Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series looking at how one rural and remote New Mexico school district connected families to high-speed internet.

A look at the Cuba Independent School District

• Located in northwest New Mexico

• Covers 120 square miles of rugged, remote terrain

• Serves village of Cuba and three communities within the Navajo Nation

• 750 students attend the district’s three schools

• 76% of students are Native American

• 20% of students are Hispanic

• 100% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch

• Only 2% of students had the internet at the start of COVID-19 pandemic

• Students needed internet to attend classes virtually during a state-mandated lockdown

CUBA, NEW MEXICO - About 80 miles north of Albuquerque, the region around Cuba boasts a hauntingly beautiful landscape. Sculpted escarpments and mountains jut from the terrain. Canyons and arroyos carve their way through the earth. 

But the same features that create such breathtaking vistas are just one of the many, formidable hurdles Cuba Independent School District officials faced when trying to solve the longstanding challenge of how to equip their students with internet in their homes – something nearly all families lacked in this largely Indigenous and Hispanic district tucked away in the rural region of northwest New Mexico. This has long posed a problem but gained even more urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Features like canyons and mountains are the first of many obstacles to better digital connectivity in remote and rural areas of the state, including in Southern New Mexico. Those can physically interfere with construction of infrastructure or the broadcasting of signals meant to transmit the internet to homes.

Another challenge arose from the fact CISD covers a portion of the Navajo Nation. And tribal areas are typically laden with a patchwork of permit applications, archaeological site surveys, and government procedures that must be followed for even basic utilities to be installed. In the Navajo region around Cuba, there are 17 different land status definitions and 17 different agencies that oversee utility installations. So the installation of fiber-optic internet lines, considered the gold standard of digital connectivity — as well as the necessary power hookups for homes that also lacked electricity — would be complicated and time-consuming.

Region experiences high poverty

Sitting on the western border of the Santa Fe National Forest of northern New Mexico, nearly 630 people live in the village of Cuba itself. The community, located along Hwy. 550, struggles with high poverty and unemployment, and low rates of high school diploma attainment.

Within the 120 square miles comprising CISD, “high poverty is the norm as evidenced by 100 percent of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch,” according to district documents. CISD students “are considered most at‐risk within the state.” This matters because finances can pose a major barrier to getting equipment like laptops and accessing the internet, even when there are service providers available.

Poverty is even more severe in a vast area outside the village of Cuba, in the hundreds of square miles of the sprawling rocky hills of the Navajo Nation that surround the school district. This rural area is home to about 480 Native American students who attend CISD.

In this portion of the Navajo Nation, U.S. Census Bureau records indicate that four in 10  families with children under age 18 live in poverty. The median income is less than $30,000 a year.  

The latest Census records also indicate that less than half – 41 percent – of people in this area had a computer, and 67 percent of this population did not have a broadband internet connection. 

“Native  American  students  across  the  district  are  struggling  in many areas including academic performance,” said CISD Superintendent Karen Sanchez-Griego.

A 2022-23 grant application the district submitted under the Indian Education Act shows that 11.7 percent of the district’s Native American students are proficient in reading, and 11.3 percent are proficient in math.

Pandemic exposed digital disparities

When the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools in March of 2020, reality set in on how remote learning would negatively impact the district’s already struggling students. While lack of high-speed internet from home creates disparities for any student, they’re steeper for students already facing inequities, experts have said.

“When the pandemic hit, we went into basically panic mode on how we were going to get connections to these kids because they were off campus,” said Tim Chavez, technology director for Cuba ISD. “Before the pandemic, we did not really know how many students had or didn't have internet, but we soon found out.”

The number was strikingly low. Chavez said only 2% of CISD students had internet. Those who did were located in the village of Cuba, which comprised just one-fifth of the district’s student population. The rest of the students lived in distant, rural areas.

Faced with the daunting task of providing internet to these rural homes amid distant mountain slopes, which lacked the cell phone service empowering wireless internet hot spots that more urban districts often send home with students, another problem surfaced: Many homes in these areas lack basic utilities, including electricity and water.

“So we were handing out laptops, but they couldn't charge them,” Chavez said. 

CISD needed to assess exactly how many families lacked electricity, something complicated by the fact some students were embarrassed to discuss the situation. But officials eventually discovered about 60 homes lacked power.

The combination of challenges seemed nearly insurmountable. Existing internet capacity, like cell phone towers and cable lines, was scarce. And building new in-ground digital infrastructure would be extremely difficult, at least within any timeframe that was meaningful to students and families plunged into the midst of the crisis that was the pandemic.

That’s when CISD officials had a breakthrough. Thanks to a charitable deed, a local resident happened to have a contact within the tech world who was able to connect the district to Elon Musk’s satellite internet company, Starlink.

To learn more about what CISD did to get students online, click here.