Episode 207 - The Supreme Court Discusses E-Rate!

On tonight's episode, the K-12 Tech Talk Podcast, we break down the results of our survey on student MFA before going deep into the Supreme Court case and will determine the next steps for e-rate. We break down the oral arguments that were presented this week and make our predictions for next steps. Thanks for listening. Live, from the NTP studios, this is the K-12 Tech Talk Podcast. This is episode 206, my name is Josh, Chris, your name is Chris. Yes it is.

In Mark, we won't give away your nickname, but you go by Mark here. Yeah, mostly. Mostly. Yeah. Did you say 206 or 207? Yeah, it's supposed to be 207, I think I probably said 206. Yeah. Wow. I'll try this. I'll do a great start. I've been drinking. So guys, what's, how's your weeks been? Chris, you're on spring breaks. So I know what you're up in here. Your week consists of sleeping until like 10 o'clock every day, right?

About 9, 9, 30. Wow. I actually, I wake up at like six something because my wife is up. She works at a neighboring school district, so she has school all week. Does she make you breakfast before she leaves? No, she's like getting ready. She opens. We've like a slider bathroom door and she like scoots it and I'll be like, try to sleep. And then I get about 9, 9, 30. It's been nice. I did go into the office today for the record just got a house. I can't stand my kids. Oh, that's a joke.

It's a dad joke. I went to Disney last week. Yeah. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. A lot of try one for three days. Favorite ride? Favorite ride. Boy, still rise of the resistance. Yes. Nice. Jackson and a net. Both say Guardians. Guardians is all right. And we did ride Mickey minis, whatever railway. Oh, that's one. That was one of my favorites as well. It was cute. It was you walk into the screen like I was blown away. I'm like, how did they do that? Yeah. The technology.

Yeah. That Mickey's producing is insane. Yeah. Line after line after line after line. Waking up at two in the morning for a flight is just a blast. Yeah. I won't get into the whole bathroom use on a plane, but whatever. My. Yeah. I'm at that age now. I had to I had to use the bathroom. You're one of those guys. And I think it's the first time ever. I've one of the first times I've had to do that.

And if I ever those bathrooms are not made for camping out, man, like we're cutting this part out, right? Actually, come on. I don't know. So let's get into it. My drama this week. I found out that Khan Academy is refusing to sign a data privacy. Let me guess. DPA. Yeah. We talked about this before. You're not. Did you get it? Did you get a data privacy agreement from Disney before you went with that one to sign up? He didn't, but he did ask for one.

No, my government context made sure that we had privacy while we were there. Yeah. Okay. We had our own escort. All right. No, Khan Academy is not signing a DPA unless we sign up for their paid service, which is $10 a student a year. So that won't be happening. So we are kind of trying to wrap our heads around how what what usage of Khan Academy looks like going forward. So we're trying to. Josh, I do, I do love your push for student data privacy on the record show.

You know, as you're laughing and you ridicule me for this, no, I love it because you do the dirty work. And then when I come along, like several behind you, the company is like, yeah, we do this. That was that guy. Josh. That was a big. I'll piggyback on Josh's agreement. They're like, you're not going to be as much of a jerk about this as Josh. You know, somebody's got to blaze a trail. That's right.

I will say joining TEC, that consortium that does the DPAs for you, like, I just give it to them. And they're the ones making contact and pestering and they just report back like that. If you can, if you have the opportunity to join TEC, this is not a paid endorsement in any way, shape or form.

If you have the opportunity to join TEC, you should, because they will help you get agreements that are awfully difficult to get any other big things this week, guys, any signal chats that you were invited to? No, I feel left out of that one. I, yeah, it's hurt. Yeah. That's fine. Chris, any major projects over Christmas break, spring break? No. One, good talk, getting my sleep back, paying attention to my health, hanging out with my family. Okay. Paying attention to your health.

How many monsters? How many? That's not. Let's move on. How many energy drinks did you drink today? One. I don't believe that for a second. My new spring break routine, well, before I get into that, my spring break routine brought to you by class. Check out classlink.com. They have great apps and a website launch pad. One seek rostering and a whole lot more. Spring break, for real, about 9, 9, 30, wake up, get up, rush teeth, open a rock star within seconds. Before or after you brush your teeth?

I brush my teeth, then I drink. Huh. Drink my rock star. And then you have another rock star, when? Nope, that's it. Oh. Anyway, Josh, I feel like you're talking way too much about my spring break. Okay. I just got it. We got to move on. Okay. Let's hit the main topic for now. Oh, when I hit the survey first, survey results from MFA. Yeah, let's do that.

We posted this on a KTOL Tech Pro. When do you think you'll implement student MFA? I was shocked by the result, not gonna lie. Should we go, I'll just start from the biggest numbers. Two to three years away. Is that 32%? Okay. Okay. Okay. Hide. Never. No chance. It's ever gonna work at 32%. Wait, wait, wait. What was two to three years, what percentage? 32%. Oh, and it tied with never is what you're saying? Oh, wow. Yes. Wow. Never no chance. Three to five years away says 26%.

Huh. So that, I mean, that's 90% right there. Is you're looking at two to three years or two or more years away with the vast majority saying four, five or never. Wow. And then last 10% here, 4% say already there MFA for students all the way. Wow. 6% say next school year. Wow. So you have four, four percent have already done MFA and 6% next year.

Yeah. I wonder how real that next year is, like purchased product in an implementation plan of some sort, like you, you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you're doing this come next school year for sure. Or that's just pie in the sky. We haven't signed a contract with anybody yet. Right. That would be my question there. Because a majority of the comments were discussing the, how do we get to student MFA? So it's text that don't, yeah.

It's not like this is one of those things where we're like, we know what we're going to do. We think it's two, three years away. Yeah. This is just a bunch of question marks about how are we going to implement student MFA? Some big district needs to blaze that trail first and be very public about it to make others buy into that idea. There's too many questions and worry about it right now. Indianapolis has had MFA for students for a long time. It's really, I got to find out how they did it.

