In the summer of 2020, there was an effort by Ed-Fi and multiple states to create a proposal “…to capture student-level digital access data. State Education Agencies (SEAs) want to better understand, at scale, the digital equity that exists among students based on student address, race, gender, economic status, and other demographic information.” This created a list of five questions to be collected from every student that asked if they had a device to perform schoolwork at home, if they have internet access at home, and if it was viable.
The first year of implementation of these questions was the 2020-2021 school year. The questions were then modified for the 2021-2022 school year as part of the Restart & Recovery: Home Digital Access Data Collection with CCSSO as the process lead. Since then, these questions have become elements added to the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS).
Though these questions were non-optional, results for 2020-21 showed 15% of students missing results, and in 2021-21 there were 18% of students missing results. A retrospective at the end of the school year 2021 determined that districts struggled to gather and post the data due to the lack of time, tools, and/or resources. Other concerns around the data collection include:
- Data collection conducted only once during the school year do not reflect changes in a student life.
- Delays in data collection posting prevent quick action to provide assistance to students in need.
- New, late, or moving students could be easily missed as part of the data collection
The Vision
An idea was formed in the summer of 2021 to utilize the successful “one-to-one device” efforts to perform a speed test on each student/teacher-provided device and upload the results to a central repository. The hope is that these results could be captured daily providing near real-time data versus the once-a-year collection. A general proposal was created and limited-time funding was established.
Early discovery to determine if the idea was plausible included discussions with Ookla and other related vendors. It was determined that it was plausible and already being performed by a few states. We talked to Ookla about developing our vision for Nebraska within the limited timeframe available. Unfortunately, the annual cost of licensing to use Ookla was more than we anticipated.
A discussion was started with a small internal development group within ESUCC to perform discovery around development of our own homegrown application.
The Progress
Phase I: GEERS funding was officially provided on June 1st of 2022 to pay for the proof-of-concept (POC) project. During this phase the initial development, environment, and branding creation were established. The POC was considered a success with the functional STEADfast browser extension collecting test data.
Phase II: ESSER funding was provided to continue the STEADfast effort starting July 17th, 2024. This funding continued development of the STEADfast browser extension and supporting software. Documentation and MOU was established. Unfortunately, ESSER funding was abruptly cut short.
Phase III: Ballmer grant was provided on May 5th, 2025 to fund the pilot STEADfast effort into school. Allowing continued development, incentive program, and onboarding assistance. STEADfast development efforts were also shared with other states via GitHub.