Woodman School is a tiny, whitewashed schoolhouse lodged in a remote clearing in Montana's Lolo National Forest. It has a total of 35 students, and in January, all of them got the same assignment: Write a letter to local lawmakers explaining why you want internet access at school.

“If we had internet, we could do tests at our own school and not have to get bussed to Lolo and take tests on their computers,” scrawled one Woodman third grader on a sheet of looseleaf.

“We as a school are behind in our education,” wrote a seventh grade student. “It takes half an hour to load a document.”

Their teachers completed the assignment, too, describing their classroom shelves filled with unused Chromebooks and hours spent at the library checking out books for student research projects. Only about three Woodman students can access Google at a time, thanks to the overloaded and dilapidated DSL line that currently serves the school and all of its neighbors within 10 miles. Safety's a concern too, given the entire area is a cellular dead zone. “The lack of bandwidth is affecting how I teach, but most of all it is affecting my students’ learning,” wrote one teacher named Jill Wilson. “They are frustrated and know that they don’t have the technology promised to them by our country.”

For the students at Woodman, it’s not supposed to be this way. Last summer, Montana Governor Steve Bullock visited the school to announce $2 million in state funding that he said would “close the connectivity gap” at schools like theirs. Woodman's technology director, Jeff Crews, worked with CenturyLink, the only internet service provider in the area, to submit a request for federal funding under the so-called E-rate program, which is supposed to subsidize broadband expansion for schools.

Nearly a year later, the students of Woodman are still waiting, after being denied funding by the organization that administers E-rate. “It’s insane that we’re in 2018, but we have internet speeds that, I kid you not, are around modem speeds,” Crews says.

'They are frustrated and know that they don’t have the technology promised to them by our country.' Jill Wilson, Woodman School

The Woodman School is hardly alone. Under the Trump administration, rural schools requesting funding for broadband expansion have faced record delays and denials, according to the non-profit EducationSuperHighway, which works to get schools connected to the internet. By their count, more than 60 eligible fiber projects have been unfairly denied since 2017, a rate that EducationSuperHighway CEO Evan Marwell says has spiked dramatically from years prior. Meanwhile, more than 30 schools have been waiting about a year for approval. On average, they currently wait 240 days for an answer. That's despite state governments having put up $200 million in funds to supplement broadband expansion projects. "The table is set, and what we've run into is a bunch of red tape," says Marwell.

The current issues with E-rate stem from a 2014 order that aimed to modernize the program, which has been in place since the Clinton administration. The order set aside additional funding for expanding broadband connectivity in schools, and shifted focus away from legacy systems like subsidized phone service. As part of this transition, the Universal Service Administrative Company—an offshoot of the Federal Communications Commission that oversees E-Rate—also began offering to pay upfront for "special construction" costs involved in building new fiber channels to extremely rural schools like Woodman. On top of that, it offered to match the money that states put up to pay for construction. With these two subsidies combined, a school like Woodman was looking at a 90 percent discount on brand new fiber internet service.

But because USAC now fronts more of the costs, it's also more cautious about how that money gets spent. "One of the overriding themes you've seen from the Trump FCC has been eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse above all else," says Marwell. That was FCC chairman Ajit Pai's justification for proposing new restrictions on the Lifeline program, which supplies internet service to poor families.