 Welcome to our webinar on Innovative School and Community Wi-Fi Initiatives to Help Close the Home Learning and Homework Gap. I'm Michael Calabrese, Director of the Wireless Future Project at New America's Open Technology Institute. In every state this spring, school closures turned homes into classrooms for nearly all of America's students and teachers. This situation seems likely to continue this fall. Even if schools reopen and can stay open, many districts are planning for part-time or hybrid learning models. California's guidelines, for example, call for a mix of classroom and online learning. Unfortunately, teaching and learning online is only possible in homes with adequate broadband connections, and at least 7 million school-aged children today live in homes that lack the broadband internet access needed to participate in online education. And those numbers are likely going up with all of the massive unemployment. And even when schools are back full-time, those 7 million or more students will still be on the wrong side of a persistent homework gap that reinforces educational inequities, especially in low-income and rural areas where broadband is unavailable or unaffordable. Although Congress is considering proposals for emergency broadband funding to address the short-term crisis, this is a long-term problem. The good news you hear today is that some school districts have been pioneering a variety of Wi-Fi and other wireless broadband innovations aimed at connecting all or most of their students in some of the most socioeconomically challenging communities. For example, later on our panel, school district CTOs from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and San Jose, California will describe the school-led community Wi-Fi networks they built out, resilient networks that give their students a way to connect from home well before the pandemic struck. Other districts have been using wireless technologies to broadcast school networks directly to student homes or turning school buses into Wi-Fi hotspots located strategically near students' lack and connectivity. None of these efforts receive support from the federal E-Rate program, which has so far refused to give schools either more funding or even the flexibility they need to deal with the online learning crisis. Open Technology Institute filed an emergency request back in early March at the commission asking for both of those things, and so far there's been a resounding silence. We'll begin today with a keynote discussion between FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenwurzel, Karen Cator, CEO of Digital Promise, and my colleague Sarah Morris, Director of the Open Technology Institute here at New America, and also a leading advocate for expanding E-Rate and Lifeline broadband benefits. So without further delay, I'll turn it over to Sarah, who will guide our opening discussion and then hand it back to me to moderate our panel discussion. Sarah? Thanks so much, Michael, and thanks everyone for joining. I think this is my first event where I've done virtually, and so it's a little different not being able to see all the releases. As Michael noted, connecting, closing the digital divide has been a long-standing priority from the Open Technology Institute. In fact, when I started as a policy analyst at the Open Technology Institute over nine years ago, the first comments that I wrote for the commission were a series of comments in the Lifeline Modernization Proceeding and an E-Rate Modernization Proceeding. And so these are issues and areas of communications policy that are near and dear to my heart and a core priority for the Open Technology Institute. I'm delighted to be joined here today by Commissioner Rosenwurzel and by Karen Cader. I'll do brief introductions, but then I want to get us straight, go straight into the conversation because there's so much to discuss here today. Karen is the CEO of Digital Promise. Prior to this, she led the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. And then we also spent a decade at Culp and began her career as a teacher and district administrator in Alaska. Commissioner Rosenwurzel is a familiar face at her events. And if you look at her official biography, the first line says that Commissioner Jessica Rosenwurzel believes that the future belongs to the connected. And this is especially true for the commissioner when it comes to connecting kids. She helps spearhead the modernization of the SECD rate program in the last administration and coined the term Homework Gap to describe the problem of students who don't have connectivity they need to do their schoolwork. Prior to the FCC, she worked as senior counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee for Senator Rockefeller, who is one of the original architects of the E-rate program. So thank you both for being here. I'm delighted to be moderating this conversation and I'm delighted that we are so color coordinated today in our day to day purple. I'd like to start by just sort of recognizing that this current connectivity divide and the corresponding learning gap and learning divide isn't new. Certainly this pandemic has shown a spotlight on that on the connectivity crisis, however, and that crisis risks reinforcing the educational inequities in low income households. Commissioner, you've been raising awareness about the homework gap for years. And yet here we are with at least 7 million K through 12 students in homes without broadband connectivity. Can you talk a little bit about how we got here? Sure. First of all, thank you to OTI for having me here today. And it's a treat to have you at the helm and Michael. I mean, these are people. You guys have been working on these issues for so long and we are so better off at the agency where I work for having your participation. And being here with Karen is fantastic too, because she's such a well known champion when it comes to digital education and what our students need. So one thing that I have focused on during my time at the agency is, of course, the E-Rate program. It's the nation's largest education technology program. And it's been around since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is, you know, feels like a lifetime ago in technology. I mean, that's what I call the Internet, the information super highway. But Congress in 1996 saw that we needed to get our schools and our classrooms connected to that information super highway. And over time, that Internet connectivity has been a powerful tool for learning in schools nationwide. And so in every state across this country, we've got school districts that rely on E-Rate for support to keep their students connected. But now, as you said, during this pandemic, more than 50 million students were sent home this school year. And educators had to do something amazing, which was convert to online learning. But we have this fundamental problem. And it's what I call the homework gap, because those kids were connected in school. But when they went to do their school work at home, for millions of them, there was no connectivity. The Senate Joint Economic Committee says that's 12 million students. The AP has done some work suggesting that 18% of our students nationwide don't have adequate Internet access at home. And when I look back on this school year and this crisis we had with the homework gap, the one thing that's become clear to me is school may be out for the summer, but we need to use these summer months to make sure we are better prepared in the fall so that that homework gap doesn't reemerge if we all go back to school online. So that's what I'm working on right now and thinking about. And I hope that sets the table for you adequately. Sure does. Thank you, Commissioner. Karen, can you talk a bit about how schools have been coping with this sudden shift to home learning? And particularly in communities with a significant share of students that lack adequate connectivity more generally or crisis at home, more specifically? Sure. And first, thank you also from me to New America for convening this conversation. Really, really important. And thank you, Commissioner Rosenberg, for your incredible longevity of supporting broadband and connectivity, and particularly for education purposes for all Americans. So first of all, it has been a difficult spring. As everybody says, it's unprecedented. It's uncertain. It's all those things. But let's start with the good news. So the best news is that teachers, by their very nature, are creative and resourceful. That is the core attribute of a great teacher. And teachers have done an amazing job this spring in many, many, many cases, learning how to zoom with 5-year-olds, learning how to zoom with 15-year-olds, finding apps and activities and websites and different things that can keep learning going as students are home. School and district leaders, they spring into action, responding to their community with whatever their community needed. In many cases, food was the very first effort. So distributing food, then figuring out how to distribute devices, checking in with individual community members, with their teachers, really figuring out what's happening and what's needed. Parents, parents and families, they settled up alongside their young students, even as they were handling their own stresses of their own work, or in many cases, being out of work, newly out of work, and keeping themselves and their families safe if they were essential workers and having to work outside of the home. So the bottom line was there were many, many heroic efforts to keep learning going. So we have a lot to build on. That's the first thing. But as we all know, and as you stated, that the pandemic and the school closures made glaringly obvious the inequities with regard to