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Schools Across US Protest FCC Plan That Could Disconnect Kids From Internet (arstechnica.com) 152

Posted by BeauHD from the no-child-left-online dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Schools and libraries from around the U.S. pleaded with the Federal Communications Commission to drop the idea of ending E-Rate, a $2 billion-a-year program that connects students and library visitors to the Internet. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has criticized school districts for having "experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students," and said E-Rate expanded too far beyond its original purpose of "supporting basic Internet access to schools and libraries for educational purposes." In June, Carr led a 2-1 vote to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking public comment on whether E-Rate should be "limited or sunset to reflect today's extensive connectivity rates."

Carr's proposal could result in E-Rate cutting the discounts that schools and libraries receive for telecom services and equipment, and imposing more restrictions on how E-Rate money can be used. The FCC seeking comment on whether to sunset the program also raises the possibility that Carr might choose to axe E-Rate entirely. The National Association of Elementary School Principals told the FCC that it "strongly supports the continued operation of the E-Rate program and urges the Commission to reject proposals that would eliminate, substantially restrict, or impose new conditions on this essential source of connectivity assistance for schools and libraries." The Carr FCC already scaled E-Rate back last year by ending funding for schools and libraries to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and for Wi-Fi service on school buses. "Importantly, the FCC does not have the authority to terminate the E-Rate program. The E-Rate program is mandated by Congress, and the FCC is responsible for administering it," the American Library Associated told the FCC.

The American Library Association said "the FCC lacks the authority and expertise to regulate screen time or determine educational outcomes." In a filing, the group pointed out that under U.S. law, determinations about what content is inappropriate for children "shall be made by the school board, local educational agency, library, or other authority responsible for making the determination."

Schools Across US Protest FCC Plan That Could Disconnect Kids From Internet More | Reply

Schools Across US Protest FCC Plan That Could Disconnect Kids From Internet

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  • Two more years (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @11:40PM (#66376672)

    Once this administration leaves the White House there must be a reckoning. The people that are actively trying to destroy this country need to be held accountable for their actions.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ihadafivedigituid ( 8391795 )
      The irony of someone posting this as AC, my goodness ...

      • Re: Two more years (Score:5, Informative)

        by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:58AM (#66376738)
        I dont see irony at all. This is an administration that threatens to come after anyone. People are scared to criticize them openly. This happens with any totalitarian regime.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by sarren1901 ( 5415506 )

          What? Who is scared to criticize Trump openly? Go turn on NBC, MSN, or CNN and just listen for 5 minutes. They'll negatively talk about Trump.

          Sticking on topic, why do the kids need wifi on the school bus? Don't their cellphones (that they need already have) have cellular connections? Seems like a waste of taxpayer dollars to me.

          As for the schools themselves, given all the other money they "spend" on sports and administration, I'm quite sure they could afford a fiber connection to the school. Cost less then

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Surely you're smart enough to figure out Trump hasn't left the Whitehouse yet?

        If he's willing to support Putin and withdraw support from Ukraine with no notice. His team would be willing to go after anyone.

        Not wanting people to be held accountable, but you're against flock I bet...

      • Re:Two more years (Score:5, Insightful)

        by maladroit ( 71511 ) on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:51AM (#66376802) Homepage

        The Trump administration is trying to strip the US citizenship of a member of Congress in an absolutely reprehensible attack on free speech and basic rights:
        https://www.wsj.com/politics/p... [wsj.com]
        https://www.aljazeera.com/news... [aljazeera.com]

        It's not surprising that people do not want to openly criticize this administration.

      • You shouldn't use words you don't understand, like "irony".

        Or "goodness"

      • The irony of someone with a UID over 8 million -> Feels the need to have a username that says they used to have one with more "prestige". Enough said. Nobody gives a fuck, and you giving one is enough of a tell for everyone reading literally anything coming out of your fingers/mouth.

        • One of the ways you can tell someone is too far up their own ass is when they have no sense of humor at all.

          My username came out of a failed password recovery process that I chose to laugh about. I've been here since late '97, so the additional joke is that I'm getting old.

