I have filed my comment in the Federal Communications Commission’s review of E-rate, the federal program that has paid a discounted share of internet access and internal networks for schools and libraries since the late 1990s. The Commission’s Notice (FCC 26-41) asks whether the program should be “limited or sunset,” whether support should be confined to rural areas or to places served by a single provider, and what would happen to schools and libraries if it ended. Initial comments close Tuesday, October 13.
This post was inspired by Stacy Hawthorne’s “Before a Single Student Logs On,” published by CoSN on July 30, 2026. Hawthorne, who chairs CoSN’s board, walks through a school morning hour by hour to show how much the network carries before any student touches a device, and she closes by asking readers to put an accurate account of what their networks carry into the record. Her piece is the inspiration for this post and for the Before the Bell tracker I built alongside it, and it is worth reading in full before anything below.
It is worth being accurate about the stakes. The June vote did not cut anyone’s funding, and nothing changes for the current year; the FCC has said so publicly. But the questions in a rulemaking shape the orders that can follow it, and the record the Commission reads will only be as broad as the people who add to it. One filing does not make a record. So this post explains why I filed, and then asks something specific of each of the people who have a stake in how this turns out.
My why
I lead technology for a K–8 district north of Chicago, and my work begins with a network most people never think about. Long before the first student arrives, it is running the systems that make a school a safe and functioning building, including the visitor and staff identification systems at the entrances, the paging system that would carry a lockdown instruction, the environmental monitoring in the buildings, the attendance and state reporting that funding depends on, and the content filtering that federal law requires of every E-rate recipient. Hawthorne’s account of that morning is one anyone who runs a school network will recognize. None of those systems is optional, and none of them is screen time.
I am also a technoskeptic. I write critically about screens and AI in classrooms, and I have argued that screen time is often the wrong question, because the more useful questions concern what the work asks students to do, how platforms are designed, and who bears the costs. I take the concern behind this review seriously. But how much of a school day happens on a screen is a pedagogical decision, and it belongs with teachers, families, and local boards. A connectivity subsidy is the wrong instrument for making it, and sunsetting that subsidy would not make the decision any wiser. I made that argument at length in “A Technoskeptic’s Case for E-Rate.”
And I filed because of who would pay. E-rate discounts run from 20 to 90 percent according to student poverty and rural status, so the program carries the largest share of the cost in the communities with the least capacity to absorb it. If the discount ended, the network would not go away. Its cost would move onto local budgets, and it would move furthest in the places that can least afford it. That is not a consequence I was willing to leave out of a federal record.
What I am asking of you
Different people can add different things to this record, and most of them take less time than reading this post did.
Superintendents and district leaders
You can speak for the institution, which carries a weight that no individual comment does. File in your district’s name, and give the Commission two facts it cannot see from Washington: your E-rate commitments, which the AASA funding map shows for the last five years by ZIP code, and what their loss would displace in your budget. Then use CoSN’s page for school system leaders to write to your members of Congress. It takes four fields, and the template asks you to add your title.
Technology directors and network staff
You know what the network carries better than anyone, so write it down. Inventory the systems that depend on it before the first bell, find your pre-discount costs and discount rate in USAC’s open data, and do the arithmetic that makes the loss concrete: at a 90 percent discount, your cost for a service rises tenfold without E-rate, and at 60 percent it rises two and a half times. Describe your systems by category rather than by vendor or location, because a filing is a public document. If your superintendent is filing, offer to draft the inventory. The Before the Bell tracker has a worksheet that turns that list into a comment starter.
Librarians and library trustees
A debate framed around classrooms makes it easy to forget libraries, and the record should not forget them. ALA reports that 73 percent of U.S. public libraries rely on E-rate to pay their internet bill or keep their networks current, and the patrons who depend on library access for job searches, government services, and homework are often the ones with no other connection. ALA’s Save Our E-Rate page lets library workers and community members write to Congress and links to a tool for filing formal comments with the FCC. (Using it subscribes you to ALA’s advocacy emails.)
School board members
Ask your administration two questions before October 13: what does E-rate pay for in our district, and what would we do without it? The answers belong in the record, and a board can put them there directly, through a letter or a resolution in support of the program filed in the docket or sent to your congressional delegation. Few voices carry more weight on a question about local budgets than the people elected to set them.
Teachers
If you share concerns about screen time, as many of us do, you are the people who should be shaping those decisions, in your classrooms and with your colleagues and boards. This proceeding is not where those decisions will be made well. What you can add is the view from the classroom, such as what a network outage does to your day or what your students could not do without a working building. CoSN’s Tell Congress page takes about a minute, and the FCC accepts short express comments from individuals.
Parents and families
The worry about how much time children spend on screens is legitimate, and families are right to raise it with their schools. Raise it there, with teachers, principals, and boards, where those decisions are actually made. The network the FCC is reviewing is also the one that runs the doors, the paging system, and the 911 calls in your child’s school. If you want to protect it, CoSN’s Tell Congress page takes four fields and sends a letter to your members of Congress.
Researchers and teacher educators
The Notice leans heavily on research about screen time and learning. Those of us who study learning and technology are well placed to say what that research does and does not show, including that findings about screen use do not speak to whether schools can afford the networks their buildings run on. A comment grounded in evidence, from someone with no funding stake in the outcome, is a valuable addition to the record.
The dates and the tools
Initial comments are due Tuesday, October 13, and reply comments are due Thursday, November 12, through the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System in WC Docket No. 26-133. SHLB has templates and step-by-step instructions for first-time filers. The Before the Bell tracker gathers the FCC’s documents, the reporting, and every action link in this post, and it quotes the Notice’s key questions with paragraph numbers so they can be cited directly. The one-minute letters to Congress are not FCC comments, and they are worth sending anyway; E-rate exists because Congress wrote it into law, and Congress will hear about it if it changes.
I filed because the questions worth asking about screens deserve a better venue than a funding docket, and because the people who would pay for getting this wrong are the students and patrons in the buildings least able to absorb it. If you lead a district, run a network, staff a library, serve on a board, teach, parent, or study any of this, the record is open until October 13.
Sources
Calascione, J. (2026, July 29). Report cards and diplomas: Progress in meeting the goals of the E-Rate program. Federal Communications Commission. https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/blog/2026/07/29/report-cards-and-diplomas-progress-meeting-goals-e-rate-program
Federal Communications Commission. (2026). Ensuring children’s safe use of screens and E-Rate-funded services (FCC 26-41, WC Docket No. 26-133) [Notice of proposed rulemaking and further notice of proposed rulemaking]. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-review-e-rate-program-ensure-congresss-vision
Hawthorne, S. (2026, July 30). Before a single student logs on. CoSN. https://www.cosn.org/before-a-single-student-logs-on/
Miner, M. (2026). Before the bell: E-rate tracker [Interactive tracker]. GitHub. https://minerclass.github.io/erate-tracker/
Sequeira, R. (2026, September 10). Schools, libraries sound alarm over potential changes to federal internet program. Stateline. https://stateline.org/2026/09/10/schools-libraries-sound-alarm-over-potential-changes-to-federal-internet-program/