By Nadia Dreid

Law360 (January 27, 2021, 7:54 PM EST) -- The FCC must release subsidy funds it is holding in reserve in order to provide internet access to millions of children still learning at home, a coalition of educational groups has told the agency.

There is "little justification" for holding the money back at a time "when the country is facing such an enormous educational crisis," the groups told the Federal Communications Commission in their Tuesday petition.

"Given the severity of our current national emergency, the petitioners ask that the bureau release hundreds of millions of dollars — currently not designated for use but held in the E-rate program — to support remote learning," the groups said.

Under the E-rate subsidy program, schools and libraries can defray up to 90% of their internet costs in order to provide more students with access. It's one of the four subsidy programs that fall under the agency's Universal Service Fund, which operates under a budget of roughly $8 billion per year.

But if the goal of the fund is to help support education, the groups say the benefit of cutting internet costs for schools and libraries does little to nothing for the millions of children studying at home. They want the agency to release the funds that haven't been earmarked for eligible institutions and give them the green light to use those funds to provide internet to those at home.

Back in March, the FCC confirmed that E-rate-eligible institutions that have shut their doors due to the pandemic were allowed to keep their Wi-Fi networks open for public use without running afoul of agency rules.

But that still meant students and other members of the public were forced to travel to those schools or libraries and connect to their networks from the parking lot, a safety pin solution at best in the eyes of the groups, which have been asking the agency for permission to use the funds "off campus" for nearly a year.

It would be a temporary solution, only for the funding years of 2020 and 2021, according to the proposal.

The proposal also wouldn't require any extra money from the Universal Service Fund aside from what's already been set aside from the E-rate program. Yet allowing educational institutions to use the funds to provide internet off-campus would be a night-and-day difference for unconnected students struggling to learn at home, the groups said.

"Even without assistance from E-rate, school districts across the country have been innovating to help their students get online outside of school," the groups said. "They are boosting Wi-Fi signals at their schools so that kids can sit and work outside the school building. They are buying mobile hotspots. They are publishing maps of available broadband hotspots."

But these efforts would benefit from much greater flexibility should the FCC decide that during the pandemic, institutions receiving E-rate funds don't have to demarcate between on- and off-campus spending.

The pandemic has thrown the digital divide into sharp relief. As the novel coronavirus raced across the country, it shuttered schools across the nation, forcing millions of children into distance learning for most of the school year.

But even before the pandemic, millions of school-age children lived in homes without internet access, leaving them unable or forced to struggle to complete all their assignments in what has become known as the "homework gap." 

Such students often turned to libraries or even fast-food restaurants with open internet connections, but amid the rising public health crisis, those doors have swiftly closed to them just as nearly all of their learning moved online.

"No student should fall behind academically because they lack home broadband," said Keith Krueger, head of the Consortium for School Networking and one of the petitioners. "The FCC must move quickly to permit school systems to use E-rate to connect students learning remotely, as well as their teachers, during the pandemic."

--Editing by Philip Shea.

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