    • The king pins will never face accountability.

    • Why wait that long?

      "Clean up your room!"

      "Oh mom! Can I do it in two years?"

    • Nuremberg trials.

    • I wouldn't count on MAGA being gone in 2 years, or Trump either. He will remain at the head of MAGA regardless of who wins the presidency, an any winner other than MAGA will be declared fraudulent - with the DOJ, FBI, SCOTUS, ICE, and the Army if needs be, to back him up.

    • So you think. Next term Ron Desantis will be president and Trump will be vice.

  • Gubmint should finance Faraday cages for schools (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ihadafivedigituid ( 8391795 ) on Thursday October 15, 2026 @12:03AM (#66376682)
    Blocking internet access at schools would promote education more than anything else at this point.
    • Maybe if a kid is well off and has parents that can take them to the library constantly and isn't in a deep breath state or half the books have been banned because the letters g, a and y all appeared on the same page at the same time you might have a point but well that's not the world we live in.

      As a dumb kid learning to program in basic I hit a wall for some reason on the concept of data statements. The idea that you would have data at the back of your program listing that you would read from the fron
      • The world has changed, grampa. For the record, I'm likely older than you based on your narrative.

        Everyone, and this includes the homeless kids living in cars, has smartphones. (Source: spouse who is an elementary school teacher in a lower middle class neighborhood). Kids are saturated in horrible online shit 24/7. School should be a refuge from that.
        • I'm pretty fucking old. I started on a Timex zx81.

          And you're mixing up different problems. You're complaining about social media and outrage porn designed for engagement. Just regulate social media. Problem solved.

          I don't see any reason to cut children off from a massive source of information that can explain a complex topic to them in a thousand different ways to help them learn just because they can go to Facebook and you are too obsessed with corporations rights to stop them from doing terrible t
          • I started on a TRS-80 Model 1 in early 1978.

            Regulating drugs has worked so well that you want to apply the same techniques to equally addictive online tech? How would you go about such a thing, anyway? The solution is worse than the problem.

            But that's a red herring: I never said anything about screen use outside of school. You ought to talk to some actual teachers if you want to know the nature and scope of the problem in school. The solution I imagine is the solution most teachers would like to see a

    • I remember when that was how it was in schools... we read books like 1984 and Brave New World and did homework on paper, and learned stuff! We didn't have cell phones and tablets and XBox 27's and PS19's... we had a phone on the wall, and (if you were lucky) a NES or a Sega Genesis and a few games, and we read books regularly (not for school stuff).

  • ""Importantly, the FCC does not have the authority to terminate the E-Rate program. The E-Rate program is mandated by Congress, and the FCC is responsible for administering it," the American Library Associated told the FCC. "

    That asshole has already cut the program back, he could just cut it to zero but leave it as a program on the books. And when has that alleged administration gave a flying rat's ass for the law or the Constitution?

    • Re:Does it matter if the FCC has the power to end? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:17AM (#66376880)

      Strange how the FCC was powerless to do anything under Biden and yet today it can do whatever it wants.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Puls4r ( 724907 )
        Not really. When you just ignore the laws, rules, and regulations, you can get all sorts of shit done. Shit being the operative word.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Malc ( 1751 )

      As an non-American, I'm curious why the amount of screen time in schools is a matter for the FCC rather than the Department of Education?

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by ihadafivedigituid ( 8391795 )
        Education policy is decentralized to the state level here. The federal government has some leverage through conditional funding, but they can't force policy in most cases.

        Keep in mind that many of our states are comparable to entire countries elsewhere in the world, so this is probably the only workable arrangement unless we adopt some kind of Soviet-style national bureaucracy.

    • In a way, the US Constitution and the Bible are similar in that they are viewed by many to be sacrosanct writings where each individual word holds outsized meaning. Yet, we don't have the original authors to clarify their intent, so we are left to rely on so-called experts for interpretation. In today's world, those interpretations far transcend the original text, despite non-believable claims of strict construction.

