Money and schools are in a constant dance. It takes money to educate children in all the school-based programs our communities demand. Of this there is no debate. Schooling requires money. Our dance with money begins and ends with governments. How much will the state legislature allocate? The state is the largest banker for school funding. How many federal dollars will make it to local schools? And, what amount of money will local taxpayers approve for the school board’s local levy? Add together the monies contributed by these three levels of government and you have the revenue side of the annual school budget. Although it seems that the “ask” is always larger than than the “get”, for the purpose of general education our schools are adequately funded.
Except. There is one “ask” that has not been satisfied and now is the time to “get” this singular requirement of education successfully funded. Internet infrastructure.
Education is now married to the Internet. The pandemic sealed those vows. Every school and every child is an Internet user or needs to be. In the post-pandemic, the requirement for students wherever they are to be connected to the Internet will not diminish – it will only grow larger. Yet, we are nation of Internet patchworks that provide wonderful high speed connectivity for some and no connectivity to ineffective connectivity for others.
If there was governmental funding power in Leave No Child Behind, we need to reword that charge into Leave No Child Unconnected.
The Biden administration has opened the door. Generally stated, the White House wants to provide significant economic relief that bridges all in our nation to a better post-pandemic economy, and, they want everyone in the nation to know that the federal government is providing that economic relief. Infrastructure is large in their political-economic game plan. The President has pointed to bridges and highways and dams. Federal dollars dedicated to replacement and improvement of infrastructure will fuel business recovery and expand employment. A great plan! We have historical examples of this level of federal infusion succeeds, thank you FDR.
A part of the Roosevelt plan was rural electrification. A part of the Biden plan must be rural Internet connectivity.
High speed Internet connectivity for every community must be one of our infrastructure outcomes. Internet connectivity fits the White House’s agenda perfectly. The Internet is the modern interstate highway of commerce, communication, and education. Every person in the nation is directly or indirectly a user of the Internet. Yet, too many are so far off the Internet grid that they are not within the economy. We cannot raise everyone in our national economy without lifting those Internet connections into the economy.
And, the Internet is in dire need of governmental action. The pandemic has taught us that a patchwork of local fixes to a national problem is ineffective and inefficient. Cities and towns and villages and townships do not have the financial resources to create the Internet systems required. We need to get the Internet off our telephone lines and power it through cables and towers and satellites. A local tax levy cannot fund this level of infrastructural improvement. We need big government to make a big difference.
Schools fit into this plan for infrastructural improvement. When schools closed their campuses in March 2020, the Internet became the classroom. Teaching and learning went on-screen. However, children at home needed adequate Internet connection in order to be on-screen and too many had no Internet in their home or extremely poor Internet. In the post-pandemic, remote and virtual education are not going away. Remote education is the new option of parent choice of schooling for children. The pandemic pointed out our extreme Internet inequity, an inequity that will only become more apparent with our increased uses of virtual teaching and learning.
A dredging up of the Bush slogan “Leave No Child Behind” makes this statement boldly evident – any child without adequate high speed Internet connection is left behind.
If I need to make more of an argument for this need to get a reader’s positive nod, then nothing I can write will succeed.
We need universal high speed Internet connectivity in every household in every community of our nation and governmental funding is the only mechanism that will satisfy this need. Our representatives in United States Senate and House of Representatives are the government that can make this happen. They are the dancers on this singular dance floor and only they can create enough money to Leave No Child Unconnected.