--- title: The Infrastructure Behind the Intelligence description: Why AI in the Classroom Runs on E-Rate | The Infrastructure Behind the Intelligence image: https://edtechnologyfunds.com/hubfs/Video-thumbnail-title-card-1.png --- [![EdTechnologyFunds-Logo-Full-Color-PNG-NoBg](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/hs-fs/hubfs/EdTechnologyFunds-Logo-Full-Color-PNG-NoBg.png?width=230&height=131&name=EdTechnologyFunds-Logo-Full-Color-PNG-NoBg.png "EdTechnologyFunds-Logo-Full-Color-PNG-NoBg")](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/) - E-Rate Overview - [E-Rate Application Process](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/erate-application) - [What is E-Rate](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/what-is-erate) - [ErateSync](https://eratesync.com) - Services - [Emergency Connectivity Fund](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/emergencyconnectivity) - [E-Rate Consulting](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/e-rate-consulting) - [Broadband Planning](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/broadband-planning) - Resources - [ECF FAQ's](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/emergencyconnectivity-0) - [ECF Common Misconceptions](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/emergencyconnectivity-0-0) - [Blog](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/blog) - [Whitepapers](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/whitepaper) - [Testimonials](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/testimonials) - [News and Events](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/news-events) - [About Us](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/about) [Book Your Consultation](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/contact-us) ## Blog October 6 2026 The Infrastructure Behind the Intelligence ![](https://edtechnologyfunds.com/hubfs/Video-thumbnail-title-card-1.png) *By Mike Lawrence, Director of “Intentional” Technology, ABC Unified School District, and Beverly Sutherland, President, EdTechnologyFunds, Inc.* **You cannot ask schools to lead on AI and shrink the pipe at the same time.** You’ve likely seen the headlines touting screen time as a detriment to student learning and calls for schools to implement screen time limits based on age or grade levels. But dive a little deeper into the studies and it becomes apparent that what we’re seeing are false narratives clouding the line between correlation and causation. What we don’t see is definitive proof of the negative impact of screen time on student learning. The FCC Chairman has now seized upon this doubt to question the value of E-Rate funding for schools and libraries (again). This approach is dangerous for all learners. In trying to protect kids from screens, this decision could quietly defund the connectivity that powers ALL screens. ***Watch (2 minutes):** [The Infrastructure Behind the Intelligence](https://youtube.com/shorts/f28tTg4t-Gg?si=THB8oYJEO8tiCNkh) — a short explainer video.* ## It’s not about the minutes… The solution is, ironically, education. At ABC Unified, they’ve reframed the discussion to focus on their intentional use and the value they deliver for learning. They’ve invited students, teachers and parents into the conversation to explore why technology is utilized, when it’s appropriate and when a pencil, crayon or construction paper might actually be the right tool for the job. Last year, ABC formed a ‘Digital Wellbeing Task Force’ made up of teachers and union representatives from each of their four bargaining units. From the work of the Wellness group came recommendations about appropriate use of technology, media and information literacy in the age of AI, and habits to protect against screen addiction and outsourcing of cognitive struggle. These discussions led to recommendations for the current year, which culminated in hosting the ‘Navigating Student Screen Time’ Parent Symposium, co-produced with ABC Adult School in September. At the event, they framed their approach through the lens of ‘Screen Value’ and shared the decision to rebrand their IT Department as “Intentional Technology” for the year. Superintendent Dr. Gina Zietlow gave every attendee a copy of “Growing Up in Public” by Devorah Heitner, Ph.D. The event featured a student panel to ensure their voices would be heard, and of course, a lively Q&A for the parents in attendance. Not every question had a simple answer, but every voice was heard, and that is how partnership gets built: on transparency, trust, and belonging. ABC’s leadership was also an early supporter of California’s AB 2071, the *Digital Wellness Education Act*, which was just signed into law and directs the California Department of Education to develop curriculum on digital and social media wellbeing for schools instead of banning devices or limiting access. The productive question in this debate is not how long a student is on a device, it is whether that time delivers value. ## Essential infrastructure The goal is screen value, not minutes. But value has a prerequisite, and that is where instruction and infrastructure meet. Consider the AI that earns a place in a classroom: guided-learning sessions that coach a student through a problem, instant feedback on written and spoken work, voice and accessibility tools that open a lesson to every kind of learner. None of it is a lightweight