      The right-wing six on the Supreme Court are right, and everyone else is wrong ... by definit

      • Congress has exercised Inherent Contempt powers as recently as a hundred years ago but they turned the Congressional Jail into a speakeasy/conference room which roughly reflects their sense of duty.

        Which, to your point, they now refer the DoJ to the DoJ for prosecution.

        But also that illustrates why prior Congresses held the power to be essential.

        It would have been grand if "The Dow, the Dow is over fifty thousand!" landed Bill Barbie in jail until she had time to think abour her duty to respond truthfully.

        I

      • In a way, the US Constitution and the Bible are similar in that they are viewed by many to be sacrosanct writings where each individual word holds outsized meaning. Yet, we don't have the original authors to clarify their intent, so we are left to rely on so-called experts for interpretation.

        In fact, we have many writings from the original authors of the US Constitution on exactly what they intended, and what they feared the unintended consequences might be. They were quite prolific in their musings. Of note is the fact that they did not all agree -they compromised.

        Start with the Federalist Papers. Then read the Convention Records for Madison's notes on the arguments that occurred during the original US Constitutional convention. You can find writings by Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jef

  • "Carr's proposal could result in E-Rate cutting the discounts that schools and libraries receive for telecom services and equipment, and imposing more restrictions on how E-Rate money can be used."

    What about that means disconnecting kids from the internet? What about that is a termination of the program?

    Nothing.

  • FTA: “The FCC received specific examples of how E-Rate helps local communities. “We estimate our annual Internet cost at approximately $3,120 and our annual E-Rate support at approximately $1,560,” Paul Lapka, the principal of Rock Valley Christian School in Iowa, told the US agency. "

    Is this Christian school really operating on such a knife edge that the $1560/year ($130/month) puts them over the edge? Note it is a private school with around 240 students and an awesome 11:1 student/teach

    • Re:The only example shared seems trivial (Score:4, Interesting)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:15AM (#66377010) Homepage

      $2 billion for any government program of this scale is really not bad. The support is scaled to the poverty level of the region. If they are getting a 50% discount, they are either rural (1%-19% eligible for National School Lunch Program) or in a relatively poor urban rea (20-30% eligible for school lunch program).

      Guaranteed funding for connectivity actually helps provide incentive to companies to build services for these areas. This is long-term guaranteed income to any company willing to run fiber to an otherwise unserviced area. I think that $3000 rate would be a lot higher if the public schools in the same town didn't have a discount too. The cost is driven by having multiple customers to support the infrastructure build out.

      This is part of what's funded by the Universal Service Fund (USF fee) on your phone bill. And it's by far the least wasteful, since it's not about connecting individual households.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ksw_92 ( 5249207 )

        Religious schools in more poverty-stricken areas scrape for every dime so subsidizing internet service via E-Rate is important to them. They don't pay the teachers that well, either, compared to the unionized public-school teachers. That 11:1 student/teacher ratio speaks more about the sacrifices the students' families are making (i.e. paying tuition, doing "service hours", etc.) than about being a posh learning environment.

  • Send in the devices (Score:3)

    by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:48AM (#66377062) Homepage Journal

    not sure how K12 works today considering I last worked for one in 2017 pre-COVID and only for one year, and I don't know how much of this if anything is funded by this plan, but I can attest that there is a ton of waste back then.

    1) iPad's galore. Every other classroom had a cart with 30 iPads in them. Most of them filled with learning apps with dubious uses. They were a pain to administer and broke constantly because kids dropped them and even the rugged cases couldn't save them. Although I've heard they switched to Chromebooks because their cheaper and more rugged since then. Speaking of Chromebooks...

    2) Chromebooks galore. My Cousin, at a different school, were given Chromebooks post-COVID. She literally has a pile of them in her room because she gets one every other year and the school doesn't want them back. Her mother gave them to me to figure out what to do with them since the school won't even take them to recycle. All of them were unregistered from the school org and I Powerwashed them with no ties back to the school org once I updated them and put them back online. All of them still have 2-5 years of support left. I know Chromebooks are relatively cheap especially when bought in bulk but this seems to be a massive waste to me.

