FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel – who is championing school broadband and E-Rate reform, met with the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) May 7th at that organization’s mid-year conference in Baltimore to bring those topics before state CIOs.
Rosenworcel, while accepting an award from the Consortium for School Networking recently, said that while most schools are connected to the Internet, connections must be faster and must go all the way to the classroom. She also took the FCC’s E-Rate program to task, calling it burdensome and bureaucratic.
And libraries, deep into the digital age, are included in the need for speed, she said on May 7 to a meeting of the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies. Libraries feature 3-D printers, on-demand book printing, eBooks, audio books, computer programming classes, Web-based instructional systems in many languages, and of course printed books and materials. And in most communities, Internet access – which has become essential for information, job applications, education and homework — is free only in public libraries. Libraries as well as schools need more capacity. The solution, she said is E-Rate 2.0.
E-Rate 2.0, she explained, consists of speed, simplification and smart spending. Speed is 100 Megabits per 1,000 students to all schools in the near term and 1 Gigabit per 1,000 students by the end of the decade.
Simplification of the E-Rate program means multi-year applications and user consortia.
Spending smart means better accounting practices, and focusing E-Rate support on broadband instead of outdated services such as paging. In addition, she said, the E-Rate program was set at $2.25 billion annually in 1998, but inflation has whittled that away and so additional funds are needed.
