 All right. So first on our agenda today is me. How convenient. You all have agendas in your packet so you can know what we're going to be doing over the next two days. As Rod said, part of the reason that we are doing this is because we have this grant money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help get more libraries, get information to the need about technology planning. And part of that is also this e-rate program that some people I'm sure are involved in are a lot of people here. I know I can't see you guys out there. But here in the room are people doing e-rates in your libraries? If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's fine, because I'm going to tell you that. Okay. So we have some that are and some that aren't. That's great. And I'm assuming we have the same kind of breakdown on our other locations as well. And that's good because now our first session here today is to tell you about e-rate, this federal program that you can use. And I'm going to bring up my presentation for this. Here we go. So in addition to being the special projects librarian at the Nebraska Library Commission, which is a nice vague title that I do a lot of different things with grant programs, with other group projects that we have. I'm also the state e-rate coordinator. And those of you guys that do e-rate, you know that. Previously it was Richard Miller who's out in the hallway. So you may have worked with him on this. And now I'm in charge of helping you guys get all your e-rate things done. And so I'm going to take you through what is e-rate and why you would do it and how it all works. And then later on in the day today we'll have information about doing technology planning and tomorrow more things that relate to e-rate and to technology in general. Everything will kind of link together. Hopefully that's the plan when all of this is said and done. Now e-rate is a federal program out there that the federal government has set up that gives discounts to schools and libraries. So you guys are all libraries. So I'm going to be talking to the library side of it of course. But also schools can get this. And you can get a discount on your telephone, your Internet Act bills, connections that you've set up for your Internet. You can get discounts on all of your bills. It's funded through the universal service fee. You may see this sometimes on your cable bill, this little universal service fee. That's where the money that comes in to fund the e-rate. It also comes from the telecommunication service providers provide funding for it as well. It was created in 1996. So the first year you could get these discounts was in 97. And the providers were ordered, as you can see from here, to provide their services to schools and libraries at discounted rates. And then they handed it over to the FCC to figure out how the heck this is going to happen. They just said, we need to do this. We need to give them discounts. We need to help schools. We need to help libraries be able to have their phone service and be able to have their Internet service and not have to struggle to pay for it. So let's get a federal program together to do it. And so the FCC was the one who was establishing the rules and how this whole program works. So some organizations, groups, names that you'll hear me talk about is the FCC who oversees the entire program. What they then did, a company, not-for-profit company, was created, the Universal Service Administrative Company, where you'll hear me mainly call it USAC. They are the company that actually runs the U8 program. There's a schools and libraries program, and there's also other ones that they have discounts on as well for health care providers, for low income people. They've got other programs as well out there. But the one that we're focused on is the schools and libraries division, which is the one for schools and libraries. There's a specific area of the USAC that does everything for you guys. So whenever you get anything that's related to E-Rate, you'll probably get a letter or something. It will say USAC on it. And as I said, FCC sets the rules. So there's rules that were set up in the beginning. And since then, they have put out orders every few years about any changes to the rules. Now, E-Rate has been around since 1997. It was the first year you could do it. And it's only been six times now, this past fall, that they've changed and made major changes to the rules. So the rules don't change all that often. But when they do, they release an order. We have to interpret it and figure out what all the new things are. So it doesn't change very, you know, too much the basic rules. Some of how you do it changes, hopefully making it easier. They're always trying to streamline things. They did some streamlining of it this year. So depending on what's in there, it may help. You can see the sixth order was released in the fall and was effective this year. There are some changes and things in there, but it's all in your information now. E-Rate funding years run from July through June. So when you're applying for discounts on your bills, that's what you're thinking about is what I will get a discount from next July through next June. The upcoming funding year is funding year 2012. So start July 1st, 2012 through June 30, 2013. Right now we're in the middle of funding year 2011, so you can't get funding for this year anymore. It's already, the process is already done. But coming up in the fall, we'll be starting the process to do it for 2012. There is $2.25 billion each year that is committed for this. Sometimes unused funds are rolled over. It's not very common, but it is in the rules that it can be. Now though they are, it was always capped until 2010 that they finally are now going to be increasing it based on inflation. It took them this long to figure out that that was a good idea, I guess. So now it will actually be the capital hire every year based on inflation. So there will be more money available, which is good for you guys because they do need to pick and choose from the applications they get how much money they have and who they can give money out to. And you can see in 2010 it was $2.27 billion, and I don't remember exactly what it was for 2011. Now who can apply? And for the schools and libraries division that we're talking about, schools, library systems, schools and school districts, libraries, if you have a consortium, which we do not have in Nebraska, but you can have a consortium of libraries that are together, a consortium of schools, they can all apply. Basically you do have to be eligible for LSTA funds. And specifically here in Nebraska you also must be an accredited library, meaning going through the library commission to have all of your board and your staff accredited and your library accredited for all the rules that fall along that. Now that is a specific rule for us. If you talk to somebody in a different state, your colleagues around the country, you may hear different rules from them about what their states require of them. In Nebraska this is what we require eligible for LSTA, which actually comes from the ERA people, and then the being accredited, that's our specific rule. How much can you get? You can get up to 90% off of your bills, and that will depend on where you are. You can get as little as 20%, but you can get up to 90% off on your telephone and internet bills. Now this depends on, they do on sort of a poverty related criteria of how many students in your school district are eligible for the school lunch program. And this is where the library is actually physically located, wherever it's physically located, that school district is what you look at to see how many students you have. And then you decide, you look and see if you are considered an urban or rural location as far as the U.S. Census Bureau is concerned. Most of Nebraska is rural, of