    3) Craptastic desktops. Back to the school I worked for. They had ancient desktops that were easily 10+ years old in 2017 and claimed they didn't have the money to replace them. I asked them at the time why don't they replace them with Chromeboxes (or use Cloudready, which Google eventually bought to make Chromebook Flex) since the school was a google shop (they were on the Google for Education system at the time) and their answer was because they needed MSOffice even though none of the kids used Office because they were on Google and were using Google Docs and Classroom for everything. They were too afraid that if they dropped MS that some software would come down the line that was Windows only, and they would be screwed. I can understand that at that time, but it was getting very clear that K12 across the board was going full web based and anything would be better than running Windows 10 on 2GB ram systems on low end Core 2 Duo's.

    4) Wifi everywhere. Every single classroom had an AP. This makes sense considering the iPad's everywhere. It didn't make sense to me that it was used so inefficiently at the time. I remember having to run 4 network lines to a classroom 200 feet from the switch to temporarily hook up 3 computers and a phone for a room that already had wifi in it when wifi USB dongles were $20 each and the phones supported wifi connectivity. Students had access to them and would hook their phones to them to watch TikTok all day.

    5) Smart boards everywhere. Every classroom had Promethean smart boards. There were projector based connected to a laptop the teacher had. Useful but were very expensive and failure prone. They constantly needed realigned and the projectors would "star-out" since they were all DLP projectors with that faulty TI chip.

    6) Bandwidth Galore. The school system I worked for had a 1gbps link at the time which was symmetrical. The busiest we would see it was roughly 750mbps around 11AM to 2PM and vary rarely peaked beyond a minute or two. They were planning to up it to 2gbps but I left there before that happened. Keep in mind that most kids at that point did nothing but Youtube and Tiktok if you put a screen in front of them so even with that amount of Bandwidth usage it never seemed to be an issue. You would be amazed how much you can stretch 1gbps when you actively manage bandwidth correctly.

    As for Cellular access points (Might make sense in some rural areas but would probably just put it in a Chromebook or tablet.) and Wifi on school buses (Why? So Billy can Doomscroll TikTok because he ran out of data?) can't comment on that since those weren't around when I worked in K12 (I'm guessing it was a COVID thing) but I don't see why you would need this overlap when there is the subsidized low income broadband initiatives already in place that's supposed to fill in these gaps.

    • Thank you. Best comment on here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MikeS2k ( 589190 )

      There's a lot of incompetence too wasting thousands of dollars.

      I worked in a district where the boobie manager had bought bottom spec computers for the whole school - Intel Pentiums (this was in an age of Core2duo, I didn't even know they still made Pentiums at that time) with bottom spec ram and spinning rust when SSD's were standard. This combined with an upgrade from XP to Windows Vista/7 made them nigh on unusable.

      They had just had all their switches replaced with GBPS switches; I remember (I was a b

  • ... are where many people go to get Internet service. Between crappy broadband and spotty 5G service, it's all they have left.

    And lest you think that this is a problem primarily of rural areas, I can drive by Bill Gates mansion on my way to work and flip him off.

  • Geez people.... Regardless of who is President, the issue here is worth taking a good look at. $2 billion is a LOT of money to burn through each year! And this is a program that arguably went FAR beyond what people expected it to do (ensuring libraries and schools had an afford Internet connection). Handing out free hotspots to people? Yeah ... I'd rather not fund THAT with my tax money. Just use free public wifi like the rest of us do.

    • It's called TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) most libtards suffer from this condition to some degree or another.

      • TDS: The paranoid feeling that someone else must be deranged because they don't love and worship the Orange God Emperor with every fiber of their being.

        It couldn't possibly be because the man is an asshole and complete shitheel.

  • ...in about two week's time the news media will report that the trump, Carr, and Lutnick families invested millions in a never-before heard-of start up company that provided internet access to schools and this company is in line to get a $2 billion no-bid contract from the DOE.
  • Top cognitive scientists point out that the single strongest variable tracking alongside dropping reading and math scores is the rise of classroom technology and hyper-algorithmic social media. Kids need fewer screens, more gym. Less internet, more gym. Less bla bla bla, more run run run.

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