education in the United States. And I would say it's a big wide country and it's a continuum. There are lots of examples on both sides. And I look forward to hearing from the schools later. So the schools in the best shape were the ones who had devices that they had already checked out to students. They already had closed the homework gap. They figured out how home access could work for all of their families. And there are communities that have strong professional learning organizationally, enabling teachers to learn from each other and support each other, share ideas, figure out what's working and what's not working, make very rapid adjustments. From a learning perspective with regard to technology, and I will say continuity of learning requires technology. There were many people who set packets of paper home with lunches and those kinds of things. It doesn't cut it. There was a story, I think, from Detroit where they showed a room full of boxes and stacks of papers that they had collected from students. But the question was, who's going to look at all these and try to figure out how to score them and that kind of thing? Or most importantly, how to give students feedback on their work. So three critical factors for technology and learning. A device for every single student. Not every family, but every student. Many cases students have to work simultaneously. So you need a device for each student. Second thing, stating the obvious, you need internet access at home or at the place where the student lives. The number is all over the place. I think I heard nine million at any rate. It's a lot of students who don't have access. And third, you need the people and the support systems to continuously improve the engagement with students. So many, many, many schools figured out how to check out thousands of devices. I think Broward County checked out something like 85,000 devices very quickly. They figured out who needed them and figured out how to get them out to their students. They took devices from the carts in their schools or from their classroom pools and checked them out to students. The home internet connectivity has taken the most creativity and partnerships and I think that's where the rest of this discussion will be. But there are kind of three important things in communities. First of all, you need to communicate and assess, listen, figure out what's needed. It's very different home to home. And second, find out what's available, work with the providers, et cetera. We'll talk more about that and then communicate broadly. Keep communicating, let people know what's possible and how and why they need to figure out how to get online. Thanks, Karen. I'm gonna move us into a little bit into the weeds to talk specifically about some programs within the Universal Service Program and focus specifically on some proposals to tweak the e-rate program. Just for background for those tuning in, there's two programs, two components of the Universal Service Program that are relevant to this conversation. One is the Lifeline Program and the other is Elate. Lifeline provides a monthly connectivity subsidy for low-income households and then e-rate provides federal funding for school and library broadband functions. OTI has supported emergency legislation in Congress to provide supplemental support as part of the pandemic response for both of those components at e-rate, or sorry, of the Universal, both Lifeline and e-rate as components of the Universal Service Program. And then as Michael referenced in his introductory remarks, OTI did file an emergency request in March for increased e-rate funding and asked the FCC to give schools flexibility as they were going into the final stretch of the school year and into the summer to use that for schools to use their e-rate connectivity in a way that allowed them to better connect students at home and their families by extension and in other locations. So we made this request in March. Mishner, can you talk a little bit about what the commission has done in response to our request? Oh, okay. Well, first I wanna thank you and for filing that petition and adding some analytical heft to our thinking about e-rate. I think, and I'm only one of five, but that it's essential that we take this program that's been around since 1996 and we make it meet this moment. We have a national crisis. Let's figure out how to use the tools that are already in the law to help get every student connected. And when I looked at the statute, the first one was e-rate. And e-rate contemplates connectivity to the school building for educational purposes, but that classroom has migrated to people's homes. It's now online. And if you can't get online, the digital classroom, you're locked out of it. And that means you can't continue with your education. So let's look at that statute. There's more than enough flexibility in there. It references additional services. The FCC has forbearance authority. We could use it right now today to make sure every school could loan out things like Wi-Fi hotspots and help students get connected with routers. I have not convinced a majority of my peers, which leaves me alternately depressed and totally charged to continue to talk about this. And so with respect to the latter, I spoke yesterday at the Senate Commerce Committee and an oversight hearing, and there was a lot of discussion about students, e-rate, and how we need to change it to meet this moment. And that in fact was gratifying because I think there's more recognition that we have a tool in the law that could help schools get every student connected. But now we just have to do something that's only mildly audacious. We have to use it. So Commissioner, I think the answer, I think I know the answer to this question based on what you just said, but we do have the HEROES Act, which is the third or depending on how you count it, the third or three and a half stimulus package that includes extra support for schools and libraries and extra support for low-income households. That's right. Is that enough? Like is that supplemental support? What role does that play in getting us through the next however many months? So in both the HEROES Act, which was passed through the house and in legislation known as the Emergency Educational Connections Act in the Senate, there is more money and direction to use e-rate to help get students connected. And it's actually beneficial because they also are trying to help get staff connected because remember, if that teacher's not connected, they cannot in fact teach that class and engage with them the way you want. I think that legislation is terrific. And as someone who has championed addressing the homework gap for a long time, what is at least gratifying is in this moment with this pandemic, with so many kids at home, the reality that we as a nation need to address this problem right here, right now and plan for the next when we get past this period is it's apparent across the board. But of course, like with everything else, we gotta make sure we actually do it. I think the FCC has all the authority it needs right now to be creative and use e-rate to connect students. But if I can't convince all my colleagues, then I hope certainly that we see some of this legislation passed into law sooner rather than later so we can get started and make sure that schools over the course of summer get all the information they need to make sure that when they start again in the fall, they're ready to get every student connected. Yes, commissioner. And I would add to from OTI's perspective, I'm editorializing a little bit, I suppose as the moderates. Go for it, go for it. I really hope that the conversations we're having right now in the context of the pandemic are really a springboard, not just for more conversations about connectivity in schools, but of really thinking about long-term durable solutions to closing the digital divide for all of everyone. And that's part of the reason why I'm so excited about this conversation because a lot of the solutions that we're thinking about impact students directly, but also have great net positive effects on the communities more broadly. And just to be a little more concrete about the types of policies we're talking about and what these modest changes to E-Rate might look like, things like, so schools have Wi-Fi networks that many of which are E-Rate supported. Those Wi-Fi networks are currently going pretty unutilized since there are not students in the building. And so, there have been proposals to open up those to provide flexibility for how those schools can leverage school or library Wi-Fi connections to extend that connectivity into the community. And we're gonna hear from some great school districts that are doing, that are thinking exactly through these types of innovative deployments, but also to provide flexibility so that schools who know their students, know their neighborhoods, know their communities can use that money flexibly to get the students connected at home through whatever types of hotspots or solutions they think works for them within the parameters of what's possible in their community. So, is this good, is this flexibility good? I mean, I'm hearing from Commissioner Rosenward so that she thinks that it would be, Karen, how do you think that the flexibility within E-Rate can help support learning flexibility? Yeah, absolutely, I mean, it's so, I mean, it's make E-Rate meet this moment is exactly right, E-Rate is there, the regulations are there, the rules are there, the structure is there, the paperwork is there, like it's all people know how to do it, it's been around for 25 years, people know E-Rate and E-Rate is the place to say, and if your community, again, the needs assessment is critical, find out what your particular