Columnists

A need for speed

Well-established case law in Arkansas makes it a violation of the state Constitution for the state to fail to provide an equitable and adequate public education to its children.

So it would seem to follow that it ought to be unconstitutional that the state's public schools are under-served and differently served in Internet broadband width and connection speed.

A study by the state Department of Information Systems says only 12 percent of the state's public schools operate Internet systems at standards needed for the looming school year for Common Core.

That's clearly inadequate for national and global competitiveness. And it's specifically unequal to kids in 88 percent of the schools.

But then I am not actually a licensed lawyer or jurist or broadband technician. And I have people who qualify as one or more of those things advising me not to get ahead of myself.

There is a statute in question--Act 1050 of 2011. It generally provides that municipalities and government entities may not compete with private broadband providers.

It's protectionism. St. Vincent and Baptist Health might want to shut down the UAMS Medical Center, too.

A section of that law, added late at the behest of the state's powerful telecommunications lobby, expressly forbade public schools from hooking onto an existing public fiber optics line--a "spine," it's called--that already serves many of the state's colleges and universities.

The private telecommunications industry argues that it has made sufficient investment in infrastructure to be able now to extend better broadband service to all public schools. It argues that the protectionist language regarding schools was added as part of a deal by which private providers made otherwise ill-advised investments to be able to serve the long-term needs of isolated rural schools.

This public system--Arkansas Research Education Optical Network, called ARE-ON--already exists publicly for a public education purpose, meaning that of public higher education.

No one is trying to open all of the state to widespread government participation in broadband competition. All we have under consideration in this case is to take the little school section out of the broader 2011 law.

That wouldn't take but a minute--or three days as required by the Constitution for a special legislative session.

For a while it seemed that Gov. Mike Beebe was torn on this issue. But now, as probably the last hurrah of his governorship, he has embraced a plan to repeal that school section of that 2011 law in a special session, if he can get the votes.

The idea is not to force schools to use the public system. It is merely to give them that option.

State money has been set aside for this use. Federal aid is available. Time is wasting.

In some areas, private providers may amount to the best deal. In fact, I'm told that would be the case in nearly all cases.

The private industry argues that no one has fully considered all factors, such as the availability of quick and competent maintenance, or the actual comparative costs school by school.

That's a fair point, but no more fair than that schools ought to be permitted to look at all options in seeking to make those determinations and calculations in the best interests of children.

This much seems true: If a general inadequacy persists in Internet services to our state's school children, and if we bog down in a political fight and fail to avail ourselves of federal and state money to correct the situation, then we certainly ought to have ourselves a court case.

This is yet another issue grounded in Arkansas' historic disadvantage as a poor and sparsely populated rural culture. It's a similar circumstance to the one that made early private electricity cost-prohibitive, which gave rise to government rural electrification.

What will continue to happen in Arkansas, absent bold action, is that we will slip deeper into a death spiral. Our disadvantaged children will fall farther and farther behind as the world spins ever faster.

Conversely, nothing could help a disadvantaged rural child catch up with the world faster than the highest-speed, highest-capacity Internet service. A kid could sit at a school in Glenwood or Bald Knob and take a virtual tour of the Smithsonian. Or a famous art museum.

Here's the best conclusion I've come to at this point: There is no good reason to deny schools the simple option of a public system--unless, that is, we made a deal with the private sector that the private sector has kept demonstrably, to the extent it can show us that it stands ready to make our schools equal and adequate expeditiously and effectively.

A leading state senator tells me this issue is not hard and that the two parties would find if they talked that they are not so far apart. So talk.

School starts again soon. We need to get our children within a instantaneous click of an equal and adequate education in the modern world.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 07/29/2014

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