It seemed more like a recovery account where you had a second email, not like to do traditional phone, which by the way, I'm going through the comments right now. That's everybody's comments is we have a no cell phone policy or state band cell phones, all that kind of stuff. So then people obviously turned off. What are the options out there and the clever class then comes up quite a lot. And then there was a long conversation about the Chromebook power button. Yeah. That. That a little tense.

A few, a few times, I think it became a great debate. And if you're not on KTL Tech Pro, you should be that it, yeah, that's where this discussion is happening. Yes. Yeah. So there's this whole bit about, and you got to dig into it, but that some Chromebooks, you could do the power button as a capacity, right? Yeah. Is that correct phrasing? Whatever.

But then you're locking that device to the kid, which doesn't necessarily implement well in a school district where you have to get loaners and devices change a lot. Doesn't mean it's off the table for all schools and all scenarios. And that's what the bigger discussion is. Yeah. Figure out what's going to work for your school and your school culture. But I've heard Google talk about the power key as your MFA pass key, but they haven't pushed it.

So I think they recognize that that's not a practical solution as well. And when they talk about that, Mark, is it acting as a fingerprint reader or is it just, it's taking the tandem action of someone's logging in and we know this, this accounts using this device and that device just hit its power key. It's a device. It's a power key. You do not have to have a fingerprint reader. Yeah. I like it. I love it. I love it. I could get there.

Yeah. Just, but just know that when a student switches to a different Chromebook, that device, that specific Chromebook is, is their pass key device. So if you have a shared cart model, it just doesn't work. Yeah. You're still going to have, yeah, share carts out. And then you'd have to figure out if you run, if you run Chromebooks through your libraries, yeah, first there's going to have to be some kind of process where one owner is given that the past that that changes.

Yeah. Again, you could, you could do it. It's more of like an adult MFA option as opposed to student in the school setting, but it's there. It's there. Never mind. I was going to make a bad adult joke. Don't. I stop myself. I stop myself. Okay. And again, it would probably just come down to a change of process. Like you're just going to add a step or two to the loner swap out process. However that it, you know, people hate change. I get it.

But reality is that student MFA is going to change some processes. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Like you're going to have all kinds of kids that have issues with the MFA working, whether it's the power button or it going to a cell phone or it being a badge or whatever, there's going to be some extra troubleshooting that that's going to be some new student helped us. It gets for sure.

I really want to talk to some of the districts that rolled us out because I almost, like I think we're talking about how it's going to be harder to do it for students. I wonder if in hindsight, it's a lot easier for students to adopt MFA than it is. Yeah. Mark, we need to get who, where is our producer? We need to get the producer online and up an interview. Hey, the new guy. And Hayden, the new guy on that, all right, Chris, why don't you talk about managed methods real quick?

I will manage methods. A proud sponsor of the KTWTEC talk podcast. They can give you easy, affordable cyber security and student safety monitoring for your school district. They know that you're on a tight budget. They can try to help you through that as well. They can do your Google stuff and your Microsoft stuff as well. I know what I was going to say student accounts are the threat vector now. Those are the accounts that are the lowest hanging fruit, the fruit lane on the ground.

Is that phrase goes, that's the next logical step here. And that is the, to me, I think what's the concerning or little shock factor in the two to three or three to five are never like this is like we see the problem. And then we're, and I'm not saying that I'm not, I would put myself in the two to three year. I did. Yeah, I did. Yeah. So I see a problem. I know it's real. I see data that supports that it's real. And I'm still choosing to not think I'm going to address it for two to three years.

But that's, that's a real thing. But from an implementation timeframe, that's, I think probably the shortest you can go. Like if we decided today or tomorrow, when I walk into school, we're doing student MFA, it's at least a year implementation plan. Like we got to find a product to do it. We got to get contract signed. We got to figure out how we're going to roll it out. We're probably going to test it with a group of kids first. That's not a, that's not a three week implementation.

That's a six month a year implementation at a minimum. So that, I think that two to three year ranges a sweet spot. Not if you're doge. They'd come in and implement that thing in like three days. Yeah. You just do it over a signal. So I guess we should get to the big, the big meat of the episode here. There was a, there was a Supreme Court hearing this week.

And I will say it's the first time that I voluntarily went out of my way to listen to a Supreme Court hearing. Agreed. Not only that is we're all listening to the Supreme Court and chatting along the way. Yeah. It was a, it was an interactive experience. It was. Play by play. We were calling people names. Like it was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've never been in like a, in a text and said like, can I get that Supreme Court link? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was great. It was great. Which justice is this?

What's their name? Oh, I was 100% going on to YouTube because you're only listening to audio. So I was going to YouTube and finding like clips of different Supreme courts to identify their voice. I'm like, all right. Are they? So Mark, do you want to, do you want to lead us into this? Yeah. So, okay. So, jokes aside here, this is our summary of the FCC versus consumers research or maybe that's backwards there.

The Supreme Court case that could potentially throw e-rate out the window along with the Lifeline program and a few other programs. If the Supreme Court determines that is unconstitutional, we've talked about this at length and there's just been a ton of briefings and a ton of documents, but now it's like time where we actually get to hear what the Supreme Court justices have to say about it. And we get a little more fine-tuned understanding of what the argument really is.

We've talked about this in the past that it was, you know, the central argument was about tax or a fee and in the conversations kind of changed. It wasn't really that was, that wasn't the central argument to that, right, Josh? Yeah. It wasn't. And I was kind of surprised by that.

I thought that was going to be the central argument between both sides and I was really surprised when the solicitor general who was there to kind of defend USF and the whole Lifeline program, e-rate program, when she kind of rolled over as a wrong term, but when she accepted calling the USF fees taxes, that didn't seem to be an arguing point by anyone.

Yeah, I think the defense from the FCC, USF side was more around the lines of, it doesn't matter if it's a tax or a fee or argument, this is going to be the same where it's watering the bridge almost. There was some saying, no, no, this is a fee. The consumers research lawyer was saying, no, this is a tax because that raises the importance of it. But the central argument was, did Congress give away too much power to the FCC and then in turn to USAC for administration of the e-rate program?

