E-rate Order Will Contain Goals, Not Requirements, Rosenworcel Aide Says
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is taking a measured stance toward adoption of new E-rate rules, said her aide, Priscilla Argeris. The agency released a long-awaited rulemaking notice in July that offered competing proposals from the various commissioners (CD July 22 p1). It will be important to balance national goals with the needs of specific communities, Argeris said on the “Gigabit Nation” podcast Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1drde1R).
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"That’s why we've been talking about capacity goals,” Argeris said. “Our hope is that we can reach these goals, but at the end of the day, there’s not going to be a requirement that a community takes on this specific goal, and reaches a certain level. There’s going to be some places where that’s probably not possible, based on the geography. But our hope is that we can at least encourage, where it is possible, for people to rethink how they're connecting, and they're going to make choices that allow more students to access higher-capacity broadband."
"It’s a balancing act,” Argeris said, that “will be about creating incentives more than it is about creating requirements.” Rosenworcel’s office wants to augment and improve the existing funding mechanism that schools and libraries have relied on for the past 17 years, Argeris said. Rather than just looking at the existing poverty and rural metrics, it’s important to consider how much capacity a school actually has, she said. The question is how to factor current capacity into how funding is prioritized, and how to ensure schools are making best choices to get the most capacity per dollar and get the best technology in place, she said.
"These are very, very hard questions, because our education system allows a lot of local control and it allows a lot of local differences,” Argeris said. That’s “a good thing, but when it comes to a national program and trying to make sure that we have some rules that apply across the board, it’s going to be challenging,” she said.
Commissioner Ajit Pai has criticized “arbitrary” national speed targets, maligning such a “one-dimensional national benchmark” that might force schools to “skew their spending decisions” (CD July 17 p2). The NPRM includes a proposal by Pai that would require matching funds from schools and shift the program to next-generation services instead of stand-alone telephony.
Comments on the NPRM (http://bit.ly/1dnvE2L) are due Sept. 16, and some are already trickling in to docket 13-184. AASA: The School Superintendents Association, and the Association of Educational Service Agencies (AESA) wrote Tuesday to urge the commission to provide more funding for the program. With a steady $2.25 billion allocation per year since its inception in 1997, the commission recognized that demand “far exceeds available funding every year,” the groups said. Simply indexing funding to inflation isn’t enough to keep up with demand, the groups said. They said raising the E-rate funding level to $5 billion is “an investment that would not only be virtually identical to program demand but would also be a systematic approach to addressing the program’s weak funding structure."
"Flexibility can be as good as new money,” the groups said. The commission should preserve autonomy and flexibility at the local level, said AASA and AESA. “A well-intentioned incentive aimed at prioritizing certain services could, in reality, fall short as schools cannot afford the higher-cost service AND find themselves no longer able to afford previously eligible lower-cost/priority services. Districts should remain in control of deciding which services to purchase through E-Rate."
Argeris downplayed the idea of the program being able to accommodate all the demand for new programs. Even if the pot eventually gets expanded, there will still be limited funds available, she said. It could be a good opportunity for involvement by research networks that say they can provide broadband for a lower cost, she said. As an example, Argeris pointed to the section in the NPRM that considers communities that want to project hot spots into the community. Groups should comment on the issues important to them, she said, but “at the end of the day, we have to balance those needs with the limited dollars we have for e-rate, and frankly what the statute says.” Even if schools want to open their doors to students to use the Internet after school hours, if there is an additional data usage cost, “the school may have to come up with other funds” to pay for that, she said.