If you took technology out of your classrooms tomorrow, what would you lose?
Two weeks ago I was in a conference room in Orlando, at ISTELive and the ASCD Annual Conference, sitting in a session on educational technology advocacy. Keith Krueger from CoSN opened it, and before he handed things off, he gave us homework. Take out your phone, he said. Go to SaveOurERate.com, put in your zip code. Twenty seconds. It pre-fills a message to your member of Congress about the E-rate program. The whole room did it.
Then something better happened. They broke us into small groups and put the same question on the screen: if you took technology out of your classrooms tomorrow, what would you lose?
I’ve worked around E-rate since the beginning. I can talk funding formulas and Form 470s all day. But at that table I mostly listened, because the people around me are the ones who actually live this.
A longtime technology director talked about differentiation: how one teacher with twenty kids, all in different places, cannot personalize learning for each of them on her own, and how technology is the one thing that lets her try. A former elementary teacher described the twins who landed in her class during COVID, years behind their peers because of language, and how the tools were the only bridge she had to reach them. Stacy Hawthorne, who chairs CoSN’s board, shared a story from a school she visited where a sixth-grade emergent bilingual student spoke his first word of English inside a VR headset, because in there he finally had the confidence he didn’t have standing in front of his classmates.
The same realization kept surfacing around that table. Nobody there thought “technology” meant a screen for its own sake. To them it was a force multiplier for a teacher who can’t be in twenty places at once. It was the legally blind student enlarging text on her iPad. It was the nonverbal student who suddenly had a voice. It was the rural kids who now have to understand the AI built into a piece of farm equipment before they can run the family operation.
Nobody thought technology meant a screen for its own sake
That disconnect is what keeps eating at me. There’s a loud argument right now that screens are bad for kids, and it lumps a child scrolling TikTok for four hours in with a phonics program built to help that same child learn to read. Those two things are not the same, and treating them as one is exactly how you end up with bad policy. Stacy said it plainly: in the absence of educators telling their own story, other people filled the void and told it for us. She’s right. We’ve been so busy doing the work that we never got around to talking about the work.
Which is why this particular moment matters more than the usual conference takeaway.
What’s actually on the table
On June 25, the FCC opened a formal proposal, a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, and the title tells you where it’s pointed: “Ensuring Children’s Safe Use of Screens and E-Rate-Funded Services.” On the table are ideas that would sunset E-rate, or shrink it down to rural areas only, tie funding to screen-time and “digital wellness” metrics, and pile on new requirements. E-rate has connected schools and libraries for nearly thirty years. It is not a slush fund. It’s a discount program built on competitive bidding, and that structure is the whole reason it works.
Here’s the part I wish more people outside the program understood. Every year E-rate runs tens of thousands of competitive bids, and more than 20,000 signed contracts, billions of dollars, all of it out in the open. A school posts what it needs, vendors compete, prices come down. If you set out to design a system to guard against waste, fraud, and abuse, you would be hard-pressed to beat the transparency that is already baked in. We can always debate how to do it better. But you don’t take a program that’s delivering real competition and visibility, make it more closed, and call that reform.
And on safety, since that’s the stated reason for all of this, I’ll say what I said at the table. If we are serious about keeping kids safe online, the safest network a child can be on is the school network: filtered, monitored, and built and maintained by professionals. I’d put it up against a home network any day. Home Wi-Fi is not battle-tested. So if student safety is genuinely the goal, let’s talk about keeping more of a child’s connected life on infrastructure that schools actually secure, not less of it.
I keep landing on a “yes, and.” Yes, we want kids safe. Yes, we want every dollar spent well. And the way you get there is not by pulling the plug. My internet went out at home for a couple of days last year, and nothing worked. It felt like a genuine crisis. Now multiply that by a school district: turn off the connections and you don’t just lose devices, you lose the differentiation, the accessibility, the second language finally coming through, the kid who spoke for the first time.
Here’s how you add your voice
So my ask is the same one Keith gave us in that room. Go to SaveOurERate.com. Find out what E-rate has actually meant for your district or your library, the site will calculate it for you, and file a comment while the record is open. Give the numbers, but tell a story too.
There’s one more way to be counted, and this one is close to home for me. Funds For Learning’s 16th Annual E-rate Applicant Survey closes this week. The FCC is asking big questions about this program, and the survey is one of the clearest ways to show, in the aggregate, what E-rate actually makes possible in schools and libraries. Responses stay confidential and are reported only as program-wide trends, so be candid. If you’re an applicant, take a few minutes and add your voice before the window closes.
I’ve spent a long time in this program, and I’ve rarely seen a moment where showing up mattered more. The educators in Orlando understand what’s at stake. Now we need the people writing the rules to hear it, in enough voices that they can’t miss the point: safe, reliable internet, used well, wherever a student happens to be sitting.