So let's get into the meat of it. We've talked a little bit about the tax or a fee that came up a little bit, but if we go to the central or the start of it, kind of one of the opening statements and one of the opening questions from Justice Thomas was, do we have any constraints on this program? Did Congress just give this program over to the FCC and then the FCC can run wild without any sort of limits or constraints? So let's listen to that question and answer now.

Would you, is there any direct statutory constraint on the revenue raising? The direct statutory constraint is the sufficiency provision that appears three times throughout the statute. It is a qualitative limit. It is tied to, you cannot raise more funds than would be needed to provide universal service to the standards that are provided in the statute. So basic telecommunication services have to be at that level. Again, it's also historically defined by what the FCC has done.

And I think this is telling because the, well respondents are saying this is an out of control program where it's gone from 3% to 35% contribution rate. The math is not, is pretty misleading on that. Does this program actually, the actual amounts for the revenues have stayed for 10 years? There's a couple of things of point there. There's a statement in there that was a focus of a lot of this and the original intent of this program and these fees originally was to provide rural phone access.

They bring up rural Alaska or rural South Dakota being able to pick up the phone from across the country and have a phone and have a conversation with someone in rural Alaska. That was the original intent of these fees was to guarantee phone service in rural areas. So it's interesting that we've made the jump or they've made the jump to Wi-Fi in classrooms and Wi-Fi on buses, which we'll get to in a second.

But the constraints thing, their point was they do not raise more than they need and they have everybody that's been through the USAC process or the 470 process. You know there's a list of items that you can request that are eligible services. That's kind of the constraint I think that they're pointing at here, at least from the e-rate side of things, but to their point, they don't have just a slush bucket of money sitting around.

It's not like they're raising money to have it in the bank sitting there $8 billion. They are spending every dollar they're bringing in every year. They don't have a surplus. You know, I miss anything. It's hard when you think about the start of it, as you mentioned, it's about phone service and getting a phone. That's a yes or no. A household has a phone or does not have a phone.

When you extend this to the internet where the programs are now, that constraint as some of the judges were alluding to could be a little bit more of a gray area. The questioning continues and this is where Josh, we were kind of going back and forth saying I think we can kind of tell where some of the judges are. Gorsuch jumps in and says, well, let's talk about these constraints. Let's talk about what does it mean to have a need?

So let's play a clip right now of Gorsuch asking about what do you mean by needs and are there limits on these needs? Let's talk about these six in schools, for example, as well. The FCC has interpreted that to mean that it can provide mobile Wi-Fi hotspots for off-premises use and in school buses, right? It has and it would also point you to H1B, which is preventing yet more specificity with respect to the how the school and library programs are supposed to go and how the rates are charged.

And again, I'll just do the refrain. If you think that there is a problem or people think that there is a problem with the way in which the FCC's rules are interpreting the parameters of the program, you can bring a challenge to exceeding the scope of the statutory program. For the FCC, use the program to give everybody a mobile hotspot. To give everyone a mobile hotspot, I know. Everybody who's a library patron, at least.

Everyone who's a library patron, I think the question there would be whether it fits within each to the extent feasible to give advance telecom and information services for schools and libraries. Yeah. So it's feasible, it just costs a lot. So now we're getting into, OK, so you haven't really explicitly defined need when it comes to the internet. So why don't we extend this and give everybody a hotspot and put Wi-Fi on buses.

This is why I think where people have been very upset over the last few years is that you're extending the purpose of this program and defining need in a little bit more broad category. Yeah. And I could get there on the bus Wi-Fi thing. I think all three of us, whenever they made that as a eligible service this last year, whenever it was, we all, all three of us were kind of like, what, seriously bus Wi-Fi? I think that money could be much better spent on advanced firewall.

But yeah, bus Wi-Fi is one of those things that's like, OK, if you're going to do something that's going to shine a spotlight and get people worked up as seeing it as waste, to me, bus Wi-Fi is one of those things. It's interesting though.

So one of the things that I just remember when these things were rolling out during the pandemic and we started seeing money going towards hotspots in the Emergency Broadband Act, I mean, we had in hindsight, we had a lot of requirements put on us to define and demonstrate need. We had to survey our families and we could only give a hotspot out if the family demonstrated that they had a need that they did not have sufficient broadband at home.

So could we have applied for hotspots for every single one of our families? Yeah. But I know of friends who are in districts that got audited for the Emergency Broadband Act and they had to show the survey results from families showing that there was a need for it. Yeah. It became a question in our online enrollment package.

Do you have internet access at home or do you have a need for internet access at home and do you have a device at home after the pandemic and after the emergency broadband thing? Like that was a question that we are expected to be asking now and that is reportable to the state. So yeah, there are limits.

School bus Wi-Fi, I remember it getting me a little riled up back then and it gets me a riled up now because there was some focus on this and man, if school bus Wi-Fi is the thing that takes down the rate, go away, because I'll tell you, my district, we need our 80% discount on internet access and if school bus Wi-Fi, I don't need that, but I need, my district needs the discount that we get on our internet bill. We need the discounts that we get for wireless access points into our classrooms.

Like there is a great point here of who determines need and what is, you know, define need, which is what the focus is, but yeah, like I understand these questions. And that is one of the arguments against this is that usac, which is a separate entity, it's private entity, it's governed by the telecom providers and the schools and libraries. So the people that are benefiting from this are the ones overseeing it, right?

The argument is, well, of course, you're the one defining need because you're the one that benefits from this program. So that, I do hear that argument. I really do hear that what stops you from just extending that need and getting, Starlink for everybody and giving school bus Wi-Fi and extending the program indefinitely. And that was Gorsuch's questioning throughout the, it's that whole thing too, like Josh said, about firewall, all K-12 techs we've been raising our hands about cybersecurity.

And you give us the firewall service included, and not just the firewall physical box. We've been saying that forever, but school Wi-Fi came about real quick, real nice. Bus Wi-Fi. Yeah, bus Wi-Fi, we're like, we don't, that's not what we, nobody was like raising hands big on bus Wi-Fi. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's keep going here because then, so now you have this potential for this fund to just have an endless supply or endless need.

