Three characters, .net, in the X-for-Y shape. N4E reads as network for education, news for everyone, or nodes for enterprise.
Network for education is the strongest. Education networks are a real institutional category: regional consortia buying technology together, research and education networking bodies running dedicated infrastructure, and school district alliances sharing services. Several of them already use exactly this kind of naming, and the .net extension is literally correct for a network.
News for everyone fits a media project, and the openness in the phrase suits anything free-to-access or publicly funded.
What you get regardless of the reading is a three-character address, which is the shortest length that stays memorable as a word rather than as three separate letters. The inventory at that length has been fully allocated for decades across every major extension.
The name is listed. Offers considered.