Before and after classes at Panguitch High School, a low-slung brick building nestled in the high desert of southern Utah, students find their way to Shawn Caine’s classroom. They settle in at the computers where Caine teaches coding and software, or they head to the back room for the 3D printer, vinyl cutter, and robotics kits.

Some kids come to log extra time on class projects. Others show up just for the internet. Caine oversees the school’s Chromebooks. Her district of Garfield County has provided a computer to every student since 2016. And yet reliable broadband is far from guaranteed in this region of towering plateaus, sagebrush valleys, and steep canyons.

Like much of rural America, Garfield County is on the wrong side of the “homework gap”—a stubborn disparity in at-home broadband that hinders millions of students’ access to the array of online learning, collaboration, and research tools enjoyed by their better-connected peers. Many of Garfield’s students trek to internet oases such as Caine’s classroom or one of the local businesses willing to host a district Wi-Fi router. Going without isn’t an option. “All their work is on that computer,” Caine says, “and they need that access.”

That’s why district leaders are eager to pilot an ambitious, statewide broadband initiative. Utah’s schools are hardwired with high-speed internet through a statewide network. The new plan would extend that network into a wireless blanket of access covering rural households and the highways on which students spend hours busing to and from sports and other activities. The broadband expansion is supported by the managers of the existing network, and the plan’s backers could tap multiple funding sources for education technology. But the pilot can’t get started without one critical missing ingredient—access to frequencies of electromagnetic spectrum.

Federal licenses to use spectrum that can carry mobile internet are a hot commodity, coveted by big telecommunications companies with money to spend at the periodic spectrum auctions conducted by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC is now poised to decide whether a trove of currently untapped spectrum should be given away for free to Garfield County and other rural school districts—or sold to the highest bidder.

Rural Gaps in Broadband

On a recent fall morning, Garfield County’s superintendent, Tracy Davis, was stuck behind an out-of-state car crawling up a two-lane highway flanked by red, rocky spires that reached into a cobalt-blue sky.

“Probably lost,” Davis grumbled. The tourists who flock to this part of Utah to visit places like Red Canyon and Bryce Canyon National Park clog up the roads, and yet, Davis said, “they are the only money there is.”

Drought and low dairy prices have crippled the region’s family farms, and the minerals and coal hidden in the surrounding plateaus can’t be exploited due to federal land ownership and the undeniable remoteness of the place, so far from markets, power plants, and processing facilities. “As you can see,” Davis said, gesturing toward an expanse of scenery home to just one person per square mile, “we’re out in the middle of nowhere.”