And this is where Judge Kavanaugh comes in and says, well, okay, so you keep talking about, and this is to the folks from the consumers research law firm saying, well, there should be a cap. And so Kavanaugh is like, well, tell me what you mean by cap. So let's play that clip now. I think your position is that it needs a cap, correct? There needs to be some kind of objective limit. Okay. Yeah. So cap. It doesn't have to be a number. Just another, if I had to make a second point.

Even if it has to be a number, you're not taking the further position, I don't think, that the number, the number could be a cap, it could be very high. And then the question is, what exactly are we accomplishing? Well, so if Congress did set a trillion dollar cap, obviously it's unlikely, but at least then we would know that Congress itself has made that determination. It says, we think universal service is this important, we want the agency to be able to raise it.

How is that then different from saying, we're not going to do a trillion dollar cap, or uncertain about, we're uncertain about the amount that will cover the costs of the program, and so we're going to use the term sufficient. And so I think you need to zero in on, that's the word sufficient and why that's not enough of a constraint, vis-a-vis the trillion dollar. Like we would be saying, I think if we agree with you, sufficient's not good enough, but trillion dollar is.

And I think a lot of people would say, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, because at that point, okay, let's raise the fees, hit the trillion dollar cap and we'll spend it and give everybody what they want. So a little bit of commentary here. So that was Justice Kavanaugh questioning the lawyer for consumers research. I felt like the Justices ate that guy's lunch. That was not a good hearing for that lawyer because they had him spinning in circles. They had him twisting.

It was not a good hearing for the consumers research lawyer. I think this question here is central, though, because you extend this reasoning to other things that the government, other programs, the government, they made the comparison to tariffs. Does Congress set the cap or limit for tariffs? Or is that something that the president is allowed to do? Which is a very, very timely question to ask right now. They compared this to national parks, right?

The national parks are the ones that set the fees or tax, whatever you want to call tax, for how much it costs to get into the national park. I don't think it's feasible for Congress to get to that specific of a policy where they're setting a cap. And that's what the judges are pushing on. Is it a dollar amount? Or are you saying Congress should set some sort of a measurable cap?

And I would agree that the term sufficient, like that's one of those terms that can be interpreted a thousand different ways and we'll get into a clip here in a second that makes a really funny example of that. But that's part of the problem with laws in general is they're written broad enough to be interpreted multiple ways. And this just unfortunately, this term sufficient, I feel like is one of those terms.

Well, and there's been a lot of groups of last few years who have tried to define what it means for sufficiency, right? Cosen has come out with many standards over the years around this is what we believe standards or what students should have. And then Justice Kagan jumps in and says, well, there are standards. So let's play the clip of Justice Kagan. I mean, there are some real standards in this program.

So what this program covers is things that a substantial majority of residential customers already have. All right. So it's not like new fangold go get ourselves some starlink accounts. It's substantial majority of residential customers already have that are essential to living in our world that are essential to education, public health and public safety. And those things have to be available at affordable rates.

So the FCC can't do anything by way of this program that is not basically geared towards getting those who live in very rural areas or who are very low income, to getting access, giving those people access to services that all the rest of us have. That's the nature of the program and that's the limit of the program.

Again, in context, they keep referring to rural phone access, but that can be, if you look at it from a larger discussion from an equitable access discussion, you know, poorer districts like Chris, that's why he has an 80% discount rate on his internet service.

That's why I have a 50% discount on mine is access is a little bit more readily available both for my families and my district, where it's a little bit more difficult for Chris's families to afford internet service or the school to afford internet service there. That's the way I see that. I forgot about this ahead of time.

So our district participated in a survey with Cowson, where we actually connected a reporting system to our data systems to measure the bandwidth usage of our students during remote learning. Oh, yeah. And that data was then collected with a bunch of other districts and that's how Cowson was able to kind of push the FCC to increase the bandwidth limits because there are bandwidth limits of what or recommendations of what a student needs at home.

And so yeah, we were measuring exactly how fast our home internet was for our students and we saw differences in socioeconomic status and where they lived. We saw big difference in families that have broad been and those who do not. And we also saw, you know, measurable bandwidth percentage or levels for students on video chat if they're on a video call what they actually need to participate.

So yeah, there are standards and to your point, Josh, you were mentioning that yes, they're saying this is about phones, but there are standards in place that have been recognized by reputable organizations like Cowson have said, this is what the bandwidth needs are.

Well, and we were talking earlier and I think one of the best comments that I heard after this hearing, you know, around the discussion of standards and sufficient and the argument being that well, they can just go out and get whatever they want. They can go out and get a new fangled fancy dancing Starlink account or whatever, whatever reason Starlink keeps coming up in this discussion.

The comment from a friend of mine was clearly none of these individuals have filed 471s through usac and going through a PIA review for their UPS and being asked how many switches are being plugged in, what's attached to the switch that's getting battery backup? But clearly none of these individuals have had a PIA review.

Yeah, we've had the friends colleagues on going for a switch and they have to define how many ports are used for whatever or one that went for a server had to define what the percentage of DHCP service was on that server compared to DNS, the whole bit, whatever. There's real stuff to it and even go back to the point of just like the standard, if in my area, and we should have the same standard as in the highly populated city, it's harder to get the internet pipe to my school. So it costs more.

So there has to be money given if we have a standard to meet. And again, Josh, to what you're saying, I think a lot of folks maybe don't thank through, there's even cost differences to these rural areas. Oh, absolutely. The school that's in the middle of, I think they talked about South Dakota a couple of times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's different amounts of work and limited service to get there.

But if you have a standard to meet, that's where E-rate, that's where USEC has helped all these years. And the other part of this conversation is the word sufficient just keeps coming up over and over and over again. Yeah. And the consumers research lawyer was just saying like, well, what is sufficient, what is sufficient? And so here's Jess's Kagan. This is my favorite flip, my favorite clip.

You're saying that we should interpret this statute to say that that word sufficient is not imposing a requirement, meaning sufficient what is required to do these services, but not more than that. Yes, because that's what the FCC itself has said for 30 years. Okay. I'd add that to my list of things that I think would be an unreasonable statutory interpretation.