course, which means you actually get a higher discount possibly. In Nebraska the libraries that do apply, on average, we get between 60% and 80%. That's where most of our libraries fall. We don't have very many that get down in the 20s, usually it's more than that, and we only have a couple that get all the way up to 90. So it's pretty good, you can get more than 50% off of your bill if you go through this. Now don't worry about writing down all these URLs, they're just here on the PowerPoint presentation. You've got that with you in your documentation and we will have links available after this whole event is over for all this stuff as well. But there is a place on the Nebraska Department of Education website where you can see how many students are eligible in your school district for the school lunch program. Now I know from, I've been doing E-rate training for a year or two now, and I've heard when I've done some trainings that some people have had trouble finding this number. That trying to call your school, they wouldn't give it out sometimes, or they would make it difficult to even, well, I'll try and get that to you, we'll see if we can get it to you. And so I had some places who had said, well, we didn't even bother because the school wouldn't tell us our numbers, so we don't know how to do our calculation. It doesn't matter anymore, the Department of Education puts it up. So you don't have to go through your school anymore. Yes, question? Right. Okay, the question is, I'll repeat the question, is someone did use that to look up theirs, and if you noticed in the previous slide it said that pre-K cannot be included in that, so you have to be able to separate that out. If you look on the Department of Education website, for some of them it does have it separate. For some of schools it doesn't. It depends on how the school has reported it at the Department of Education. In order to figure that out, then you would have to go to the school to see how many of those were the pre-Ks because we need to subtract those in order to e-rate. When the schools report these numbers to the Department of Education, they aren't doing it for the purposes of e-rate. They're doing it because they have to, it needs to be reported back. And for some of them, depending on your school, it will include the pre-Ks, so you'd have to go to your school to figure out how much of those to subtract out. Right, yes. Right, yes. Actually, it's a benefit. If your school is also applying for e-rate, then they would have had to do this themselves already. True. So they should have something already on hand if they're also applying for e-rate that does do this separating out because the pre-K kids do not get included in the school lunch count for purposes of e-rate. So if they're already doing it, yes, that they should be able to give you that number, no problem. So when you are looking at what's on the Department of Education website, pay attention to how it says it. If it says K through 12 or rather, or does it say pre-K, because it will say on there. And if it says pre-K, contact your school to figure out what those kids are so that you don't include them when you do your calculation, because that will cause problems. Yes, you're not supposed to include them. After that, you figure out your urban or rural status, which I've got a link here. There's a part on the USAC website where it just tells you every county in the state and whether you're considered urban or rural. Like I said, most of Nebraska is rural. Obviously things like Lincoln and Omaha would be considered urban. And then there's a matrix they have, which I'll show you on the next page here, where you figure out the percentage of your eligible students, and then whether or not you are urban or rural determines your discount. And you can see because we have rural, we are usually a little bit higher, depending on your percentage of eligible students. And then that will tell you right off the bat, is e-rate even worth it to me. This is what I always tell libraries to contact me. Should I do e-rate? Is it too much of a hassle? Should I bother? Do this calculation first, because you can do all of this without applying for anything, without submitting any form. This is just going to those websites and looking up your numbers and doing the calculation. And then decide, is it worth it to get, am I getting 60%, am I getting 70% off? And then decide, depending on what your bills are, is it worth it now to go through all the process of doing this every year? E-rate is an ongoing process. It's something you do all year long, meaning there's forms at certain times there that are always due to keep doing and you have to redo it every year. But once you get in the habit of it, you'll always do it. But always check this first and decide, are we only going to get 50%? Maybe our bills aren't that high, it's not worth all the hassle. But if we're going to get 60, 70, 80, that might make a big dent in our budget and be able to help us out a lot. Now, what can you actually get a discount on? There is what they call the Eligible Services List that is published every year. It's this huge 50-some-odd page list of every individual type of thing you can get a discount on, whether it's your phone, your internet, the different kind of connections you have, and they list it all on their website. So you can look up there and see, is a hundred number eligible, which it is, is it voicemail, email, servers, networking, construction we've had done, all these things are detailed out on the Eligible Services List. So you can go there to see exactly what things are erratable. And there are things that are added and changed to it each year, so every year a new one comes out, so you've got to make sure you look at the right list for the year. The basics of it now, like I said, it's a 50-some-odd page document, so I'm not going to, of course, tell you every single thing that is on there. But the basics of it is there's two priority levels of things that you can get erratable from. FireD1 and Priority 2. Priority 1 gets funded first to get first priority. Telecommunication Services and Internet Access. This is your basic telephone, your long distance, a hundred numbers, anything phone-related, and your basic internet bill. Basically you're paying for your internet, your monthly bill that you pay for your internet connection. Then priority 2 is other stuff, internal connections. If you have networking done, wiring, all that kind of stuff, stuff that helps you get your internet and your phone working. And the basic maintenance of those, if you have ongoing maintenance, if you have a service plan, those kind of things are in there. Generally, a priority 2 stuff is not the kind of thing you have every month to pay for. When you first get a library hooked up, that'd be something that needs to be done first getting network, getting your upgrades or whatever. So that would only come in randomly as you need it. Your basic month to month would be your telephone and your internet, the Priority 1 services. Priority 1s are funded first, as it says, so you'll first hear about libraries getting that. And then months and months later, they start, then once they've put out all the money for the Priority 1s, they go back and look, okay, now who's applied for Priority 2 services? Let's see if we have enough money and how much money we have for all those libraries. So if you do an application for this, and you do some Priority 1, some Priority 2, you will get responses back at different times of the year. You'll be told, yes, you've got your phone and your internet bill, here's your discount for that, you're all set, and we'll come back to you in a few months and let you know about those Priority 2 ones you applied for, because we have to wait and see if there's money left for that. So, filling out the forms. Lots of