Pennsylvania is set to receive the first installment of federal funding to improve and expand broadband internet access across the commonwealth, Gov. Tom Wolf said last week.

State and federal officials joined Wolf in the Governor’s Reception room of the state Capitol on Thursday to announce that $6.6 million from President Joe Biden’s “Internet for All” initiative is on its way to Pennsylvania.

The federal infusion is the first installment of more than $100 million Pennsylvania is set to receive for projects that expand and improve high-speed internet access in urban and rural areas of the commonwealth.

“We really need to do a good job of making sure every corner of Pennsylvania is connected in a robust way to the internet,” Wolf, who leaves office in January, said. “This $6.6 million is the beginning of a generational change waiting for Pennsylvanians.”

The funds, and broadband projects statewide, are overseen by the Pennsylvania Broadband Development Authority, created by Wolf in 2021 as a independent agency of the Department of Community and Economic Development.

In mid-November, the authority released its for spending the money to expand broadband access in Pennsylvania.

“With guidance from the Pennsylvania Broadband Authority, distribution will be carefully targeted for guaranteed progress,” Wolf said.

Wolf said that the lack of affordable and accessible broadband is hindering Pennsylvania’s economic growth.

“The lack of consistent, affordable, quality statewide broadband keeps children from learning. It keeps businesses from growing, it keeps the job market for workers much more limited than it should be, and it reduces medical care options for all of us,” Wolf said. “It’s one of the biggest challenges holding Pennsylvania’s economy back right now.”

Western Beaver County School District and Blackhawk School District Superintendent Dr. Rob Postupac echoed Wolf’s comments, adding that “families living without broadband face significant barriers in educational opportunities, employment opportunities and access to basic needs such as healthcare through telemedicine.”

“For too long now, those in our rural communities have had to live in digital darkness,” Postupac said. “The time has come to tackle this issue.”

Earlier this week, the Wolf administration’s broadband authority asked Pennsylvanians to review Federal Communications Commission (FCC) maps, which are used in accessibility and infrastructure projects, for accuracy before they are finalized in mid-January.

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“I represent a largely rural district in north-central, northeast Florida, and we have children who do their homework in a Hardee’s parking lot,” said U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican.

Students around the country scrambled to find internet access to participate in virtual learning when the pandemic limited in-person classes. It was a reminder that federal funds should be focused on providing broadband access to as many Americans as possible, Cammack said, rather than increasing the speeds of existing service.

Several members of the House’s Commodity Exchanges, Energy and Credit subcommittee echoed those concerns about so-called “overbuilding” of existing infrastructure during a March 8 hearing that sought to review the rural development component of the next farm bill, which could be approved next year.

The current farm bill was last renewed in 2018 and partially expires next year. It’s a wide-ranging law that was expected to cost about $428 billion over the course of five years. About three-fourths of that money is devoted to food assistance for low-income residents, and most of the rest goes to crop insurance, commodity support and land conservation.

Previous farm bills provided loans to develop internet infrastructure, but for the first time in 2018, lawmakers also established grants for the projects and raised the minimum speed thresholds that define whether an area has sufficiently fast access, according to the Congressional Research Service. The previous download speed considered sufficient was 4 megabits per second, which was increased to 25.

Xochitl Torres Small, undersecretary for rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said establishing broadband access for as many rural residents as possible is a paramount priority that must be balanced with other projects that will allow for speed upgrades.

“We certainly saw in the midst of COVID, with your kids who are sitting in the Hardee’s parking lot, that 25 (megabits per second) isn’t enough for them to be able to listen to their teacher and learn from home,” Torres Small said.

Lawmakers also created the ReConnect Program in 2018 that is separate from the farm bill’s Rural Broadband Program but has similar goals, and states have implemented their own programs.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has made , proposing in his State of the State address this year $400 million for broadband access, with $250 million to reach approximately 75,000 households without access to even moderately fast internet connections.

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CEO Evan Marwell estimates about half of those families include school-age children. 

“The narrative is that it’s been about building infrastructure in rural America,” Marwell said, but added, “after decades of investment, affordability is now the biggest problem.” 

