In far eastern Oregon, Huntington School District superintendent Scott Bullock arrives at school 35 or 40 minutes early. He takes a few moments of “peace and quiet” to think about the day ahead, then greets the school’s staff members and its 86 students as they trickle in. He visits classrooms and walks through the school before starting his administrative work.

Close to the Idaho border and the Snake River, Huntington is only a few miles from the interstate but feels a world away. About 500 people live in this valley of the high desert, surrounded by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. It’s a former railroad town—the school is “home of the Locomotives.”

“We’re a very low-income community, and poverty seems to reign supreme, unfortunately,” Bullock said.

Bullock has greeted kids at Huntington for 20 years now, first as a history teacher and now as a superintendent, often functioning as principal and athletic director as well. He is committed to this school because he cares about the students’ futures, and their success.

“I just try to make sure that every one of them has the opportunity to understand that there’s more than what you see every day here in Huntington,” Bullock said. “There’s a lot more to the world.”

Huntington kids connect with the world outside Huntington through field trips to other communities, natural areas and cultural spaces, as well as through interactions with 10 high school exchange students, who live in a school-run dormitory. Still, in the 21st century, it can be hard to connect students to the outside world when the internet doesn’t work.

For years, the entire Huntington school stumbled along with 10-megabyte-per-second internet on old copper lines. “It would just lock up,” Bullock said. “It would just buffer and spin and spin. Once all the technology came on, it would just come to a standstill.”

When students took state standardized tests, everyone else in the school had to stay offline. Without sufficient internet, teachers couldn’t use the online resources that came with textbooks bought by the district. They couldn’t take full advantage of the expensive equipment purchased for Science, Technology, Engineering Art and Math (STEAM) instruction.

Randy Seals is director of technology for the Malheur Education Service District, which started working with Huntington School District in 2021. “They were basically running the school off mobile hotspots,” he said.

The school’s connection had been even slower before it inherited pandemic-era hotspots. “The hotspots helped tremendously,” said Bullock.

In 2022, the school hooked up to Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by SpaceX. Upload speeds remained slow, however, challenging the school’s server backups. Finally in 2024, a federal E-Rate grant helped bring fiber internet service to Huntington school.

The Federal Communications Commission distributes funding of up to $4.456 billion annually to bring affordable high-speed internet to schools and libraries across the country. The E-Rate grant funded 90% of the project. The American Plan Rescue Act created funding for the $7.1 billion Emergency Connectivity Fund. 

With fundingsecured, Huntington still struggled to find a contractor who would connect the school. Permits to cross the interstate corridor presented a challenge. It wasn’t until a contractor appeared onsite that Bullock allowed himself to hope the school had a broadband future.

All told, it took more than five years of persistence to get fiber to Huntington school. “Now we can use all the technology that we purchased,” Bullock said. “We can actually stream and watch videos from educational sites. It has dramatically changed the school itself.”

The American Rescue Plan Act was a stimulus package passed by the 117th U.S. Congress in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was signed into law in March of 2021 by President Biden to aid in the country’s economic recovery.