Linda Jacobson/the 74, The associated Press

As superintendent of Desert Sands Unified in California’s Coachella Valley, Kelly May-Vollmer has a hard time naming a system that’s not somehow connected to the district’s broadband network.

Parents can check a school bus tracking app to make sure their child arrived on time. Cafeteria staff don’t use cash registers; kids’ meal accounts are linked to the cloud. Even grounds crews depend on external wireless access points to maintain the fields and landscaping at the district’s 34 schools.

“They’re running our sprinkler systems off iPads,” May-Vollmer said.

Her district is like the more than 96,000 across the country that apply each year for discounts on broadband service through a federal program called E-Rate. High-poverty districts like Desert Sands save up to 90% of the cost of connecting their schools and classrooms to the internet.

But the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program Congress created 30 years ago, has launched a “top-to-bottom” evaluation that has leaders of the nation’s school districts on edge. The FCC is collecting views on how the program should be reformed or even whether it should be abandoned altogether because it “has fulfilled” its mission. In addition to asking whether the benefit should be restricted to rural districts, the agency links E-Rate to present-day concerns over screen time. Comments are due Oct. 13 and replies are due Nov. 12.

The proposal is “aimed at empowering parents and ensuring that our E-Rate program produces the great educational outcomes stakeholders have intended,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in early June when he announced the review. In Project 2025, the far-right Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, Carr said because of advancements in technology, decisions about the program “should be made with an eye to right-sizing the federal government’s existing broadband initiatives.”

The review process has left ed tech leaders both confused and ready to fight.

“They’re asking us to comment on a potential rulemaking and they haven’t told us what the rules would be,” said Keith Kruger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, a leading ed tech professional organization. He called the initial 70 pages of questions the FCC released “so extraordinarily broad and comprehensive” that they’re too overwhelming for the average district leader to address. “We’re going to have to be very loud and noisy as a community to our members of Congress and to governors to say ‘Hands off the E-Rate.’ ”

As in Desert Sands, districts depend on internet access for a lot more than classroom instruction, including taking attendance and managing payroll. But it’s how students use the internet at school that has taken over the discussion about updating the program.

“Historically, underserved students lacked access to computers and technology, and efforts were made to ‘close the digital divide,’” said Emily Cherkin, a Seattle-based consultant and leading figure in the battle against “big tech.” In 2026, she said, “the pendulum has swung too far.”

In January, she testified before the U.S. Senate, saying that children’s access to the internet has led to “catastrophic” impacts on their mental health, learning and development. In response to those concerns, some states are restricting screen time. Parents are demanding the chance to opt out of apps and learning platforms, and others, including Cherkin, are suing ed tech companies and publishers, accusing them of data privacy violations and false advertising.

‘A connectivity program’

Groups like the Consortium for School Networking have called for a balanced approach before the valid concerns over kids’ time online threatens the loss of a program that saves schools and libraries over $2.5 billion each year.

The discounts apply to high-speed internet service as well as Wi-Fi access points, routers and switches. Desert Sands, for example, is currently upgrading such equipment district-wide — a $1 million project that is only costing the district $200,000 because of the discount. But E-Rate benefits don’t extend to devices for students, digital content or software licenses.

E-Rate “is a connectivity program,” Krueger said. “It’s not an education program.”

Last week, CoSN released a report highlighting examples of “purposeful” technology use and stressed that there’s a difference between a student scrolling social media during the school day and another working with a classmate on a multimedia project.

“The goal is not simply to reduce or increase screen time,” the report says. “The goal is to ensure that every use of technology has a clear instructional purpose.”

But Cherkin is skeptical of what she calls the industry’s “ rebrand.” As long as students are spending time on a device, she wrote that it doesn’t matter whether they have high-quality materials. Her years as a former middle school English teacher in Seattle private schools, from 2003 to 2015, helped to shape her views on technology. Schools had computer labs and a dedicated technology teacher, a model she’d like to see reinstated. That arrangement evolved into reserving a cart with laptops that she would bring to her classroom when needed.

The turning point, she said, was when she started uploading grades into a digital portal.

“Instead of coming to talk to me directly and having a conversation about what they might need to do to improve … they were instead directed to a digital platform that had a number or letter grade, which told them very little overall,” she said. “I saw it devaluing the experience of learning to be a student who could self-advocate.”

Parents, whom she described as “highly anxious,” constantly checked the portal and emailed her about why their children didn’t get an A or were missing a grade. Despite her concerns over the internet’s impact on students, she still supports the argument that access should be universally available.