In 43 states, the inability to pay for internet service accounts for more than half of the digital divide — even in those with large rural populations, according to the report, entitled “No Home Left Offline.”

Congress included a $7.1 billion Emergency Broadband Benefit in the American Rescue Plan last March, but less than 17 percent of eligible households have signed up, the report said. A lack of awareness of the program, skepticism over whether the benefit will actually cover internet costs and confusing enrollment procedures are the primary obstacles to participation, the authors note.

Since the start of the pandemic, millions of students have missed out on learning because of insufficient internet access because they lack stable or strong-enough connections to complete tests, upload assignments and interact with teachers and classmates over Zoom. Problems with technology are among the reasons for high absenteeism rates among remote learners, an issue that has persisted this year with students in quarantine. Experts say states and communities need strong and targeted marketing campaigns to get wary families to take advantage of free and discounted programs.

The report comes as the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package — which includes $65 billion for broadband — awaits a vote in the House. The bill renames the benefit the Affordable Connectivity Fund and allocates $14.2 billion to make it permanent.

‘Can’t rely on volunteers’

The federal benefit program primarily serves existing customers who have faced economic setbacks because of the pandemic — not those who have never subscribed to an internet provider, according to the report. That’s why it’s important, Marwell said, to have staff dedicated to getting students connected.

“One of the big takeaways from the pandemic is you can’t rely on volunteers,” he said. “You need paid staff, and you need really specific data about who you are trying to sign up.”

In Little Rock, Arkansas, Maddie Long is already doing that work.
On a break from finishing her master’s in Indigineous studies at the University of Kansas, she was working as a landscaper in Little Rock when she saw the opening for an fellow. Heartland Forward, a think tank focusing on the needs of states in the middle of the country, is funding the position to help reduce the digital divide.

Now Long attends community events, such as a recent vaccination clinic at the Guatemalan consulate, to talk to those who qualify and provide flyers about the program for the Little Rock School District to stuff in food pantry bags for families.

Parents, she said, are sometimes resistant because they’ve heard the benefit will run out when the pandemic is over (That’s true unless the infrastructure bill passes). The program also includes a one-time $100 credit toward a device, but participants have to get it through their internet provider, which may not be participating in that part of the program

“I don’t think that was set up in the most user-friendly manner,” she said. “Every federal benefit has its own challenges.”

‘A real turn-off’ 

The Los Angeles Unified School District is trying another strategy — using the federal Emergency Connectivity Fund, another part of the American Rescue Plan, to pay for students’ at-home internet service. 

Tanya Ortiz Franklin, a Los Angeles school board member, said that while many internet providers launched discounted programs last year, parents would get turned down because of previous late payments or faced increased costs after trial periods. 

“That was a real turn-off to a lot of high need families,” she said.

The district was inspired by a , run by the nonprofit Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, that serves over 400 families in three low-income communities in the city. The district has now received responses from 22,000 parents who want to participate in the larger, districtwide program, when the contract is finalized, Franklin said. While the district promotes the Emergency Broadband Benefit, she doubts many families are participating.

“It’s another layer,” she said. “A lot of these things are super well-intentioned, but the implementation requires so much social work.”

Students who often put up with dropped connections, broken devices or maxed-out wireless plans are also speaking out about improving access to Wi-Fi.

“People talk about it, but nothing really gets done,” said Marylin Terrazas, an 11th grader at Travis High School near Houston. She’s among the Fort Bend Independent School District students producing and moderating a live Nov. 17 broadcast organized by Connected Nation, a nonprofit focused on eliminating the digital divide. “I thought this was a great way to spread the word that there are people who need help,” she said.

Joey Dyrud-Lange, the district’s media production teacher, said lower-income students with parents and grandparents who “aren’t necessarily the most educated on technology” are especially at a disadvantage.

“I saw a huge gap in learning [last year], and it’s not the students’ fault,” she said. “They go to extreme lengths on their cell phones to try to access their learning.”

The EducationSuperHighway report recommends “broadband adoption centers,” staffed with employees who can help parents enroll in the benefit program. Under the infrastructure bill, the broadband subsidy would drop from $50 a month to $30. With many internet companies already offering low-cost programs for $10 to $15 a month, that’s more than enough, Marwell said, for companies to not only cover their costs but offer faster internet speeds and even make a profit. 

