 Hello and welcome to E-Rate what's new for 2023. This is the Nebraska Library Commission Workshop for Nebraska Public Libraries who may be looking to apply for E-Rate either for the first time or if you've been doing it for years and years. We will go through the basics of the whole E-Rate program from beginning to end and show you how to do everything. If you've never done it before, this is obviously a very good introduction to that and even if you haven't done E-Rate but doing it regularly it's always good to have a refresher or see if there's anything new that you might want to know. I am Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director at the Nebraska Library Commission and one of my duties as Library Development Director is I am the State E-Rate Coordinator for Public Libraries. So I do all of the training and consulting and guidance and helping you navigate the E-Rate process. I have been doing this part of my job the E-Rate part since 2009. So it's been a long time that I've been involved in this. So and I'm going to help you show you how E-Rate is done today. For anyone who is from a school or speaks to anyone in our schools, E-Rate is also for Public Libraries and for schools. The Department of Education handles all the support and training for them. So today we'll be talking from totally the Public Library viewpoint. Most of the process is exactly the same. There's a few differences. So we'll be talking about Public Libraries today. If you have any questions throughout the session, do please do type into your questions section of your GoToWebinar interface at any time. Just type in there. I'm monitoring that here and I will answer your questions as they come up. You do not have to wait just as soon as you think of something. Go ahead and ask your question. So what is E-Rate? E-Rate, it was established by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The first year you could apply for it was in 97 to receive discounts in 1998. The first schools and libraries received them there at that time. It is a federal program and here's the exact wording here to ensure that schools and libraries can obtain high speed internet access at affordable rates and keep students and library patrons connected to broadband by providing a discount on eligible services and equipment. So that's a mouthful. Basically it gives discounts to schools and libraries on the cost of your internet service, your monthly internet, however you receive that, and any construction equipment, anything you need to make that internet service work. The funding for E-Rate comes from the universal service fee. This is not some funding for E-Rate is not part of the federal budget or anything. Just the regular federal budget is fees that we pay as customers and our service providers on our telephone bill or internet bill. If you look at all those taxes and fees, one of them will say USF or universal service. We all pay into a pot of money for this and that is where all the discounts come for our schools and libraries. The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, runs the E-Rate program. They are in charge of it. They oversee it by setting the rules and the policies and they set up a not-for-profit company called the Universal Service Administrative Company, USAC, who runs a day-to-day program. So accepting your forms, reviewing your forms, all of that. USAC is what you'll hear me talk about most today. USAC actually runs four different programs that come from the Universal Service. E-Rate is for education. That's for schools and public libraries. There's also a one for healthcare facilities for those facilities to have a discount for people who are low-income to have a discount on their telecommunications service and for people in high-cost areas. Specifically for the E-Rate program, the particular department that is in charge of that within USAC is called the Schools and Libraries Program. So E-Rate is done on a funding year. That's where everything revolves around is this funding year. So it's done annually. Every year you do have to apply for your E-Rate for the next upcoming year. So right now, when you are attending these workshops and thinking about E-Rate, you're thinking about whatever discounts you will receive starting July 1st of next year. You do it ahead of time. Excuse me. The funding years run from July 1st to June 30th of every year. So right now funding year 2023 that you are applying for now starts July 1st 2023 and runs through June 30th of 2024. You can only receive E-Rate discounts on purchases you're making in the future. There's nothing for things you've done in the past. So if you've already gone through a year, you can't go back and say, well I want E-Rate for a discount, something I already bought. It's a thinking to the future type process. So everything revolves around that funding year. As I said, all the different E-Rate program activities. Before the funding year starts, you apply saying you want to receive E-Rate for the upcoming year. You may go through a competitive bidding process, applying for your discounts, picking who you're going to have your service provider, what services they're going to provide to you. At the very beginning of the funding year, that July 1st date, your services start. And then during the funding year and after it's over, then you have what's called invoicing. That's when you receive your actual discounts. And we're going to go through the whole process here throughout through the whole funding year this afternoon. So who can apply for E-Rate? Libraries, library systems, schools, school districts. The only main criteria for being eligible for E-Rate is that you must be, for public libraries, you must be eligible to receive LSTA fundings. This is, oops, back. Library Service Technology Act funds. This is through the IMLS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. In Nebraska, all public libraries are eligible because we provide services to you that use LSTA funding. And so as you receive these kind of first services from us, databases, discounts, and things that we fund from that, you are all eligible. This also includes tribal libraries now. It had been, it wasn't really a clear indicator of does tribal libraries count. And just the beginning of this year, the FCC did amend the definition of