“With agriculture being the number one industry in the state, we are looking to inspire students to learn globally and live and produce locally. Agriculture and STEM education are a natural fit. With GPS-guided equipment and variable-rate irrigation and fertilizer applicators to better manage natural resources, education is key.” These are the words of Beau Sherman, Regional Distant Learning and Video Coordinator for Education serving schools connected by Community Network Services (CNS) in Georgia.
CNS was formed in 1997 when several towns in rural southwest Georgia got together to form a public telecom utility. They started by connecting local schools and libraries with a fiber broadband network. While CNS has since grown into a full-service telecommunications provider – offering phone, video and internet access to business and residential customers – its impact on local education is a shining example of how community broadband networks can improve local education. CNS now serves 65 schools across 3,278 rural square miles including the cities of Cairo, Camilla, Moultrie, Pelham and Thomasville.
To help realize the network’s full educational potential, the school districts served by CNS teamed up to hire Beau Sherman. Mr. Sherman had long been a strong advocate for pushing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education in rural southwest Georgia. So he was the perfect fit for the role of helping the schools harness their new state-of-the-art broadband network.
One way Mr. Sherman is leveraging CNS’s high-speed fiber network is bringing live interactive science demonstrations into classrooms via Georgia Tech’s Direct 2 Discovery (D2D) program. With CNS and D2D, students in rural southwest Georgia enjoy live interactions with research scientists demonstrating principles of science in fields including astronomy, high-energy physics and nanotechnology. Students see in HD exactly what the scientists see and can ask questions as if they were all in the same room. Having worked with schools lacking high-speed fiber connectivity, Sherman attests that these two-way HD interactions would not be possible for his students without CNS’s fiber network.
Another way CNS is enabling new educational opportunities is by offering telepresence capabilities to a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) program set to launch at Mitchell County High School in Camilla, Georgia. Telepresence will allow students to complete their practicum requirements with supervising instructors who cannot physically be in Camilla. Due to low numbers of medical professionals in rural areas, it is difficult to provide consistent supervision for medical training programs. But thanks to CNS’s high-speed fiber network, medical supervisors can be much more efficient with their time – treating patients in one town while training nursing students in another, without hours of driving in between.
Thanks to CNS and Beau Sherman, students in some of Georgia’s most rural stretches are enjoying high-tech educational opportunities available only through advanced broadband networks. And as we see time and time again, municipalities are very well suited to solve these problems locally with their own investments at a far lower cost than they would pay to lease inferior services.