The city said it would be “impossible” to quickly install Wi-Fi in shelters for remote learning. Some shelter operators have proven them wrong.

By Andy Newman

School days at the Diallo sisters’ apartment in the Bronx can be hectic.

Adama, the oldest, attends high school from the black couch in the corner of their apartment in a family homeless shelter. Her 10-year-old sister, Hawaou, sits nearby at the dining table, firing back answers to her math teacher’s questions. Her youngest sister, Aissatou, 7, sprawled on a bed in the other room, giggles her way through her second-grade lessons.

“It’s a lot of noises,” said Adama, 14.

Still, the family’s remote-learning setup works. The operator of their shelter got the place wired for Wi-Fi in the spring, shortly after the pandemic shut down schools, so that students from the building’s 79 families could attend school online.

At Aaron Morris’s apartment at a shelter in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, it’s a different story. Aaron, 15, is still getting kicked offline many times a day, and it has affected his grades — and his moods.

“It upsets me to the point I just want to quit and not go to school at all,” he said earlier this month.

Providing reliable internet access to the city’s 111,000 children in homeless shelters and unstable housing has been one of the most stubborn obstacles to getting online schooling right, and for many students there’s no relief in sight. The city belatedly started putting Wi-Fi in 200 family shelters in November and says it won’t finish until the end of summer, after a second pandemic school year has come and gone.

In November, when a lawsuit demanded that the city speed up and complete the Wi-Fi project by early January, the city protested that it was being asked to “perform the impossible,” listing 14 bureaucratic hurdles to be cleared at each shelter before installation could even begin.

But operators who collectively run more than a dozen of the city’s 200 family shelters have proved it is not impossible at all.

Recognizing the urgency of the situation — no connection means no school — they took it upon themselves to get their buildings wired months ago and got it done within weeks — most for a fraction of what the city is paying the cable giants Spectrum and Optimum to do the job over nearly a year.

The city is installing cable and a Wi-Fi router in every shelter apartment, while most shelters that did it themselves had contractors install access points in hallways that they say provide fine service.

“Given the fiscal crisis the city finds itself in, this is just silly,” Catherine Trapani, executive director of Homeless Services United, a coalition of shelter operators, said in mid-January. “There’s a cheaper, faster way — what is the reason you wouldn’t try to do it?”

Robin Levine, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, said in a statement that installing a Wi-Fi setup in each apartment was “the only way to ensure families will have a permanent, reliable way to access the internet.”

The city’s solution “accounts for long-term support needs” and is overall “better, stronger and cheaper,” Ms. Levine wrote.

The city declined to say how many students in homeless shelters still lack reliable internet but has said in court filings that a survey starting in late October found nearly 3,000 shelter families with school-age children reported problems with city-issued iPads.

As frustrating and cumbersome as remote schooling has been for students and families all over, the process of getting New York’s poorest students connected has been a case study in complication. When Mayor Bill de Blasio shut down schools on March 15, his Department of Education began distributing internet-equipped iPads with unlimited T-Mobile data plans to every child who needed one. But inside many shelters, T-Mobile’s signal was weak or nonexistent.

At Bronxworks, which operates three shelters — including the one on Nelson Avenue where the Diallo sisters live with their mother, Fatoumata Kamano, a home health aide — officials saw disaster unfolding. Even before the coronavirus, the constant disruptions of homelessness meant that more than half of the students at Bronxworks’ shelters were chronically absent from school.

“We immediately realized that we needed to get Wi-Fi in our buildings,” said Scott Auwarter, Bronxworks’ assistant executive director.

Bronxworks contacted a cable company but determined it would take too long and charge too much. So Bronxworks had its security-camera contractor piggyback Wi-Fi for residents onto the existing network. By mid-May, the vendor had installed one hallway hot spot for every three apartments. It cost about $300, plus about $2 per month for service, per apartment.

“Our approach was more of the Starbucks coffee approach,” Mr. Auwarter said: “It’s just cheaper, easier, faster, nobody can tamper with it, and it’s been maintenance-free.”

The city’s effort, meanwhile, was floundering. It switched more than a thousand students from T-Mobile to Verizon, but many still had problems. The school year ended with many homeless students having missed most or all of the final three months.

Over the summer, another shelter provider, HELP USA, which houses over 600 families in seven shelters in the city, raced to get its buildings wired. “We had one site that took like two months to install — there was a lot of conduit that had to be laid and holes drilled in walls,” said Stephen Mott, HELP USA’s chief of staff.

Still, he said, the project was completed in August, for about $400 per apartment, plus about $3 per month for service. Ms. Trapani of Homeless Services United said she knew of two other operators who wired their buildings.

In October, after the Legal Aid Society threatened a class-action suit on behalf of Aaron Morris and others, accusing the city of denying homeless students their right to basic education, Mr. de Blasio said the city would install Wi-Fi in every shelter.

It has budgeted around $13 million to pay Charter and Altice, the parent companies of Spectrum and Optimum, to wire 10,500 shelter apartments — more than $1,200 per unit — plus $20 per month for service.

That is more than triple what Bronxworks and HELP USA are paying.

One of the first shelters the city connected was Aaron’s, the Albemarle Family Residence.

But Aaron said the Wi-Fi unit “hasn’t helped at all.” He has simply traded his cell-signal problems for Wi-Fi problems. Most days, he said, he gets disconnected from his classes at the High School for Youth and Community Development multiple times.

“Even if I know the answer to a question, I can’t share it,” he said. He said the glitches cause him to submit homework late. “My grade can be a 90 and it drops down to a 75,” he said.

In a motion opposing the class action, the city said it had already hired 50 technicians to troubleshoot I.T. problems for shelter families, opened a dedicated help desk for shelter students and surveyed each family’s connectivity needs. It noted that many shelters lacked the infrastructure needed to run cable throughout the building and will require custom construction. It said the project would take two years if not for the city’s “aggressive efforts” to finish by September.

Last month, the federal judge in the case rejected the city’s arguments that it was doing enough to provide homeless students access to education and ruled that the suit could proceed to trial.

A spokesman for Charter said on Thursday that the company was nearly half done with its installations and expected to finish “well before summer.” A spokeswoman for Altice referred questions on when it expected to complete its work back to the city.

Susan Horwitz, head of the Legal Aid Society’s Education Law Project, said there were many ways the city could speed up the project, including learning from shelter operators like HELP USA that installed Wi-Fi in buildings that lacked infrastructure, hiring more installers and scaling back from wiring each apartment.

“It’s such obvious stuff,” she said. “I just keep shaking my head and saying, ‘Really, that’s what they’re doing?’”

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