‘Pulling out the rug’

For Krueger and others who fought to increase access for students in schools and homes, this moment feels like a giant step backward. As founder of EducationSuperhighway, a nonprofit, Evan Marwell advocated for a fiber connection to every school in the nation, reaching over 99% by 2019.

“There are a lot of good uses of technology in classrooms,” he said. “Pulling out the rug from teachers and students on all those good uses would be, in my opinion, a big mistake.”

During the pandemic, his organization pivoted to signing up low-income families for discounted high-speed service at home so students wouldn’t have to sit in McDonalds’ parking lots to pick up Wi-Fi to do homework.

Last fall, in its first move toward rolling back federal broadband initiatives, the FCC voted to remove at-home and school bus Wi-Fi access from the program, features that were added during the Biden administration. The move, Carr said in a statement, would end what he called “illegal funding” of young kids’ unsupervised screen time.

Sen. Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who wrote the E-Rate program as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act said in a statement that the decision would “leave low-income, rural and marginalized communities disconnected.”

The FCC asks whether E-Rate should be “limited or sunset,” considering the nearly universal access in schools. But Kevin Taglang, an executive editor with the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, a nonprofit, wrote that high-poverty districts receiving the largest discounts serve more than 16 million students. In Desert Sands, those kids have parents who work at the resorts, golf courses and restaurants across Palm Springs.

“Any eligibility change that removes these schools from the program, or substantially reduces their discount levels, would fall hardest on the students and districts least able to absorb the loss,” he wrote.

Preventing fraud

Conservatives first tried to end E-Rate through a 2023 lawsuit. Consumers Research, a nonprofit, argued that the FCC’s arrangement with the Universal Service Administrative Company, the private entity that runs the program, was illegal and gave too much power to a federal agency. But in a 6-3 decision last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the program.

The Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, highlighted E-Rate in a December report, saying that out of five government programs evaluated, it was the only one following all nine recommended practices for preventing fraud, waste and abuse. That was a big improvement over a 2020 GAO evaluation, which flagged the program for “several key fraud risks.”

Krueger, with CoSN, said some improvements to E-Rate are needed, like more “serious funding” for cybersecurity.

“Having broadband that is at risk for cyber attacks isn’t helpful,” he said.

Between July 2023 and December 2024, 82% of schools experienced some type of cyber incident, such as a ransomware attack, a data breach or a phishing attempt, according to a report last year from the nonprofit Center for Internet Security. When the FCC opened up a $200 million E-Rate cybersecurity pilot program in 2024, the demand was huge. The agency received applications totaling $3.7 billion.

Krueger, however, questions whether the FCC is the right agency to determine whether Wi-Fi access is harming students’ learning. That, he said, should be the responsibility of the Office of Educational Technology, which the Trump administration gutted last year when it eliminated roughly half of the Department of Education’s staff.

At a late July gathering in Washington, Amber Davis, chief of staff in the Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, told advocates from about 22 states that there is still an ed tech office at the agency, according to CoSN Chair Stacy Hawthorne. The attendees, Hawthorne said, joked that it may only exist on paper.

The department did not respond to questions about the makeup of the office. But on Thursday it issued guidance that tries to redirect the debate over ed tech away from screen time. Ed tech “should not be evaluated solely by the amount of time students spend using it,” it said, adding that district spending on technology should be “guided by evidence of effectiveness.”

The July event was one of several likely to occur over the next couple months as leaders advocate to preserve E-Rate. With this year’s application period already complete, the FCC had to clarify on July 29 that the program still exists and that its “notice of potential rulemaking” won’t immediately result in a loss of funding.

If the administration scales back or discontinues E-Rate, district leaders say they’ll have to make up the difference somehow. LaTonya Goffney, superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District, near Houston, said with 86% of her district’s budget tied up in personnel, she would have to cut staff or programs to replace the more than $2 million saved each year from discounts.

“The utilities, the transportation — all of those things we can’t eliminate,” she said. “We still have to provide those for our students.”

In Desert Sands, May-Vollmer added that because E-Rate requires competitive pricing, the cost of broadband service for schools would likely increase if the program is gone. For her, unlimited Wi-Fi in the classroom replicates the real-world for students.

“You and I don’t schedule time to go to a computer lab,” she said. “At work, if I say ‘Everybody, go get your computer,’ we have that ability. I want that ability in the classroom, too.”

___

This story was originally published by The 74 and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Learn more about our News Monitoring here.

---