people I've heard, now I'm new to e-rate myself, never did it before, never had to hear about it, do anything with it until I took over from Richard Miller to do it. So I came into it a couple of years ago, and they've got these forms are all online. You can go onto the internet, fill them out, it prompts you to do things, it's pretty cool. I hear from people though that the reason, one of the reasons that they don't do e-rate is because, oh my gosh, the forms, are you nuts, they're huge, they're long, they're impossible to figure out, they're terrible, they're pages and pages, and they just drive me nuts, I can't do it. They've simplified it. If you looked at e-rate five years ago, maybe ten years ago, it's totally different now. So don't be afraid of it, it still is a complex process. As you can still see, it still takes four forms, you have to do it a certain time every year, but it has gotten easier. All the forms are available online, but they are still available in print. I do still have people that prefer the print, or if I've had people with their internet connections at their libraries are not that great and they need to do the print, that still is available out there, no problem. The four basic forms, you start off at the beginning of the year, well, the beginning of the year for submitting these forms is about in the fall. Form 470, where you're telling them, I want to get an e-rate, I want to get a service, I want to get a discount on my phone and on my internet. After that, you do a 471, you're chosen as your service provider. I'm going to get into the details of all these forms in a second, but this is just the basics of it. So first you say, I want to get a discount on the e-rate, second, I want to, here's who I've picked to be my service provider for both phone and for internet. Then you wait and as soon as your service starts, you let them know I'm starting receiving services. Our contract started in July and we actually have our phone, we have our internet, we're paying for it. That's a form that for some reason lots of people forget. They apply and they think it's all done, but you still have to let them know, it's all started. A lot of flivers lose their funding at that point. If you don't keep submitting all the forms, it just falls apart. And the last form is getting your actual money, saying you've paid your bills or you're going to be paying your bills and you want your discount. For anything that you do e-rate related, any forms that you fill out, any documentation you have that's related to it, any letters, quotes, things you get from service providers, you have to keep everything for five years. Sometimes the government, FCC, will come back and do audits and check up on things. They can go back as far as five years. So make sure you just make files for things, maybe a file for every year. We have here a notebook for each year, so everything is separated, but you do need to keep that because they may come back to you. Even after you've gotten your money and you've paid your bills and you get your discount, someone reviewing something, remember this is a federal program, so it's a federal government, someone will come back in three years and say, I don't know about this thing here, let's go ask them about it. Now it is a federal program, it does have a lot of checks and balances things, but they do want to give away the money to you as well. The whole purpose of this program is to give out this money. It was set aside for this purpose. You still just have to go through all the steps for them, but don't think they're trying to keep it from you, they're just trying to, you know, there's going to be someone out there who questions it, someone who wonders where their taxpayer money is going to, and that's what all these forms and everything is for, but the whole purpose of this program is to give away the money, not to keep it. So this is, you probably can't read this very well, and that's okay. I did include a full copy of this on your flash drive and on the website for you to download. The basic timeline of when things need to be done, and this is a really good resource. A lot of people lose track of which forms they need to do, when they need to do it, what's the next thing, the next step I need to do. This is a timeline that someone else put together, it was before me, that is really good for tracking all of this. The order of the forms, what happens in between the forms, the different letters you receive back from USAC, all that information is here. Now this does not have specific dates on it, so it's a nice generic one, because some of the dates haven't been announced yet, and they do vary some time, year to year, when the deadlines are for everything will vary, but this is the basics of it. And we're just going to go into the details of this. Later on, I'm not going to redo that whole thing right now, but you do have copies of that. Now, every time you file a form, you get a letter back from USAC saying we received it, or here's your information back about it. Yes, use file your forms online, they send you your letters back in paper. Yeah, I know. They're halfway there? I don't know. I don't know if this is the reason, but they do color code each year, when they do send you the letters too, which is nice. In the beginning, when they first started this in the late 90s, they did not color code the years. Everybody got everything in regular white paper, and it got confusing. You can be working on multiple years at the same time. Someone finally got the idea, let's color code it. So every year is yellow, pink or blue, canary, pink or blue, and then they rotate the colors. So you can coordinate, file your letters based on the funding year, based on the color of the letters you're getting. If any of you have ever talked to me on the phone or an email, and I've tried to help you out, it's a blue piece of paper. This year we're in blue for 2011. Next year I'll be saying to get the yellow piece of paper. It'll be on yellow. So it is all coordinated, so you can color code it by your funding year. If they ever do go totally electronic for even replying to you, I don't know what they'll do. Color code the text. But right now you can do everything online. They will send you a paper letter in the mail. So when you're doing your forms, make sure you've got the right address, the name of the person who should be getting back the letters from USAC. Now, technology planning. That's what we're here for, right? Technology planning is related to e-rate. To a point. In the past you had to write a technology plan for anything that was internet related. Meaning if you're doing your internet access, you want to discount that for priority one services, you had to write a technology plan. That's what we're here for. For priority one services, you had to write a technology plan. And of course, anything that would be priority two, which is all internet related, you would have to create a plan. Starting with this fiscal year 2011, the one that we're funding you're right in the middle of right now. If you're only doing priority one, meaning your telephone bill and your basic internet access, you do not have to do a technology plan anymore. Which makes it a lot easier for some libraries. I know some libraries skipped work. It could be extra work if you don't have one already. For e-rate purposes, it's not required anymore. However, and this is the whole reason we're here. Yeah, I'm getting a little snarky. Technology planning is still an important thing for libraries to do. It's still a good idea. That's why we're all here for these two days. So we're going to be taking you through how to do these plans, why you should do them, the importance of them, ways to help you do them easily. So that you do have these plans. You still need to keep track of what you're doing, why you're doing it, what you