School buses bring Wifi out to Monterey County students in need

MONTEREY COUNTY, Calif. (KION)

A new project called "Park and Learn" brings school buses equipped with Wifi out to the community for families of students in need.

Students can now access wifi in the following locations:

• Lucky parking lot - Marina
• Target parking lot - Sand City
• Dr. Martin Luther King School of Arts - Seaside

Three buses with Wifi routers will be strategically placed around Monterey County communities for families to pull up and park while their students access the online material they need on their devices.

Schools have resorted to distance learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic since March.

A rough survey was conducted by the Monterey Peninsula School District in which six to seven hundred families indicated they had no internet access at home.

Each bus can connect about one hundred people and took about $1500 dollars to make but the school district says this is a minimal consideration to what they can do for the students in need.

"We needed to make sure that all of our families had access to the internet because that's how they're going to get a majority of their instruction while we're in distance learning, so we had to be really creative on what resources we could actually get and how we could leverage of the best," says Chief Business Officer, Ryan Altemeyer.

This project will run from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday for the rest of the year as needed.