community needs and figure out how the E-Rate funds can support learning at home. I'm not saying we take apart school library connectivity because that's going to still be important and we don't wanna lose that very critical point, but we do definitely want to make sure that we have other connectivity, you know, people, some of the things that people tried, they put buses in different places with wifi connectivity, they use parking lots, but that's not equity, that is a lovely, innovative solution if there is absolutely nothing else, but getting it into the home so that some students don't have to find a vehicle or find a way to go sit near that bus or whatnot, that's the important part. Many providers this spring did step up and offer free connectivity, that was important and thank you to all those providers who kind of took the barriers away and figured out how to get people connected, but that's not a long-term solution. We've got to figure out how we can get free and low-cost access into homes and schools are the best place to analyze and do the need assessment and get that done and then e-rate is the best place to add funding or use the funding or offer flexibility so that people can in fact solve that challenge. That was so well said. Totally agree. I've noticed that we have a question from the audience around libraries and the role that libraries can play and I know Karen that you're a bit more focused on education in the context of schools if I understand correctly, but for either Commissioner Rosenberg or for Karen, is there a role that libraries can play in this vision of long-term connectivity at home? Oh, absolutely. We are focused right now on discussion on schools but it is vitally important to know that e-rate since 1996 has been offering funds to connect both schools and libraries. So both the educational institutions and the community institution and libraries have been such dynamos when it comes to making digital opportunity available to their community and to so many kids who rely on them just to be able to get some connectivity if they don't have it at home. And now during this pandemic, so many libraries are leaving their wifi signals on and it does mean that people can sit in the parking lot and get free access. And I completely agree with Karen that is not the digital equity we're looking for in this world but I wanna credit their creativity for this moment because it is really essential and there are people who have been able to get connections for school, for education, for work as a result of libraries taking that posture and taking that position and schools and libraries and connectivity really go together. That's been true since e-rate started and I expect it will be true in the future too. I agree. Well, and I would say one could look at the BTOP program which came out of the prior round of stimulus bills in 2008 and OTI full disclosure was a sub grantee on a couple of different projects through BTOP but there was a focus on community anchor institutions and the role that those institutions play not just including libraries but also including, I think NTI had a pretty broad definition of community anchor institutions at the time in not just supporting the connectivity itself but the human infrastructure, the human capital to help get people connected when they were new to using the internet or new to navigating certain types of tools online. And so, librarians can play, I think, a tremendous resource but we need to make sure that they have the long-term support that the libraries need in order to fill that role. And also I should point out that libraries were the original entities that loaned out Wi-Fi hotspots. We saw that in big libraries like in New York and in little libraries in rural Maine and they demonstrated that that was a powerful tool for getting more people connected and we really in some ways want to borrow that model and make it available from school libraries and in schools, so much as they give you a math textbook to borrow for the semester. If you need to be connected because you don't have reliable connections at home they can also give you a hotspot and really that's modeled off the early experiments of libraries across this country. Exactly. We have another question in the chat and this will probably be our last one. There is, so we mentioned the existing programs e-rate and lifeline, what role does municipal or community broadband play into this ecosystem? I think we will talk about a slice of community a version of community connectivity in the upcoming panel but any thoughts from either of you? I'll just start, I'll just say that this is why every community needs the flexibility to know what they need. In some cases they can build out a community area network and everybody can learn 24 seven online. In some cases it's checking out hotspots in some cases it is funding home internet access every community is different and we have very urban settings and we have rural settings we have every variation across the country and so that is why we need the funding put in and the flexibility given to communities and then we need a very strong technical support system and I think that's partly what BTOP did as well is it created a situation where people were supporting each other helping each other figure out how to build out how to put in fiber how to make sure you connected your anchor institutions and then got the last mile into homes. So I think that that's the most important thing is getting the funding in place so that people can figure out what they need but building a community area network so that everybody has access because we're talking mostly right now about K-12 but if we think about all the 30 plus whatever it is now 40 million people out of work the people who need workforce skills there are so many things people can learn online or if you want access to help information I mean all the reasons that every American needs to be connected so that they can have a productive today and a productive future that is what we need to strive for. That's really well put I listen every option needs to be on the table the goal is to connect to everyone let's not take anything off the table prematurely and I don't believe the same thing is gonna work in every single community but one of the challenges of course with municipal networks is that many state legislatures prohibit them or limit them. Again I think every option though needs to be on the table because we're gonna have to find a way to get everyone connected and that's certainly one of the things we're gonna look at in order to make that happen I just hope that we can make sure our federal and state policies work together in that regard. I think that's a delightful note to end on. Thank you Commissioner Rosal thank you Karen I'm going to we'll wrap up the keynote here and I will turn it over to Michael turn it back to Michael. Thank you, thank you very much. Thanks Sarah and thanks Commissioner Rosenwurzel and Karen that was great discussion and so I'll ask the panelists to turn their video on and join us virtually here all together and the way we'll do this is I'll ask, you know kind of introduce in brief just kind of your title and you can share what's most relevant about what you do but I'll introduce each of the panelists in turn to just give some opening descriptions of what the challenges are in their community and what their school districts have been doing to to meet the moment you know starting with David Fringer and then Vicki Robinson, Randy Phelps and Tina Heichhofer so just to kick it off David is Chief Technology Officer of the Council Bluffs Iowa Community School District so David can you tell us why you were partly ready to meet this challenge? Absolutely, good afternoon everybody it is an honor to be here today and I am such a proponent of what we're talking about. I am the Chief Technology Officer in the Council Bluffs Community Schools Council Bluffs is a community of about 55,000 folks in the Omaha, Nebraska metro area. We are a high poverty community north of 70% for in reduced lunch we're typically an 80 or 90% e-rate discount district so that gives you kind of an idea of our demographics. Like many school districts a number of years ago and it goes back to 2011, 12 for us we decided that every student needs a device and that was brought up in the keynote and I think every student needs a device and we went after that back in 2012 conquered that all of our students in K-12 have a device. What we realized after those devices rolled out was they were in some cases quite useless when they were away from school. They went home with the kids but without connectivity the homework gap persisted. So folks looked around for places where the wifi was like the public libraries or sitting outside a school building where the signal penetrated the walls and those types of things but that was not okay and as part of a strategic planning process in 2013 we started ideating what we could do to solve this problem and thinking small at first some community hotspots in parks and public buildings and school campuses but we're in Iowa and it gets cold and outside isn't always an option it is today, it's a great day to sit outside but on many days it's not so that outdoor wifi was kind of a solution but not something that was gonna solve the whole problem. So bigger ideas were considered what if we brought free public wifi including a student network component to our high poverty neighborhoods and that's the idea and that's the path we went down. In 2013 and 14 we gathered up some really smart people in the community, nonprofit leaders, the city of Council Bluffs obviously the school district, some nonprofits and some for profit business folks and we put together the Council Bluffs area Wifi