Children and Media

Sens Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced the Kids Online Safety Act, comprehensive bipartisan legislation to enhance children’s safety online. The Kids Online Safety Act:

The independent, nonpartisan Future of Tech Commission was formed to consider and propose a national framework and tech policy blueprint for the United States. Based on the range of input and information shared with us, it is clear that there is broad consensus on a few key points, namely that:

NewsGuard, a service that uses trained journalists to rate news and information sites, will become available to millions of public school students at the end of January 2022 through a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Kids increasingly turn to the internet when looking for homework help or doing research for school projects. But unlike books in a library or articles in a journal, online resources can be difficult to filter for quality and misinformation.

Federal funds and municipal bond money have flowed to school districts during the past two years to help connect students to the internet during the global pandemic. Some of this funding has helped create private LTE networks using CBRS spectrum under General Authorized Access. One of these networks serves Texas’ Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD). The network was designed to favor capital investment rather than ongoing operating expenses, since a windfall of funding was available from a bond and from the government’s Emergency Connectivity Fund.

Connected Nation’s “Connect K-12” program has released its report on US school connectivity for E-rate Funding Year 2021, which includes findings on the nation’s progress toward meeting the Federal Communication Commission’s bandwidth goal of 1 Mbps per student. Connect K-12 aggregates, analyzes, and visualizes federal E-rate program data at the district and state levels. Key takeaways from the report include:

The Federal Communications Commission announced that it is committing $602,985,895.13 in its latest wave of Emergency Connectivity Fund program support, which will connect over 1.4 million students in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. These additional commitments bring the current total commitments to over $3.8 billion, supporting students, school staff, and library patrons in all 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia.

The Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF) has provided a much-needed infusion of laptop computers and Wi-Fi hotspots to keep K-12 students and library patrons connected to the Internet. Up until this point, we have all been estimating what was needed to help our communities stay connected. The time for guessing is over. Based on ECF funding request data from 2021, Funds for Learning found that $4.51 billion is needed annually to provide secure devices with internet connections to families who otherwise lack adequate connectivity.

From April 2020 to May 2021, the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a Michelson Spark Grantee, studied the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on digital inequity, particularly among school-age children in California. Researchers leveraged 2019 census data from over 35,000 households in California to establish the pre-COVID baseline as they considered how ethnic groups, income levels, educational attainment, and locality impacted device access and connectivity.

New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas announced that his Consumer & Environmental Protection Division has resolved two federal court cases filed against Google. Both cases concern allegations made by Balderas against the company under the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, as well as under state consumer protection laws. The centerpiece of these settlements is the creation and funding of the Google New Mexico Kids Initiative.

The internet has become necessary infrastructure during the pandemic, but ubiquitous 5G service has been slow to fully develop in the US. Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) said it will invest $100 million to both acquire wireless infrastructure company Dense Air and use its small cell technology to build a "borderless classroom." SIP, which was spun out of Google-parent Alphabet, intends to work with an as-yet unnamed city to build a private wireless network for a school district so students can connect to the same network whether they're in the classroom, on the school bus or at home,