So if you see me, it's like when I call the pizza operator and say, I want you to send me pizza sufficient for 10 people and then an 18 wheeler shows up. That is not an accurate understanding of what I asked for. Well, I think the key distinction there is at least you have an objective limitation on the end, right? So sufficient pizza for 10 people. Okay. We'll give them the benefit of that. So I take that point. So it is sufficient for what, and then we go back to my earlier things.

It's sufficient to get the people in these rural and low income people, these populations. It's to get them the services that the rest of us have, that the majority of us have, that are necessary for education, public health, and safety, and that can be accomplished at reasonable and affordable rates. That's the nature. That's the substantive mandate. Soficient is, that's how much you have to raise is to do that and nothing else.

Well, it's never a good sign when a Supreme Court justice lodges a joke at your expense and you can hear people in the crowd laughing like that. Your day is not going well if you're that low here. My favorite part of that though is if you listen carefully, you can hear Clarence Thomas like a belly laugh.

So yeah, great joke, great point around like there, while we can say that the word sufficient is vague and open to interpretation, there are clear examples of when sufficient has been, sufficient he has been met. So this whole thing was around, you know, two, two and a half hours and obviously we all want to know what happens next. And the justices were also asking that question too, maybe in the, maybe halfway through Sotomayor asked the question, so what happens if the program is struck down?

So let's listen to that clip. By the way, check out Fortinet, Fortinet podcast. The justice is love. Respondents said at the end, recognizing the rather dramatic effects of invalidating this law would have on communications, that we had two alternatives, one, as we did in the bankruptcy context, tell Congress figure it out in six months before we made our judgment effective, I'm covering all options in my questions.

I hope it's not a hypothetical that's necessary, but I'm covering options or I don't know what the second, but do you have a preferred manner to do this? So minimize the disruption. Long term, you can't because we're overruled and precedent in putting a lot of programs at risk. Yeah, if the question is, do we have a preferred way to lose?

You know, it's not, you know, high on my wish list, but, you know, I mean, look, I don't think the Northern pipeline sort of six month interregnum was necessarily the height of this court's remedial jurisprudence. So I am somewhat reluctant to recommend that to you as an option. I actually kind of think it works the other way, which is if you really think you need to do Northern pipeline, then maybe you shouldn't do what you were doing in the merits part of your opinion.

There's a whole lot of people in that area of law who agree with you. Yeah. We shouldn't have done it, but. Yeah, no. And, you know, so since I think that's doctrinally, I think the second thing they suggested is you could make this relief only run to the particular parties here at Issue, and since it's capable of repetition, you're debating review, I'm not even sure what that means. And then you could try to fix it.

The other thing they suggest, of course, is you could fix this whole thing with half a sentence. Well, gee, whiz. I mean, I don't really think that that sort of is right. And I think, you know, what would the sentence say? Would the sentence say no more than $10 billion? Well, if you look at the way the program is operated, that's essentially how it's operated. And if this were delegation run riot, I just don't think you'd see that flat lawn line in terms of the size of the fund.

That last line there around a half a sentence being added refers to should they put a cap on this to prevent this program for running wild. I think here you have this question from Sotomayor around, well, what happens if this is struck down? I think, read between the lines of her questioning, you can almost tell exactly where she's going to vote on this. But they're saying, should we do, you know, give Congress six months to figure this out? Congress isn't doing anything in six months time.

Very true. So, you know, you have this idea of, well, what happens if this is struck down? What's the damage done? And I think one thing I thought was missing was the conversation as you talked about Josh really centers around phone and lifeline access. And with that option, it's, you know, if the program goes away, then the phone lines go away as well. And we talked a lot about, well, this is going to take away access to rural Alaska and a lot of the reservations.

And we know how Josh feels about Alaska, yeah, support Alaska, man. I thought the one argument that was missing from this though was here we are in schools. We're getting billions of dollars out to schools for internet access. We're not going to take that, like the internet's not going to go away from our schools. This is going to fall back on taxpayers and I felt like that argument was very, very important that I didn't hear at least in the oral arguments.

Yeah. That should this program go away, the internet's not going to go away from these programs. We're going to have to supplement it with taxpayer dollars. And that's, that I think is a really, really important thing for the justices to be aware of. I don't know if, if I know Keith Krueger was in DC and out front of the Supreme Court building holding up science, saying support E-rate. I don't know if he actually was selected to go inside to the hearing or not.

I can only imagine if he was, he would have been like raising his hand like, oh, pick me. Pick me. Like, Kosen has very well documented information, data, specific data on what that fallout would be. That I completely agree, Mark, that is one area that I feel like both the solicitor general and the, what is it, SHLB, that consortium for libraries, I feel like they could have had much better data or much better information on when it came to this argument.

But you, you can also say, well, you know, coming from the standpoint of these services will go away, could be even more influential than saying, well, it's just going to be more expensive or we're just going to pass the cost over to taxpayers. Well, and there was a point to early on in the arguments, they were going down the rabbit hole of the good that this program does. And it was, there was a point made that this isn't an argument about whether or not these are good things.

The argument is whether or not that's constitutional. And I can, I can get that like I totally understand that. If it is an unconstitutional, that's one, that's the law. Yep. It doesn't matter whether or not the things are good or not. Well, for next steps, we'll probably find out by end of June, maybe sooner, what the next steps are.

If we were to go strictly based on questions, which you really have to be careful to read too much into questions, sometimes they're just playing devil's advocate, sometimes they're trying to get one of the lawyers to make a stronger point. But I would say that at least the more liberal leaning judges seem to be more supportive of it. And that clip from Sotomayor, she almost candidly comes out and says that she is against this ruling or this thing.

Reading through the other questions, I felt like even on the conservative judge's side, there was a little bit more support or skepticism of the argument or support for the program and skepticism for the argument. So if I were to guess today, I would say we probably not going to have a unanimous vote. But I think it's going to fall towards keeping E-Rate in place and striking down the lower courts ruling. I agree.

