E-Rate in Line for a 21st-Century Makeover
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 02/15/2010
The E-Rate program, which provides discounted telecom services to schools—may be getting a 21st-century lift.
Supported by Edward J. Markey (D-MA), who crafted the House version of the first E-Rate bill in 1996, which helped bring Internet connections to nearly all K–12 schools across the nation, the updated law, E-Rate 2.0, would now grant discounts on services and technologies for e-books.
The use of ebooks in classrooms and school libraries is gaining more traction among educators as some schools have slowly started to adopt both the devices students use to read these digital tomes, along with the material itself, and media specialists support their adoption.
Beside ebooks, Markey is proposing to grant "low-income students" access to E-Rate discounts in their homes, and extend the discount to community colleges and Head Start programs through grants, which could be used for broadband equipment and services as long as they use these services to teach students. Markey also wants to expand the current $2.25 billion total cap on the E-Rate program—set in 1996—so total funding can better reflect today’s pricing.
That expansion is critical, as many leaders, including John D. Rockefeller, chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, have noted that the E-Rate cap needs to better align with today’s inflation.
"The original E-Rate Bill that I authored has largely fulfilled its mission of linking up schools to the Web," said Markey, in a statement. "The fact that only 14 percent of K–12 classrooms had Internet access at the time the 1996 bill was enacted, compared to more than 95 percent today, is a testament to that success. Now, with the expansion of the scope of technology, students need more than just Web access at school, and our E-Rate 2.0 bill is intended to reflect those expanded needs."
Photo by woodleywonderworks.
