¶ Intro / Opening
Hello there, listeners. In this week's episode of the K12 Tech Talk podcast, we ask the question, will tariffs impact pricing on projects for next year?
¶ Podcast Introduction
We talk about Google's new Chrome AI-powered security feature, but of course, I raise privacy questions. And the big topic of the night, Mark brings us down with the threat to E-Rate. Have a listen.
Live from the ntp studios this is the k12 tech talk podcast episode 202 uh we're a distributed podcast tonight uh well i guess chris is chris i'm home yeah you spent the last couple days in vermont and we'll talk about that in a second uh mark you are not home you are in what looks like a bunker with a concrete wall and you're tan no no that's from the comment before show that he's still blushing about that comment
Oh yeah no i i'm not tan i i'm just it's i don't know what's wrong with the camera i'm no i am in los angeles right now so this is believe it or not it's my first like substantial visit to la so kind of fun have.
You met anybody famous
Uh nope nope not at all besides.
Our french rr
Yeah i'll see him uh in a couple of days so getting together with some old friends uh doing some work out here and getting together with my superintendent which i'm excited about is there snow believe it or not i can actually see snow from.
Where i am can you really i didn't realize they were
Yeah yeah la is is surrounded by mountains so yeah.
I knew that i didn't realize those mountains were that high
Well maybe that's snow i don't know it's.
A cloud it's a low
I left so much snow when i was uh in new england we got just pummeled by a snowstorm on uh saturday and sunday and then i got an airplane and flew to la so i'm happy as can be yeah.
I passed by you on a plane uh to vermont we just went to uh the tech clinic with vital earn and i felt like we were just missing each other and there was snow there was snow in vermont like feet feet of snow
Yeah did.
You have the candy treat that mark told you to find
I looked for it i did buy some maple syrup candy um that does taste like maple syrup as a candy and then i bought some maple syrup so
The treat i was telling you to to to ask about was sugar on snow. You don't buy it.
You make it. Oh.
You didn't ask anybody about it, did you?
No, and in Missouri, we just do pee on snow. I guess we make that ice cream.
Snow ice cream.
Yeah, we do that too.
Yeah, with raw eggs. Yeah.
It's basically just maple syrup on snow, but there's some more steps to it, and it is delicious.
Well, I was in Vermont at the Tech Clinic with VitalLearn with David of NTP. We had a great time there. David got to talk up Sentinel One, his SOC, TVM, and Core Services that he does with KTOL Tech Pro Consortium Pricing.
¶ Vermont Tech Clinic Experience
Uh i'll tell you guys and david's gonna hear this but and josh you well mark you know this too david's a talker yeah so i'm i was saying i'm kind of jet lagged or whatever but i think i'm just i'm just just worn out from all the conversations i had with david like david lag we had david lag there was one flight that david was like uh my seat got changed we were sitting by each other and i just made like a funny face as if i changed it you know yeah i don't know what happened
i didn't change the seat though anyway we had a great time up at uh vermont uh and had snow and then came back to missouri today and josh we're having snow here we are uh we're tired of that did your
Uh pipes freeze chris
No pipes have frozen good
Because last time i got this cold but like we're gonna have negative 20 tonight wind chills uh you had frozen pipes all right mark now that you're in la you're two hours behind us so we have more late breaking news than you do you you won't get it for two hours i guess uh what news have you curated for us tonight mark
So it is a little bit of a slow week, not too much going on. I did find a couple of articles that are interesting conversation points. The first one, which is not necessarily relevant to K-12, but it's more of a talking point. And I wanted to get your thoughts on this one because I'm intrigued by it. And I want to see what you guys have to say. So this week, Google Chrome's AI-powered security feature went live for everybody.
And what happens is you opt into this service in Chrome browser, gives you enhanced protection by essentially using artificial intelligence to just view if you have any dangerous extensions, downloads, or web pages that you visit. There is one heck of a warning. I don't say warning, but there's a description before you turn it on that kind of explains that you are opting to upload your entire browser history to Google's AI search tool if you want to allow this to happen.
So I was intrigued by it. I have not bit the bullet and clicked the button. And I wanted to see what are you guys doing? Because Josh, you tend to be more conservative than me. And Chris is more like, let's just click the buttons.