Before the hearing, I was very concerned, I would have probably placed a bet that we were going to lose E-Rate after listening to the hearing and hearing how they just ate that lawyer's lunch. It's not going anywhere. And they tossed out early on the whole fee versus tax thing. Yeah. That to me changed, oh, how I think this is going to play out. And they just act like they were like over that part.

Well, and I think the other part of the conversation was there were other departments, and I swear one of them they mentioned was USDA and some function. There are other departments that are funding services in this same manner. So if they strike this down, there are major ripple effects for other grant programs to be halted, not like we've been through that in the last three months, in a major way that would disrupt a lot.

So I think they're going to tread very carefully there on this decision as well. I don't know that it's out of the question for a unanimous decision here. I think it'll be interesting to see. Yeah. I do think the conservative judges are thinking about how this would play out in other things like tariffs. Yeah. And the National Park Service was brought up, I believe. So yeah, I, I'm feeling positive, but it's anybody's guess who knows, man. Chris, when I hit those last sponsors, I do.

And then I guess we'll just go straight into a special interview, a so we want to thank Extreme Networks. You can email demayer, Dominic mayor at extremenetworks.com for your extreme switching networking needs. You can get those, those are e-rate items currently, get them while they're hot. And hey, it was this week was the last day to file your 471 yesterday, wasn't it? Yes. I think that's right. Which may or may not matter. I know you're from now. It'll matter.

I guess, I guess we'll see how that plays as well. And then next week, if you are going to the coast in conference in Seattle, Mark and I, Josh wasted his days away at Disney, so he's not tagging along. But Mark and I will be hopefully at a table near the registration area and the vendor area with podcast equipment in hand. We have some buttons, some stickers, some special odd and Kate will tech pro meetup items. So come and say hi to us, hang out with us, we'll give you some free stuff.

Happy to to talk to you about Kate will tech pro if you're not on there yet. We just launched the cybersecurity hub today. Join if you haven't already, click sponsorship to get on for free. But come and hang out with us if you're at coast and make sure you stop by and say hi. And then finally, a couple of days ago, I got to hang out with Jeff from visor. That's V I Z O R and we're going to show we're going to play this interview.

Jeff was a great interview, great guy talks about visor and some great changes that they've come out with 4 K 12 that can really impact small and medium size schools and more. So check out this interview. All right, I'm hanging out with visor that's V I Z O R visor and Jeff director of sales

or something like that. I was just trying to figure out what your title is, we're hanging out with Jeff for a few minutes. Jeff, how's it going? Very well, Chris. Thanks so much. Yeah, I appreciate you having us. Yeah, I remember the part of the title has to do with emerging technologies and sales and we all wear lots of hats here. We're kind of a small shop. So we wear lots of hats and we have a little bit of trouble. I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. What is your title?

I like technology director and then you'll get director of technology right and then you'll get some that are like director of innovation and technology. Yeah. And I just say on the tech guy like that's right. It's it's whatever. Yeah. Similar to that, right? The districts, the tech teams at districts are those are small teams, right? So everybody's got to wear. It's whatever. It's pretty tough to pigeonhole somebody with one single title. So my sis admin Matt is also the esports coach.

Like it's fine. It's whatever. So we have enjoyed the visor partnership sponsorship. I mean, we're a couple years into that and and we plug visor all throughout the year. You guys are hanging out with us for all of 2025, but I wanted to check in just what's going on with visor, what's new with visor. Can you fill us in? Yeah. Well, lots of big changes, right? We're all operating under kind of an interesting time, right?

I think there's lots of, well, you guys have talked about the uncertainty in the climate and things like that. So we're trying to address that as much as possible. I think an overarching theme for us since the end of last year where we introduced three really big changes to visor. So that's kind of probably one of the most exciting things, those three big changes.

And then kind of an eye towards, you know, what's coming and really, like I say, with an overarching sort of eye on what do we do to help in these challenging times, right? Like this is a, there's a lot of economic, financial, you know, uncertainty change, you know, challenges, I guess is what people are facing. So we're just doing the best that we can or really trying to keep that in mind and adapt to those challenges and changes.

Yeah, we were talking before I hit the record button about you were with us and Dean was with us at Midwest Tech Talk in July and got to meet some of the customers that you guys already have. But I like that you're being mindful of those guys and that we're facing some financial uncertainties and you're also trying to shape up some things, of course, to get more people on board. So you talked about some changes, would you unpack some of those changes with me? Yeah, yeah.

Three big ones for us, again, kind of having to do with the sort of, let's do more with less on top of all the, you know, features and functionality, which I know a lot of your audience, Chris, are already familiar with just because that long standing partnership that we've had with K-12 Tech Talk. So these big changes kind of stem from that overarching team that I mentioned.

So the big, the first one is sort of a re-launch, I think of the visor platform, which now includes a full help desk module, let's say. So it's the second side of the same coin. So asset management is kind of where we've really focused, but a lot of districts started coming to us with a need for a help desk and kind of talking about multiple vendors and the challenge of having to sort of work with multiple vendors.

So our new offering visor for schools now includes obviously what everybody knows is the device management, student Chromebook management, and all the features that go along with that. But with also a full, fully functional help desk system. So it's a system that's specifically geared towards K-12. It's kind of a product that's been sitting on our shelf for a long, long, or not sitting on our shelf. It's a product that we've had for a long, long time, a bit of a kind of a crown jewel for us.

It was really a stable husband, but never really on the education side. What we did was originally when launching education well over a decade now ago, we included a repair management system, right? A very big and important part of Chromebook management is the management of the repairs that are the life cycle. But we weren't including the full help desk system which had an allowed for tracking and managing tickets of all kinds. So now that's included with the product.

So now we've got this sort of full product that includes the visor service desk. So the service desk though is focused specifically for K-12. So we took that sort of, we took that product that was sort of enterprise-focused and we've really focused it on K-12. So K-12 workflows, K-12 process automation, the ability to use the help desk tool within the school to do things like ticket assignment. There's some really cool features in there for schools as well. I shouldn't go too far on this point.