novelty. Many of these tools, by design, run on the adult’s screen rather than the student’s. And all of them live in the cloud, in near-constant conversation with the devices in the building. In twenty-five years of helping schools and libraries fund their connectivity, intentional technology has succeeded or failed on one quiet condition: whether the network holds up, every day, in every classroom. That reliability is not a given. It is engineered, paid for, and maintained. And the program that has made it affordable for public schools and libraries across the country is E-Rate. Let’s translate what these tools actually ask of a network, because in this debate the numbers matter. Start with concurrency, the number of devices using the network at the same moment. Guided learning with AI is rarely delivered one student at a time; it is thirty devices reaching a cloud model in the same few minutes, and hundreds more in the rooms down the hall. Then latency: a guided-learning tool that stutters or lags is one that teachers quietly stop using, making responsiveness a necessity, not a luxury. It is the line dividing adoption and abandonment. Finally, capacity, the total bandwidth a school needs. That number keeps climbing. 2019 SETDA guidance (Broadband Imperative III) calls for roughly 2.5 Mbps per user in small districts, 2.0 Mbps in mid-size ones, and 1.4 Mbps in the largest, up from the 1 Mbps-per-student benchmark of 2017-18, with demand modeled to grow at 25 to 54 percent a year. Interactive, multimodal AI—the voice, image, and video tools arriving in classrooms now—runs on the order of HD streaming, three to five megabits per active session. At roughly four megabits each, thirty students in one lesson window is about 120 Mbps for a single classroom, and concurrency multiplies that across every room in the school. Two things follow. A 4 Mbps multimodal session is two to three times the per-user planning figure, so every classroom running one is borrowing headroom from rooms that are not. And at 25 percent growth, demand doubles in about three years; at 54 percent, in about a year and a half. A circuit sized correctly today is undersized before one five-year Category 2 cycle ends. A district the size of ABC Unified with 17,300 students in 2025-26 routinely hits 8 Gbps during peak usage. And the SETDA large-district figure alone implies roughly 24 Gbps of peak internet capacity before a single staff member is counted. Where are districts actually? The final [Connect K-12 report](https://connectk12.org/static/media/Connect_K12_Connectivity_Report_2023_FINAL.dfc96770.pdf) (November 2023) found 74 percent of districts, 9,573 of them serving 27.1 million students, meeting the 1 Mbps-per-student goal, and 3,330 districts with more than 25 million students still below it. The FCC’s 2024 broadband deployment report adopted 1 Gbps per 1,000 students as the school benchmark and found the same 74 percent. A quarter of districts have not reached the 2017-18 target, and the target itself has since nearly tripled. E-Rate funds both halves of the path. Category 1 pays for the broadband circuit into the building; Category 2 pays for the Wi-Fi and switching that carry it to the desk. The FY2026 cap is $5.2 billion, up 2.8 percent from $5.059 billion. FY2025 requests were $1.806 billion for Category 1 and $1.418 billion for Category 2, and USAC estimates FY2026 demand at about $3.5 billion. The review is about scope, and narrowing scope at either layer means the AI we are asking teachers to adopt simply does not load. A capped or shrinking E-Rate is not only a budget story. It is a technical one. ## In the classroom: AI that adds value, not minutes The most valuable classroom AI often adds zero student screen time; it adds minutes for adults, not for students. - **Teacher-side (student screen time: zero):** differentiated materials (reading-level variants, letters in home languages); first-pass feedback on written and spoken work that the teacher then edits; IEP and 504 drafting (present levels, goals, data summaries); and grading of offline work (scanned exit tickets, clustered by misconception). - **Student-facing (minutes, not hours, bounded by design):** oral-language practice (two-minute spoken exchanges for English learners); accessibility (live captions, text-to-speech, translation); guided-inquiry checkpoints (think on paper, then check the reasoning); and creation over consumption (critique a draft, debug code, storyboard). **The adult does the screen time. The student gets a better lesson.** ## In the district office: AI that gives adults time back Away from the classroom, the same tools return hours to the people who keep a district running: early-warning analytics (attendance, grades, and behavior, flagged weeks earlier); scheduling and staffing (master schedules, substitute matching, bus routing); family communication (multilingual messages, plain-language policy); compliance and documentation (board summaries, grant narratives, records retention); E-Rate procurement records (Form 470 specs, bid evaluations, audit-ready files); and network monitoring (predicting a saturated circuit before a testing window). A district could cap student minutes and it would still need a bigger pipe. Teacher tools, accessibility, and the office all ride the same circuit E-Rate funds. The clocks, PAs, alarms, even the thermostat leverage the same network. ## Same government, two signals On one hand, the White House has made AI-ready students a national priority, through EO 14277 (AI education for youth), EO 14278 (skilled-trade workforce), and America’s AI Action Plan. At the same time, the FCC review could narrow the program those students actually learn on. *You cannot ask schools to lead on AI and shrink the pipe at the same time.