There's no privacy on the internet.
Oh, okay.
Like, I mean, your stuff, even if you use a VPN, that's why I laugh at VPN commercials. And, you know, the people that think they're hiding, They're searching up bad websites, nudie sites, using a VPN. It's really not hiding anything. There's no privacy on the Internet. I don't know that I would have a problem turning this on. I don't have anything to hide.
Okay. So, Chris, I want to hear your answer. I'm going to take it one step further.
Yeah, I was just reading the screen. I mean, it sounds like a good thing. Warns you about dangerous sites even ones google doesn't notice before because it's doing some analysis stuff uh looking for suspicious downloads it's doing better checks of what password you're using if it's been compromised before that sounds like stuff i'd be turning on for my people you know well
That was gonna be my next question should this opportunity arise for you to turn this on for your entire district.
Now okay so my answer was at first on a personal level at an enterprise level if it's just dns queries and you know what sites you're hitting that's one thing but if it's actually like screen scraping data and sending that data off to be analyzed
It is I
Have a problem yeah see I have a problem with that on enterprise setups especially a K12 environment
I was just thinking turn it on for K12 and leave it off for myself that's really funny
So what it does say, just to be very explicit about what the warning says, it says, sends the URL of sites you visit and a small sample of page content downloads extension activity and system information. So you.
Have to assume
If you're on your student information system.
Yes, exactly.
A small sample of that. So you're a little apprehensive about it.
¶ Google Chrome AI Security Feature
Are you still going to turn it on for yourself if you are or even allow your employees to turn it on if they're visiting your data system?
I don't i think i would disable this at an enterprise level uh for school at home i i might turn it on
Do you chrome it at home do you duck go what do you got i
Got chrome you duck duck go don't you
No i don't
No yeah i use chrome
I i i chrome it this is random reminding me have you ever typed in like like your password on accident into like the google into like the search bar never and then you're like oh crap I just searched my password and like google now the bad
Guys have it
Google for sure got that one yep no results oop I'm in I'm in I'm gonna turn it on
So there's another article in a local blog around costs of devices with tariffs. It's estimating that tariffs are going to drive Chromebook parts and devices up 10 to 15 percent. This is based on the previous tariffs from the last administration and current cost estimates based on on what the president has said he's going to institute tariffs. So we're already seeing manufacturers both on the sales front as well as real time pricing going up.
We've heard from some districts. I just talked to a district yesterday who said that their latest quote was an additional 10%. So that's kind of spot on. And it's also impacting not just the devices, but repairs. So, gentlemen, what are you going to do for this? Are you taking the approach of I'm going to talk to my budget office and make sure that they're aware?
Or could you use this as a way to start to change policies, to reduce the number of devices that are broken or lost, to start to keep the cost down, or maybe even institute, we've talked about this in the last couple of episodes, chargebacks to parents for devices that are broken. Anything that you guys are doing within your districts for tariffs?
We are not particularly for tariffs, but we already charge back damage costs to families. One thing that I actually started going down a rabbit hole earlier this week was the cost of getting refurbished machines versus brand spanking new machines. So that's going to be a pretty significant cost savings for us. The other thing we're doing is we are buying Chromebook repair parts from Chromebookparts.com and getting that discount for pro members. How do you like that, Chris?
I love that. We haven't addressed – I haven't brought up tariffs at all with my administration. I know our – so we do the self-maintainer Lenovo stuff, and we do the self-insured stuff with our parents. And that money, we never make money on any of that. We either break even or lose money. I don't see us increasing any prices or doing anything that's going to hit our patrons or whatever you want to say. But this is real.
I mean, we already had – I remember the last round of Chromebooks we bought, and that was because we bought those touchscreens as well. But the cost already went up. So if this becomes a – the thing even with how tariffs and stuff play out is you always wonder how long that's going to last. And then does that give those companies a reason to keep the price up?
Oh, absolutely.
They're going to – oh, the consumer will still pay this dollar amount. Yeah. It is a concerning thing just for long game too.
I've got an RFP out right now. I'm going to be curious to see what my Chromebook quotes come back at this year.
