Connecting rural America to broadband is a popular talking point on the campaign trail. In one Kentucky community, it’s already a way of life.
Connecting rural America to broadband is a popular talking point on the campaign trail. In one Kentucky community, it’s already a way of life.
**************************
Old soda bottles in a store window.****************************
****************************
**********************
(When Gabbard returned to his home town after college, in 1996, he took an entry-level job at the telephone coöperative. “I had this degree in business management that I thought was really cool, but I got a job answering the phones,” he said. “At the time, we were all on party lines, and everybody was calling and complaining about somebody on their line and they couldn’t get the phone. I was taking those complaints. And I remember thinking that, once we got everyone their own lines, we won’t have any more problems. I did not have a clue what was coming. ”
At the time, telephone service itself was relatively new in Gabbard’s corner of eastern Kentucky. The area was served by an electric co-op, created in the nineteen-thirties to take advantage of the (Rural Electrification Act) , New Deal legislation that brought electricity to the most isolated parts of the country. But no commercial telephone company wanted to spend the money to plant the poles and string the wires to connect Jackson and Owsley Counties to the rest of the world. When the R.E.A. was amended
, in (*******************************************************************************************, to enable co-ops to take advantage of low-interest loans to build and operate telephone services, a group of local businesspeople went door to door assessing the desire and asking residents to demonstrate their commitment by paying a modest membership fee. With a loan from the federal government, they built a telephone company, as Gabbard describes it, “from scratch.” In (************************************************************************************************, Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative began providing party lines to five hundred and seventy-five subscribers. There are now around seven thousand active members.
of work overnight. “Our economy fell off a cliff that day,” Jackson County’s chief elected officer, Shane Gabbard, who is no relation to Keith Gabbard, told me when we met in his office in the county courthouse, a redoubt of taxidermy and crucifixes. “The car lot next door to the factory went out of business. The gas station went out. Every business in town was affected. ”
************
(By) , unemployment in Jackson County was more than sixteen per cent. (In Owsley County, which sits at the edge of coal country, it was about twelve per cent.) Few places in the country were as down-and-out — and even fewer had fiber-optic service to the home. But, as Gabbard and his crew saw it, when it came time to upgrade infrastructure in parts of both counties, it made no sense to replace old copper wiring with new copper wires, which don’t have the capacity for broadband. “It’s no more difficult to build fiber than it is copper,” he said. “It was just a matter of money and time.” With twenty million dollars borrowed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and twenty-five million dollars in Obama-era stimulus — some of it a grant and some of it a loan — P.R.T.C. pulled a thousand miles of cable, to all seven thousand structures in the county. In the most rugged terrain around McKee, the crews relied on a mule named Old Bub to haul the cable two or three miles a day. “We’ve got mountains and rocks and not the greatest roads, and there were places we couldn’t get a vehicle to,” Gabbard told me. “Farmers here have been using mules for centuries. It just made sense that, if a place was hard to get to, you went with the mules. ”Old Bub, he said, was able to do the work of eight to ten men.
Once Jackson and Owsley Counties were wired, Gabbard was approached by the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program ( EKCEP
), to see if they could use PRTC’s broadband to bring Internet-based jobs to the region. In (********************************************************************************, Teleworks USA (***************************************, a job-training nonprofit, opened a branch in Jackson County. It is a collaboration between
EKCEP
, the phone coöperative, and a number of other civic groups. P.R.T.C. supplies the hub with Internet connectivity and gives three months of free service to anyone who completes a workshop there. In nearly five years, it has created more than six hundred work-at-home jobs in the county. Participants learn enough basic computer skills to get placed at companies such as Hilton Hotels, Cabela’s, U-Haul, Harry & David, and Apple.
Shani Hays, who knew nothing about computers six months ago, is now fielding calls about iPads, AirPods, iPhones, and Apple Watches. “The training was really extensive and really, really hard,” she said. “There was all this technical stuff I knew nothing about, but I just kinda nickel-and-dimed my way through.” Hays has received two raises so far, and now earns more than fourteen dollars an hour. She will soon be eligible for health insurance, paid vacation time, and other benefits. Working at home saves her money, too. When we talked, she had a hard time remembering the last time she had to put gas in her car. “And there’s none of that stopping to get gas and driving away with a coffee and a candy bar and there goes another ten dollars,” she said.
The Teleworks office is in a small industrial park about ten miles south of McKee, in a (one-story brick buildingthat sits on a rise looking out on the Daniel Boone National Forest . Inside is a warren of cubicles where people who can’t work from home sit with headsets on, talking and typing, and a conference room where job fairs and workshops are held. On the morning I visited, I spoke with Betty Hays, the operations manager, who has been with the program from the beginning. “The first workshop we had, five years ago, was supposed to be straight-up customer service, like, how to deal with people on the phone,” she recalled. “But I tossed in a little computer tech, because I realized people did not know how to do simple things like open tabs or copy and paste.”