consortium, the mission to be to provide free public wifi wherever it's financially and technically feasible. Now we had to go find money to do this this project is not E-rate eligible so the hardware and installation and the design of this network had to be funded in another way and we went to philanthropists and to our community foundations and we found enough money to do about a phase a year and a phase covers about a square mile roughly in our community. So we're now six phases in slowly creeping across our community beginning with high poverty neighborhoods first and providing free public wifi to anybody in the community but also connecting automatically school-owned devices to internet service without the student have to do anything. So if the student device is turned on in a wifi area it just connects to the network and off we go. It's done by V-landing on the back end making sure that E-rate eligible resources like the bandwidth we're provided with are only used for school district devices. So like I said, we're about five or six phases in we plan to fast track two phases right now phases seven and eight and we'll have covered primarily the high poverty neighborhoods in our community. The CARES Act dollars have been helpful for that and some matching philanthropy in our community. So we're gonna consider ourselves done with our community wifi project but now it's time to refresh the hardware that was installed in 2014 in phase one. So again, searching for money, et cetera, for doing that. E-rate specifically, some of the recent changes in E-rate have been fantastic. Least dark fiber, some of the category two changes that have allowed us to build some really robust networks inside of our schools have been amazing. They're great. What we would like to see is the kind of hardware that we're using to take that school network from the mothership of the school out into the community for that hardware and connectivity to also become E-rate eligible. That would solve the problem in our urban community. We would be able to provide wifi to the door of nearly every home in the community if we had that kind of financial support. So that's our story and I'm looking forward to hear from the other projects. Thanks, David. That's very impressive. Next up, Vicky Robinson who is the director of the Air Band Initiative USA at Microsoft. Vicky, can you let us know some of the things you're doing? Happy to do so, Michael. And it's a pleasure to be here to talk about an issue that's important for me, not only professionally as part of my work with the Air Band Initiative but also personally as a parent for school-age children. I wanna give you a bit of background about what the Air Band Initiative is and then I'll take some time to kind of zero in on our work to close the homework gap. The Air Band Initiative was launched here in the US just about three years ago. In fact, it'll be three years next month as both a call to action by Microsoft and our programmatic effort to close a rural broadband gap here in the United States and while doing so help deliver on what is our core mission as a company which is to help communities achieve more. The Air Band Initiative is all about partnerships. This is not a model in which Microsoft itself is seeking to become a direct provider of connectivity. Instead, we're working with internet service providers and other like-minded organizations and individuals to really leverage a toolkit approach to closing the rural divide. And when I say toolkit approach, I mean leveraging all sorts of technologies, whatever is gonna work best to solve the gap. So that will include technologies that are fixed wireless including unlicensed unused spectrum which is often referred to as TV white spaces and doing so along other technologies whether it's fiber optic or satellite coverage again all in the effort of trying to optimize to close the broadband gap. Here in the US, we have a big ambitious goal of working with internet service providers and others to extend broadband connectivity to three million people who currently reside in unserved rural areas of the country. This is actually up from our initial commitment of two million when we launched the initiative two years ago. From the inception of this work that Microsoft has been engaged in, we've been laser focused on work to close the homework gap. In fact, as part of our first project here in the US, we work with public and private entities to talk up to sort of really bring to life when the use case that's been talked about as part of the opening remarks. And David, it's really leveraging connectivity as provided to schools to extend wireless broadband access to schools and to communities in Southern Virginia's Halifax and Charlotte counties. This is literally our first project here. And then from there, we went over to Northeastern Michigan to work again with public and private entities to expand connectivity to school buses again using TV white spaces. And more recently, we're working with the Grand Island School District in central Nebraska. Again, in light of COVID, working to find ways to extend broadband access wirelessly and come again, particularly important. And the pilot is starting off with great success so much so that the state of Nebraska is looking to actually expand that work as a model to solve the gap in other districts throughout the state. Of course, our work to address the homework gap has taken on height and importance in light of COVID-19. We have a partner in Central Valley of California, Cal.net, who we're working with to address this problem. Cal.net is taking a very innovative approach to work not only with K-12 school entities, but also community colleges and others to again think through ways about how we saw the broadband gap and to the point that was raised by other panelists, it's not just a connectivity. We are talking about working with Cal.net to provide support to bundle connectivity with devices and software and digital scaling because all of these things are gonna be particularly relevant as you sort of think through how you actually go about solving the digital divide. Another piece I wanna sort of point out, sort of what we've done, I've been talking about sort of homework gap is our work around supporting community access. And so essentially as part of our work in response to COVID-19, we've been working with our internet service providers, the Public Libraries Association, as well as other strategic partners to launch over 300 public Wi-Fi hotspots across 23 states in the country. And we're incredibly proud of this work. And while it's certainly not a substitute for our home broadband access, which is actually, we've just always ago, it is important to be able to provide that, which not only will serve this immediate need, but acts as a way to have a redundant network that could be activated in future times of need. Sort of building upon this work, we've also extended grants to nonprofits who are to support and scale their work around emergency access efforts here in the US. And I'll just take a quick minute to talk about an example of what that looks like in practice here on the ground. We have a partner, an Air Band partner, Sacred Wind, who is providing access in New Mexico, primarily on Navajo Nation as part of a grant that we provided to Native Network. They have not only deployed hotspots that are being leveraged by chapter houses on the reservation, but they also have extended broadband access to 60 homes to where you have school-aged children who have obviously been impacted by the pandemic. And they are also looking to do more. They're very excited about being able to leverage fixed wireless technology, for example, to provide school buses, connectivity on school buses becomes particularly relevant when you talk about communities that are isolated and they have long businesses that children have to travel to and from school. So in sum, our approach is really about trying to take effort to address both the home learning as well as the homework gap, really leveraging a multi-stakeholder approach that's looking to use whatever technology works best for the needs on the communities that are taught, that are brought to light by the specific community. This includes, this important to this is having access to various tools, technology tools to solve the problem as well as devices and skilling and most importantly, community engagement. Really happy to be here to talk about this topic and thank you for the time. Yeah, thank you, Vicky. And as you probably know, we are longtime supporters of using those vacant TV channels to, for super Wi-Fi to reach those, particularly hard to reach areas as you get more rural tribal areas and so on. So hopefully we can come back to that again during the discussion. Next, Randy Phelps, who is the Chief Technology Officer for the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, California. Randy, can you tell us what you're up to? Sure, about seven years ago, we recognized that we had tremendous equity issues on the East Side of San Jose and that we wanted to address those. And the first thing that we knew that we needed in order to address them was money. And so what we did was we sat down with a bond salesman and we actually designed a bond specifically for technology that was good for the taxpayers, but it was also really great for the district and gave us tech-only monies because we knew that as part of, well, how we raised the money in order to run the bond on the ballot was to have an idea of vision for what we were going to do. And since we focused on equity, the idea was community Wi-Fi and a network both for the kids that would come back through our filters and work with all of our applications and all of that. We also asked that the city, led