Well, there's an interesting argument against prices being raised by these manufacturers with them saying they don't want to start school districts looking at other competitors and looking at different models. So if you're right now paying for the touchscreen device and the tariffs drive that up, then maybe school districts are going to go and look at a competing manufacturer or they're going to move off of the touchscreen devices.
So there is some evidence that manufacturers are starting to eat the cost of tariffs just to prevent people from making a different decision.
I like that, too. I mean, I think about my relationship with Lenovo and we're all in on Chromebooks district wide with them. and we do the self-maintainer, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, if... I mean, money is the number one thing that we tend to look at. And then we look at design and durability and all those other things.
¶ Tariff Impact on Device Pricing
So, yeah, that's super interesting to think about. Hey, maybe the district just puts their foot down and try to put the squeeze on the company.
Yeah, it's funny because to me, Chromebooks are one of those things. The cost is, in the scheme of things, relatively cheap. They're practically a commodity. Like, you know, you're going to buy it, and so many of the internal parts are the same, regardless of manufacturer. Like, there's only so many Intel chips that are going in these models. There's only so many LCD. Like, the LCD screens are practically interchangeable now between manufacturers.
It just, it's going to come down to dollars and cents. And if I have to move from Dell to Acer because they're $25 cheaper per device, like that's a significant difference.
Yeah.
So that's exactly the – yeah,
That's the pricing that people are starting to see, $25 to $50 per device more as a result of the tariffs.
Wow.
Well, I will say this. What people are being told is that some of the pricing prices are the results of the tariffs. There could be a whole host of things that drive prices up.
But yeah.
Yeah, shortage, you know. Yeah. You couple that with the funding issues that districts are staring in the face. That could be a it could open that door. We've talked about it a couple of different times of, OK, or is it time to roll back one to one programs in particular grade levels? You know, is it is it worth the three hundred dollars a device to send a device home with a second grader every day?
Yeah yeah so at middle school in particular you know we'll have kids that just can't handle bringing their chromebooks home so we arrange with the library you know here's the kids that always check their chromebook in to be set aside you know each day kind of thing um you know what if that scales up because we're just trying to get whatever middle school chromebooks that's that's our that's our most breakage right so so yeah let's let's change our program where they're not going home.
Maybe it's just eighth grade and maybe it's not sixth grade. You know, maybe it's just as needed. Well, that's good conversations.
And I think it really depends on how your building flows too.
¶ E-Rate Challenges and Supreme Court Case
You know, if your students start their day out and end their day in the same classroom, like an advisory class or homeroom class for first five minutes of the day for the last five minutes of the day, that's an easy way to throw a cart in that room and those devices stay in that cart overnight.
They charge the kids grab them when they come in they put them back at the end of the day like that ideally that would be my solution but my my middle school they're they don't operate in that manner and i don't know how many any more do um i did when i was in high school but hell that was almost 30 years ago um Yeah, I don't know.
Put some dollars to this one. If your device is, if you're doing a refresh of your device and it goes up $25, the average school district, you're looking at $100,000, $150,000 in additional costs. So that's one or two teachers that you're looking to lose as a result of the increased cost. So, yes, I think when it comes down to it, school districts are already facing budget crisis. They're going to make a different decision.
Uh i don't know how much you're paying your teachers but that's like four teachers in missouri well
You got i'm trying to account for benefits pensions all that kind of stuff wow all right that's it for the.
News that's all i got all right chris what do you got from uh pro land well first you're gonna hit an advertiser aren't you thousand
Percent so check out lightspeed lightspeed systems.com they can do your content filter help you out with classroom management it and more. Yeah. So on K12 Tech Pro, I have a couple of topics to discuss, but these tied in well and it's kind of good. They were talked about not so long ago or pretty recently on K12 Tech Pro, but up at Vermont's Tech Clinic, they had these good breakout sessions where the attendees would split and kind of pick a topic and discuss it.
So this first one I mentioned to you guys, I think we've talked about it on here before, but Josh, you said that it's been a little while. So let's unpack substitutes. What do you guys recommend? What do you think best practices would be? What do you do as far as technology access to a substitute teacher? And then the second part would be to a substitute office worker. What kind of access do those have? Do those have the same access kind of thing?