“They’re going to look at this and say, ‘Now, we have 18 million potential customers. We need to build a business plan to get these people signed up,’” Marwell said. “The idea that we can do this is not a pipe dream.”

LaDonna Squiemphen has a satellite dish from Warm Springs Telecom and a mobile broadband hotspot from her grandchildren’s school district. But even with both devices, Squiemphen said that internet access at her home is still spotty, especially in high winds or snow, which aren’t unusual on the Warm Springs Reservation.

“We’re out in the open. We have very little shelter from the wind when it comes,” said Squiemphen, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs who works as a juvenile prosecutor for the tribal government.

Squiemphen lives with her husband and four of her grandchildren — a 15-year-old freshman, a 13-year-old seventh-grader, and two fourth-graders who are both 10, but four months apart in age — 18 miles from the town of Warm Springs.

Sometimes her grandchildren can’t access the internet to attend online classes at the Jefferson County School District, she said. They get marked absent if they’re not logged in, even when it’s not their fault.

“I’ve had to fight for them because it’s not perfect reception,” Squiemphen said. “It’s hard because the tribe lacks the up-to-date equipment to make the internet work.”

Broadband access in rural areas, and particularly on reservations, has been a problem since the 1990s, when the internet went from being a niche network for scientists and academics to something ordinary people accessed for work, school, and entertainment.

According to a Census report , a vast majority of Oregon households — between 79.6% and 84.5% — subscribed to a broadband internet service, numbers similar to the rest of the U.S. By contrast, just 67% of Native Americans nationally had broadband access, and just over half — 53% — of Native Americans on tribal land had broadband subscriptions.

That chronic lack of access became acute when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many activities of daily life online.

“With the COVID pandemic, most of our customers need to video conference with work and school, which was either a challenge or flat out impossible,” said Tim York, general manager of Warm Springs Telecom, a utility owned by the tribal government.

Relief is on the Way

And with the pandemic came some long-overdue assistance. Two Oregon tribal nations received funding to upgrade their broadband infrastructure under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, according to Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency. In 2020 Warm Springs Telecom received $492,290 in CARES funding to upgrade broadband capacity — specifically to upgrade office equipment and radio equipment on towers and in equipment huts. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon received about $1.75 million in CARES funding for broadband upgrades, including money the tribal government received directly from the federal government for work on a fiber-optic network.

And at the end of 2020, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill setting aside money tribal nations can use for broadband improvement. The bill included $1 billion for tribal broadband connectivity, $300 million for broadband infrastructure deployment, and $285 million for connecting minority communities.

York said the CARES Act grant enabled the utility to update the wireless network with all new equipment that gave customers access to internet speeds of 25 megabits per second, the minimum to meet the FCC definition of broadband.

He also said the utility will soon offer speeds of 100 megabits per second or more — which would put Warm Springs residents on par with Portlanders, who had an average connection speed of 110 megabits per second, according to a .

“The old broadband offering varied between 1.5-Mbps and 4-Mbps,” York wrote in an email. “You can’t do much with those speeds.”

Access Still Limited

It’s hard to say exactly how much access reservation residents have to broadband: The FCC has been tracking internet access since the 1990s, but until recently, they whether it was possible to access the internet from a given Census block — not whether households in those blocks had internet service.

Even those numbers show a significant gap in access, however. The FCC’s published in January said that in 2019, more than 99% of Census blocks in U.S. urban areas have access to some broadband service, but only 65% of rural tribal lands have the same level of access.

The situation has improved in recent years — between 2018 and 2019, the deployment of high-speed internet access increased from approximately 46% to almost 50% on tribal lands — but the consensus is that when COVID-19 hit Oregon, many people living on reservations were not receiving internet service that allowed them to work from home or attend classes remotely.

Ryan Heinrich, the principal of Nixyaawii Community School, a charter school in Pendleton that serves Native American students, said in January that attendance was down 10%-12% from the same time last academic year, but that the numbers improved this academic year over last spring’s attendance, due in part to improved broadband access.

Every tribal member received a Chromebook in the spring, and while some students at the school are not enrolled in the tribe, the school was able to get devices to them too.