by Mayor Sam Liccardo, who's done a fantastic job and Reggie Natier and Dolan Beckel who have been with us all the way on this, we knew that there needed to be a community component that the city supported that would allow people to do things like learn about new jobs, apply for jobs, learn new skills, those kinds of things. So we knew that that was important from the get-go and we wanted to provide that. And so we passed the bond with a 77% approval rating from the voters who are hardworking, blue-collar, the tougher, more harder area of San Jose to live in, economically depressed, but people rose up and voted for it, which was absolutely amazing. We've gotten support on the West side as well and now they want the community wireless on their side as well. As we've put it in, we took the approach, I also wanna say Karen Cater, everything you said, as usual, I agree with you. How we went about providing a device for every student was we simply said, if you need a device, ask us for one and tell us how you'll use it and we'll provide you the right device. So some kids get Chromebooks, some kids get MacBooks, some kids get PCs based on what they need and what they're doing. For us, our community wireless does not hit every single home because of topography and other just engineering things. So for those kids, we applied for and received a Sprint 1 million grant, which we used the last three years, which is a fantastic opportunity from Sprint and they allowed us very good pricing as the grant has sunset it for us. So we provide hotspots for the kids who aren't reached by the community wireless yet or if it doesn't reach them for some reason and we also use attenuators to bring up the signal for the kids who need to bump it up. For us, that's been a huge first step, but we believe that like water and power and those things that having internet access is something that people absolutely have to have to live in the modern world. For us, going into COVID-19 era was a challenge, but the biggest thing we were also able to do was move all of our staff home and have them be able to work from home, which was everything from the bookkeepers to the finance folks so that we get pay our bills and people weren't in danger and people could work from home. So we, our main emphasis was that everyone gets a, not just a fair shot, but everyone gets what they really need in order to succeed and to do well. But that's been the focus for the last seven, almost eight years here for us. So this was nothing new. This was just an expansion of that. And the one wish I have is with the remaining category, $2 that have not been touched, it would be really, really great if we could use those toward things like community Wi-Fi. And if there are current laws that prohibit that, it's a perfect time to change those news COVID-19 to adjust those laws to provide this because it's really the best way, even when I work with rural school districts, which I helped very frequently last week, I helped one work on a balloon solution for providing community Wi-Fi in a mountainous region. So this is all possible and it can all be done. It just takes a few people to put their heads together and figure it out and the money to provide it. Okay, thanks, Randy. And yeah, for those who, I think it might have been mentioned earlier, but category two is the portion of E-Rate funding that can be used for internal connections, particularly for extending Wi-Fi to every classroom or even around the school property. But so far, schools don't have the flexibility, even now, while the schools are closed to use those dollars to extend connectivity to where it's most needed, based on their own situation. It's been a tremendous lever for us because a lot of the vendors will actually discount lower than what we get through E-Rate if we don't use E-Rate category two. So category two and the overage of the dollars in that have been great forces of bargaining chip, but it would be a great time to leverage the leftover dollars to do projects like community Wi-Fi. Right. Okay, so, and then our final panelist here to give some initial remarks is Tina High-Covered. Tina is the chief of communications, engagement, and enrollment for the Baltimore City Public Schools, which is definitely a big challenge, I'm sure, during these tough times. So Tina, can you give us your perspective? Absolutely, happy to be here today. So we can go on to the next slide. I'm just gonna give you a quick overview of what we did during the building closure to figure out how to get an echo distribution for devices and internet to our students. We are just like the house of about 80,000 students, which about 85% of our kids qualify for free and reduced lunch because the other idea where we're sitting, you are not a one-to-one district prior to this happening. We very quickly had to deplete the computers out of our schools to get them out to students and then do massive purchases, moving dollars around. People think, oh, there's cost savings because buildings aren't open and it couldn't be further from the truth. There's just cost shifting. And so we ended up purchasing 18,000 devices in addition to the ones we've had in schools to get them out to students distributed through social distancing at our school sites. In order to do that though, we had to identify which kids and families actually needed these. We did a food and tech survey because besides devices and connectivity, food was our third biggest challenge for our families. So we did a food and tech survey. They're about a 48% to our return, which is actually pretty decent from a turn on surveys. However, it didn't give us the full picture of what we actually needed to accomplish in order to get the families connected, the kids connected and getting their devices in their hands. We can go to the next slide. So we have the data that we use as an issue of the survey was an American Community Survey study that was done in 2018 in a report that the Abel Foundation here locally did in May of 2020, which gave us some data that we actually used to determine what our goals were around connectivity and devices. So there's a couple of things to point out here. About 19,200 households in our city do not have, for students, do not have wire line broadband at home and neither 20,000 households or kids under age of 17 do not have wire line broadband. So that's the number we're working from is trying to make sure we're getting at least that 20,000 number kit while we're still trying to understand how many kids we're able to get on during distance learning. We know about 85% of our kids tacked in one of three ways. We had packets, which is not the ideal. We've heard an earlier presentation at our meal sites. We also took over, we've come and aired our local television station that we have for our school system, as well as the city's local cables channel. And we actually broadcast lessons on both of those channels with scheduled families where kids could engage lessons on the television program. And then about 45, 50% of our kids actually were able to access online learning in the very short term. We know we have to plan while we are proud of what we've set up very quickly in a few weeks. We know we are planning very differently for what we have to do in the fall. We're just really moving to a one-to-one strategy for those kids who do not have the devices. It does not mean we buy devices for every single kid in our district. My own child up is to be a city school student, right? So he doesn't need a device. It's making sure that every single kid has access to a device and using an equity lens around who we give the devices to quickly and first. You can go to the next slide, please. So our Chrome, we closed on May, or March 13th. We quickly bought Chromebooks. Again, distribute them on April 13th. We had a second round. I would say in the first round, we just did one device per household only because we wanted to make sure that every household had something to connect to. Recognizing it wasn't good enough. We did our second round of device distribution on May 18th and we included all children in a household who actually might need a device. Chromebooks were our device of choice right now. We are now doing an assessment over the summer to determine what other devices we need for different populations of students, whether it be special education, early learners, et cetera. And those will be purchased over the summer as well. We've distributed all the devices from our school. 