might be needing to do in the future. You'll actually get right into that this afternoon after lunch. We have our technology playing session and a cool tool to use to do it make it very easy. However, if you have been only thinking about technology planning relating to e-rate, it's no longer needed if you're doing just your anything priority one internet and phone. So it might make it a little easier for you now to jump into doing a tech doing your e-rate and getting your discounts. For e-rate purposes, there are four elements that you need to have. There used to be budget they included and they don't need a budget from you anymore. I guess they figure they trust you that you must have enough money and they don't need to know what your budget is anymore. Most people just included their budget from a spreadsheet anyway. So it was probably the easiest part of the whole technology plan to do and now they've eliminated that as a requirement. So we're going to talk about technology planning. Some of these things will be when we talk about technology planning this afternoon. We'll be talking about other things as well. I'm looking to Michael because he's going to be doing the talk. But these are the specific ones for e-rate purposes. So remember if you jump down to doing priority two you will need a plan and these are the things that you'll need to have in it. Goals and strategies for using this technology. Why do you want it in your library? What's it for? Professional development strategy. Training for your staff. Making sure they know how to use these technologies and how to teach your users to use them. Assessing the services. Do we need to upgrade this? Do we need to upgrade that? Excuse me a minute. And then evaluation process. And this is evaluating your plan itself. Not necessarily evaluating technology. That is also included in it. But you do need an evaluation process for how often are we going to look at our plan and update it. Now there is information on the e-rate website and on our library commission website for how to do a technology plan. So that can help you out with it for the e-rate purposes of it. And the same thing. Keep copies of it for that same five years. If you do submit a technology plan to us I do the approvals of it. I'll look over your plan and read it. There is a criteria in there. If you need to tweak something I'll let you know. We do a required I don't know if you require which is not in here. For accreditation in Nebraska working on having technology planning be part of that. So that would be something that would be approving for you as well. So you'll be doing this for other reasons not just e-rate purposes. But for both the plan itself and the approval letter that I send you make sure you hold on to those also. A few more specific details about them and this is specific to e-rate of course. You need to start writing your plan before you even apply for e-rate. Before you do that first form the 470. Just something that you've started a draft. Doesn't have to be the final plan. Just get it going. You can write them for up to three years worth of time. You can only have to rewrite it or reevaluate it every three years and let you do it up to that long. Some places do it every year which is fine. But you don't have to. You know don't feel pressure to do a new plan. It depends on how quickly you're doing things if you need to do one of that often. Approved by the USAC certified tech plan approver, that's me. So you know that I would be the one to send that to. Now SIPA, this is a hot issue for some people. Should we? Shouldn't we? How do we? What do we do about it? I'm only going to talk very briefly about it here because tomorrow afternoon we have tomorrow morning afternoon. We have sessions specifically on filtering and SIPA and more details about that. If you are applying for e-rate discount for internet access or internal connections, you do need to apply with the Children's Internet Protection Act in order to get your e-rate funding. This means having some sort of a technology protection measure which they consider any sort of way of filtering. There's lots of different ways to do this and as I said, tomorrow afternoon we'll have some speakers who will be here from libraries in the state. Excuse me, across the state will tell you how different ways of possibly doing it. You also have to have a plan, an internet safety plan, some way of what do we do when someone does access one of these sites? How do we follow through with it? What do we do? And then before you impose any of these technology protection measures, filters you have to publicly announce that you're doing it. Let your public, let your citizens know. We're thinking about doing this. We're going to let you guys talk to us about it. What do you think? Now if you already have done this, you already have filters, you may have already done all these things already so it doesn't matter. Not something new that you have to do. You just would have had to have done these in the past. And there is a whole page on the USEC website about SIPA. But it's only for internet and internal connections. It is not for telephone access, of course, because you don't filter the telephone. I don't think you can yet. But like I said, tomorrow we'll get a lot more into this. I'm sure it's a big issue that a lot of people want to talk about or have ideas about. I want to hear more about. We have a whole session tomorrow more specifically on that. Now as far as applying online, this is the website to apply. And there is an, on the left-hand side apply online is linked to go to the web page. I would also recommend if you're interested in e-rate, if you do it, or if you're just interested in trying to figure out what it's like, keep an eye on this website because they post notices about what's going on constantly to the page. So over here where it says the fiscal year FY 2011 window is now open 49 days. There's a countdown there letting you know when things are due. When things are open, when new deadlines have come up. So it's always a good thing to keep an eye on their website for that. In addition to going to apply online. And then you can see here, you can do your 470, 471, 486, all online. And also the other two forms, the first one is getting your invoices are on here as well. And I pointed out here that yes, it's all available online, but there is a link to instructions and PDFs of all the forms as well. So if you want to do it or need to do it in paper, you totally have that. I also highly recommend looking at the instructions online before you go to apply online. When you're applying and doing the online forms, there's a lot of prompts, there's a lot of help. There's a lot of where it'll do the math for you, which is great. But it's always good to look at it beforehand and see what do I need to compile to bring together, what do I need to do to fill out these forms. And that's on the paper forms that you can get where the paper instructions are along with the paper forms. So I highly recommend getting a look at those, printing them out maybe and having them next to you while you're filling out your actual online form because it'll tell you how you need to do everything. Online and in-print are all exactly the same. It's just paper or print version or paper or online versions of them. Specific forms. 