library in the official E-Rate rules to say that to include tribal library in the list of what are libraries. So for a tribal library, since they are done a little differently than public, they have to be designated, created by a decree from the Tribal Council, a resolution, whatever. They must have regular scheduled hours, have actual staff and materials that library users can borrow. Those are the three criteria for a tribal library to be considered a library, as far as I'm less concerned, and then be eligible for E-Rate. This is only for tribal community libraries, not for tribal college libraries. So you know, there are many tribal colleges and universities that have their libraries. Those, they especially are not eligible for E-Rate. So all of our schools and school districts, all of our public libraries in Nebraska, and any of our tribal libraries that meet these criteria. As I said at the beginning, I'm going to only be speaking about public libraries, because that's who I help find services for through here through the Library Commission. So the first thing I do when I tell libraries, if you're thinking about doing E-Rate, is to figure out how much this is going to benefit you. And to do that, you calculate your discount. Figure out how much of a discount you're going to receive on your services, and to see if it's worth your time to go through this process. As I said, it's an annual process. You do have to do it every year, and it is multiple forms throughout the year, three or four forms throughout the year at certain times a year, that you need to make sure that you submit. So how much of a discount could you receive? Anywhere from 20% to 90% off is what you could receive on your internet service and any of the equipment that you might need to purchase to make your internet service work. Most public libraries in Nebraska fall in the 60, 70, 80% range. So we're talking more than 50, at least 50% off of whatever you're paying now. This discount base is calculated with two different criteria. First is the National School Lunch Program numbers. The FCC had to figure out some way of determining how much each area, each library should receive, and so they want you to pick something that was an indicator of the neediest areas in the country. And there are lots of ways you can decide who's neediest and who is the highest poverty rate and things like that. They decided to go to the school lunch program numbers. If there are more students eligible for the school lunch program, it is probably a more needy area, and they will receive a higher discount in some things. So to be clear, this is a number of students that are eligible for the school lunch program in your school district. Not how many apply. That will possibly be different numbers. Not everyone who's eligible actually applies. So this is just looking at how many could potentially receive this. And this is school lunch numbers for the school district in which your library is physically located in. So you may provide services, and you probably do, to people in multiple school districts just because of where the lines fall. People may come and use your library from all over the place. But as far as calculating e-rate, you just look for physically where does your library sit, what is that school district, and those are the numbers that is used to calculate your discount. In addition to that, then look at whether you're considered urban or rural as far as the U.S. census is concerned. Luckily for us, we have places we can look up all this information ahead of time. The Department of Education here in Nebraska does post their the school lunch numbers on their website every year. It's updated. So you can go to that URL and look up for the current year for your school district as a whole. They do list out individual schools, so if you have an elementary, a middle, or in a high school in your district. But you don't have to do the math and add those all up. There is a separate sheet in the worksheet. It's a spreadsheet that is of the whole district as a whole. So you can look up your number there. And then you can check on the USAC website to see what this U.S. census thinks you are if you're urban or rural. The cutoff point for being urban or rural is 25,000 population. Urban areas populations equal to or more than 25,000 and rural would be anything else. Everybody else. Most of Nebraska is rural, so most of us will fall into that category. And then you use the discount matrix that USAC provides to calculate this information. And before I go on here I'm going to tell you don't worry about trying to scribble down all these URLs here. They're in the presentation that has been provided to you. And they're also linked all on our e-rate website as well. So you'll be able to access them later very easily. So once you have these two items, your school lunch numbers or your urban or rural status, you go to USAC's discount matrix. So you'll see here there's two different categories of e-rate category one and category two. And I'll get into the details and the differences between those in just a minute here. And you can see whether you're urban or you're rural. And you can see at the lower levels it is a slightly higher discount rate for libraries in a rural areas. So over here a percentage of students eligible for your school lunch. If you have just 50% of your students, just only half, you can get 80% off on your internet services by applying for e-rate. That's a pretty good deal. That's a lot to receive if you just have only half of the children in your school district being eligible for the school lunch program. So as I said, I always tell libraries look at this first if you're not sure, if you're on the fence about applying, or if you need to convince your city or your library board that this is something you should do, do this, go through the math and you can tell them we'll get 80% off on our bills. I should probably spend some time working on it. If you want me to look up your numbers and give you an official email telling you this, I can do that as well to provide. So that's how much you could possibly get off on your e-rate and your internet services with e-rate. So what can you get a discount on? The eligible services list tells you that every year annually the FCC publishes their ESL, Eligible Services