100% have gone out. So now we've completed our school-based resources. So part of our CARES Act resources that are coming in is that we're going to do a hybrid model in the fall, which is more than likely for our district. We're going to need to have both virtual and in-person mobility to do technology. And so part of our CARES Act money is going to purchase additional devices to make sure we're getting homeless students who weren't captured during the time period or foster care students or students who weren't able to get a hold of, to get them home-based devices, but also to replenish the school-based devices that we actually pulled out and gave to kids. They are all loaner devices. The only devices we collected over the summer months were from our seniors who were graduating, so that students could also participate in summer learning, summer enrichment, or engagement activities and be ready for the fall work. We began practicing our high schools around the distribution and then went down to K-3-8 and used our community conditions index, which is basically where we know where the most challenging conditions are for our families, and those are the schools we actually went to first for distribution. And go to the next slide. I so appreciate Randy's talk about what I call a public utility that internet needs to be now. We as a school system are working tirelessly to stand up internet for our students, but the reality is we really need a municipal Wi-Fi strategy for the city of Baltimore that will allow our families to stay on and maintain, as Randy said, water and electricity, et cetera. It's just as important nowadays to have internet. But in the short term, we're not, we don't have that. We did get funding from the city council, from private donations, from others for our own resources to sort of figure out how we do connectivity in the short term. The first thing we did was do Comcast Internet Essentials as a national program where you get two months free of Wi-Fi and a modem is sent to a home and you get connected. We obviously had a few problems with that because we had to sort of mitigate the barriers that families experience when they try to get on. For example, needing a social security number. If you're not a citizen of the country, you don't have that number to give in order to get that. So really working through with our partner with Comcast to mitigate those barriers so that families could actually get on for that free two months. After that, they're offering a $10 a month fee, which may seem reasonable to some people, but for many it is not. And so right now I'm literally exploring how much it's going to cost me to keep about 6,000 families which is a cousin household, which could actually result in about 10,000 kids on through that program. Two months free is about to expire or has already expired. And so we're looking at a sponsorship agreement with Comcast through some external fundraising. They would extend that period for up to a year. So the braided strategy that's one component. The second point is that we're doing a mesh network strategy. We have a partner who is literally broadcasting the signals of internet out from schools, libraries, other public buildings into communities, installing hardware on the outside. We have a row home city, so we have tight quarters so you can install the hardware on the outside and then load them on the inside. But we're doing four schools right now as a pilot or proof of concept to see how that's going to work. But that's going to take a while to get up, sand it up, set up, right, and get across the district. So that's one piece of the strategy. We're hoping a year from now, that is the way in which we were able to get internet out into our communities. But in the short term, it's going to take some time to get that going. And then we've also just purchased a bunch of hotspots. We just literally spent, I put a deal on with T-Mobile to do 10,000 hotspots for our district. And that way, we are deciding who would pick it on mesh network, who was on Comcast and our essentials. And when we know those, the kids who are not on those actually will get the hotspots. If we do that, that gives us that 20,000 number I spoke to earlier. Probably looks like we have to get connected. And then we'll continue to iterate as we move forward to make sure we're getting all of our families connected. And we have done advocacy efforts. We have the Digital Equity Coalition as a city-wide coalition of different stakeholders just helping us pull together some advocacy efforts around fundraising, around supporting with Comcast and others to make sure we are doing the right things to make sure kids and families are connected. So we'll go to the next slide. That's it. Just last couple of things. We are doing our recovery model, as I mentioned. We're doing both a hybrid, but also a virtual academy that's going to be all online. So the criticalness of getting this figured out over the summer months and getting at least 20,000 families that really need to be connected connected is our goal right now. And it's just, it's been really challenging but also rewarding to see how quickly we were able to stand up, advise, purchase, distribution and getting kids online. So quickly, it's just a matter of now keeping them online and having the right mix of devices, broadband, et cetera, that keep us moving. So I'll stop there. Okay. Thank you, Tina. That's quite a full court press. And thanks for mentioning or explaining the Comcast program because that hasn't come up previously, but particularly in the short term during the crisis, companies like Comcast and their program is really the gold standard is an important piece of addressing this. But it's so interesting that you've combined it with three or four other components. So I'd like to ask some questions and we also have some audience questions. So I guess, Tina, if I could ask one, if I will, from you to begin with, you mentioned that roughly 35% of Baltimore's students lack adequate internet access or devices at home or sometimes both. Is any online learning viable when it excludes such a substantial share of the students in a class? So, and this would be, I pose this generally for the others after you is, how well are schools able to cope with, with online learning, if at all, if you don't have nearly all the kids connected? Tina? Absolutely. And I would just ask for a little grace. My four-year-old was waving her hand around here just now. So you're on your own schooling and teaching and doing our jobs at the same time. So she might pop back in her moment and just letting everybody know. So that's a fair question, right? And the packets, I heard somebody mentioned in the beginning panel presentation that they weren't grading the packets and we aren't either, right? We did participation grades basically for the fourth quarter, understanding that if students showed up and were engaged, picking up their packets or online, they wouldn't lose traction. They could only gain in the grades just to make sure we were being thoughtful about that, but for meaningful engagement. But the families who were online got a mix, but I think robust experience. But we also asked every teacher to check in with their students at least twice a week. So that meant that even if you're not digitally on the virtual platform, right? When you're doing ACE, we're gonna start in with the television station. You're still having your classroom teachers, especially for our K-8s, right? Calling them and engaging over the phone instruction, if you will too. So it wasn't a perfect science, but it was a way for us to be able to reach out and touch all of our kids. We also know it has to be different for the fall. And that's why we're working in policy right now do all our recovery planning efforts and to make sure that all 20,000 of those kids are online and we are confident that we will have devices for all of those students as well for just a matter of solving the internet strategy. So I agree it's an equity issue obviously, but we did mitigate that a little bit with the grading stuff, but the fall has been so much different. I will also say, historically a lot of black communities do not trust systems and governments because of historical equity issues and racism and that kind of thing. And so we recognize that some of our families are not gonna feel comfortable bringing their kids back to school, right? Even if we are on a hybrid model, we knew we had to stand up some kind of virtual model as well so that we understand their respect, the need for families to feel safe with their children and comfortable with their schooling. So doing that balance all figured out also is gonna be a challenge for how we do equity around that. It's also something we just had to stand up for our families. Okay, anyone else on that point or okay. Well, another issue are the very unfortunate fact that state and local education budgets are now under a more severe strain than ever. At a time when obviously you need more resources. So short-term, as we heard in the discussion, the next congressional relief bill is key. So what do you think your schools would do with an emergency boost in e-rate funding? You know, what are the priorities and what kind of flexibility do you need in that regard? Right now I should mention, I think Sarah mentioned during the previous discussion that the house has already passed its version of a relief bill, the HEROES Act, which includes initially a $1.5 billion increase in e-rate funding through September of next year. So, you know, that would be, I don't know, if you can quickly think about what that would mean, but certainly there could be some infusion if a bill like that goes through. And I'm just wondering what you think your schools would be most likely to do with additional funding and what advice you have for other districts and educators. I'm happy to take the first shot at that. I know that in our case, we have a tested and a technology that's working. I know that we would effort completion of our community Wi-Fi project, but that would be more than just money. It would also require changing some of the e-rate rules around, you know, what hardware we're allowed to buy and where we're allowed to install it. Separate from e-rate. The other thing that we need to do in our school community is continue to ramp up professional development for teachers who are new to blended online flipped learning to continue to support those teachers with mentoring and high quality professional learning. Well, Brad, for us it'll be an influx of more software for teaching and learning. And the other thing that we are about to address that we could really use an influx of some extra dollars is addressing the learning needs for different types of students. So students in computer science, students in the arts, students in music, we need to provide them with a different type of device. And so there's a cost to that. And so we want to address that for those students and for our teachers. We want to give them more methods to instruct, you know, expand our doc cam program, you know, so there are some different things that teachers need device-wise beyond just a laptop. So all those things would be helpful. And what we would do is move that under what the current e-rate dollars do provide for and shove the other dollars toward our community wireless to get that beefed up even more because this is the time to build this out, right? Just quickly say nothing different, but I would add training for families and students, right? We did training for teachers really well. We did not do a great job of training for parents. And so I would offer that in addition to what all has already been said, we also need to carve out online training for families and how to act in multiple languages to access the online learning in a way, as parents being co-teachers right now as they are, that we have to stand. And I would just add on to what Tina is saying from our perspective at Microsoft, digital skilling has to be part and parcel of any kind of connectivity effort. You can't just assume if you build it, people will come. You absolutely have to show communities how to leverage these, this connectivity once it becomes available. So that has to be part of the approach and attacking this problem. So these things that you all have mentioned such as specialized, more specialized devices, software training for network extensions, are those things allowed under the current E-rate rules or will you need greater flexibility with whatever funding is coming in the future? Randy? Not covered and we need the flexibility to do it. And the reason that there are dollars left over in category two is that it's too difficult to access the category two dollars without an audit. It's gonna not go your way. So people shy away from it. People stay with the meat and potatoes parts of E-rate, but they stay away from the finer points because it's too prohibitive. If they could just broaden that a little bit, we could really make a difference. Right, and David, I think you mentioned to me perhaps that you actually leave category two money on the table because you could go and play everything, but you have really a greater needs, but you're not allowed to use it for those greater needs. That is exactly correct. We've not spent all of our category two budget ever, including the first five-year period, this one gap year, we won't spend all of that. And if the formula remains the same, we'll never be able to spend it all because we're able to use that money to provide very high quality, internal networks to our schools, access points, switches, routers, you know, all of those things you gotta buy to make that happen. And it doesn't cost as much as the amount of money we have in the budget. So I guess we could refresh our hardware every year, but that would be just simply a waste of taxpayer money and not ethical. So we just leave money on the table. We just can't find things to spend it on specifically because of our rules. Yeah, that's a shame. And then at the same time, you still have neighborhoods that aren't covered by your community wifi, right? Exactly. We need a rural electrification program for both urban and rural places just like we did in the 60s. Now, during the Johnson administration, they got power out to the rural areas of the United States that didn't have it before. We need to be doing that with broadband. Right. And this isn't something that the commission, the FCC was shocked to find out as a gap, right? I mean, Vicki, maybe you could talk just a minute about the fact that those two Southern Virginia school districts you mentioned, both rural, they joined with Air Band and Microsoft, right? To file a petition at the FCC to request flexibility to extend their network to students at home that was years ago and it's still pending, right? It was. And the reality is that the current rules are a bit vague but I think Brandy made the point that you don't wanna be caught in sort of auditing purgatory which I can speak to personally having worked at both the FCC and the Universal Service Administrative Company prior to joining Microsoft. And so Microsoft actually filed that petition in abundance of cost. You think it's a no-brainer, right? Because realistically what we should be striving for as a country is how to have these finite dollars do the most good. And that's a way of sort of optimizing the funding that's provided to anchor institutions to literally wirelessly extend it out, leveraging those same dollars, really taking a whole community approach. We remain very optimistic that at some point the petition will be granted. But we're hearing anecdotally that some school districts particularly in times like this maybe moving forward in any absence of having sort of a definitive ruling from the commission which again, I think is silent on this specific issue but because you have to cost allocate or the whole thing could be sort of spit out, it's important that we get clarity. Clarity is what's needed to actually continue to push people to innovate to solve this important problem. Right, so Randy and David, each of you has implemented a school led community Wi-Fi network as you described. And I'm hoping you could talk a bit more about the economics and local politics of getting that done. So specifically, and I guess this would be relevant for Tina as well as they move forward in Baltimore, but at a high level, how do you think about the economic sustainability of community Wi-Fi compared to paying cellular providers for mobile hotspots? That would be the first point. And then we can come back to the politics which may be harder. Dave, you wanna go first? You want me to go, or Tina? Go ahead, Randy. Well, San Jose is a very, very, very large city and it's exploded and here we are in the heart of Silicon Valley and I have kids who don't have access. So it's both an embarrassment, but it's also like for everyone else and every other locale, you can know that the problems are everywhere that they aren't unique. And no matter how many rich companies that there are in your neighborhood doesn't necessarily mean that any of it filters down to the people who actually do all the work. The costs for it, it costs us for a neighborhood and we count a neighborhood as about 24,000 people to 30,000 people. The cost is about a million, $1.4 million to put it up for six years. When you pencil it out versus, when I've worked out the numbers between hotspots for families and for, even if you did individual families rather than kids, the cost is about three times cheaper to do community wifi than it is to do bricks. So bricks is, you know the stories about where all the grocery stores are out of a neighborhood and you have to go to the 7-Eleven to buy your groceries. That's what using bricks ends up being. You don't necessarily get good access, but it's really expensive access, even at $10 a month, but it's what you have to do because it's what's in your neighborhood because you don't have a car and you don't have a way to get anywhere else. So when we, when Chris Funk and I came to this district, Chris is our superintendent. We said, we're not doing this. We're gonna build something that's gonna be big and it's gonna work for people and it's gonna serve everyone and we're gonna do this right. The politics of that are amazing. But one of the questions that you'd asked earlier about what was the impact of the telecoms being upset about that, they have not been. In fact, they contributed to our bond fund to run our bond. They see this as growing their clientele. That the service that we're gonna be able to offer is never gonna be as great as, you know, Generation 19, the Wi-Fi, the $900 phone. We're not competing with those guys. We're providing people with good service like basic cable effectively. You don't get everything, but you get enough for where you can move ahead to get what you want. So we have not had a pushback from the telecoms about that. We are a good telecom customer, both for our broadband, you know, for our connections for our schools and also for some bricks for places we can't mitigate yet. So that hasn't been a problem either, but the dollars for doing a community Wi-Fi type project are about a third of what they would be if we bought everybody a brick and a brick wouldn't work in the first place. So that's like saying, if you bought somebody a bag of Doritos, does that feed them for two days? Well, yeah, but not well. We're talking about a really good meal every day that you can count on. And what's nice is the costs go down after year six because all you're really doing is snapping in your hardware and hardware continues to improve. And what's been great for us in the politics of this is the city of San Jose didn't actually know how many poles they had. They didn't know what kind of power they had. They didn't know anything about their infrastructure. Now they know a lot, so there's value add for them. The second thing that's been kind of nice is we went to PG&E, our power provider, and when they saw how difficult was gonna be the leader, the electricity going to the access points, they decided to waive the costs of the electricity for all the poles. And that was their end time, which was great. Yeah, you've had incredible synergies. And I should clarify, if people didn't pick this up, that in San Jose, and I believe the same is true in Council Bluffs, that these networks are partnerships with the city. So in San Jose, you use the city fiber for backhaul. So that's free, I mean, from your perspective, not from theirs. And then, of course, they waive all the permitting fees and let you use the street lights and traffic signals to mount your little boxes. Correct. Yeah, that's true at Council Bluffs as well. And everything that Randy said is true and the total cost of