Clayton County Schools may consider transforming some of its school buses into wi-fi hotspots as it tries to make it easier for students to attend virtual classrooms.
The district, which plans to buy 38,000 laptops for student use in September, said retrofitting some of its bus fleet with access to the school system’s computer network could help ensure the 5,000 or so students without Internet access can get online.
“I think that the transportation department has said that we could potentially use eight buses,” Clayton Schools Chief Technology Officer Rob Smith told the Clayton School Board Monday, adding that routers could be supplied by the state.
“And what we would do is we would place those wireless Internet routers on those buses and then strategically place (the buses) in our most needed communities,” he said.
Clayton, like all of metro Atlanta, closed schools in March and shifted to virtual classrooms in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
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