On April 27, 2020, the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) sent a letter to four United States Senators encouraging Congress to “include sufficient funding for student broadband in the next Coronavirus relief legislation.” Referencing Funds For Learning’s analysis, SHLB warns that if “Congress chooses to limit the amount of funding to $2 billion total,” the program “would need to reduce the number of students served, reduce the number of months that broadband costs would be covered, reduce the number or types of devices funded, and/or reduce the funding for network security.”
In a letter to Ranking Member Maria Cantwell on April 24, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) encouraged Congress to “provide much more than $2 billion” to support connectivity in unserved areas and critical network security services “required to effectively combat increasingly complex and frequent cyberattacks.”