Mendocino schools propose sale of MCN internet to city of Fort Bragg
MENDOCINO CO., 11/14/24 – After being one of the first and last school districts in the country to be the internet service provider for an entire community, the Mendocino Unified School District wants to sell.
The district is taking its second look at selling the Mendocino Community Network, known as MCN.
The city of Fort Bragg has offered to pay the district $500,000 over the next ten years to buy MCN and has promised to keep all services and employees.
A special informational meeting will be held Thursday afternoon by the district to introduce the proposal. The district hopes to vote on the issue at the December regular meeting of the school board. There could be a vote tonight also.
In 1992, the school district got the help of NASA in starting educational internet services for a World Wide Web most people had never heard of at the time. In 1994, MCN was founded for students to learn about the then-new internet.
Led by English teacher Mitch Sprague, the school district hoped to be called “The Silicon Coast” by providing groundbreaking access to the web from Gualala to Westport. Suffice to say, the nickname did not stick. However, MCN successfully spread dialup, then wired the internet up and down the coast. In 2021 MCN introduced a fixed wireless internet connection in Fort Bragg.
For most of that time, MCN hosted listservs – an old school “social media network” comprising community announcements and discussion lists for each community in the county, from Ukiah to Point Arena. The listservs continue to operate today with more than a thousand subscribers, serving as a core communication tool for residents, district parents, activists and local politicians.
Last year, the school district announced that it would discontinue the listservs after a handful of people used the unmoderated platform to threaten each other and the district with legal action. A group of volunteers, including this reporter, stepped forward to moderate the listservs apart from the schools. The listservs are expected to be part of the purchase by Fort Bragg, Mendocino Unified School District Superintendent Jason Morse said.
During the 1990s internet service providers popped up in nearly every community across the nation, but most were private businesses, not school districts or other government agencies. Most vanished as the business was taken over by giants like Comcast.
For the past several years, the school district has wanted to unload all of the MCN ISP along with moderation of the listservs, so it could focus more on the work of education. Back in 2022, the school district proposed selling MCN but then rejected all bids to buy MCN. Community members insisted on local control and the proposal became unpopular.
The internet created untenable, costly long-distance charges back in 1992. That’s when NASA stepped in to provide the school district with a free line, through a grant, to get started. How did the school district become the master of the internet on the Mendocino Coast?
“The district achieved regional and national recognition for the project which was considered visionary at the time,” the district website explains.
“As the (1992) grant came to an end, the communities of Mendocino and Fort Bragg were without dialup access. The original project-based learning education program has from the beginning had a community component built into it so it was a natural fit for the district to begin offering commercial internet service to the community in the spring of 1994. MCN grew dramatically with the booming demand in dialup service, reaching over 4,000 dialup customers at one point in time,” the district website explains.
Over the years, MCN kept up with what was happening at other ISPs and managed to compete with Comcast when that company took a sizable portion of MCN’s customers. It offered website hosting, DSL, Wi-Fi and broadband as those became the latest technologies.
Morse issued the following statement about the offer being introduced on Thursday:
“Under the proposed transition, the city of Fort Bragg has stated it “would continue to service MCN customers, including those residing outside city limits, maintaining the same high-quality service MCN customers have come to rely on. Additionally, all current MCN staff members would become city of Fort Bragg employees, ensuring continuity in operations and customer support, pending approval by the Fort Bragg City Council.”
MCN is wholly owned by the Mendocino Unified School District. The district covers 420 square miles and serves the communities from Caspar on the north to Elk in the south and inland to Comptche. MCN covers a much larger area of the Coast, including Fort Bragg, where downtown broadband is provided by MCN.
Fort Bragg recently won a $10.3 million grant to expand broadband access under the Last-Mile Broadband Initiative, a state funded program. The city was one of three local governments to get grants from the initiative, including the Round Valley Indian Tribes which received $35.2 million and the city of Ukiah, which received $5.6 million. The effort to provide high-speed broadband to all has been compared to the rural electrification effort led by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.
The board meeting about the sale will be Thur., Nov. 14th at 5:30 at Mendocino High School and on Zoom. The agenda and Zoom link can be found here.
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