fund a one-year contract for services through multiple private Internet providers.
The consultant's suggested long-term plan would build a statewide network for kindergarten-12th-grade schools that would purchase Internet capacity in bulk, lowering the cost to school districts. It was suggested that the short-term plan go out for bid proposals in 2016, but the request for proposals issued Friday seemed to skip the short-term recommendations from the consultant.
Evan Marwell, chief executive officer of EducationSuperHighway, said late Friday that he was surprised by the Education Department's contract request just hours after the report was released.
"That is not the [request for proposals] we worked on with them. This is an RFP they had worked on before we did our study," Marwell said. "There are a number of issues in this document that are bad ideas. We expressed how long it takes to actually plan to do a statewide network and do it right. We think to try to go this way for the 2015 school year is rushing into something, and there will be long-term consequences."
The nonprofit's 25-page report makes a number of recommendations categorized into short-term and long-term solutions for the state to provide a certain amount of high-speed Internet access to every student -- a goal set by the federal government.
The consultants recommended that no service providers, regardless of size, be excluded from bidding on the contracts for the solutions.
The Education Department's bid request "includes a regional bidding component that requires companies to bid on providing service to an entire region of the state. Service providers will tell you that will result in higher costs for those services," Marwell said.
"Regional bidding excludes smaller providers who are too small to bid on an entire region but could have provided the service for a smaller geographic area maybe at a lower cost. The state said [the regional approach] is the only way they can ensure all of the districts get service ... but we don't actually believe that."
Adequacy involved
Legislators have been debating for more than a year how to move forward with increased high-speed broadband Internet access for the state's schools.
The conversation has shifted to become a part of the state's educational adequacy plan because some districts have argued that the gap in technological access may be creating a gap in educational opportunities.
Lack of access to broadband has started to cause problems as more standardized tests are moved to online formats. Also, Act 1280 of 2013 requires that every school district provide at least one interactive online course.
EducationSuperHighway urged the state to move quickly in issuing the one-year contract. In a statement early Friday morning, Education Department spokesman Kim Friedman wrote that the request for proposals was on schedule to be released "very soon" and that the department was planning to meet the timeline set out for reimbursement from the federal E-rate program.
Friedman's response did not note that the request for proposals was not the same one the nonprofit has worked on.
Marwell said he hopes the state will not award contracts based on the proposals that are due back by Jan. 16.
"I hope what's going on is that they are just trying to collect more data, but if that's the case, then I hope they also release the RFP that we worked on with them," Marwell said.
The request for bids notes that the state plans to announce the best proposals Feb. 16.
EducationSuperHighway chose Arkansas, along with Virginia, as one of two states to help design plans to provide low-cost, high-speed, high-capacity Internet services to every school in the state. The nonprofit researched some aspects of the state's broadband network before choosing to pilot its program in Arkansas.
Its study found that the $11 million from the Education Department -- that is paid annually to the Department of Information Systems -- is used to purchase about 5 percent of the overall Internet capacity of school districts. But consultants found that the cables used by the Information Systems Department to provide broadband are mostly copper, an antiquated and expensive system compared with fiber-optic cables.
School districts privately purchase the remaining 95 percent of their Internet access for about $8 million at an average rate of $13 per megabit. The Department of Information Systems' rate is $286 per megabit.
Kilobits, megabits and gigabits per second are measures of data-transfer rates. The more data that can move per second over the Internet, the faster the Internet connection, which makes it easier to stream videos or participate in live classes or tests.
Comments on report
Private service providers said Friday that they felt "somewhat vindicated" by the report, which also found that about 58 percent of the state's school districts were providing the federal goal of 100 kilobits per second per student.
"We're ecstatic. It confirms what we've been saying for the last year and a half," said Len Pitcock, director of government affairs for Cox Communications.
Pitcock is also the chairman of the Arkansas Cable Telecommunications Association board of directors and a member of the Arkansas Broadband Coalition for Kids.
"When you go back and look at the original studies about broadband in Arkansas schools, we're ranked somewhere along the bottom," Pitcock said. "We stood up from the beginning and told people that availability is not an issue. Now this report shows that not only are we not in the bottom for available broadband, but we're ahead of the mark in the country. We are leading the nation."
Private providers have bristled during several conversations about how to provide broadband access to schools over the past year. Although they've disagreed with the overall needs assessments in the past, many of the industry's concerns have focused on whether the state should open access to an existing system of high-capacity fiber-optic cables that connect the state's public universities, two-year colleges, research hospitals and some libraries.
The Arkansas Research Education Optical Network, known as ARE-ON, is a public-private partnership that uses Internet cable owned by the private providers and leased and managed by the public entity. A state law prohibits kindergarten-12th-grade schools from joining the network.
Advocates for opening ARE-ON, many of them technology and communications professionals, say the network will offer the cheapest and best service to the state's schools. Several of those advocates highlighted a portion of the nonprofit's report in statements Friday.
"For the aggregated network and Internet access components, [the Arkansas Department of Education] would be well served by removing the legislative barriers that currently preclude ARE-ON as an option," the report noted.
"While it is unclear whether ARE-ON will be the most cost-effective option for these network components, it is highly likely that if ARE-ON is allowed to participate in the RFP, its availability of low-cost Internet access will undoubtedly lower the overall cost of the aggregated network and Internet access for [Arkansas Department of Education] and Arkansas' taxpayers regardless of which provider is selected to provide these components."
Jerry Jones, executive vice president of Acxiom and chairman of FASTER Arkansas, a group of industry officials originally appointed by Gov. Mike Beebe to study broadband in schools, applauded the report's recommendation to open access to ARE-ON.
"ARE-ON exists. It's there, and it has the capacity. It's been paid for with taxpayer money," Jones said. "Creating a separate statewide network would be building another almost identical wheel when one already exists."
Jones said he hoped the state would move quickly to change state law to allow kindergarten-12th-grade schools on the network.
"It's been my position for quite some time, that the time for studying this is over," Jones said. "We know we have a problem. We've known we've had a problem. Let's move to solving this. Let's not waste any more time on providing our students with this resource."
Pitcock said the state law is not the only issue ARE-ON supporters had to contend with.
"I think there are a number of us who feel that our current contracts that we have with ARE-ON today would prevent them from adding additional capacity outside of higher education," he said.
The Legislature would have to change the state law preventing kindergarten-12th-grade schools from being a part of ARE-ON before the entity would be allowed to participate in the requests for proposals from the Department of Education. The 2015 legislative session is scheduled to start Jan. 12, and Beebe has declined to call a special session to deal with the broadband issue.
Beebe, who has said he supports the law change, will be leaving office in January.
"He still feels that ARE-ON should be opened up, and I think this report meshes together well with his feeling that it should be considered as an option, as one piece of the solution," said Matt DeCample, a spokesman for Beebe.
A spokesman for Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson said he would not be available for comment Friday.
A Section on 12/06/2014