E-Rate Under Fire
The FCC has put a formal proposal on the table asking whether E-rate should be limited or eliminated entirely. Not restructured. Not reformed. Eliminated.
If you've spent any time building out a district network, you know what E-rate has meant in practice: the fiber run you couldn't have afforded otherwise, the Wi-Fi refresh that cleared your access point debt, the monthly circuit costs that didn't eat your whole budget alive. The program has been moving money to schools and libraries for thirty years. Questioning whether it should exist at all is not a routine policy review.
The Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) is running a campaign at saveourerate.com where you can contact your elected officials and, once the FCC comment window opens, file directly with the commission. CoSN, ALA, and AASA all have action centers with templates ready to go. If you're an IT director who has ever had to explain to a superintendent why connectivity costs what it costs, you have something real to say here.
The draft proposal apparently raises questions about screen time and rural versus urban funding distribution. Whether those are genuine policy concerns or convenient reasons to gut the program, the comment record is where that gets contested. FCC commissioners read volume and they read specificity. "E-rate funded the fiber that connects six buildings in our district and we could not have replaced it from the operating budget" is worth more than a form letter, even if the form letter is all you can manage right now.
SHLB is also hosting a webinar walking through the draft proposal in detail, including what to include in a comment and when the window opens. AnchorNets is in Arlington, VA this October 7 through 9, if you want to be in the room when people who track this for a living are comparing notes.
Comment windows close whether you're paying attention or not.
Featured articles
The FortiBleed campaign just got more serious. Researchers at SOCRadar have tied the operation, which pulled credentials from over 73,000 Fortinet devices, directly to the INC and Lynx ransomware groups. The method is worth knowing: attackers planted a custom packet-sniffer called "FortiGate Sniffer" on compromised firewalls and harvested VPN credentials straight from live traffic. Not from a breach notification six months later. From the wire, in real time.
If your perimeter runs on FortiGate and you have not audited for unauthorized config changes or unknown processes, this is the week to do it.
Google has quietly closed one of the more awkward gaps in Workspace's compliance story. The Gemini app now respects data region settings, meaning admins can pin storage and processing to the US or EU at the OU level, the same way they've handled the rest of Workspace. For districts that were holding off on broader Gemini adoption because they couldn't answer "where does this data actually live," that answer now exists. Education Standard and Education Plus get in-region storage; processing controls require the higher tiers. Worth checking before your next school board asks.
Google has brought Ask Gemini into the Drive mobile apps for Android and iOS, so the same multi-turn, folder-grounded AI conversations that landed on the web in April are now available on phones. For K12, the piece worth reading is the security claim: Google says Gemini never copies your files and honors your existing access permissions, DLP policies, and IRM controls. That matters before you explain to a principal why a student's IEP surfaced somewhere it shouldn't. It requires Gemini for Workspace in Drive to be enabled, so check that toggle before your teachers find it on their own.
CoSN is pushing "vibe coding" as a K12 teaching moment, the idea that students can build working software by prompting AI tools without learning traditional syntax first. Teachers are apparently doing creative things with it. Fine. But the piece is light on the part you actually need to plan for: students generating and running code on district hardware, through district networks, with district data potentially in scope. Before this becomes a curriculum trend in your building, someone needs to decide where those AI prompts are going and who agreed to the terms of service.
Tech tip of the week
Document your district's AI usage policy for Google Workspace and staff guidelines
Google's AI features inside Workspace have been rolling out faster than most districts have written policy around them. That gap is going to matter when a parent asks what Gemini did with their kid's essay, or a principal wants to know if staff are feeding student data into an AI summarizer.
Start in the Admin Console under Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for your org. Gemini features can be restricted by organizational unit, so you can lock things down for student OUs while leaving more latitude for staff. Document what you've set and why. A one-page internal reference covering which features are on, which are off, and which OUs those settings apply to is worth more than a 20-page policy nobody reads.
Pair that with a plain-language staff guideline covering what counts as student data and why it stays out of AI prompts. Keep it short enough that someone actually uses it before their next lesson plan.
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