Press Releases

Congresswoman DelBene Leads Bipartisan Letter to FCC Chairman Wheeler Urging Action to Improve Internet Access in Schools

BOTHELL – Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (WA-01), along with 25 other members of Congress, sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging action to improve and modernize the federal E-rate program, which has provided critical discounts for schools and libraries for telecommunications and Internet services since its enactment in 1997.

In addition to Congresswoman DelBene, signatories on the letter include Representatives Jared Polis (CO-02), Chris Gibson (NY-19), Jared Huffman (CA-02), Don Young (AK), Rick Larsen (WA-02), Derek Kilmer (WA-06), Denny Heck (WA-10), and 18 other members of the House.

“Closing the education gap means ensuring that our schools and libraries have access to digital learning opportunities that require high-speed broadband. However, too many of our children are currently trying to learn skills for tomorrow with outdated infrastructure from the past,” the members wrote. They go on to urge the FCC commissioners to “support swift action to modernize and expand the E-rate program to bring transformative learning opportunities to every school in America.”

The letter calls on the FCC to update E-rate by focusing the program on high-speed broadband connectivity and long-term infrastructure investments, creating an upgrade fund to connect every school and library across the U.S. to high-speed Internet, increasing the program’s accountability and transparency, and streamlining its onerous paperwork requirements to ensure more funding is focused on delivering direct investments into schools and classrooms.

“We recognize the great value of the E-rate program to K-12 schools in Washington, and strongly support modernization of the program to improve broadband access to all schools in our state,” said Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn in his support of the congressional letter to the FCC.

“We have several schools in rural areas of our district that do not have adequate high-speed Internet access, which I am sure is also true of many other districts in our state,” said Darrell Heisler, the Sedro-Woolley School District Executive Director of Technology. “Expanding access to high-speed broadband across our state should be a top priority.”

The average American school has about the same bandwidth as the average American home, but with 200 times as many users. In total, an estimated 40 million of America’s students in K-12 schools do not have the Internet access they need to succeed in the global economy.

The E-rate program was established by Congress in 1996 to connect every school and library in the nation to the Internet. Today, it remains the federal government’s largest source of funding for technology in education. Administered through the Universal Service Fund, E-rate provides vital funding to school districts across the country based on the poverty level of the population and the local cost of telecommunications and Internet services. During the 2012-13 school year, $42.38 million in E-rate funds were committed to schools and libraries in Washington state.

A PDF copy of the signed letter is available HERE.

The full text of the letter is below:

Federal Communications Commission

445 12th Street, SW

Washington, DC 20554

Dear Chairman Wheeler, Commissioner Clyburn, Commissioner O’Rielly, Commissioner Rosenworcel, and Commissioner Pai:

As Members of Congress concerned with improving our education system and preparing students for the jobs of the future, we are writing to urge swift action to improve and modernize the E-rate program in order to help connect our nation’s schools with high-speed broadband over the next five years. This critical update will ensure every school has the ability to accelerate next-generation education reforms, support teachers, and enhance student learning. We believe this is an important step we can take to provide our children with high-quality digital learning opportunities in order to improve student outcomes and prepare them to succeed in a 21st century economy. 

Improving our children’s ability to take advantage of learning technologies has always been a bipartisan endeavor, as has been the E-rate program itself. We are proud to support the bipartisan recommendations to update E-rate and we call for those across the education, government, and business communities to recognize the opportunity we have to improve and modernize our schools. Therefore, we ask the Commission for swift action to bring high-speed broadband to our students on an expedited basis.

Closing the education gap means ensuring that our schools and libraries have access to digital learning opportunities that require high-speed broadband. However, too many of our children are currently trying to learn skills for tomorrow with outdated infrastructure from the past. While the E-rate program was enormously successful in bringing basic telephone and broadband to schools and classrooms, the connectivity provided is no longer sufficient. The average American school has about the same bandwidth as the average American home, but with 200 times as many users. Therefore, 72% of our schools do not have the Internet infrastructure they need to take advantage of digital learning opportunities today, and fewer than 1% have the infrastructure they will need in the future.

In an age when high-speed broadband is transforming almost every aspect of our lives, we must extend digital opportunities to every classroom. This is particularly crucial in rural areas, where students are less likely to have the speeds and infrastructure they need to take advantage of new technologies and high-quality educational content. Forty million of our nation’s students—the next generation of talent in the United States—are being left behind without the speeds they need to succeed. As Commissioner Ajit Pai has noted, “Today, too many kids walk off the school bus, only to walk decades into the past. This is unacceptable. … Parents are right to expect that schools will help prepare their children for the America of tomorrow, and they know that can’t happen in the classroom of yesterday.”

Experts agree that to enable students to take full advantage of digital learning, America’s schools should aim for 100 Mbps of bandwidth or more for every 1,000 students and staff members today, and 1 Gbps by 2017. In today’s global economy, these high speeds aren’t just an educational imperative, but a competitive necessity. Test results released this month show that American students still lag far behind countries like China, South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands in math, reading, and science. It’s no longer enough just to compete for jobs; we have to compete for higher educational outcomes enabled by higher broadband speeds.

This means we need to: (1) Focus E-rate on broadband connectivity and infrastructure to ensure that we maximize the impact of the program on learning by limiting support for yesterday’s outdated dial-up era technologies; (2) Create an upgrade fund within the E-rate program to connect every school and library, particularly those in rural areas, to high-speed broadband; (3) Increase transparency and accountability for the program in order to reduce costs, research effective practices, and ensure that all students have access to the connectivity they need; and (4) Simplify and streamline onerous paperwork requirements to improve program efficiency. These reforms will make possible strategic investments to deploy high-speed broadband to schools and classrooms across the country.

We simply cannot prepare our kids to compete for 21st century jobs by leaving them stranded with age-old technologies. Therefore, we ask you to support swift action to modernize and expand the E-rate program to bring transformative learning opportunities to every school in America.

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