But there it is. There's just a ton of features inside of the help desk. Yeah. And it's interesting too. We talk about it on K-12 tech, bro. It's kind of a little bit of a running joke. One of the most asked questions on any K-12 tech email list or forum is what's everybody using for a work order system because everyone's kind of looking for that great, great solution. So I like that you guys are getting into that game because we know that you do asset management well.

You're not new to that game. No, we're taking, polished it off again. Yeah, exactly. We're taking something that's existed for gosh, I don't want to sort of age myself here, but this is when I started this product was around. So we're talking 25, 25 years ago that we were working on that product. All we've done there is just tailored towards K-12. So very specific workflows, the ability to assign tickets to technicians or resources facilities and management people.

So I was going to say, am I right? It can be used for facilities for maintenance guys too. Exactly right. Yeah, so you can leverage that again, the multiple vendor challenge at a lot of districts are facing. This sort of now is that gap too. We'll talk about why it makes sense in this case too, and just in terms of licensing, which is one of the other changes.

But yeah, the ability to leverage the system and be able to use it across departments, which makes purchasing a little bit easier, which makes justification a little bit easier. It's great. There's lots of different features in there, again, specific to schools. That's one of them.

The assignment of tickets based on workload or skill set or just department or, you know, depending on the type of ticket that that visors looking at, it will automatically assign it to the correct resource, which is a pretty cool spot. Yeah, chargebacks to repairs to families and things like that.

Visors got a ton of intelligence in it there to allow for both the calculation of the cost, but also to determine for the district, whether or not that's a cost that should be passed on to the family, and that can be based on insurance. It can be based on, you know, the number of times that particular student has submitted issues before of a certain type, like user initiated.

So there's all kinds of intelligence and sort of automation in there, again, trying to make this as easy as possible for districts and allow them to do more with less. I know that's, there's a bingo card right there, but yeah, there's, yeah, it's important for us. So that's kind of the first big change. Okay. Yeah, the second one has to do with again, that same sort of thing, but we've got kind of a lower cost entry level type version of visor.

I don't want to make that sound like we're removing any major functionality, but what it is is, it's, we call it visor essentials, and this particular platform removes that helped us. So for anybody who's still just interested in ITS at management, doesn't want to pay the extra cost, which is still very reasonable, but doesn't want to pay that. This has very, very significant decreasing costs.

It's almost a 40% delta or a 40% savings, essentially, for anybody who's really just focusing on ITS at management. So that's kind of what we call visor essentials. It's a really, really cool option for schools that already have a help desk in place. So there's a real significant upgrade, but we're an easy upgrade path to, you know, including help desk.

So one of the things that we've done for some districts recently is just turn on help desk, allow them to start using it and seeing it while they're still under contract with the different help desk, giving them an opportunity to compare and decide whether or not that's a path that they want to take advantage of the upgrade path to the full system.

But it's still got lots of, you know, great features, kind of what our sort of bread and butter has been, I guess, over the last, you know, six or seven years. So all the same sort of Google integration and bar coding, checking in and checking out student information system integration, the whole asset inventory and all that stuff. Yeah, nice. All right. You have one more thing. Is that right? One is the pricing.

So this really does focus exactly and on that, Chris, just in terms of making things easier. So what we've done is we've kind of simplified the pricing to the best of our ability and that's based on one single number and that student enrollment. So the complexity that we're dealing with with districts and trying to, you know, just discuss what are prices going to look like next year? You know, how many assets are we managing? How many technicians are we having working on tickets?

How many facilities and maintenance team members are working on work orders? All of those questions go away with with our new pricing model. We make it super easy, no, unlimited, yeah, it's just based on student enrollment. And the cool thing too is that a lot of the districts are working with, they have easily, they have a, you know, a good forecast of what's coming, right? So they know what their current enrollment is.

They have anticipation for either growth or decline in student enrollment the following year. So we simply chew up, you know, we ask them to sort of give us an idea as to what they think enrollment is going to be, cover that number, the lowest that you possibly can. And then we'll just chew up if we need to increase the cost, you know, the licensing for the subsequent year, we can do that. And if not, then we don't have to or if we drop the number, then we drop the number.

So we just try to simplify that as much as possible. I think you probably know if you're going to a, you know, super BA and you're trying to say, you know, this is what I'm looking at purchasing. Having a very, very simple way to sort of deliver that kind of purchase request I think is pretty, pretty, pretty helpful. Yeah, right. We're actually, as many schools are, we're getting ready to do all these budget talks. And it's, those are, those aren't fun talks. Those are hard, hard talks.

And we know that prices for most products or most services change. And there can be this natural, but doesn't fill natural progression of the cost keeps going up, the cost keeps going up. So love that visors trying to unpack acknowledging that we're K-12 that sometimes we put things together with duct tape.

And our budget doesn't hit the same as what business sector might, might, so love that you guys are identifying that and trying to work with that and not do this, you know, year to year, raise the prices. Even, you know, I'll have to where I make an account for one person, they don't use the product as much, but I love that they have an account. But man, if you're, if you're charging me for that particular user, I'm going to trim that thing out.

So I love that you guys have this formula to make it not so difficult to figure out. Yeah, that's the goal for sure. I've had some good conversations about asset management, inventory. If you don't have this in place already and you're like, well, I don't have a budget line for that.

I think a lot of schools can look at how much loss they're having in devices and if those devices could be recovered, what that savings is, and that's where you can have a great conversation with your boss about, that's what validates the cost of visor because we're going to lose X amount of devices less, we're saving money over on this side actually when it all plays out. Yeah. 100%. So cool. So I mean, is there anything else? Are we missing anything else with visor?

Well, I mean, we talked about kind of the idea of financials and sort of you just addressed it. So I just want to kind of highlight that because it is important. I think there's a lot of folks, a lot of districts that are dealing with that sort of price creep kind of year over year pricing increases. We don't do that.

So it's something that we talk about just about every conversation we have recently is how important it is for us to make this as simple as possible from an economy standpoint, right? Like to make this financial as simple as possible. So we don't raise our prices. We have an absolute obligation to not raise our prices by more than 2% any year. And we haven't raised our prices in over five years.