470, now we're going into details of each form and what it's all about. The 470 is where you say I want to get a discount. I want to start participating in E-Rate. This does not commit you to do anything yet, which is good. So this is just feeling out, seeing, telling them I want to do this. What you're officially doing when you do your 470 is opening a competitive bidding process and asking for quotes from local service providers that will provide you with either phone or internet service or whatever it is that you're doing. By posting the form, it goes public. You don't have to contact these providers and tell them I'm doing this. You just send the form to E-Rate and then it becomes public and all these providers know to go to their page and see if there's anybody who wants to get service and then you might be contacted by these providers trying to offer you a service. On this form as William will say, I need local and I need long distance phone and I need internet. You'll specify specifically what you need. Sometimes you won't hear from anybody and that happens a lot, especially in the small towns that we have in Nebraska. I have lots of people that we have who we have as our provider and that's it. There's no one else to contact us and say, I want to be, you know, here's my bid for your library and that's fine and your own provider might not even contact you either and say, hey, I see you've done this E-Rate. They'll just assume you've been doing it. You'll keep doing it with us. All good. So you might not even hear back from everyone but I also have heard that lately in the last year when I was doing training in the beginning of this year, suddenly service providers are contacting libraries who've never been contacted before by any of these companies and so people were surprised that somebody actually wants to give me a discount I've never heard of this company before. I think my guess is a lot of these service providers are getting kind of desperate because when some of these libraries got back to them and said, okay, I'm in so-and-so town, what can you give me? Then the company said, oh, really? Oh, we don't serve that town. Oh, okay. So they're just doing this blanket kind of thing saying oh, they're kind of in Nebraska, we're kind of in Nebraska. Let's tell them we'll give them a discount in service and then when you finally get down to talk to them, about half of the ones that I talked to, they ended up telling the library oh, well we don't serve your town, so never mind. So be aware of that if they do contact you. They may or may not actually serve where you are located. You must post to have your 470 submitted and then you've got to wait 28 days before you can do your second step, which is where you tell you sack who you've picked. This is noted to give a decent amount of time for any other vendors or anybody to contact you. This is where the competitive bidding process comes into play. They put up deadlines and dates on the USEC website and I announced it as well through the commission of what's the latest date you can possibly do a 470 and then do your 470 once you know all these deadlines so you can keep track of it. If you do get any other bids, you've got to keep track of them and then you've got to decide. You've got to compare these different companies if you do get multiple ones to decide who you're going to go with. Price is a primary factor. They always want you to get the big at best deal but it doesn't have to be the only factor and it shouldn't be the only factor in why you pick a service provider of course. Some of you may know if you have multiple providers in your town these guys are really good and even though they cost more because the other guys down the road, their customer service is not so hot, we don't want to deal with them or for whatever reasons you know your local people and that can be taken into consideration when you're doing your criteria for picking your provider. Some things that will come up when you are doing this form you all are assigned to build entity number your BEND number, you'll hear about that. It's just an ID number assigned to each school and library. I think pretty much every library in Nebraska has already had one, has in the past done something with USAC. If you're brand new to it you never have done it before or if you're not sure if someone has done it before you in the past we can look it up and see if you have one and if you don't we just call and they assign you one no problem and then you're able to go through with your submitting and this is a number assigned to your particular library and it is used throughout the life of the library for as long as it's doing anything with USAC. So if someone before you was the director they were assigned a number, they should have passed that information on to you. If they did not that's okay like I said we can go and look that up. Separate from that is a personal identification number, a PIN number that is assigned to individuals. This is a code number that can be used for you to put your signature on any online forms that you submit. So this goes to you as individual. If a previous director had one you can't use theirs, you've got to apply for your own. And it's not a big deal to apply for your own. I know some people do because there's a deadlines are coming up really quickly and they use the old one just to get some form done and that does happen and as far as I know USAC has never gone and tracked down and said well you're not really Sue, you're Bob but what you should do is when you're new even if your previous director or previous person at your library has been submitting online forms, do one form in paper and they will get you or what they call your wet signature where you actually have to physically write your signature on it then issue a PIN and then you're back to online for everything and you just use that PIN number to sign all of your online forms that you submit with them. After you have sent them their 470 they will send you back a letter in the mail in whatever color is for that year which is your receipt notification letter just letting you know we got your 470 here's a summary of what you wrote on it double check it make sure it's right if anything got missed in translation or in applying for the form for it and let them know if there's any changes or any mistakes that were on it then once you get that you've got to wait your 28 days before you can submit your 471 which is your form letting them know who you've picked as your provider so that's what I talked about the competitive bidding process it's public you don't have to do an RFP or a request for price or proposal some municipalities or cities or counties do require you to do that so check with your city in case you need to or not but most people I've talked to in Nebraska is not required you don't have to do it just submit your 470 serves the same purpose as that because it puts out exactly what you want how much you need what bandwidth you need what phone you need all on there anything as a provider needs to say they want to provide you a service is on that 470 if they come to you and say you need to do an RFP tell them no because you don't it's only required if your side like your city or town makes you do it when you do the bidding evaluating as I said price is the primary factor but take other things that you know about into consideration some libraries you can do a little matrix of price is 51% of our decision making process all these other things are these or if prices 49% of our decision making but then we decide on their location and how the customer service is and previous history you know all those things can be different parts of your decision making process as well just be able to if anyone asks because they don't always ask be able to back up why you pick this provider over a different one especially if there was a price difference just be able to show well we know this about them put stuff in writing write yourself an e-mail that has a date on it write a memo and put it in the file just something that says here's the reasons why we pick so and so over so and so and like I said this is only if you get multiple ones which the trend seems to be in our state not a lot of that happening after you have done all that you've got your 28 days the ACDs the allowable contract date the time when you can finally say I have picked my vendor and