What a modern school network actually carries and why “it’s just email and Google Docs” stopped being true about fifteen years ago.
Every district I’ve worked with eventually gets some version of the same question, usually from a board member holding a budget and squinting at the network line item. Why does this cost so much? It’s email and Google Docs. It’s a fair question. It’s also built on a picture of school technology that expired a long time ago.
This week I spoke at an E-rate briefing on Capitol Hill, convened by CoSN, the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition, the American Library Association, and the Education and Libraries Networks Coalition. I was asked to describe the many ways a modern school uses the internet. I didn’t start with a classroom, and I didn’t start with a student. I started with a clock.
5:30 AM — the buses roll
Before the sun is up, the fleet is already on the network. GPS routing. Parent-facing apps that let a family watch the bus approach their corner. Ridership scans that create the record documenting special-education transportation, the kind of documentation that matters when a compliance question arrives eighteen months later.
6:00 AM — the building wakes up
HVAC runs on an IP-based building automation system. So does ventilation and CO2 monitoring, thanks to COVID. Boilers, chillers, lighting, energy management: monitored remotely, and increasingly with predictive maintenance, because a furnace that announces its own failure on a Tuesday is a furnace that doesn’t cost you a school day on Thursday.
7:00 AM — the doors
Electronic access control unlocks on a schedule. Cameras come up. Security systems move to full operation. In many districts, visitor management scans a driver’s license against offender registries before anyone gets a badge and a door held open for them.
7:30 AM — breakfast
The cafeteria point-of-sale is not a cash register. It’s the federal meal-reimbursement claim. It’s also where a student’s allergy information lives, which is to say it’s a health record that happens to be sitting next to a milk cooler.
8:00 AM — attendance
Attendance posts to the student information system, feeds the state reporting system and drives the district’s state funding. A network problem on a count day is a budget problem.
And not one student has touched a device yet.
That’s the part I want to sit with for a second. Every system I just described runs before first bell. None of them is instructional. None of them is optional. All of them ride the same infrastructure.
Then the school day starts
State assessments are computer-based. IEP documentation and IDEA compliance obligations are maintained in systems that live on the network. The nurse’s office runs electronic health records, and in a lot of rural districts, it runs teletherapy, because the nearest child psychiatrist is not a drive a family can make on a school day.
To keep this short, I skipped the entire back office: payroll, accounting, finance, procurement, human resources. The unglamorous machinery that makes a district a functioning employer of several hundred people.
The network has become the school’s life-safety system
I want to be precise about this, because it’s the part that gets waved past. In a lockdown: the announcement over the PA. The door locks engaging. The camera feed the responding officer pulls up while still in the car. The phone that dials 911 and tells a dispatcher which room. Every one of those rides the same infrastructure.
That is not an amenity. That is the thing you are counting on at the exact moment nothing else matters.
Congress and the states mandated most of this
Here’s what I’d ask policymakers to hold onto: schools did not choose most of this. It was assigned to us.
- Kari’s Law requires multi-line phone systems to dial 911 directly, without a prefix, and to notify someone on site when that call is placed.
- RAY BAUM’s Act requires that a dispatchable location travel with the call. Both are federal statutes, implemented through FCC rules.
- CIPA requires internet filtering and a publicly adopted internet safety policy — as a condition of E-rate.
- IDEA requires the documentation.
- A growing number of states now require silent panic alarms, and more than thirty now restrict student phone use in school buildings.
The mandates arrived. The wire to carry them mostly didn’t.
So let’s be clear about what E-rate actually funds
E-rate does not buy a single device. It does not buy a single app. The FCC’s own eligible services list is explicit that end-user equipment (e.g. computers, laptops, tablets) and applications and content are outside the program.
E-rate funds two things: the connection into the building, and the wiring and Wi-Fi inside it. That’s it. That’s the layer every system in this post silently assumes already exists.
Which is why I’d push back on framing E-rate as an education technology program. It isn’t. It’s a utility. It’s the water main. Nobody asks a district to cost-justify having water, and nobody argues that the way to improve a school lunch is to reduce the plumbing.
Why this matters right now
The FCC has opened a wide-ranging review of E-rate in WC Docket No. 26-133, including questions about whether the program should be narrowed, limited to certain geographies, or sunset altogether. The comment window is open.
If you run a district network, you already know everything in this post. The people writing the record may not. Nobody can describe what breaks better than the person who gets the 6:00 AM call when it does.
That’s the most useful thing any of us can put in the docket: not an argument, just an accurate account of what the network carries and what it would mean if the funding that built it went away.
Here is your homework:
- Contact Your Lawmakers: Pull your district’s customized funding stats at Save Our E-Rate and send a message directly to Congress.
- Sign the CoSN Petition: Have an authorized representative sign the petition on behalf of your district to back affordable school broadband
AUTHOR: Dr. Stacy Hawthorne, CETL serves as the Chair of the CoSN Board of Directors and Executive Director of the EdTech Leaders Alliance.
Published on July 30, 2026
CoSN is vendor neutral and does not endorse products or services. Any mention of a specific solution is for contextual purposes.