ownership calculations we've done are the same results, two other things that I'll point out. When you said the partnership with the city, in our case, the city of Council Bluffs, that fiber's already there. They pulled 12 or 24, 36 pairs to these traffic signals and they're using hardly any of it. So there's no actual cost. It's opportunity cost, it is free. It's already there, it's existing infrastructure. None of that had to be built to make our network work. And the second thing is, our telecom gets a very nice income from school district internet service and it's E-rate category one. And that Wi-Fi or that network, ISP is only being used in school buildings, typically six and a half, seven, seven and a half hours a day. With our community Wi-Fi, that is now a 24-7 investment. So the actual cost per hour goes down. That bandwidth is available to our kids on non-school days. And right now in the summertime, we do not collect our devices in the summer. All of our kids have their devices and they're using them. We can see them using them. So that investment in internet service compounds because it's usable every single day at all times of the day. So. And we'll just offer for our tiny little project. It's $38,000 for schools. We have 170 school residents for schools, hoping to get 100 kids on at each one of our schools to see if this proof of concept actually works. So for those who are in an empathy state versus having the whole city behind you, that's where we are. We have an external funder who actually agreed to pay for it. If it works, we have other funders lining up actually to pay for it, which is fantastic. But it's gonna take time for us to get proof of concept to see if it actually does get our kids online and get them tended to learn it. Now on the, one quick follow-up on the politics is it would seem they would be, and again, because I know a bit more perhaps about thanks to David and Randy about Council Bluffs and East Side Union than I do about Baltimore. But I know in your cases, your community Wi-Fi that the schools have built out in partnership with the city, since the city is contributing, they're also open to the public on a separate SSID, which would seem to make the potential backlash from the private ISPs, from the telecoms, even dicier. Do you handle that in part by limiting the throughput? I mean, is it, I think you had said it was something like five up and five down megabits per second on the public portion. So it becomes, that's not a true substitute for having fixed broadband at home for families. You wanna do multiple Netflix or something. Is that part of what helps you get over that or is it just not even been an issue? Well, we are not, in any case, we insisted. The city was reticent to turn up the public side at first because they were afraid of the support issues that people would be calling them all the time, asking them, how do I get, you know, all the usual, how do I print kind of things. And we said, nah, they'll treat it like Starbucks where it works or it doesn't work. And they'll go down the street until they can get on it. So don't worry about that. And that's been our experience is that people just use it. And it's pretty simple. But we insisted that the city, that the regular community have access, one, because they should have access. Like, come on, this isn't even, this isn't even something we have to think about. Like people should get on and get on YouTube and learn how to change the tire in their car or whatever. It's just, it's a given. But the second thing is, is that we did not want our parents getting our kids passwords and logins for their secured access. We don't want to turn people into cheaters and liars because of the rules. And when the rules aren't fair, it turns people into doing the wrong thing, which is you stress really hard with the kids, don't give out your username and password. And so we knew that if we didn't have on the public side, you know, the big brothers and the big sisters and the moms and dad that go, come on, man, just get me on, just put me on. And you know what, I couldn't even argue with that. That I would do the same thing. So that was the first insistence. The pushback was, in fact, I've had to talk the city into un-ratcheting down the access. What we found is our people had a lot better experience when we just put it wide open. Granted, some people may hog it and they may watch a bunch of Netflix or whatever, big deal. They, for the most part, they don't. For the most part, people are good. For the most part, people do what they're supposed to. It's pretty easy to catch the people who are abusing it and you just talk to them and tell them to knock it off. And once they know that you can pay attention and get them, they stop. We just hasn't been a big issue. On the city side, same thing. They couldn't believe how much more of a positive experience they had by unthrottling our areas rather than what they do at the airport and downtown. Their airport and downtown solution was the big fear for them that it was such a negative experience because they did throttle. We said, don't throttle. It's not gonna be a big deal. And the way the internet works, it'll be fine. And it has been fine. And so with the telecoms, people still like to have LTE. People, you know, business people still don't wanna be on a public network. So it's not a big, there's not a big conflict there. It's not gonna be long. We're running a few minutes over. So we will wrap up in just a couple. Thanks for hanging in with us. David, unless you had something to add on that one. What he said is right on, our experience is the same. Good. Okay, that's good to know. So I just wanna get in one, at least one audience question, since it's right on point and kind of helps round out some of this, at least from a technical point of view, which is, you know, what do you do about areas that are not technically or economically feasible to cover? You know, I think Randy did mention that they give out, you know, some hotspots there in those places, but are you doing other things or how do you think about that? I mean, is there definitely a limit to this? Because it's, even a community Wi-Fi network is not something that can magically cover everyone, whether it's urban, suburban, or rural, right? Our local telecom is Cox Communications and they offered a program called Connected Compete, which was a low-cost, reasonable installation of a home cable-based network and it included a Wi-Fi router. So we would direct students that way. We also have, you know, some hotspots that we're using. We're using other available public Wi-Fi locations in the community, trying to publicize those. It's a multifaceted approach, just like the other school districts. You know, one solution doesn't solve the whole problem. And I would just add to what David is saying. You know, first, one solution doesn't solve the whole problem. You can't lay fiber everywhere, particularly in these sort of, you know, dense, you know, very sparsely populated areas who sort of lean into new innovative solutions, but you also need to continue to think about, you know, higher use of public funding to support this, because sometimes even the $10 price point for something like Comcast or AnacentJos or the Cox version to connect to compete, there is still a need for funding to come along and to commission a rules and rules display, you know, lifeline and e-ray can play a role in that. And so I think that that's important and what we're seeing in some of the new proposals that are being considered here in DC where I live is that there are, there is thinking around the devices as well. These programs have been around for a long time, but if people can't get a device, they'll just go to their phones. And in a lot of instances and there's research to bear that out. And so I do think you need to Randy's point and our president, Microsoft's president Brad Smith talks about this all the time. You need to sort of harness the energy and the efforts and like-minded determination to kind of get this done, which you saw done around the world, electrification efforts. That's what we need here, like yesterday. Yeah, and I should mention, yeah, definitely. And I should mention there is another community in California, Lindsey, Lindsey Unified School District, which is less urban, of course, it's a farm worker community. And they have a community Wi-Fi network. I believe they're about, it's extremely impressive. They're about two neighborhoods short of covering everybody. But I just want to note there, they told me that they use Wi-Fi for about 80% of the households that they're targeting. And then they use educational broadcast, I'm sorry, educational broadband service spectrum, EBS, which is licensed to school districts and colleges on a local basis. They use EBS spectrum for the other 20% that is less densely populated. And the thinking is that the EBS band, that equipment is much more expensive, but it has a better range and better quality. So they use it there and they use Wi-Fi, which is more affordable wherever they can. So it's an interesting hybrid there. And I'd urge anyone who's really interested, educators, look at their website, they have an impressive video, short five-minute video about their network and how it's architected. That's Lindsey with L-I-N-D-S-A-Y, California Schools. Well, but I'll just ask you all if you have any final word, any final thought to share before we sign off since we are over time and I really appreciate you hanging in. Anything else or, okay, well, we'll give a big round of virtual applause to our panel and to all our speakers today and to the audience, which is very, very large today, a lot of interest in this issue and we'll be doing more on this in the future. So thank you all.