here's who I'm going with sometimes it might just be I'm sticking with the same people I'm sticking with the same company and that's fine you're still going through the process for e-rate and the federal government of saying we put out our bid we waited we put our request we waited and we're still sticking with the same company you're just telling them that to your service provider you're just continuing your same contract you're continuing your same process in June you pay your bill in July you pay your bill they're all doing this too they've all been doing e-rate for years and years most of them so they know the process as well there are some service providers out there we have heard when we've been talking to some libraries now with this grant that do not participate in the e-rate program it's rare it shouldn't be happening they're supposed to all be participating but if they're not you may need to talk to them about that they need to get on board with it otherwise they might not get your business that is also a reason not to choose the vendor is well if you're not getting the e-rate I'm going with so and so down the road so the next form to do is your 471 and this is where you then finally tell them yes I've picked my service provider you let them know who it is what services are providing to you this is where you put in finally your discount you let them know how much of discount you were eligible for you would have already done that calculation in the beginning decide if you want to do this this is where you finally reply that enter that into the form to let them know and this is where they'll check on that for you they will double check information and numbers and everything to make sure you have that all correct in there as I said you wait that 28 days it's very important to wait if you don't wait the right timeline the right number of days they will you will get denied if you don't do those 28 days you won't follow the dates that are out there for all of this you just won't get the discounts for the 471 and what's in bright red here which we don't know right now there's always a filing window that is announced it's announced usually sometime in the fall and it runs usually November December to January February March time frame and that's the time frame for when you can submit the 471 it's only during a few certain months during the year that you can do this form application filing window is announced then you can figure out when is the last date I can possibly submit the 470 to give that 28 days so right now you can start doing your 470s now if you want to for next year and then just wait to see what this filing window is to figure out when the deadline is and to get all of that done now something new was added to the 471 this year and anyone doing it for 2011 encountered this they're asking for an FCC registration number this is not your libraries build number, build entity number that you had for the library this is not your pin number for you individually this is something new to the form but probably not new to your library lots of libraries didn't even know they had one of these I didn't know any library that does business with the FCC anyone who's in business with them at any time for any purposes e-rate, taxes, whatever has been assigned one of these registration numbers you may just not know it because you never had to use it for anything before but now they're asking you to put this number in the 471 it's for the FCC people and if you don't know what it is there's a place where you can look up your library's number or request one if you don't have one if you've never done business with them before last year I had lots of libraries call me and say what is this I don't know everyone I looked up had one so I didn't realize but there was one in there we didn't have to request one for anybody as far as I knew last year but I was aware of so you have one we just have to figure out what it is it's a long 10-digit number that you probably never use for anything else and won't use for anything else again but the FCC wants it on the forms now after you send them the 471 they send you back another letter there's the acknowledgement letter same thing just to try this confirmation of everything you entered in the 471 you can make check corrections to this form as well in case you get this letter back and it turns out they said something wrong or copied something over wrong you can do corrections to the form you can also request changes in your funding sometimes you discover after you're going through this process that your bill is actually less from the service provider or you decide not to go with internet just to go with phone you can request reductions but not increases so think about that as you're doing your original forms that you can't up anything if you suddenly discover that your bills have gone up on the form on the letter when you get it back your internet will be assigned a funding request number they'll call it a fern everything gets an acronym of course so each request you did your telephone request will be assigned a funding request number your internet will be assigned a funding request number your long distance phone will be assigned a funding request number and these will be things that people will be asking about for future forms and future information each service provider has their own service provider ID number like you have your billed number you have your PIN number they have a number assigned to them we're all numbers now if you've done this before you've probably known what your service provider number is if not, it also can be looked up on the USEC website all the stuff can be looked up there too your numbers, their numbers, everything there's always a place to look something up if you're not sure what it is when you do submit the 471 you do this little attachment called an item 21 where you just specify in detail what you're actually now getting from the provider this is long distance phone number for the library and its staff this is the internet connection for all these computers in the computer lab on this just to repeat of the fact that you can get things changed so after you do the 471 this is when you wait and you wait to see if they're going to give you the money and how much money they're going to give you they will be checking over your forms and all of your information and information about the service provider you're going with your discount that you claimed you had where your library is located and you're verifying in there and this is what they call their you'll hear it called the PIA review program integrity assurance review so they'll be coming back to you and asking questions sometimes and saying what did you mean by this oh can you give me more information about this can you give me proof of this I've had a lot of libraries being asked can you prove your school lunch program numbers so you just send them that link they don't always go through those steps of searching going on to google and searching and finding that the department education has this they just say I wonder if this is right this doesn't sound right let's ask and they let you tell them this is where I got that number from the department of education and this can take months and months you will see notices go out saying these list of libraries have been funded and you're not on it and then next week if you have another list they can take months and months to get through all of these applications they get so don't panic that yours isn't on there right off the bat they may still just be going through their piles of applications they have it doesn't always mean something is wrong with yours it just means it's this far down in the pile of what they're doing whenever they do decide to let you know you get a funding commitment decision letter let you know if you're funded or not and how