There were fifteen people in the class, all
of them women whom Betty Hays had worked with BAE Systems, a defense contractor, sewing military backpacks. In the company shut its factory in McKee, taking two hundred jobs with it. By the time the workshop ended, all fifteen had been offered jobs paying more than ten dollars an hour, plus benefits. (The minimum wage in Kentucky is $ 7. 43.) Once the placement agencies understood how reliable and fast the Internet was in Jackson, and that there was an untapped workforce, they started offering more jobs. Acall centermoved in. A factory where helicopter rotors are fabricated was expanded. Hays began taking advantage of the county’s fast, lag-free Internet herself. Between five and eight every morning, before she heads to Teleworks, she talks withschoolchildren in chinawho are trying to improve their English. The conversations each last twenty minutes and Hays is paid twenty-five dollars an hour. “We joke that there are going to be all these kids in China with Southern accents,” she said.
PRTC has also partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs to create a (telemedicine office) and private lounge inside the county library, where veterans can talk discreetly to mental-health providers and hang out with one another. (The space doubles as a G.E.D. testing center on Mondays, when the V.A. does not schedule appointments. The librarian proctors the exam.) P.R.T.C. not only paid to outfit the room with comfortable furniture; It provides Internet to the entire library. Because so many people sit in their cars after hours and log onto the library’s Wi-Fi, the library now beams it out to the parking lot, too. Shane Gabbard, the Jackson County executive, told me that more people were moving into the county than away from it. “Land is cheap here, taxes are low, and we have more jobs than we can fill,” he said. Unemployment in Jackson County is now under five and a half per cent.,Joe Biden,Pete Buttigieg, and (Tom Steyer) have each offered plans to bridge the gap. Amy Klobuchar has been (writing legislation) to expand rural Internet services for years.
Meanwhile, in April, the Trump Administration, led by the FCC’s chair, Ajit Pai, announced its own broadband initiative, the (Rural Digital Opportunity Fund) , which, as critics havepointed out, is essentially a renaming and repurposing of an Obama-era program called the Connect America Fund. That program uses a portion of the (Universal Service Fund,
****************************
)
Owsley County, even more than Jackson County, might seem the least likely community in the country to be wired with fiber-optic cable . In Al Jazeera (found it) to be the “poorest white county” in the United States. Even now theis about twenty-three thousand dollars a year, and a third of Owsley residents live at or below the poverty line. The county has been hit hard by the Appalachian trifecta of opioid addiction, the collapse of the coal industry, and the decline of tobacco farming. Tim Bobrowski, the county’s school superintendent, estimated that thirty-five per cent of his students were being raised by their grandparents or someone else because their parents were in jail, addicted, or dead. It was hard, he said, to get adults to care much about education. “It’s not different here than in urban areas: where there’s poverty, there’s apathy. Where there’s apathy, there’s poverty. ”
The Owsley County school district has been able to take advantage of the Internet in other ways, too. It has established a telemedicine connection with an area clinic that gives students and staff access to on-call pediatricians and mental-health practitioners. And when the weather is bad, or there is a flu outbreak, teachers are able to stream their classes to their students at home. It’s called a nontraditional-instruction day, and it has allowed the school district to collect needed state funds even when the schools themselves are closed. Bobrowski is now looking into the possibility of capitalizing on broadband to create remote internships for his students. “I want this technology to give them a sense of hope,” he said.
A few years ago, a Teleworks hub opened in a former strip mall in Booneville. So far, it has created three hundred jobs. “Three hundred people employed in a small county like this makes a big difference,” Carla Gabbard (no relation to either Keith or Shane) told me. (Owsley Couny has around forty-five hundred************************ (residents) ****************************************.) She mentioned a woman who had been making five dollars an hour at a gas station but who is now making eighteen dollars an hour plus health insurance, and another who had a drug-related felony conviction and couldn’t get a job until teleworks found a company that did not require background checks. “Three years later, she’s still working and still off drugs,” Gabbard said. And, although three hundred jobs and high-speed Internet can’t undo decades of poverty, they have lowered the unemployment rate by four percentage points since the Teleworks hub opened, three years ago.
“I don’t think having broadband is necessarily going to make a five-hundred-job factory move in to Owsley, but it certainly can make people lives better and keep them from having to drive a hundred miles a day, back and forth, to work, ”Keith Gabbard said. “You can’t make everybody magically go from making twenty-five thousand dollars a year to seventy-five thousand. Broadband is not going to create higher-paying jobs for everyone in the county. But it can help education. It can help entertainment. It can help the economy. It can help health care. And I even think that people’s mind-set — how they feel about themselves — can be improved just by not always saying ‘we don’t have nothing here.’ In this case, we have something to be proud of. We have something everyone else wants. ”
David Attenborough on Spiders With Personalities
)
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings