We at the FCC have worked for over a year with the National School Boards Association and its excellent Executive Director Anne Bryant, who I know is blessed with a dedicated and talented staff. Michelle and others have been a constant source of wise counsel from the board's-eye-view.

Indeed, all of the fine organizations that make up EDLINC should be congratulated for presenting a united front throughout the FCC proceeding: the American Library Association, the American Association of State School Administrators, and the Council of Chief State School Officers and so many others have time and time again provided the Commission with excellent guidance as to how this program should work in practice so that we don't needlessly burden schools and libraries. Just as important, these groups and their members have reminded us that our work is first and foremost about preparing schools, teachers and children for the 21st Century. I want to mention specially the National Education Association, our host today. In so many areas NEA has been a tireless advocate for educators and, as a parent of three school-age children, I am personally deeply grateful for your work. Carolyne Breedlove deserves a hand for her blood, sweat and tears in pulling together this meeting on such short notice.

You've heard from so many excellent speakers today, this forum has been like the All-Star game of education technology. Linda Roberts from the Department of Education has been a tireless voice in this area. Earlier, this morning, you heard from two people who, in my estimation, should be regarded as modern day heroes of education. Kenneth McClure and Julia Johnson were members of the Joint Board on Universal Service that took the Snowe-Rockefeller provision of the Telecommunications Act and gave it life and they deserve our thanks.

I want to say a special word about my friend Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Jay Rockefeller, along with his colleagues Sen. Olympia Snowe and Sen. Bob Kerrey, insisted on including schools and libraries in the Telecom Act long ago, fought to make sure there was room in there for our children when it passed, and have stayed deeply involved in the process of implementing their legislation through this very day. I meet with and work with them regularly and I can tell you that their commitment and support has been one of the true privileges of my job.

President Clinton said in his Second Inaugural Address that we must guarantee that in the next century "the knowledge and power of the Information Age will be within reach, not just of the few, but of every classroom, every library, every child." President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Secretary Riley and many other members of the Administration have done much to bring affordable access to education technology to the head of the national agenda.

I don't need to explain to this group what making technology ubiquitous in the nation's classrooms will mean. I don't need to spend time talking about how integrating computers into the educational process accelerates learning, how grades go up and discipline problems down. Computer technology allows teachers to give their students individualized attention, it allows students to be inquisitive, to explore, to try new things without the fear of embarrassment.

I don't need to talk about the dramatic effect on Gross National Product, on income distribution, on your children's ability to get good jobs with good wages. You know already that by the year 2000, 60% of all new jobs will require working with computers.

What I should do is explain what lies behind and ahead.

November 7, 1996 is a date that will long stand out in the history of American education. The Joint Board on Universal Service on that day gave concrete form to the notion that every American child is entitled to the same quality of education regardless of how poor they are and where they live.

Congress intended the Joint Board and the FCC to solve two problems of integrating technology into schools -- unequal access and unsustainable expense. Study after study showed and continues to show that the cost of telecommunications technology relegates most schools in poor and high-cost areas to second-class status. One group presented an informal study to the Joint Board that showed that the same high-speed phone line cost $237 per month in urban Portland, Oregon and $2,080 in rural Lakeview, in the same state.

Meanwhile, exclusive private schools and a few public pilot projects serve as showpieces of the electronic age. One hundred years ago only the exclusive schools had libraries. For a century we've been struggling to put the resources of the Paper Age in all schools. In the next century all schools should be equipped like those showpieces. And we shouldn't spend 100 years working on this goal. Under our new law we intend to start this fall and by the time the century starts we want all schools on line, with technology fully integrated into the students' lives.

The great accomplishment of the Joint Board was to come up with a way to put technology into our schools on an equal basis and at the same time transform those schools and libraries into the community hubs they can and should be. The final vote on the program was a unanimous 8 to nothing, with state and federal, Republican and Democratic commissioners voting together. So bipartisanship is alive and well at the FCC.

I understand that the purpose of this gathering is to discuss implementing the Snowe-Rockefeller plan on the state level. To some degree, even having this conversation is a little premature, since our final rule might not be out for two and a half months and we at the FCC must remain silent until then about what changes if any will be made in the Joint Board's recommendation. Even so, it is eminently clear that there will be a great deal left for the states to do after May 8 if the benefits that Congress and the Joint Board and the President -- and you -- want for the nation's children are to reach them.

For present purposes, I want first to explain the blueprint from which we work -- the Joint Board's Recommendation -- and then discuss what lies ahead so that you understand completely why working on the state level is so tremendously important.

The Joint Board handed the FCC for its consideration a plan that would provide all elementary and secondary schools and public libraries in this country with deep discounts on the purchase of telecommunications. According to this plan, all the nation's telecommunications companies will pay a small percentage of their overall revenues into a Universal Service Fund. A portion of that fund -- as much as $2.25 billion a year -- will be set aside exclusively for schools and libraries. If less than that amount is used in any year, whatever is left over will roll into the next year, to be added to the 2.25 billion available at that time.

What will the discounts pay for? All commercially available telecommunications services, from the most basic telephone line to fiber optic cable and wireless technologies. All internal connections will be discounted -- the connections between classrooms that will make it possible for students to collaborate on science projects or interact at the same time with the same college professor. The servers, routers, and hubs that make it possible to run a complex network and have more than one student on-line at a time -- all that will be discounted. And yes, the cost of Internet access will be discounted.