Can I ask you a clarifying question? We would constitute substitutes in one of two categories, like your daily subs, somebody's out sick, and then a long-term sub, meaning someone's on maternity leave.
Yes. Yeah. So mostly talking about daily subs. Okay. The general assumption, I think, of the room and then I think of us is if it's a long-term sub, we start treating them like a regular teacher. Okay.
So our itinerant subs are day-to-day subs. They have both a network account and a Google account, and the teachers are sharing those day-to-day lesson plans through Drive. Since we don't classify them as a classroom teacher, so they don't get Google Classroom access, they're not allowed in our student information system.
All of that, they're just, you know, it sounds horrible, but they're the adult in the room that take attendance and send it down to the office and make sure everybody gets to class in the appropriate time. They really have no rights on the network.
Is that a shared Google Drive for the whole building or what?
No, when their sub-job is filled, they're notified who picked up that job, and then they're supposed to share any documentation for that period with them. Now, does that happen very often? No. Very few teachers actually leverage that functionality and do it. Uh, most of them, when they know they're going to be out, they have written lesson plans or whatever. Um, but the, the fact that the substitute can still, they can at least log into the PC is themselves.
They can log into their Google account as themselves. And if they need to, they can email the teacher, email the principal and get help.
So we automatically grant all employees an account and an email, whether or not that substitute actually knows that they have an email and they use that email as a different subject. I did. I remember talking to a substitute who's like, I sub in four different towns. I'm not keeping track of four different emails.
So that was the challenge of,
Of just helping substitutes to know that they had an account. But the other challenge we had is even if they they were in their their google account and there were some subset that you know they would be there in a different school in our district every day and so they would use that email address but the ability for us to grant them access to the student information system and content was it's very very manual and a lot of schools you know the principal is extremely busy in the morning they're
not going to sit down and start swapping things out and change of permissions and a lot of times you don't know who that substitute is until you know five minutes before class so unfortunately um there's just a lot of you know non-electronic uh usage when there's a substitute in the class for a daily sub i.
Uh go ahead no go ahead we we didn't really talk about workflow so i'll try to touch on that so our school board approves our subs, um, to which then they felt like a tech user agreement. That's how they're then getting like a windows account. Uh, and we give a windows account to every sub teacher by default. And then we don't give them Google unless they do. It's like a 10, 15 minute extra training. Uh, the training is something that I made up and it just goes over.
Uh, they have to send an email from like their personal email to prove that they They know how to send an email. They access a Google Doc and type in it just to prove that they know how to get to a Google Doc. And they fill out a Google quiz. The video talks through the basics of what's going to be in the classroom when they show up. Like here is DVD player, look for remote. And so then they do a quiz. So they've at least had a basic understanding of
what they should be showing up to. And if they do that, then we make them a Google account that only emails internally. Now, that used to be used. It was supposed to be, here's your level one subs with a Windows account, and here's your level two that did Google in the extra. And then our person that assigned subs would pick from the level two people first. But we just are desperate for subs now, so it doesn't matter if you've done the training or not. Like you just get asked.
So I've, I've wondered if we shouldn't just give Google accounts to everybody, you know, just encourage that. Chris, do you
Guys block external access or external emails for subs? Yes. Am I remembering that correctly?
Yeah, we only do, like the sub can just email within our domain. They can email students within our domain, but they can't do anything externally. Now, we don't do like the shared drives, and I think that's a great idea. There was one conversation about doing, they do like a building share with those subs, in particular, like at the elementary level. Because sometimes, like you said, Josh, the sub's going to take attendance.
And it could be a last minute thing where there is not a great prep so there's some activity sheets and different things in there that are just like a default thing that the sub could access I thought that was a kind of interesting idea too alright so that's teachers what about office staff you know your sub secretaries I
Can't say we have sub secretaries i i i don't know that i've done anything like that since i've been here
Yeah i we we do not i mean the same thing they get an account but uh they don't necessarily use it i'm really afraid to ask the question of you know are you is we won't go there but right yeah.
I'm a little mm-hmm yep
Yeah that was part
To the student information.
