No internet, no screen time? FCC weighs cutting subsidy that lowers school internet bills

The E-Rate program, which helps connect schools and libraries to the internet at discounted rates, is under review by the Federal Communications Commission. Educators and advocates are bracing for the funding to shrink or be eliminated. The agency's recent focus on the program has left educators including David Thurston on edge. Thurston oversees technology for the 33 school districts nested inside California's San Bernardino County. The area covers more than 20,000 square miles of southern California: "We have mountain regions, far-flung desert regions, and then our urban and suburban areas. We're a really diverse county," Thurston says. The county already built the infrastructure to get internet access from the edge of Los Angeles all the way to the state's eastern border, but the spending doesn't end once the fiber optic cables are installed. Internet access bills come monthly.  "There's no doing without," he says. School districts "are gonna have to pick up the costs." For San Bernardino districts, that's tens of thousands of dollars every month. "Those are ongoing, essentially, utility costs," he says. "That's what E-Rate pays for."