SHLB's Joey Wender on the fight to save E-Rate

The Federal Communications Commission's move to potentially gut or end E-Rate is just the latest under Chairman Brendan Carr to place limits on the program. The FCC also rolled back rules that allowed E-Rate to fund school bus Wi-Fi and voted to approve a competitive bidding portal for participation in the program, described as "overly burdensome" by the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition. But a new effort to potentially kill the program has broad implications for the country's progress on ending the digital divide. While the FCC Chair is framing the E-Rate Notice of Proposed Rulemaking around a missive to curb kids' screen time, SHLB executive director Joey Wender says such concerns, while "valid," should not be "a back door for cutting school and library funding to connect to the Internet." Notably, E-Rate does not just fund kids' use of necessary connectivity services, but it also ensures schools and libraries have the resources they need to operate everything from HVAC systems to security cameras. "The whole point of E-Rate was to close the digital divide between poor communities and wealthy communities, and so if you take the E-Rate funding away, who's going to suffer the most? Disadvantaged and low-income communities that are going to have a hole blown into their school budgets or their library budgets, that's the effect," says Wender.