List, and it tells you what is e-rateable. I don't know if that's a real word but it's what I use for this. There is a new list every year so when you are applying for e-rate make sure you look for the correct list for the year you're applying for. It hasn't changed much over the last few years so even if you look at a previous one it won't be terrible but I'm always trying to look for the most recent one just to make sure they do update it annually just to make sure if there's anything new, any new technology that's been created or come out for providing internet, any new services, new equipment, anything they want to make sure they include. Technology changes over time and if the FCC does understand that they want to make sure the eligible services list reflects that so if anything new needs to be added. Here's where we get into the category one and category two that I had mentioned earlier. Category one services are services providing high-speed connectivity to the building so anything that gets broadband it gets internet service to your building. Category two is for all the services and equipment and everything inside your building that makes that internet work so the break between category one and category two would be your library walls so in this little graphic I've created over here these these bricks here that's your building's walls. Category one gets that's the connection to your building whether it is the actual service itself or doing any construction or installation that needs to be done once you've got that in the building then any of the equipment that you need need to buy and cabling routers, uninterrupted power supplies, server switches, etc etc all these pieces of equipment that make the internet work all of that is your category two e-rate eligible. The devices that use the internet are not eligible so e-rate is about the service itself this the service the internet service getting it to your building making the service work the device you use to access your internet service is not something that's part of e-rate. For category one you can there's no limit and how much you can request it's just whatever it costs you you get a discount on that cost. Category two there is a budget limit on how much funding you can receive for all that equipment and we'll get into the details of that in a few slides. So category one specifically more specifically basically anything that provides high speed broadband internet to your building DSL fiber cable modem wireless broadband over power lines these are just some examples this is an exhaustive supply that's with exhaustive list that's with that eligible services list we'll get you but this is just to give you an idea of the types the most common types of things that you might receive internet via. Now fiber want to get into a little more of a discussion about that fiber is being deployed all over the country maybe in some of your areas you're having new fiber come in and there are two different fiber options in the e-rate world there's lit fiber and dark fiber. Lit fiber is service it's already out there and available and you just contact a company or they contact you and say hey we have fiber and you connect to it and you have fiber. Dark fiber is portions of the fiber optic lines that are out there but they haven't been turned on yet. When fiber lines were laid or are being laid over the years they put in more than they needed at the time planning for increased demand in the future so you can contact a company and say hey do you have some dark fiber you could turn on and make it work for us you know I don't see anything right now but there might be something out there we can turn on and connect to. When you do your e-rate application you will have to and you want to include fiber as a potential service you will have to look for both ask for both and the form will make you do that just to cover all your bases you want to make sure if you're asking about is there a lit fiber you might want to investigate you make sure you know is there any dark as well. Now related to fiber is special construction which is another service is available in your category one this is outside your building if you need as construction to bring that fiber connection to your building you can receive an e-rate discount on this special construction so the their fiber may be in your community somewhere but it's a few blocks away so you need to have it run to the library building or it might be near your city and you need to have it run to the city and then to the library all of that construction can receive an e-rate discount. This would be the actual construction work done planning engineering anything related to getting that fiber linked to your library. Now the FCC knows that not these companies can't always work just in the e-rate funding year starting after July 1st so you can receive a discount on construction that could start at least up to six months before the funding year starts so as early as july january first so if they start doing the construction sometime in the spring for you that's okay the construction can be at any time and then your service would hopefully start by July 1st and then you can start getting your discount on your fiber service starting on that July but the construction beforehand can also receive an e-rate discount. Now related to special construction the e-rate program has this they call their state matching fund this is a little extra e-rate discount money you can receive and this is something they put into place then some odd years ago it's additional funding if your state comes up with money to help pay for the amount the library has to cover e-rate will match that so for e-rate you know you receive 80 off on your is your 80 percent is your e-rate discount you're responsible for the extra 20 cost of the of the service of the construction if your state has a pot of money they say will help pay for part of that e-rate will match so that extra bit that extra 20 could be covered by state funds and then even a little more by e-rate funds so here's an example of that to it's hard to describe it in words but this makes more sense i think so you have a bid and i don't know if this is accurate i know this is an accurate amount that it might cost but it's just easy for the math a hundred thousand dollars a