In fact, and I don't want to speak for the rest of the industry, but I'm pretty sure that there's not too many that are doing what we're doing. And that's, we haven't had a price increase in over five years. And in fact, the only price change we've had is a price drop because of what we just introduced at the end of last year.

So almost across almost every tier of our pricing level, the price has decreased for an increased value product offering others were offering more at a lower price and were offering a much more even lower than that affordable entry level type solution that really just focuses on the very much essentials of what a district needs for asset management.

So that was really important for us to be kind of, you know, stand out in the marketplace a little bit and really present ourselves as we're listening to what you guys are dealing with, right? We're aware of it. We're keeping it in top of mind and trying to make this as easy as possible for you guys to sort of, you know, jump in and benefit from. So yeah, that's kind of an important point that I wanted to hit with you, Chris, and with your listeners.

The other one then just in terms of kind of, again, what you talked about there is the ability to justify a platform like visor through a return on investment, like an actual return on investment. You mentioned a great example in terms of loss devices, tracking those. But also, there's some really cool things that people are doing with visor in terms of trends analysis.

Cool. So there's a district that I was working with they have, you know, let's just say four or five different schools, I think it's five schools. And they're all trying to lower their costs of repairs and they're trying to introduce these new initiatives that they think might help in lowering the costs and they're using visor to analyze the results of those initiatives.

So a month over a month, view of what type of repairs are we facing, which manufacturers devices are costing us the most, you know, which school is kind of doing the best. Who's initiative has proven useful in so far as lowering the number of repairs a month over a month? How do we implement that initiative in the rest of the district?

So lots of very cool analytics that visors drawing on to really allow for, you know, a very, very significant, demonstrable return on investment for the districts that are using it. So that's pretty cool for us too. Years ago, we had a particular Chromebook model that we felt like we didn't have a visor in place at the time, right?

We felt like we were having more issues at this particular building with this particular model with this particular screen, but those were just feelings because we weren't tracking it well. And you're just kind of looking at each other, when if you have visor, you can just pull the report. Yes, that is correct. That model, that building, that screen is happening, look, look what it looks like compared to last year with a different model, same demographic.

So you know, you can pinpoint things down well. Yeah. I know that you guys do a great job with lost devices and work with Google, Evan and console as well, again, about device recovery, that kind of stuff too. Or we just had a kid come back that was gone tech department, this didn't necessarily know that he was even gone. I know visor helps out with identifying students have multiple devices or not getting that return correct. Yeah, absolutely right.

Yeah. So students that are leaving the district or moving from one school to another, visor allows certainly there's protocols and process in place through visor that prevents schools from being able to allocate a second device to a student without sort of a justification. Otherwise, if the student brings the original device in for repair and that gets checked in, then you can check a second one out. That's an optional process, a protection in place.

But yeah, that's an example of how visor can certainly be used to mitigate that type of risk. Yeah, absolutely. There's a ton of those. It's a lot of fun just kind of going through one of my favorite things is just listening to districts and they're different initiatives like the always one, just kind of a cool if you've got time Chris.

It was a really neat one, a tech director was telling me about any student that gets to the third repair, we're going to put them in it, we're going to put them in a frequent flyer OU and that requires them to view a PowerPoint presentation followed by quiz and they have to get it. Oh, I love it.

Yeah, eight out of the 10 questions correct on that quiz to get out of the frequent flyer OU so that they can get back to being able to sort of use the non essentials of the Chromebook like games and stuff like that or have access to certain privileges that they otherwise don't when they're in this sort of penalty. I have some I have some teachers I'd like to put that in yeah, yeah, exactly, it doesn't not even exist.

Yeah, I thought that was super cool and again, they were using visor like so visor counts the number of times each and submits a any device repair.

So visor can automatically they were using visor to automatically place that student in that OU and then automatically send the PowerPoint presentation to the student, have them watch it and then yeah, and then they have to click a link in that same notification the visor sent over so that they can try to pass that kind of exam on how to properly care for the device. So it's pretty cool. There's lots of really, really good issues. Yeah, I just come up with all I just love talking with them.

You know what I mean? That's just I hear all these things and I'm like, oh my God, Vice, it can help with that and that's such a cool initiative. I love that. So yeah, it's very good. Yeah, I know. I think Scott County's been mentioned try Valley strafford. I know that we did some links to like a case study with strafford. So we can link in the podcast description to that.

Yeah, it's nice to see this kind of like this initiative, the kind of speak to financial constraints under which districts are working. It's nice to see that feed through to these new clients that you just mentioned. Yeah, it's nice. We get lots of positive feedback from clients and we're really trying to get this right in terms of making this as affordable and easy as possible for for districts to come on board. Great. I know that we can point listeners to visor.cloud slash k12 tech talk.

That's b-i-z-o-r.cloud slash k12 tech talk. Get a demo. I think you guys still give away a shirt and a hoodie with the podcast too. Yeah. You can take on a demo. Check that out. Jeff, is there anything else that you want to mention? Yeah, I appreciate that. Chris, yeah, super quick. One of the big initiatives that we have is trying to get in front of as many people as possible this year face to face. We're not trying and when I say as many people as possible, we're trying to keep this focus.

I really want to get in front of people, we're trying to sponsor as many lunch and learns as we can. We really love to hear from directors that want to kind of, you know, we'll come in with pizza if you guys are getting together and we can come in and just tell you about what we have and listen to you, find out about, you know, what is it that you're facing? What can we be doing better for you? It's something that we want.

Yeah. If you're listening out there and you want to talk more visor.cloud slash k12 tech talk absolutely, we would love to hear from you. Great. And visor is buying pizza. Awesome. We are buying pizza and we'll bring some visor visors. I love that too. Visor visors. Love it. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks Jeff. Thanks for hanging out for a few minutes. My pleasure, Chris. Always a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you very much for your time. We might not be the same.

You share the same pain that I do. The views and opinions expressed on the k12 tech talk podcast are the personal opinions of Josh, Chris and Mark and do not represent the views or opinions of our sponsors or other organizations that we're affiliated with. The material and information presented here is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. We were buying words and by the phrase of the way.

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