System that was part of the the interesting conversation that was had like at the tech clinic was you have a a part-time person or a substitute secretary you know however you wanted to find that and you know the the building doesn't know who is subbing in for the day so they were even having some of this conversation about well do you do a generic account which i josh i talked up Missouri like we kind of all tried to run away from generic accounts a couple years ago
but again or are they sharing you know their infinite campus account if you don't know that those folks are coming in to sub for the secretary you know that even brings me I try to just turn my head like we have like our high school front office and during lunch that secretary leaves for lunch and another secretary comes in i hope they're switching accounts but they're only there for you know less than an hour uh
it always begs the question of you know did they really you know who's who's in there
Um, well, there's a new feature out if, if you use clever, uh, where I, they, I'm going to drop the support article in the chat. So there's a little bit of information. It's not public yet. It sounds like from this article, it's coming out in March, uh, where you can turn on sub access and you'll generate a badge for a substitute and they'll be able to log in and view the teacher's page, uh, for a limited amount of time.
One really cool feature, which I was thinking about of my head is, well, wait a minute, this allows a teacher or a substitute to then impersonate, I don't want to say impersonate, but they're in that teacher's page. When they click on a learning app, they're going to be logged in that learning app as the teacher. Very cool feature, which I was thinking about, but then I just realized that the article actually addresses this, is that certain resources will be blocked out.
So if you have Google in Clever, that will have a red X on and the substitute will not be able to log into that teacher's Google account. So pretty good way of addressing security concerns while also allowing that substitute access.
Yeah, that's cool.
All right. Another another post on here, which this is going to be brought to you by Safer Watch app. That's saferwatchapp.com. They can do your anonymous tip reporting, threat reporting, incident management, drill tracking, assessment stuff, alert systems and more. Check out saferwatchapp.com. Their app is cool. It is slick. But a couple of days ago, we started getting posts on Pro. And again, this was topic at Vermont's Tech Clinic with VitaLearn.
It's still about the power school breach. and we had it's funny because we had just talked about uh how things have gotten quiet uh and then we started seeing people post uh that their parents uh are that their guardians are receiving letters uh about the power school breach about about data possibly being compromised kind of thing so from power school from power school without i guess without the school really getting a heads up that that was going down but the letters are going out wasn't
There a comment over on pro by a district that hasn't used power school and their parents got the letter
Yes it
Was i know that district is an infinite campus district and has been an infinite campus district for some time and their parents are getting these power school letters
Because they were really scratching in their heads on how and why. Yes.
It's hard to know why, but it's very possible that that parent went to another district that uses PowerSchool, or they even applied to a school that used PowerSchool.
We don't apply to schools in Missouri. We probably will be soon, though, next year.
We're registered.
Yeah.
There was one person that talked about how what this general thing about how old some of this data is uh where a school either left power school but the data was still you know power school still had the data it was still still done uh but one person talked about because i the math was messing me up they were like it was like data of like 30 years ago or something like well that's weird but it's not if you were moving from sys to sys to sys
and you end up with power school and you did a bunch of historical data like that sucks um yeah so power school sending out this letter uh it says to power school user or parent slash guardian and then it does some explanation uh which i guess it's good i mean we were just complaining about communication so
A couple different viewpoints on this, like good on them for doing it. Number one, I feel like I need to move my screen because I'm not looking at you guys.
Yeah, it's been annoying me the whole time.
I'm sorry. My camera's on the other monitor. Good on them for sending out those emails to parents. You know, like that needed to happen. It probably should be a physical letter in the mail as well.
Um but again for those parents or for those districts that haven't been on power school for a while like part of me wants to feel like that's a responsibility of the district part of me wants to feel like that's good for power school to take that initiative and send those letters i'm not real sure where i land um like i feel like the district should be taking the lead on those notifications but also maybe power school should take the lead on those notifications We already
know that PowerSchool is notifying state Department of Educations and Attorney General. So maybe they're just kind of taking this by the horns. I don't know. I find it interesting.
I'm going to ask a question that I'm really afraid to answer. So in the PowerSchool webinar, they stated that they have changed the protocols and PowerSchool support no longer has access to each customer's instance unless you take action and grant them access. If that was the case, how did PowerSchool have the data to send families this notice?
Liars.
