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Bloomberg
Eighth-grader Lakaysha Governor spends two hours on the bus getting back and forth to school each day. Thanks to a grant from Google, she can now use that time more productively and get her homework done.
The aspiring forensic anthropologist is one of nearly 2,000 students in South Carolina’s rural Berkeley County who will ride to school on one of 28, Google-funded, Wi-Fi-equipped school buses. The tech giant also has given the school district 1,700 Chromebooks, the stripped-down laptops on which many schoolchildren now do their class and homework.
As more class assignments and homework migrate online, such long bus rides have generally counted as lost time in preparing for the next school day. But Google said it hopes to help expand the use of Wi-Fi on school buses in other rural areas elsewhere around the country.
Google has at least a decade-long relationship with Berkeley County, where it’s invested more than $1 billion in data center complexes since 2007, bringing more than 100 jobs.
Google says it also has awarded nearly $2 billion in grants to local schools and nonprofits.
Google hopes to see the Wi-Fi program extended into other rural areas of the US, including locations where it already has data centers that process search queries and other information, according to Lilyn Hester, a Google spokeswoman based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The first such effort was launched last year in Caldwell County, North Carolina, where a data center already exists.