“The device was not the issue. It was the broadband access,” Heinrich said.

Future Investment

Bruce Zimmerman, the tax administrator for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, said the CARES Act funding was enough to build a “fiber-optic backbone,” the start of a fiber-optic network.

“Construction of the backbone began in December, with the goal being to roll out access to households this summer.”

“A number of Indian Reservations that I know about have extreme terrains … think Arizona desert,” York, of Warm Springs Telecom, wrote in an email to Underscore. “In the Willamette Valley to plow a fiber optic cable in the ground may cost around $5 per foot. When you are trying to dig through rock … the price skyrockets to $30+ per foot, making it impossible to place fiber cables to all customers. That is the problem with getting fiber to all of our customers here in Warm Springs, as it is with many other Indian Tribes.”

There’s more federal funding on the horizon to get broadband into rural areas. York said Warm Springs Telecom is installing free Wi-Fi in the downtown Warm Springs area for students who have a difficult time getting reliable broadband at home.

He also says there is talk that the utility’s assistance program for low-income consumers will soon stop subsidizing voice service but will pick up broadband. A little more than a third of the utility’s 650 customers qualify for the assistance, York said.

“This is huge, as one of the final barriers to internet is the cost,” York said. “Internet is not cheap.” Warm Springs phone and internet bundles start at $36.99 per month and top out at $79.99 per month.

Squiemphen said in January that she was aware of the upgrades to the reservation’s Wi-Fi access, but “we still have the issue with the weather.” Her house just isn’t in the right position to pick up signal from the antenna, she said.

By early April, little had changed in her household: Schools had reopened but allowed students the option of continuing with distance learning, and her grandchildren chose to remain home.

The school district has switched to an online learning program that allows students to learn on their own schedule and seems to work better for students, but the connection is still sporadic, she said.

Gordon Scott has children in school in Warm Springs and also works as a community liaison for On Track Oregon Health and Science University, which partners with Oregon schools to increase the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds in the health sciences. He said he’s able to access the internet at home, but knows students who’ve had to “get creative” — driving two or three miles down the road to access the internet in their vehicles. Squiemphen said she saw a photo of a little boy using a device at the grocery store to attend school online, and she’s shown it to her children as inspiration to keep at it even when their connection is sporadic.

“We are very adamant about education in our household,” Squiemphen said.

And the internet access at Scott’s home “does work, but it’s just very unstable and unpredictable. You have to make adjustments for how you’re using it,” Scott says.

“The whole world has switched to doing things online and doing things at home,” Squiemphen said. “For us here in Warm Springs, it’s a bit of a different story. The internet is so vital. It’s kind of a leaky faucet in a poor home.”

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When the pandemic shut down schools in March, it created a new urgency to narrow the digital gap in the U.S. as millions of to participate in remote learning because they didn’t have internet access at home. It also reinforced the reality that the divide doesn’t just exist between rural and urban communities, but also within America’s largest cities. Some lack reliable connection in New York City, for example; in Chicago, don’t have broadband, according to data published at the start of the pandemic.

As many local governments have scrambled to secure internet access for children in virtual school, some policies could last past the pandemic. One popular approach in cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago has been providing low-cost or to families who can’t afford a broadband subscription, and the tech devices to go with them. Some measures are currently set up to , while others, like Chicago’s, will continue for several years. Recognizing that the digital divide will persist after the pandemic, digital inclusion advocates say there is a need for more permanent solutions.

One approach that’s gained traction is for local communities to play a direct role in providing internet service — in many cases by building their own or relying on their own infrastructure.

“The options in front of them looking at the affordability barrier were to pay for existing service — cellular through hotspot, or wireline — or build something,” says Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. “And I think the the folks who went with the build-it solution are the ones thinking, ‘This problem isn’t going away after the pandemic.’”

Municipal broadband

Establishing a municipal network to cover an entire city isn’t new; Chattanooga, Tennessee, was the first to accomplish this in 2010. The local government installed its own fiber-optic cables on streetlights across the city, serving not just residents but also businesses that were than was previously available. But the city-run initiative set off both legislative and that have barred Chattanooga from expanding its network to neighboring jurisdictions — and muted the movement to bring similar ideas to other U.S. cities.

