Akron is rebuilding every public school as a Community Learning Center, with 17 schools already completed. Four more Community Learning Centers are coming online, seven are under construction, and more are in the design and planning stages.
Cisco today announced that it has joined with OneCommunity, a leader in incubating public-private partnerships and a nonprofit broadband service provider supporting northern Ohio. Akron’s OneCommunity network allows organizations to operate a converged IP network capable of delivering robust voice, video, and data services at speeds from 10 Mb/s to 40 Gb/s.
The pilot programs, will focus on workforce retraining, public safety, access to healthcare, and public services. Cisco and OneCommunity have aligned with local governments to share the digital infrastructure, capabilities and services that underpin dedicated citizen services and public safety programs.
The Cisco Smart+Connected Communities initiative helps transform physical communities into connected communities. The OneCommunity/Cisco regional revitalization programs include:
- Public WiFi and Training to Improve Workforce. OneCommunity is launching an ambitious digital literacy program with more than a dozen training partners. Together this consortium of nonprofits will provide digital literacy training, technical support, and help address 30,000 households over the next two years.
- Connected Incident Response. To improve citizen safety, Cuyahoga County is using the OneCommunity Service Delivery Platform to immediately assemble multidisciplinary emergency response teams, regardless of their location or communications media.
- Online Healthcare Education and Telemedicine. Cisco is working with OneCommunity to begin to deliver healthcare education to the region’s school system. These education programs are designed to take an aggressive approach to disease prevention and reduce the need for future care, treatment expenses and child/parent absences due to illness.
- Online Community Services. The city of Akron is using Cisco’s network-driven collaboration technologies to deliver several community services via advanced online portals. Akron citizens will be able to access incident reports from a Web-based portal. Additionally, the system will automatically send an e-mail report to a victim or witness if the police officer is provided with an e-mail address.
