The Affordable Connectivity Program that helped provide broadband services to nearly 23 million households nationwide officially stopped taking applications in early February as federal funds are expected to completely dry up by the end of April, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
Though congressional lawmakers proposed a $7 billion bicameral, bipartisan bill in January to temporarily extend the program, the legislation has stalled. Without the additional funding, the FCC said, millions of people who were connected to home internet services through the Affordable Connectivity Program could lose access.
The program provided a $30 monthly discount to eligible households to pay for broadband. Those living on qualifying tribal lands received $75 per month for these services. Households also got a discount of up to $100 to buy a laptop, desktop computer or tablet.
As signs of the Affordable Connectivity Program’s end become increasingly apparent, advocates worry the deep division of digital access for K-12 students will be exacerbated. In fact, 3.1 million families of students who receive free or reduced-price school meals have benefited from the FCC program.
Families participating in the program are also worried about the consequences of losing internet access. Some 81% of parents enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program said they were worried their children would fall behind in their academics if they lose home internet access, according to a fall survey of 1,600 program participants released by consulting firm Benenson Strategy Group.
There are school districts that have relied on the Affordable Connectivity Program to provide home internet services to their students, said D’Andre Weaver, chief digital equity officer at the nonprofit Digital Promise.
“Those are students that those districts don’t have to come up with a solution for at the moment," Weaver said. “And so now, we’re putting more of the responsibility back on school districts and local communities to try and solve a problem we think is embedded in the infrastructure of our country at this point.”
Weaver said he’s worried that some districts won’t have enough resources to take on that responsibility, and their students will go without home internet access as a result.
What can state and district leaders do?
Now that students will have to rely on their school districts to provide more assistance to keep them connected to the internet at home, Weaver said, it’s crucial that districts try to meet that need in some shape or form.
States can support districts by ensuring they have access to resources or tap into already existing funds to help address larger infrastructure needs in their school communities.
For instance, district leaders could consider partnering with their communities and local governments to address internet affordability when leveraging new infrastructure access to broadband that might have recently been established through the federal $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, said Brian Stephens, director of stakeholder engagement at Funds For Learning. The consulting firm helps schools and libraries navigate the E-rate funding process.
The deployment program, administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, is helping communities across the U.S. plan, build out infrastructure, and adopt programs to expand high-speed internet access.
There are also existing programs that can help districts serve students’ connectivity needs. For instance, Digital Promise has partnered with Verizon to provide students and teachers with internet-connected devices in select middle and high schools.
In the last decade, the partnership has connected about 620,000 students across nearly 600 schools. The program is low-cost for participating districts, Weaver said, as schools need to commit some funding to sustain the program.
Hopes and challenges with other FCC efforts
In the longterm, Weaver said he hopes the Affordable Connectivity Program will receive permanent funding from Congress. In the meantime, Weaver is anticipating that the FCC’s efforts to expand E-rate will help address concerns surrounding students’ digital access outside the classroom.
In October, the FCC approved the use of federal E-rate funds to support Wi-Fi on school buses. About a month later, the agency also proposed a rule that would permit schools and libraries to use E-rate to pay for Wi-Fi hotspots and off-premises internet services.
While the expansion of E-rate to cover school bus Wi-Fi is a positive first step for helping schools provide more internet access, students still can’t use the internet once they step off the bus, Stephens said.
Because the decision to allow E-rate funds for school bus Wi-Fi happened fairly late in the fiscal year, not as many interested districts were able to bid for those services using E-rate funds, Stephens said. In fact, only about 500 school districts have been able to do so, he added.
But ultimately, if the FCC does not adopt its hotspot proposal at the same time that the Affordable Connectivity Program ends, Stephens said, “I hate to think about it, but there are students that are going to go dark when they leave school.”
While the hotspot program is much needed, Stephens said, its approval would mean schools will have to determine which students are eligible for receiving hotspots based on who — as the FCC broadly describes — has “unmet needs.”
Schools “need to get strategic about ‘how do we determine who those students are in our district, and how do we document that,’ and get that ball rolling now to get a jump on what we imagine to be some fairly detailed record-keeping requirements in the future,” Stephens said.
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