As of 2020, have laws that deter or even prohibit local governments and communities from establishing their own networks, according to the group Broadband Now. They’re in large part the result of lobbying from commercial providers who argue the laws are necessary to prevent unfair competition. Siefer says they continue to restrict communities from connecting everyone in need.

This year in a number of cities, the pandemic has inspired some narrower versions of municipal broadband that get around these restrictions, focused on creating “affordable networks” that specifically target low-income households. Several of these were born out of the immediate need to bridge the homework gap.

“Pre-Covid there were at most a handful of networks being built to address affordability; now, we’ve started informally keeping a list and we’re over 30,” Siefer says. “The phenomena of setting up a network for that reason, in that way, is new.”

The concept is simple: “Basically try to offer free connectivity in areas that are heavily populated by people who cannot afford the connections that are available,” says Chris Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. The methodology varies, but often, these solutions aim to set up a system that can address the affordability barrier well beyond the pandemic.

In some cases, they rely on infrastructure the city has already built out. Chattanooga, for example, to provide low-income students with free internet access after the pandemic began.

San Antonio, Texas, where more than lack in-home internet access, also relied on pre-existing infrastructure. The municipally owned utility had years ago built an extensive network of fiber-optic cables that delivered internet to government buildings and community centers like schools and libraries, and when those centers closed — leaving underserved students in the lurch — the city decided to use $27 million in CARES Act funds to to the homes of some 20,000 students across the city’s 50 most vulnerable neighborhoods.

Antennas from those school buildings will send internet signals to receivers fixed to students’ homes and apartment buildings where the city’s fiber cables don’t reach. The initial phase of the project focuses on six of those neighborhoods near two high schools where more than half of the student population live in homes without internet access. Over the next eight months to two years, the city plans complete the expansion to all 50 neighborhoods.

Because of a Texas law that restricts local government telecom networks, the city likely wouldn’t be able to expand the service to a broader population . “In San Antonio, that network is only available to students because there’s a state law that says that the city can’t be in competition with commercial providers,” says Siefer.

The wireless approach

While equipping homes with wireline broadband is typically thought of as the gold standard, few cities have the infrastructure ready. In the absence of an extensive network of municipal-owned cables, some communities are establishing wireless networks to connect low-income students to free or low-cost internet.

One such initiative is the Every1online program in the Pittsburgh metro area, a 12-month pilot project aiming to connect at least 450 families and low-income school children to high-quality internet, for free. Spearheaded by the nonprofit internet provider Meta Mesh Wireless Communities, with partners like Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the program uses antennas mounted on top of tall structures to beam internet signals to the homes of residents in Homewood — one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods — and of low-income school children in the nearby New Kensington and Coraopolis school districts.

Connecting communities through mesh wireless networks isn’t new, but Every1online is one of the new initiatives born out of the pandemic to target low-income families. After the , school districts have the option to purchase service for students in need — a model that organizers hope to . (Pennsylvania’s law prohibiting city governments from setting up their own network does not apply to nonprofits.) Rather than connect individual households to the internet, the nonprofit hopes to partner with school districts and other community groups in underserved neighborhoods to set up a network for multiple families in a concentrated area.

In a newer strategy made possible only recently, a handful of school districts from California to Texas to Utah have begun leveraging a band of wireless spectrum known as Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) to establish high-speed wireless networks for students. Unlike other bands that are allocated for private use, the Federal Communications Commission made some of the CBRS band publicly available in early 2020 so anyone, including local governments, can access it. It also sits in a sweet spot on the spectrum range that makes it useful for offering relatively high-speed connection with enough coverage for a small area.

One of the first to test the technology is the Fontana Unified School District in California, where more than half of students lack reliable internet at home. In April, the district a five-year initiative to build out a private wireless network for some 36,000 students. Partnering with the network infrastructure provider Crown Castle Fiber, the district will install about 400 “access points” that will transmit signals to thousands of Wi-Fi hotspots near students’ homes, which can then be used to connect school-provided devices to the internet.

