St. Joseph Herald-Palladium: Peters pitches for rural broadband

BLOOMINGDALE — If you head over to Pullman Elementary School anytime when school is out, you’ll find kids sitting outside with laptops and similar devices.

That’s because the only source of broadband internet in the area, aside from satellite service, is at the school.

An experiment with providing kids with netbooks “failed miserably,” according to Deb Paquette, the Bloomingdale Public Schools superintendent, because students couldn’t use them at home. Pullman is part of the Bloomingdale district.

Paquette said she wants to see a level playing field when her graduates go to college.

“My students don’t have the same opportunities that other students have,” Paquette said.

Paquette was directing her remarks to U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Hills, who was holding a town meeting at the main office of Bloomingdale Communications in downtown Bloomingdale. Although Peters said he had no prepared speech and was willing to take questions of any kind, the only topic was the internet.

The visit started earlier with the meet-and-greet and a tour of the Bloomingdale Communications facility, which provides telephone, DSL, video and fiber optic services. Bloomingdale’s fiber connects all the schools in Van Buren County. It provides residential and business service in the Paw Paw, Bloomingdale and Mattawan areas. In South Haven it provides business service only.

Van Buren County Administrator Douglas Cultra told Peters the area could use a Tennessee Valley Authority approach to rural broadband. The federal government created the TVA during the Great Depression to provide electricity, navigation, flood control, fertilizer manufacturing and other economic development with a series of dams to a severely depressed area.

Peters told the audience of about 30 people, mostly local officials and Bloomingdale Communications employees, that he has been working on internet issues since the 1990s when he was in the state Legislature. He visited a computer lab in a juvenile detention facility and found a young woman who was excitedly learning things through the computer. He asked her if she could use computers at her school. She said no. There was no computer lab.

“Something’s really messed up about that,” Peters recalled thinking. After that he began working on getting computers for the Pontiac school district.

“We’re well beyond that now,” Peters said. The current issue is getting speedy internet service to everyone. Peters said there should be a government component because the internet is infrastructure, like bridges and roads, which the government already handles. It’s needed for economic development and security.

"That’s why its critical we make these investments,” Peters said.