Well, I mean, they had the data that had already been taken. Like, they knew whose data had already been taken. Is it just a copy of that? That would be the assumption.
I don't know.
But bigger question along those lines, Mark. if let's make the assumption that they're operating off this secondary copy of the data that was taken What are they doing to protect that data while it's at rest at PowerSchool? Well, you know, like it's data, you know, that's, uh, yeah, that's a good one. I don't know. I don't know the answer there.
All right.
And we don't know like the bad guy that made the backup before he deleted it. Like we don't know where that USB stick is.
It's a pinky promise. they're they're pinky promising to keep it safe
It's fine do
You have another sponsor i was going to tell my uh threat level freak out mode incident we had
This week this next threat level freak out mode by josh is brought to you by class link uh they have a we we we know that ed tech tools are on the rise uh teachers using more and more every single year class link can help you with your sso with your rostering, with your analytics, with your MFA, all bundled up into Classlink. So check out Classlink. It's secure. It's affordable. It's reliable support. Classlink.com. Back to you, Josh.
So Monday, President's Day, we were off. I got an email from a teacher sometime in the afternoon. She's like hey i think my remind account has been hacked because a message went out to a parent inappropriate message went out to a parent it was a link i was gonna say
What what's the details
It was a link to a facebook video that it let's just say is a topic that has been in the media and would have gotten people upset um So she's panicked, like, who else got this video? How did my Remind account send this if I didn't send it? Okay, you know, raise the alarm flag. I'm suspending your Google account. We're going to dig into this. So I text the person at school that's in charge of Remind. I'm like, hey, look through Remind logs, see what you can find.
I look through Gmail logs because we SSO with Google to Remind. And I immediately did not see any authentication on this account. For the last three days. I'm like, that's weird if this was sent with Remind in her account. So we figured out that it was a, with Remind, you can communicate over text and it looks like it's sending through Remind.
Like the teacher had a text message from Remind on her phone that was from a parent and she replied to the text message and it went back to the parent through Remind. Long story short, I met this teacher at school, looked at her phone, and her phone somehow had sent 15 different text messages to people with this link to this Facebook video. I said, what were you, did you leave your phone unattended for a period of time?
Like, what was going on? She goes, no, this was sent at one o'clock, and I was in a meeting with a retirement my retirement advisor for an hour and a half and it you know one o'clock was during that meeting and my phone was in the coat of or in the pocket of my coat so i don't i still don't have a good explanation how these text messages were sent but it it sent like 15 text messages out as her from her phone and she wasn't using it not cool we went from remind being breached to
there's something really wonky with your phone maybe i
Bet it was the retirement person like just trying to get it to retire
Remotely remotely hacked it yeah early retirement Oh, that's my story. A lot more anticlimactic than I thought it would be.
No, I appreciated it. Mark, you liked it?
No, it was the best story I've heard all day.
Guys are jerks.
Anyway, Fortinet. Email FortinetPodcast at Fortinet.com. We have the K2 Tech Pro meetup coming up, the Midwest Tech Talk Security Symposium, March 6th and 7th, and Fortinet will be there. This thing is Jurassic Park themed, fellas. I'm really excited about it. We're having people bring their oldest tech slash memorabilia. We're going to put it on display as if you're in a museum.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, it should be. Someone already messaged me. they still have uh i think it's still wrapped in plastic like windows 3.1
Oh that's funny which
Is probably worth some money uh so i'm i'm excited and i think he said something about some some floppy disks so i'm hoping we get some good technology to show up and we have
Some fun at one of my jobs we had one of the real big was it 10 inch floppies yeah we would give to the person who made the dumbest mistake at any given time it
Stayed on their desk kind of thing
Yeah until the next person made a really dumb mistake and then they were able to hand it off to somebody else.
I like that. Anyway, Fortinet going to be at the security symposium. They're doing some workshop stuff with us.
Kind of like the cone of shame.
I'd like that.
Yeah, but Fortinet's not, you know, we wouldn't consider Fortinet a cone of shame.
No. I used to give a free spam and water lunch to the building that clicked on my phishing emails the most. And I had a building that...
Celebrate the positive, Chris.
They were like, this isn't funny. I thought it was hilarious.