The initiative does come with a hefty price tag of $40 million, with Crown Castle paying most of the upfront costs. But in an with New America, Fontana superintendent Randal Bassett called it more cost-effective than paying for subscription service from an existing carrier. In the long run, the infrastructure can be expanded to cover more households and be used for other city services such as digitally connected infrastructure.

Experts like Mitchell and Doug Brake, director of broadband and spectrum policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, say they are cautiously optimistic about the potentials of CBRS. It could be a game changer for municipalities, but it’s a finite resource with a lot of uncertainty about how it will scale.

“It’s an exciting technology, but it’s also not clear to me that there is enough spectrum yet to be able to ensure that you can provide high-quality service,” Mitchell says. adding that students living in an apartment building could experience different speeds than a peer living in a single-family home. “One of the things I really hope the FCC does is create more spectrum that would be available to be shared in this way because I would worry that in many cities, it might be exhausted and congested very quickly.”

Other options

Brake says it might be redundant and costly for some cities, particularly those that are cash-strapped, to build their own system using CBRS when there are other private-sector providers with already-established infrastructure. It “opens up new opportunities, so I am excited to see how it plays out,” he says. “But I don’t think a good tool to be building an entire network on, especially where there’s such a competitive market already providing services.”

He suggests other options ranging from using Wi-Fi hotspots, as around closed libraries or on school buses, or partnering with private providers, as Chicago has done.

How communities choose to bridge the gap ultimately depends on their needs and resources. With schools fully remote and an estimated lacking internet access in Chicago, the city chose to partner with major broadband providers to fill in the immense gap — though not before conducting an extensive survey on who needed access the most. The $50 million Chicago Connected initiative, which launched in June, is expected to provide low-income students free internet for at least the next four years, with funding from the CARES Act and, more crucially, from a handful of private donors. The money will be paid directly to Comcast and RCN so that families will not be charged, .

Some major cable companies have also started partnering with cities and offering to low-income customers, though families and officials have .

What’s next

It’s no surprise that distance learning has prompted local governments to take more aggressive action on digital access, but going forward, expanding current solutions to a broader community will be a monumental task that will require more involvement from the federal government.

Congress has made digital equity a higher priority since the pandemic began. In December, it included $3.2 billion in its Covid relief package to fund a $50-per-month emergency broadband subsidy for those laid off or furloughed during the pandemic — part of the connectivity and infrastructure.

But Siefer says solutions need to address all barriers, including the uneven access to devices and the lack of digital literacy among some communities. Advocates are not only calling for more funding, but also more informational and political support. would be a good start, says Siefer: “For example, there is no widespread data on the cost of broadband service in the U.S. because internet service providers don’t want their data out there. But the FCC should be collecting it and making it publicly available so that communities can make informed choices when they’re figuring out how to address the problem.”

The effort also calls for policy reforms, in particular one that would prohibit states from restricting municipal networks and other community initiatives. In 2019, the introduced in the House of Representatives sought to do just that, but has not been debated. With a new administration, and new control of Congress by Democrats — as well as the appointment of senior FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who’s been vocal about digital inequality, as the agency’s new acting chairman — there is cause for cautious optimism among advocates.

For their part, commercial carriers, too, are looking to address the gaps. Mobile carriers T-Mobile and Verizon are looking to enter the home broadband market. Both companies offer limited home internet service use their wireless 4G networks, which they advertise as being fast enough to be cheaper alternatives to cable internet. So far, coverage is spotty. Both are also working to bring the highly coveted and blazing fast 5G service to homes, with T-Mobile planning to focus its initial rollout .

Such plans still leave some digital inclusion advocates skeptical about relying on the private sector to bridge the divide. “My questions would be, will there be data caps and what’s the price point?” says Siefer. She points to Starlink, a satellite internet service from Elon Musk’s Space X that was nearly $900 million in December from the FCC to boost service to rural residents. (Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai touted the awards as the “single largest step ever taken to bridge the digital divide.”) The upfront cost for a subscription — $500 for the equipment and $99 a month for service.

“Might that change later? Yes. Might T-Mobile, Verizon and the rest of them come up with some other great solutions later? Yes,” Siefer says. “But until these things are real, people are suffering and there need to be solutions now.”

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