 The Maine senator initiated the amendment with Senate colleagues from other rural states. |
Echo of the 'public lane' proposal: Senate backs telecom discount for schools, libraries, rural hospitals
Originally published in Current, July 31, 1995
By Steve Behrens
The Senate has passed and the House may soon consider a provision giving ''affordable'' access to telecom services for K-12 schools, public libraries and rural health care providers.
The item, buried in S.652, the Senate's version of the big telecom bill that will reregulate the telephone and cable industries, was crafted for passage by narrowing the groups of institutions eligible for assistance.
For educators it's a small but welcome echo of last year's failed attempts, in the telecom rewrite of a Democrat-controlled Congress, to create ''public lanes'' on the infohighway--free or discounted access for a much broader class of nonprofits, including public broadcasters and colleges.
The new provision--initiated by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and cosponsored by Sens. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) and James Exon (D-Neb.)--was part of the Senate bill adopted June 16. Two days earlier it had withstood a challenge on the Senate floor: by a 58-36 vote, the chamber rejected an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to strike the provision. But the cosponsors, who had already left higher education out of the bill, supported McCain in further narrowing eligibility to:
- K-12 public or nonprofit schools with endowments less than $50 million,
- libraries eligible for certain kinds of federal aid, and
- rural health-care providers, including nonprofit hospitals, medical schools, clinics and mental health centers.
If enacted, the preferential rates would be defined by the FCC. The Senate provision originally set school rates at the telecom companies' cost of providing service, but was toned down to say only that telecom rates for schools and libraries must be ''affordable'' and ''less than the amounts charged for similar services to other parties.'' Rates for rural health institutions would have to be ''reasonably comparable to rates charged for similar services in urban areas.''
A similar amendment to the House telecom bill, drawn up by Rep. Bill Orton (D-Utah) and cosponsored by Rep. Connie Morella (R-Md.), simply requires ''affordable access'' and limits the health care providers to hospitals using telecom services for telemedicine. The present House bill, H.R. 1555, requires only that telecom companies ensure schools' access to advanced services if the companies offer those services.
House backers were seeking Rules Committee permission last week to offer the amendment on the floor, while the bill was struggling under assaults from the long-distance industry.
''It's been shocking how little education has been a part of [telecom legislation],'' comments Michelle Richards, federal networks advocate for the National School Boards Association. But the Snowe-Rockefeller amendment was a ''huge victory'' for education, she says.
Bill Wright, a pioneer K-12 net-maven who now staffs the Consortium for School Networking, Washington, reports that high phone charges multiply the cost of Internet access for schools that are outside of cities. A school in Grand Isle, Vt., for instance, must pay about $11 an hour for a line into Burlington, the nearest available connection to the Internet.
He quotes a South Dakota teacher: when the infohighway came to town, she felt the cost amount to a chain across the road. And the feeling is worse for educators who want to use interactive video in distance learning.
''A lot of schools are getting sticker shock,'' says educational telecom consultant Richard Hezel, when administrators discover that a two-way video hookup can cost $20,000 or even $48,000 a year, per school, in line charges.
''What is happening is that schools are purchasing the equipment and then are not able to pay the line costs because they are so outrageous,'' says Chris Dalziel of the Instructional Telecommunications Consortium.
New River Community College, at Dublin, Va., has equipped distance-learning classrooms on two campuses 20 miles apart so that they can share instructors, but the college can't afford the line charges of a combined $3,600 a month, says Tom Wilkinson, distance education director.
Internet connections at the Dublin campus are also inferior; the college's 56 kilobytes-per-second hookup to the 'net is swamped when many students are using it, and the college doesn't have the capacity to allow students to connect into it from home.
''My opinion would be: if the telecom vendors would lower the rates, the volume would more than make up for the higher costs,'' predicts Wilkinson.
Richard comments: ''It's also surprising to me that some of the corporate interests aren't looking to how they can get kids and schools working online.''
Indeed, some major telcos see that advantage and have helped schools introduce young people to advanced telecom services at school by offering reduced school rates, as have Bell Atlantic in Maryland and Pacific Bell in California.
Elsewhere, state legislatures have moved out ahead of Congress in mandating telecom discounts or allocating funds for educational technology. In Georgia and Michigan, where phone companies owed big refunds to customers, the states directed millions from the refunds into school technology, says Hezel. Tennessee gave education a 30 percent break on telecom rates.
Texas has made one of the biggest commitments, planning to invest $1.5 billion over 10 years in building school networks and training educators, according to Connie Stout, director of the state's Texas Education Network. The state will collect half the money from wireline phone companies and the other half from cellular operators.
Telecom companies that want to benefit from the ''sunset'' of state deregulation, she says, must offer schools a distance-insensitive transmission rate that is just 5 percent above costs, effective Sept. 1.
Later news: Snowe amendment becomes law in Telecom Act of 1996.
Web page revised Nov. 23, 1996
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