Swedish fish.
I put it in their teacher's lounge. It was cans of Spam with cups. And I wrote a note, go to water fountain for the water. I only did that one year.
¶ E-Rate Uncertainty and Future Implications
That's horrible celebrate the positive chris
Well this this would be kind of a quick one uh i went down a rabbit hole uh this week around talking with a couple of people and reading up on all the paperwork that's being filed on e-rate right now because supreme court session is about to start and it is going to include the uh e-rate the fcc versus uh consumer research which is the big e-rate decision so a lot of paperwork's being filed this week and last uh there's a lot of letters of support going out so i was
like let's go let's go down this rabbit hole and find out what is the story with this e-rate case and what could happen should this case go sour so, i'll kind of divide into three parts first is i'll give you a little bit of a background on what this case is and what it means second is um i'll kind of dive into the the logistics of what these arguments are. And then the third is what happens should the Supreme Court come down and say no to E-rates, which is the most interesting part.
So step one, what is the entire basis of this case? So this is a case filed by Consumer Research. It's, or Consumers Research. It's an organization that's almost a hundred years old. They are, I won't kind of go into the backstory of this one, but they are essentially a Republican-leaning or conservative-leaning organization that has been filing a bunch of different lawsuits over different things.
They are, you know, some of their work, they're behind the corporate bannings or boycotts against Disney around their kind of woke agenda. They're behind the Anheuser-Busch anti-Budd Light situation. You know, this is this organization that has a lot of conservative motivations. So given that we have three branches of government right now controlled by the Republican Party, It's a valid piece of information here.
They are arguing that the E-Rate program itself violates the non-delegation doctrine, which means non-delegation doctrine is a part of the Constitution that says that Congress is the only person or body that can establish laws. And what they're saying is that the FCC is establishing a law or they've gone too far in the E-Rate program.
And so they're trying to basically have the E-rate program ruled as unconstitutional, essentially saying that the FCC has taken too much power and delegated to USAC, which is Congress's role and not theirs. That's an important point, which we'll get back to in a second. So that's the first part of it. That's kind of the history of it. where we are right now is the fifth district court originally came back when they have like a smaller court or a three-person court.
They said, no, there's no problems with this one. We're going to rule against this ruling. Case was taken back up again by the full court. And that's when they said, hey, no, this does look like it's a violation of the non-delegation doctrine. So we are going to rule it. Everybody at the time, both the FCC and Consumers Research said, hey, this needs to go to the Supreme Court.
If you think about the overall impact of this, of the FCC kind of taking too much power and almost usurping the congressional delegations or their legislative power, this has deeper meaning, which is why they wanted to go to the Supreme Court. This is expected to be taken up in the upcoming Supreme Court hearings, which is going to be starting in a couple of weeks in March. So we should be seeing this case taken up in front of the Supreme Court in March or April. Now for the scary part.
That was scary enough.
Yeah, yeah. You've taken it too far, FCC. We're going to rule this unconstitutional, but we're going to delay implementation of this ruling until X number of days. That would give the FCC time to come back, come up with a plan to sunset the E-Rate program. That would also give Congress the ability to kind of come up with a solution. There's lots of opinions as to whether it could happen. The general consensus is it's unlikely that the Supreme Court would actually delay a decision.
Typically, when the Supreme Court makes a decision like this and they rule something as unconstitutional, it's an immediate ruling. If that happens, so let's say that in two weeks the Supreme Court takes this case up and they say, yeah, it is unconstitutional. We're going to rule against it. E-rate stops immediately. This is the scary part.
Not when funding dries up?
No, immediate. That means that the FCC pilot could potentially come to a halt. That means that applications that are out there, your form 470s that have been filed, stops. Funding that has been approved, but yet to be issued, stops. So there is a potentially catastrophic event that could happen in a couple of weeks should the supreme court rule against this one you're.
Just a barrel of sunshine yeah
We should have ended
There's a whole host of other things that could happen but but the the thing that we have to wrestle with is it's either absolutely nothing happens meaning the supreme court over terms. The status quo, e-rate continues as normal. Or life comes to a screeching halt mid-March for schools and libraries. There is an overwhelming amount of support being sent to the Supreme Court right now in favor of it. The superintendents organizations have come forward.