* The districts that feel cuts first are rural, remote, and high-poverty, exactly where E-Rate closed the gap to begin with. Screen value as a privilege of the already-connected is the opposite of the policy’s intent. Consider Westside Union Elementary School District, a small rural district in California’s Central Valley. Its internet still rides fixed wireless, and the cabling and Wi-Fi that reach each classroom live entirely in E-Rate Category 2, so when rodents chewed through that cabling the district had to wait for its next C2 budget to make the affected rooms whole. With no network engineer on staff, the E-Rate competitive bidding process is its only route to a qualified vendor. For a district like this, E-Rate is not a discount on a plan it would have funded anyway; it is the plan. Contrast that with San Benito Consolidated Independent School District, a mixed urban and rural district in the Texas Rio Grande Valley. Once a district is connected, E-Rate reaches far past lessons: Category 1 carries the broadband and the links between campuses, and Category 2 carries the switching and Wi-Fi that run the security cameras, door access, alarms, public address, and the daily operations a district cannot pause, from the student information system to nutrition and transportation. Cut E-Rate and it is not only the AI lesson that stops loading; it is the camera at the front gate and the phone in the front office. For a mixed district, C1 and C2 are the foundation it stands on. Any cut to E-Rate would land hardest on the students who rely on it most, reopening the access gap the program was built to close. Do we really want to see school districts sacrificing necessary services to cover the gap that a funding reduction would cause? ## A better answer: don’t tear out pipes to shorten showers To be clear, the review raises fair questions. Program integrity matters; Sutherland spends her days helping schools document and defend their funding, and a program that protects public dollars is a program worth keeping. Legitimate online-safety goals deserve attention too. Here is where we disagree with the current proposal, and it comes down to network layers. A network simply moves bits. Safety, pedagogy, and screen time are human decisions made on top of that infrastructure. Congress built the safety layer into E-Rate in 2000 through the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Meanwhile, learning outcomes belong to the educational layer: curriculum design, intentional-use norms, and the digital-wellness instruction now required under California’s AB 2071. Screen time is a scheduling and classroom-management choice—not a bandwidth setting. Shrinking the pipe to curb screen time is therefore the one tool that cannot hit its target. It does nothing to change screen time for the student scrolling on a phone using cellular data. It does degrade the teacher drafting IEPs, the captions for a deaf student, and the technician trying to predict a saturated circuit before a testing window, because those ride the same circuit and have no screen-time problem to solve. Pulling the infrastructure to curb screen time is like tearing out the plumbing to discourage long showers: you do not get better habits, you get a building that no longer works. ## What can you do? The comment window is open now: comments are due October 13, 2026 and reply comments are due November 12, 2026 in WC Docket No. 26-133 (notice published in the Federal Register on August 14, 2026). This is the moment. What administrators, boards, and tech leaders can do: visit [shlb.org/save-our-e-rate](https://www.shlb.org/save-our-e-rate) and file comments, document how connectivity drives instruction, and frame their own AI plans around value. The intelligence we want in classrooms is only as real as the infrastructure underneath it. ## Sources - Mike Lawrence, “[Let’s Focus on Screen Value Over Screen Time](https://edcal.acsa.org/lets-focus-on-screen-value-over-screen-time),” EdCal / ACSA. - ISTE+ASCD: [Screen Value Guide](https://iste-ascd.org/screentime-to-screenvalue). - *Growing Up in Public*, Devorah Heitner, Ph.D. - [Connect K-12, final report](https://connectk12.org/static/media/Connect_K12_Connectivity_Report_2023_FINAL.dfc96770.pdf) (Nov. 28, 2023). - EdWeek: [Balanced Instructional Approach](https://www.abcusd.us/balanced). - CoSN: [From Screen Time Mandates to Purposeful Technology Policies and Guidance](http://www.cosn.org/from-screen-time-mandates-to-purposeful-technology-policies-and-guidance). - FCC E-Rate program review, WC Docket No. 26-133; notice published in the Federal Register August 14, 2026 (screen time, online safety, program integrity, administrative reform). Comments due October 13, 2026; replies November 12, 2026. - EO 14277 (AI education for youth), EO 14278 (skilled-trade workforce), America’s AI Action Plan (July 2025). SHLB “[Save Our E-Rate](https://www.shlb.org/save-our-e-rate)” campaign, shlb.org. SETDA Broadband Imperative III (per-user bandwidth targets). 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