The FCC plans to fund wi-fi on school buses. A lawsuit claims it’s overstepping

When the Federal Communications Commission voted last year to pay for school-bus wi-fi with educational connectivity funds, it seemed the agency was teed up for an easy A.

Now, a lawsuit endorsed by Sen. Ted Cruz argues that the FCC overstepped its authority—and that it could be putting kids at risk in the process.

“Addictive and distracting social media apps are wreaking havoc on our kids,” Cruz, a Texas Republican, said in an April 11 statement announcing that he and other senators had filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit. “The FCC’s decision to fund children’s unsupervised access to social media on bus rides to and from school is both dangerous and unlawful.”

“The homework gap”

The controversy traces back to October, when the FCC voted along party lines to allow school districts to spend funds from the agency’s E-Rate program on wi-fi routers for school buses beginning in July 2024. At the time, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement that the move was crucial to closing the “homework gap,” a term that describes the experience of students who may struggle to complete coursework because they lack reliable internet access at home.

She added that outfitting buses with connectivity is “especially vital in rural areas, where commutes to school are long and broadband is not always available.” She also noted in the statement that through a temporary Covid-era program, some districts found that school-bus wi-fi alleviated students’ need to print stacks of pages at school or sit in dark parking lots late at night to pick up a signal.

John Windhausen Jr., executive director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB), told Tech Brew that the government has been trying to reduce the number of people who lack internet access for years, but affordable home broadband still isn’t accessible to roughly a quarter of people in the US. Wi-fi on school buses is one strategy to help bridge that gap, he said.

“We’re now at the stage where we have to try every possible policy solution in order to do a better job of getting everybody connected,” said Windhausen, whose group joined the case in January in support of the FCC’s position. “Access to the internet is so fundamental to education,” he said.

The controversy

In the wake of the more flexible Covid-era program that enabled some of the early bus wi-fi experiments, the FCC decided to allow bus wi-fi equipment to qualify for its E-Rate program—which typically helps schools and libraries, especially those in economically disadvantaged areas—purchase connectivity at discounted rates. Notably, E-Rate is funded through mandatory contributions from telecom carriers that typically show up as line items on consumer bills.

Rosenworcel’s two Republican colleagues on the commission dissented over the funding structure in October, arguing that Congress authorized E-Rate funds to be spent only on connections for physical classrooms or libraries.

The FCC’s ruling led Maurine and Matthew Molak, two parents who run the David’s Legacy Foundation, an anti-bullying nonprofit, to file suit. They sued to block the rule change in December on the grounds that it “exceeds the FCC’s statutory authority” and is “undermining” their nonprofit’s mission to eradicate cyberbullying by “enabling unsupervised social media access by children and teenagers.”

A contingent of high-profile Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn, joined Cruz in filing the amicus brief in support of the Molaks’ position. The legislators stated their concerns bluntly in a press release: They’re “opposing Biden’s effort to subsidize TikTok on school buses.”

Appropriate oversight?

Moving forward, policymakers and the courts will decide where the line falls between protecting children online and providing the access they need to complete schoolwork and stay connected.

Kinzoo founder and CEO Sean Herman, whose company creates children’s technology products and entertainment, said that gatekeeping kids’ wi-fi connections isn’t guaranteed to prevent negative online experiences. He noted that many children already have 24/7 access to the internet on the smartphones they bring to school, and those devices don’t require wi-fi.

He echoed some of the concerns over children’s access to social media, including platforms that impose often-ineffective age limits for new accounts and employ “dark patterns” that promote overuse.

“Limiting or blocking students having access to wi-fi just to keep them off social media feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater a little bit,” Herman said.

According to SHLB’s Windhausen, schools already commonly use content-blocking features across their networks, including the ones installed on buses. But he said the debate over the types of educational connectivity the FCC can fund isn’t going away anytime soon. The commission is soon expected to extend E-Rate funds to cover hotspot lending programs through schools and libraries, which Windhausen said is also likely to go to court.

In the meantime, Herman said it’s important to approach this policy debate with a measure of realism.

“It’s probably a bit idealistic to think, ‘We’re giving you wi-fi; we want you to do homework,’” he said. “Maybe there are a subset of kids on that bus that maybe are able to have access…and they’re actually using it as intended. I think that that is a win.”