much you'll be funded for at some libraries where they say yes you can have it but we're actually lowering your discount we can argue with that and you may receive more than one of these two they may make the decision on your telephone but for whatever reason wait and three months three weeks later make the decision on your internet it's all a huge process of people they have doing this so pay attention when you get the letter to see what exactly it's for so you know okay we've got this one we've got the other one waiting and they said you can appeal anything on here if you think it's wrong if you don't agree with the fact that they didn't want to fund you or did want to or wanted to fund you for less you can always do appeals for this like I said they want to give you the money that's the whole point of this program is give away this money it's earmarked for these purposes it's not like they can take it and just roll it into some other government program it doesn't work that way it has to go out to the schools and libraries to be discounts on these bills so if you want to argue something I say go for it I will help you with it I've been helping some libraries with some of their issues with it it may take some time to go through their whole process but it doesn't hurt to say I don't agree you did this wrong whatever there's detailed information about doing that on the USEC website as well program integrity insurance that's what I was talking about that actually reviews these things for you so if you ever get any contact from them it will come from something called PIA a PIA reviewer it will be what they are on your forms the 474.71 there is a spot where you say how you want to be contacted do you prefer telephone do you prefer email remember what you said there because that's how they will contact you that's the only way they will contact you they send you an email and you don't get it they're not going to try and call you too they're just going to do the one thing that you said was your primary way of wanting to be contacted and if you don't reply back to them they always give a deadline you have 15 days 30 days whatever if you don't reply back to them they assume you don't care and your application goes away so make sure you have it be a way you will be responding to them and getting the phone call if it's a phone call getting the email and reading it if it's an email and responding to it the next step in the forms that you do is your starting of your services your 486 this is where you tell them this is where some reason libraries forget this they think I've applied I've told them who I want they told me I got my money with that funding commitment decision letter I'm good to go well you're not this is where some libraries just forget and just don't do this and then they don't get the discount you've got to tell them that the service has actually started that our contract has begun that it's all good that the service is being provided and we're getting it like we said we would it also certifies if you had to do a technology plan this is where you tell them yep we did one you don't send them the plan you just say yes they may ask it for you whoop and the deadline is 120 days after the service starts or the date of the funding commitment decision letter whichever is later so you do have a deadline for that too but it's on that funding commitment decision letter is that date as well so it's all on there after you have submitted that you'll also get a notification letter back same thing everything you send them they'll send you a notification saying yep we got it yep we got it make sure you get those letters back and you have them proving that they've gotten the form you submitted if you haven't gotten one of those notification letters back for anything go and check with them contact someone there or contact me and we can find out well you said you submitted on so and so date let's find out what happened to it then the last thing you do is the invoicing this is after you've started receiving the bills you can decide how you want to receive your discount you can either have pay all your bills in full and get a reimbursement check back or you can have the bills discounted in the first place in the bill you receive from your service providers already discounted for whatever the amount is it's up to you which way works with you with your accounting people with your city or town if that they have issues with how this is done sometimes it has to be worked out with the provider as well that they prefer to do it one way or the other of course easier billing wise for one way or the other but you do have a choice so talk to your money people your budget your business people and find out which way works best for you if you want to be reimbursed afterwards you do what they call the bear form the build entity applicant reimbursement that's the reimbursement one and you submit that and then you pay all your bills in full and you get checks back from the usac with the money so it comes afterwards you do have to have the money ahead of time to pay out and then you get a reimbursement check reimbursement check back the other option is the service provider invoice form where they submit the form actually so you wouldn't submit it but you would have to talk to them first and find out is this the way we want to go and then they submit the form to usac where it says we're just going to discount the bill in the first place to the library and then usac sends them the reimbursement not you guys, you guys just get a discounted bill right off the bat from the service provider and in the end the service provider gets all their money full billing they just get part from you and part from the government so up to you to decide which way you want to do that you do get a notification letter for the bear letting you know that it has been submitted and everything has been done and you'll be sent quarterly a report letting you know all of your bills and all of your discounts so you can track and make sure how everything is going throughout the year if you do need help they have people on staff there all the time to help you out they have they do regular kind of nine to five hours eight to five hours during big times when a deadline is coming up they will have extended hours so they'll be open until like 11 p.m. midnight they are based eastern time zone because they're in Washington DC so pay attention when they do time zone things that it will say eastern and you gotta bump it back for central but you can call them they have an 800 number they have a website where a web form online you can type in a web form if you want to ask them something and they will they're really quick I've actually asked them some questions about the commission's application we apply as well and they're usually very quick with response on that anytime you do talk to them on the phone definitely confirm in writing make sure you have everything somehow in writing in the end so you can say well on this date you know SLD told me this this and this and now you're telling me the different thing here's my email when I confirmed with her what she said that's always a good thing to have there's also places on the website we can get information the news briefs that's where they have their every every week they do an update of what's going on with e-rate so you can sign up for that and email I get it so just let you know here's what's coming up next here's the new deadline coming up here's a new thing we've announced here's a change made to the forms and the process flow chart that's on here this is a long URL for that it's also included on your flash drives and on the website this event it's a flow chart of showing exactly each step in the process for both you as a library and the service provider so you can see what they're having to do too they've got all these