The libraries, because remember libraries are also in this one, they have come forward and with letters of support it i'm going to be very hopeful that that helps the the ruling um because not because they're it's about sympathy but it's about them kind of talking about the importance of this and the impact but at the end of the day yeah.
Does that matter
Like no yeah.
If if they're judging whether or not it was unconstitutional the the the good that it does quite frankly doesn't matter at this point right i mean And if you're looking at it black and white, yes, no.
Just it. Supreme Court.
The hard, the, the, we've, we've unpacked before, like the thought would be like, if this is real unconstitutional, then something new has to get created. Like something has to happen would be the thought, the hope, the whatever, but that's, that has to happen.
Right.
So if it's a hard stop, um, well then, and we still believe in the what's next because of all the letters that the librarians have sent in.
And there are these librarians are the only people that write letters anymore.
The uh pink pony club librarians of vermont fest all the letters that they wrote in that that impacts we still have to wait for everything to get put into place yeah
Yeah so there there lies the third part which is uh should worst case scenario happen e-rate comes to a halt uh it's the fcc's job to come up with the next steps to cease operations of the f of the e-rate program There's a whole host of questions that we just don't know what's going to happen with that one. And then our next step would be for Congress to take up this issue and come up with a more constitutionally friendly way of administering the E-Rate program.
That's going to take, best case scenario, months. And as you can imagine, they've got a lot more clear right now.
So, you know, clarity's sake, it's not just E-Rate. It's also rural internet fund and isn't there a, like a rural healthcare fund that, cause this is all funded by USF and there's like three major, three major things that USF funds. And I think it's a healthcare thing. It's a rural internet thing. And then E-rate. So all three would, I'm assuming go away.
Correct. So again, there's a whole host of things that could happen. Uh there's there's a yes or no decision by the supreme court and then there's a a yes uh with caveats or a no with caveats uh timelines could be potentially delayed um but long story short uh we could be seeing our world dramatically changing in a couple of weeks and we could see this thing kind of fall apart and and and fade into the to the background so uh something You know what will happen?
Their session doesn't end until late June. This will probably be one of the rulings that they hold on to until that last week of June when the new fiscal year starts, July 1. So everyone will have their 471s in. Everything will be ready to go,
Spend money. We'll be feeling nice, feeling good.
And then they'll come out and say, sorry, you guys have been doing illegal activity for the last 15 years. It ends today. and then all of that work for this year's cycle will be for naught.
I didn't want to go into this one, but there is a lot of questions around, well, wait a minute. What if you've just bought the services and you are either on the bear or the spy and you, the district or the service provider, are waiting for reimbursement? What happens then? And that is, what's worse than the worst case scenario? I guess catastrophic case scenario is.
You're stuck with it.
Yeah, you're stuck with fulfilling that bear.
We're in the end game now.
Well you know like schools that have signed multi-year contracts for msp uh what do they call it chris how those districts have bought uh clear pass um i can't see what that what that's termed but that's like a five-year contract um mibs mibs yes um yeah
And i i think on most those contracts you sign oh absolutely like that's your end no matter what yeah
And and And if funding disappears, you're still on the hook. Absolutely. And three years ago, two years ago, nobody thought this was even close to being a thing. Like, E-Rate will never go away. It's a done deal.
Yep.
And here we are.
Just three months ago, I was like, you can't get rid of this program. But I got to say, with everything going on in the world right now, I'm not going to predict anything right.
Yeah. Well, Mark, we hope you make it out of the concrete pit that you
Should probably stay there until the E-rate ruling happens.
I really think Mark's been kidnapped and is being held hostage in a concrete hole.
It's like it's one of those cool trendy hotels, which is just they just save money on the drywall. That's it for me.
¶ Closing Remarks
All right thanks for ending the episode on on a high note mark wow wow all right well uh share us with your friends send us an email k12 tech talk at gmail.com uh hopefully next week we will all be back in our respective homes we'll see you next week
The views and opinions expressed on the k12 tech talk podcast are the personal opinions of josh and do not represent the views or opinions of our sponsors or other organizations that we're affiliated with. The material information presented here is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.