The members of the bipartisan, rural-urban, state-federal Joint Board that voted unanimously for this recommendation can be justifiably proud of what they did. In many respects this is another example of something American government in its finest moments does well, preparing in advance to meet massive challenges in the future.

In many ways, this is the ideal government program that the President was referring to in his Inaugural Address when he said that "We have resolved for our time the great debate over the role of government. Today we can declare: government is not the problem. . . "

With such a compelling plan to work from, it may surprise you to learn that the FCC has been working hard almost since November 7 to evaluate, assess what the public had to say, and continue to revise and refine the Joint Board's work. But there are still thorny issues to work through.

One problem that many people have identified is that there is no guarantee in this program. What is there to stop the wealthiest, most sophisticated school districts from getting on line for discounts first and emptying out the fund? The answer is that, while the wealthiest school districts will always have a natural advantage, the Joint Board took giant strides towards assuring equal access. Simply put, this program gives the biggest discounts -- as much as 90% -- to the poorest, most isolated schools and libraries. A public school with an impoverished student body could get as much as a 90% discount on high-speed phone lines that can be used for data transmission; or on wireless technology that can hook laptop computers to the Internet anywhere in the school building.

Others have told us they fear the schools and libraries will buy services they don't need, waste the money and end up with closets full of disconnected computers and unused phone lines. But we're building safeguards into the program to insure prudent planning.

Some critics say the schools are already well on their way to being wired, through existing public sector initiatives and private sector charitable efforts. Corporate America should be congratulated for what it has done to date, but simply bringing a wire to the schoolhouse door doesn't pay the cost of a distance learning program in Bledsoe County, Tennessee. We're designing an ongoing working system.

All of these are valid, probing, questions. Together, they form the kind of high-quality policy debate this country needs to have more often. I am confident that, come May 8, we'll have the right answers.

The problem is that the work doesn't end on May 8, it really only begins then. As soon as the FCC issues our final rule, it will be the responsibility of the state regulatory authorities to make sure that you, the parents and educators and library users of this country have easy access to advanced telecommunications services.

The Joint Board decided back before November that they wanted every state to participate in this program the same way. So they recommended that, in order for the states to have access to most of the money in the Universal Service Fund, they will have to adopt a system of discounts just like the one the Joint Board designed, ranging from 20-90%. The money will come from the federal fund, not the states, but the size of the discounts will be decided by the states.

It will be up to the regulatory authorities -- the people you are seeing later today -- to do this. It will also be up to them to design and adopt many of the complicated technical rules that govern how the money we supply is directed through the system. Surely schools and libraries will benefit most if those rules are adopted quickly and if they are simply and understandable. The more confusion there is in this system, the longer it will be before schools and libraries start to receive the benefits.

What this all means is the following: you, the education community, have made this issue a priority until now, and you have done a marvelous job working with the FCC and with each other. You now must learn to work with your state regulators.

The scope of this task differs for each of you. I am told that at least 44 states are represented here today. I don't have to tell you that the level of activity and awareness of what we are doing at the FCC varies drastically from state to state. In New York, a committee made up of representatives of every conceivable interested party was convened more than a year ago to get the Public Service Commission ready to tackle their responsibility. On the other hand, I have been told that Illinois has yet to take any action. Whether or not that is the case, the perception exists that it is. So there is work to be done everywhere.

There is no reason that the relationship between the education community and the regulators should be adversarial. After all, the Joint Board itself was made up almost entirely of regulators, four of them from the states. But rapid change breeds apprehension and conflict, and you will have to be prepared for that.

Ultimately, I believe that the success or failure of the Snowe-Rockefeller plan depends on citizens like you. The FCC cannot simply announce on May 8 that funds will be available and assume that everything will run smoothly. Introducing technology into our schools and libraries will require an enormous amount of preparation, and you will have to drive it. I urge you when you go home to focus your school and library administrators on the task at hand, assessing their own technological needs and forming the strategic partnerships that will let them make intelligent use of the program we set up.

The greatest enemy of Snowe-Rockefeller is complacency. If you leave here thinking that after May 8, the way will be clear for the introduction of technology into your children's classrooms, you will be in grave danger of losing the battle when it is barely joined. There is so much to be done on the home front, above and beyond forming relationships with your state regulators.

But we have come a long way. I am enormously proud of the work the FCC has done to bring within reach the networking of this nation's classrooms. Snowe-Rockefeller has made it possible for education to become an integral part of the FCC's mission.

Too often the burden of preparing our future leaders has rested with individuals who take small but heroic actions on their own. During the Joint Board proceeding, I received an email from Sandra Hildreth, a teacher in Canton, New York. She described the painstaking way she introduced computers to her students, first by spending her own money on a computer and then, over time, by applying for a series of grants and fellowships that she used to keep the technology current. And still, Sandra said, she lived with the constant fear that the grant money would stop flowing and her students would lose access to this wonderful technology. This isn't fair and she's not alone: many teachers spend between their own money on basic classroom supplies. This used to be just books and paper; now it's telecommunications too.

The Joint Board has offered a helping hand to these local heroes -- and sealed its place in history.

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