On June 25, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission voted 2 to 1 to open a top-to-bottom review of E-Rate, the program that has paid a discounted share of school and library connectivity for thirty years. The Notice asks whether it should be narrowed, restricted, or ended outright.
Nothing changes for the current funding year. What is on the table is everything after it, and the range is wide. Discounts could be reduced. The allowance for equipment inside the building could be cut. Paid help keeping that equipment running could be ruled ineligible. Support for bringing a new connection to a school could be pulled back. The program could be phased out entirely. Any one of those changes what a founding team can afford in its first year, and what an established school can afford to replace in its sixth.
The comment record is open until October 13, 2026, and the schools CTS serves have as much at stake in the outcome as anyone.
E-Rate is what makes opening a school affordable
E-Rate is usually described as a discount on internet service. In the charter sector, it functions as something else entirely. It lowers the barrier to entry for founding a school, and that is how a connectivity subsidy ends up funding educational innovation.
A new charter school must have a working network before a single student walks in, and it has to buy that network at the exact moment it has the least money it will ever have.
Think about the sequence. A founding team takes possession of a building that has very likely never carried a school network. It needs cabling, switching, wireless coverage in every instructional space, a firewall, and an internet connection ordered months ahead, because providers do not shorten their timelines to match your opening date. All of it before opening day and opening day does not move.
Now the revenue side. No enrollment history means no per-pupil revenue yet. Startup funding is doing the work, often a Charter School Program grant, and it is being asked to cover facilities, curriculum, staffing and technology at once. And credit is hard to come by with no assets on the books or evidence of likely future revenue.
E-Rate does not make that cost disappear, but it does change the size of it. A school at a high discount rate carries a fraction of the eligible portion, and that is often the difference between opening with infrastructure that holds for five or six years and opening with something improvised that gets torn out in eighteen months, out of operating funds that do not exist yet. Raise that number and some schools do not open at all. Others open smaller, or a year later, or with a network that will fail them during their first state testing window.
The filing calendar starts before you have staff, too. A Form 470 posts what you need and opens competitive bidding; a Form 471 requests the funding. Those deadlines land in the same months a founding team is hiring teachers and finishing a facility, which is worth saying in a comment if it has been your experience.
And then it matters every year after that
Networks age on a schedule. A switch bought for opening day reaches end of support in year six or seven years whether or not the budget is ready. Enrollment grows, a second campus opens, a one-to-one program arrives, and the bandwidth that felt generous three years ago becomes a constraint. Meanwhile the recurring internet cost never goes away, on a budget that is largely fixed per pupil.
What E-Rate does over that longer arc is make the refresh cycle something a business manager can plan. You can build a five-year picture and know roughly what share the school carries each year. Narrow what is eligible or cut the discount and the refresh does not become impossible. It becomes deferred.
Deferred network maintenance in a school does not look like a dramatic outage. It looks like a testing window that fails in one wing, a classroom where the wireless drops until the teacher stops trying to use it, and access points running firmware nobody patches, a security posture aging quietly until it matters all at once.
What the program actually covers
Two categories, and the Commission is asking about each separately.
The first is the connection that brings the internet to your building, and the monthly bill for it. It also covers the cost of physically running a line to a site no provider already reaches, which for a school in the wrong location can be the largest single number in the whole project.
The second is everything inside the building: the cabling in the walls, the switches and the wireless access points, the firewall, and paid help keeping all of it running.
That second category comes with a fixed allowance per student, set across several years rather than renewed every year. That is what lets a business manager plan against it. It is also why it runs out. Once a school has spent its allowance, the next project waits for the cycle to reset.
Your discount rate is driven by the share of students eligible for the National School Lunch Program and by whether your site is rural, which is why two schools ten miles apart can carry very different shares of the same project.
What the Commission is actually asking
Worth reading the Notice yourself rather than the coverage of it, because it asks more than the headline suggests. Among the questions on the table:
Has the program met its objectives, and should it be limited or ended given how many schools are already connected?
How much do schools actually rely on E-Rate for internet service and for the network inside the building, and what happens to affordability if that support ends?
When the program pays for a school to build its own connection rather than lease one, does that crowd out private investment?
What should be required to protect children using the networks the program pays for?
What would make the program harder to abuse and simpler to administer?
For context, the last major overhaul was the 2014 modernization, which produced the two categories and the per-student allowance described above. A review is not unprecedented. What is unusual is that this one puts the program’s continued existence on the table alongside the housekeeping.
What is not changing right now
Current funding year windows, deadlines and obligations are unchanged while the review runs. Any rule change follows the comment and reply deadlines and comes through further process, which puts the earliest realistic exposure at the following funding year. So if anyone suggests pausing a project because E-Rate is ending, that is not what the record says today. Nothing changes now, and a change later is possible.
How to comment
The FCC builds its record out of what people submit, and this docket is already busy. As of August 31 it held roughly 470 filings. If you assumed that meant lobbyists and trade associations, it does not. The record is overwhelmingly individual school districts and public libraries, plus several hundred people using the express comment form. Capistrano Unified, Central Dauphin, Toledo Lucas County Public Library and hundreds more have already put their own numbers on the record.
Charter schools are the exception, and the gap is stark. Search the docket for charter and you get twenty-one filings. Take out the traditional districts, the unrelated filings that list this proceeding alongside a dozen others, and the individual comments that merely use the word, and eight are genuinely from the charter sector. Two of those eight are associations speaking for everyone: the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools filed on August 26, and the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools on August 19. The remainder is a handful of operators, among them Plato Academy, Northpoint, PACT, Hiawatha Academies, and one comment covering seven Springs schools in California. Out of roughly 470 filings, individual charter operators are in the single digits.
Filing is more straightforward than people expect, and you can read the whole record before you write a word. Filings are public as soon as they post, usually the same day, with no embargo until the window closes. Search WC Docket No. 26-133 at fcc.gov/ecfs to see what your peers have said, then file there yourself. Comments are due October 13, 2026, replies November 12, 2026. If you want the primary sources first, the Federal Register notice is at 91 FR 52626, published August 14, 2026, and the Commission item is FCC 26-41.
Before you submit your comments, it is important to note: Charter Technology Solutions does E-Rate work for charter schools. We have a commercial interest in how this comes out, and you should read anything we publish with that in mind.
If you have years of E-Rate history and a view about what it bought, the record is open until October 13. Whatever that view is, it counts for more inside the docket than outside it, and at the moment the charter sector has left that job to two associations and about six schools.
