A growing partisan fight is emerging over a push to expand internet access on public school buses.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, is proposing to clarify a rule to state that the buses are eligible for E-Rate funding, a program that gives schools discounted Wi-Fi access, in an effort she says would help close the homework gap.
Now that the FCC has a full board with the confirmation of Anna Gomez in September, after a two-year holdup over a prior nominee, the FCC’s Democratic majority is positioned to follow through with the chairwoman’s plans.
But top Republicans in House and Senate Commerce committees have criticized the proposal, trying to base their opposition on the argument that it would increase children’s access to risky and detrimental social media apps in a situation with limited supervision. The GOP lawmakers also say they don’t support the expansion because they don’t think it falls under the scope of the program.
Supporters of the expansion, however, said the GOP opposition falls short on proving either point.
“You’ve got to ask yourself the question, what is a school? And the school is where learning takes place. If that learning is in a classroom, or a study hall, or a school bus, the school is where learning takes place. And you want to facilitate that learning using technology. And that’s the purpose of the E-Rate program,” said Tom Wheeler, a former FCC chairman in the Obama administration.
Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and House Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) sent a letter last week to Gomez, the newly confirmed FCC commissioner, urging her to reject Rosenworcel’s plan. It followed one the Republicans sent the chairwoman in July with similar opposition.
The FCC is scheduled to consider the proposal during its upcoming Oct. 19 meeting.
A growing need for Wi-Fi for students
The issue of Wi-Fi on school buses is relatively new as homework and other assignments for K-12 students have increasingly shifted online, especially since the pandemic.
Because the average school bus ride for students is around 40 minutes long, according to Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, having internet on the buses can make a big difference.
Michael Flood, a former member of the Consortium for School Networking board, said his daughter takes a more than hourlong bus ride to a magnet school and uses her school-issued Chromebook to get her work done while in transit.
“Without internet access on the bus, she can’t do that work during that hour each way,” he said.
Flood pushed back on concerns that adding Wi-Fi to buses would be wasteful spending, calling E-Rate “one of the best programs in the federal government for minimizing waste, fraud and abuse.”
Because it only gives schools a discount, Flood argues districts with short bus rides likely won’t take advantage of it, but rural schools with rides of an hour or longer.
Advocates argue school bus Wi-Fi would also benefit student-athletes who sometimes don’t get back from their events until 10 or 11 p.m.
Concerns around access to social media
Along with the letter to Gomez last month, Cruz and McMorris Rodgers released a joint press statement saying the plan raises concerns about “subsidizing children’s unsupervised internet access to social media sites like TikTok and Instagram on their bus rides to and from school.”
Wheeler said by following that logic one also has to ask, “Is that a problem when students are connected to desks inside their school?”
A Republican Senate aide said the lack of supervision on a school bus, compared to a classroom, poses additional concerns. Even if preventative measures are put in place, the aide pointed out that kids are savvy at finding ways around blocks.
Others say the GOP members have a point on concerns about social media on school buses, but the problem has already been mitigated.
“We have the data that shows if you take a regular filter, like the filter the schools use in the classroom, and you put that same internet filter on the bus, it does not work,” said Ben Weintraub, CEO of Kajeet, a company that puts and monitors Wi-Fi on school buses.
“[Cruz] is exactly right, so what we do is we lock the filter down way tighter than the school would normally lock down in the classroom. No TikTok, no Facebook, none of that stuff,” Weintraub said.
A customer of Kajeet, Billy Huish, who is transportation director for the Farmington Municipal Schools in New Mexico, says last year on school bus Wi-Fi, students collectively spent more than 63,000 hours visiting homework sites, and the filter was able to block every attempt to get on platforms that were banned.
“TikTok, it was trying to be accessed 27 percent of those hours, denied. Snapchat, denied. iCloud … denied. Facebook, denied,” Huish said.
Farmington Municipal Schools started with school bus Wi-Fi around five years ago, starting out with a few test buses before quickly adding it to all of them months later.
“I started out slow. If I had to do it again, I probably wouldn’t have lost that extra three months or so that it took me to put it on every bus,” Huish said.
He said he bought the equipment while the Title I office at his school has been paying for the renewed service each year.
The cost for this service is relatively low, according to Weintraub, who says it takes only a small portion of a school’s transportation budget.
“I mean, it varies depending on what the school wants and any equipment they buy, but the service cost can be anywhere in the neighborhood of, I think, $35 to $50 a month. … It’s not in the hundreds by any means,” Weintraub said.
Along with the benefits of allowing students to get their homework done, supporters argue Wi-Fi on buses also helps mitigate behavioral issues.
Since COVID-19, educators have raised alarms about student misbehavior in classrooms and on buses, but Huish said since adding Wi-Fi, he’s seen a decrease in the number of fights on buses and an increase in the roster of drivers for routes.
Huish said he believes in internet on school buses so much that he doesn’t have any intention of using the E-Rate program if it expands to bus Wi-Fi, so he doesn’t take away funds from others to get it.
“I would rather somebody that does not have Wi-Fi on their buses apply for that money and get that money because I don’t want to take that money away from somebody else that could have this. I think it is that important. I think this tool is great,” he said.
What could Congress do?
Within the FCC, there is also GOP opposition. GOP Commissioner Nathan Simington responded to the Republicans’ July letter agreeing with them that the E-Rate program’s scope should not extend beyond classrooms.
Simington said a school bus is “neither a school classroom nor a library” and the proposal “would eviscerate Congress’s restrictions on E-Rate and make a mockery of the law.”
But with the Democratic majority, the commission is poised to be able to put the extension in place.
Congressional Republicans may not be able to stop the vote from happening, but the Senate GOP aide said they could look to other options in terms of responding.
For example, through the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers can seek to overturn rules issued by federal agencies.
Any action Congress tries to take in response, however, will face an uphill battle based on Democratic support.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in a statement said the FCC’s proposal “is a much-needed effort” to avoid a system that created “two-tiered access to technology” for wealthy students versus those in low-income or underserved communities.
There is also a chance that Republicans could roll back any expansion if the GOP gains control of the administration in 2024. But unlike some of the other Obama-era FCC laws, such as net neutrality rules, which were peeled back under the Trump administration, updates to the E-Rate program were kept in place, Wheeler said.
That is emblematic of the program’s support and need, he said, to benefit the “most important national asset — our youth and their education.”
“We need to make sure we are using every piece of technology available to use to facilitate that education process. And to think that school is a little red school house is to ignore what the reality of learning is today,” Wheeler said.
—Updated Tuesday at 12:44 p.m.