forms themselves to fill out like you are I haven't told you about any of that because you don't want to know what they have to do but they do have a process as well so you can see that you're both doing different things throughout the year and of course like I said I am the special project librarian slash e-rate state e-rate coordinator I've got a website up with lots of information links to all these things on their website excuse me links to their forms for our forms that can help you out and of course you know where to find me you can call or email me about anything that you want to know as well so that is the basics very quick yes I know of e-rate I do longer sessions of this where I longer trading is that I will be doing that I usually do in the fall and these forms are available of actually how to submit the forms all the different forms that are out there step by step but this is just to get you the basics of how the program works what it's all about what might help you if you're a current provider or current user of it to learn something you didn't know maybe or if you've never used e-rate before to see if maybe it might be something you want to do so we still have about five minutes left yes for my time here does anybody have any questions here or any questions from out in our remote locations Michael is over here monitoring our remote locations out there and he can bring in any questions we have here too yes Stan sometimes the question is when you do PIA review and so they do ask you for something some sort of information and then you never hear back what do you do about it or something you can do there is depending on the situation there is a spot on the website where you can look up the status of your application so you can see where it is in the process when they have it and if you know it was being held up for some reason you can go there and check and see if it's been bumped and moved along in the process they for some reason aren't very good about responding back and saying yes we got that and now we've moved you on they just kind of do it and then you suddenly get your next acknowledgement letter or whatever so you can look it up online there if it still isn't say what you want I strongly recommend calling them or contacting back the PIA reviewer who contacted you in the first place just to have them double check and let you know I sent you this thing three weeks ago and I'm not sure what's going on can you please let me know but you can check it yourself on the website and then yeah, I can point that that's what they're there for they're there for you to do your review you can yeah do that oh yeah, yes, sure yes, the question is if you already have your phone on the internet do you still have to go out and go through the process of getting the competitive bids yes, by just filling out and submitting the 470 you've done that though you don't have to do anything extra you just apply for e-rate it becomes public providers may or may not come to you offering up their services part of your decision making process can be and one of your major reasons for staying with a provider is we're staying with the people we've been with for 10 years there's no reason to change they've been great so you still do by just submitting the 470 you kind of go through the process but with no extra work and then if you never hear from anybody and even or sometimes you don't even hear from your own provider you just say go spend 28 days I'm on to my next step in the form and then really what you're doing is you're just saying I'm going through the steps that I'm required to to get the discount for e-rate but I'm sticking with the same people yeah we have a remote question it's on okay and I think we'll be getting into this tomorrow a little bit too but the question is SIPA only requires that public access computers be filtered right not office computers wrong sorry no that's not true SIPA actually says all of it all the libraries computers all of its computers is the wording must have a filter on it which means yes every computer both public and staff need to have filter on it however also it says you have to have a way of turning off the filter very quickly and easily and simply so you do have to install on your staff computers but then just turned off and that covers the requirements for it the SIPA law is very short I've also included that in your flash drives it's like 12 pages long it's this tiny little thing I was surprised when I read it I was like dreading looking at this as like this has got to be some huge ridiculous thing because all about internet safety and it's not it's short and brief and that's one of the things in it it doesn't say it doesn't differentiate between public and staff room it just says a technology protection measure must be installed on its computers it's being the library and that's it but you do have to turn also it does require a way to turn it off so you do install it but you turn it off anything else? Yes yes here in Nebraska the question is did I understand that a library has to be accredited to apply and that is a specific requirement here that we have in Nebraska yes not that I'm aware of what it wasn't before okay well it might not maybe my time it wasn't that could possibly be if you're thinking but as far as long as I've been doing it which has been a whopping like two three years it has been that would be a question for other people like Rod, Richard, I don't know because you're not going to be able to I don't know the comment is that the comment is that someone's been doing e-rate for a long time it's been a great help and to getting the discount but if it is required that they be accredited that might not they might not be able to do it e-rate anymore because of budget cuts and other things that need to be reduced at the library it may mean they will lose their Nebraska state accreditation that's something to be thought about I'm not going to say anything it's not my part of my job that part yes they did put it back the comment is that a couple years ago the DOE had taken off those school lunch numbers from the website for privacy issues so that the library then had to switch to going to the schools to get it there are back up now but there's just a few years back it doesn't have like 20 years worth of them no that's true it's got maybe three or four the last time I looked I would have to look at it again but they are up there now again I don't know if they figured out a different way to put it up or did they get over that issue I don't know I just found it it was out there and I checked it and I said yeah that's the numbers it's kind of interesting with me being new to this too that I don't have a lot of this history myself I have Richard who I can ask sometimes but some of it I just go with what I know at the moment okay yeah yes one more question do you have anything from okay one more question because then we need to go to lunch yes interesting comment of some schools are not reporting their school lunch program numbers because they are embarrassed that the students are getting or the students themselves are embarrassed well if they are still doing that that's just something to the USAC to the E-Rate people there is an official number on the DOE website if there's these things these little political whatever things behind the scenes that we know about we just don't need to mention that there's an official number out there in this public and so we just go with what's out there and that's what we go with unfortunately though the more that students that are eligible for the program the better a discount you get so it kind of will hurt it will hurt you E-Rate wise yeah because it will be helpful yeah and there's no individual names it's a big ground number it just says this number these many students it doesn't have any personal information yeah and you know