The comments before the Commission run from one pole to the other. What unites them is a temptation to ask the FCC to settle, from Washington, two questions that state and local authorities already answer: who counts as an eligible school, and how students use devices in the classroom.
As the FCC prepares to vote on changes to the E-rate program, the filings urging it one way or another run the full length of the spectrum. The pre-vote record in WC Docket Nos. 26-133, 13-184, 21-93, and 21-455 reflects that range. At one pole, former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth urges the Commission to read the schools-and-libraries program down to a much narrower statutory core, arguing that courts will no longer defer to the agency’s past interpretations. At the other, Independent Women urges the Commission to use the program to address how children use technology, citing screen-time research, child online safety, and parental authority. Defending the program’s current scope, INCOMPAS argues that the program’s connectivity function is more essential than ever. The filings are striking less for where they disagree than for where they do not.
A common starting point
Across the spectrum, no one actually argues that the connectivity should disappear. The narrowing commenter is explicit that the point of the review is to make the program defensible, not to end it, and that the statute would not permit the Commission to abandon discounts for schools and libraries altogether. The reform filing acknowledges that the proceeding would maintain connectivity even as it presses for tighter limits on use. And the program’s defenders frame the whole dispute around keeping connectivity adequate as needs evolve. Getting affordable broadband to schools and libraries is the settled core that every pole takes as given.
That matters, because it locates the real disagreement. The contested ground is not whether the program connects schools. It is what gets layered on top of the connection: which entities are eligible, and how students may use the networks once they are connected. On both of those questions, the decision already rests where it belongs — with the states and localities.
Eligibility already follows state law
USAC’s Eligibility Table for Non-Traditional Education opens with a single governing principle. Eligibility for Head Start, pre-kindergarten, juvenile justice, adult education, and special education entities is determined, in the table’s own words, “as determined by state law.” The table is nothing more than a fifty-six-jurisdiction compilation of those state and territorial determinations. The federal program supplies no freestanding definition of a “school”; it looks to whatever each state has defined as a public educational entity and funds connectivity to what sits inside that boundary.
The result is anything but uniform. Pre-kindergarten is eligible in states such as Texas, California, New York, and Florida; flatly ineligible in Tennessee, Georgia, Wyoming, Nevada, and Idaho; and conditional in others. That patchwork is not an inconsistency to be cleaned up. It is the direct product of a deliberate choice to let each state’s own definition of its public education system govern who qualifies. A categorical federal decision that pre-kindergarten or Head Start sits below the line would replace those judgments with one national rule. Framed as restoring local control, an eligibility cut would do the opposite: it would remove the deference to state law the program already embodies. A state that excludes pre-kindergarten needs no federal rule to reach that result; a state that includes it made that choice under its own statutes.
Where Congress wanted a uniform federal floor, it said so. Special education students ages 3 to 21 are eligible in every state — not because the FCC decided it, but because the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (20 U.S.C. § 1400 et seq.) sets that floor. A uniform federal rule exists in precisely the one place Congress legislated one. Everywhere else, the program reads eligibility off state law, consistent with Section 254(h) (47 U.S.C. § 254(h)), which directs support to elementary schools, secondary schools, and libraries without itself defining those institutions in the abstract.
So does student device and screen use
E-rate is, at its statutory core, a connectivity mandate. Section 254 directs the program to enhance access to advanced telecommunications and information services for schools, classrooms, and libraries. It is not a screen-time statute. It says nothing about how many hours a student may spend on a device or how a teacher should run a classroom.
Those decisions are not going unmade. They are being made, at scale, by the level of government closest to the classroom. As of December 2025, 35 states and the District of Columbia had enacted laws or policies governing student cellphone and device use in K-12 classrooms, the large majority of them in 2025 alone. And they are reaching deliberately different answers: some impose “bell-to-bell” bans, some require districts to adopt their own policies with local flexibility, and at least one state legislature declined to mandate anything, leaving the question to teachers and parents. Governors of both parties have signed these measures. That is local control working as designed, across the political spectrum.
A federal screen-time condition added to a connectivity program would override all of it, substituting one national rule for the differing judgments of more than fifty jurisdictions actively legislating in this space right now.
What CIPA actually requires
The Children’s Internet Protection Act attaches a child-protection condition to E-rate, and its scope is narrow and specific. As a condition of support, schools and libraries must adopt an internet safety policy, hold a public meeting on it, and put in place a technology protection measure — a filter — that blocks visual depictions that are obscene, that constitute child pornography, or that are harmful to minors. The Supreme Court upheld that framework in United States v. American Library Ass’n, 539 U.S. 194 (2003).
What Congress wrote, in other words, is a measure to keep harmful images away from students, content protection tied to the connection. CIPA is not a screen-time limit. It does not ration device hours, dictate instructional methods, or authorize the Commission to police how schools use technology. Reading it as a lever to restrict screen time, or as a basis for conditioning E-rate eligibility and funding on how schools and libraries manage classroom technology, would extend a connectivity statute and a narrow filtering condition beyond what Congress enacted. The condition Congress attached is precise, and its limits are part of its design.
The bottom line
E-rate’s job is connectivity. The questions this proceeding is tempted to federalize — who counts as an eligible school, how students use devices, how much time belongs on a screen — are already being decided, deliberately and differently, by states, territories, and local boards. CIPA’s single federal child-protection condition is narrow by design: keep harmful images from children. Holding the program to that statutory lane, connectivity paired with that one targeted filter, is what respects both Congress’s design and the state and local authorities already doing this work. It is also the position most likely to hold up no matter which way the broader debate turns.
As the Commission weighs these questions, your voice belongs in the record. The 16th Annual E-rate Applicant Survey takes about eight minutes, and it puts what applicants are experiencing in front of the policymakers shaping the program’s future. Take the 2026 survey today.