service provider says it will take to run five or two your library and you have an 80 discount so e-rate covers 80 percent of that which is 80 000 of it and the library is responsible for the extra 20 000 but if your state has come up with some funding to help pay for it they can do up to 10 of that what's left so that would be another 10 percent then e-rate says hey your state is providing funding will match what the state is discounting you and will pay another 10 percent and in the end zero uh is what the amount that the library is responsible for comes out to nothing no cost to the library or your city or whoever so here a hundred thousand dollar project e-rate covers 80 a state match says will cover 80 000 state match says will cover 10 000 e-rate says will cover another 10 000 zero to the library now why am i mentioning this because we have a state matching fund here in nebraska yay we are actually in the third year of our state matching program here through the public service commission the nebraska public service commission runs our universal service fees and funding here in the state they're a companion commission they're like the nebraska library commission but they're for public services and they budget a million dollars to use from 2021 to 2024 to help run this fiber construction to libraries and schools now this is for new fiber being run to your buildings if you already have fiber it doesn't it's you're not eligible for this because you don't you don't need the help but if you don't have fiber run and you want it run you need it run for the first time this could be a way to help you get that at either little or zero cost to your library this is url for the information from the public service commission um where you would apply to get that extra funding in order to do that you do go through all the steps in the e-rate program you do the first form in the process the form 470 and i'm going to show you how to do that in a minute here and then you pick you want your provider to be who's going to do it some companies will contact you and say hey we can do this and you say okay we'll go with you then you apply to the public service commission um and do their application for the state matching funds it'll include a copy of your 470 and who use who you chose they will then evaluate your application and get back to you and say and with a letter it'll be an email with a letter attached to it saying that whether they're if they are going to provide you with those matching funds and then you can use that letter when you do your second form in the e-rate process the 471 which is when you tell e-rate USAC we've picked a provider you also include this letter to let e-rate know we also have state matching funds so that they know if they approve your e-rate application that they will have to match those state funds as well uh so there are some deadlines coming up for this the deadline to apply for the public service commission funding is the end of the year december 31st uh and then sometime in mid january they get back to the libraries and let you know and that's in plenty of time to do your 471 for as far as e-rate deadlines in search uh i will tell you though that they are the public service commission is is they want to give this money uh so they're willing to to um give libraries some leeway we've had at least one or two libraries in the last few years we've had to go pat weren't ready at december 31st but they were able to submit these applications later on in january and sometimes i think in january so uh try to do it as soon as we can try your 470 and as soon as possible so that you can then do the public service commission but if there's a delay or um for some reason or if you just aren't ready to get this going you've got to talk to your city or something about it let me know and we can reach out public service commission and let them know you're working on it so that they know to wait for your application to come if it's going to be after december 31st so you will have to work with your local government on this this is a major construction project running fiber lines so this isn't just something the library does on their own you're going to need to talk to your municipality about what are the rules for putting out bids for this kind of project do we have to do a special request for proposal rfp uh what are our rules locally for evaluating accepting um multiple bids if we do get them is there someone you need approval approval from before you can even initiate this process so are there people you need to talk to like your city administrator your it people uh city attorney the mayor definitely make sure your library board knows what you're doing and this kind of major thing um and if there's anyone else uh who might need to be involved in this process so this is not something you can just you know do independently as the library you're definitely going to need to bring it to whoever um because this will bring fiber potentially to the whole community or to the whole all the city departments and the library would be facilitating that so you definitely want to reach out to these different people and let them know hey here we've got an opportunity to get fiber run at either very low or even zero cost to us so i'd like to try and do this what do i need to know from you all so that's category one and everything involved with that does anybody have any questions yet um about the basics of the beginning of e-rate or category one before we jump into our category two discussion you type in the question section of your go-to-webinar interface all right on to category two so category two is called your internal connections this is all of the equipment needed to make your broadband work inside the library building so you may have a network closet like this nice neat picture here with all the cable management done nicely on a rack you might have a bunch of wires behind a desk or under desk somewhere uh you may not have a clue what they are it's okay um this would be your access points your cables all the racks that all of these pieces of equipment sit on the switches the routers power supplies also any software that might be needed to make the network work so this is specifically just network software not like microsoft word or something like that that kind of software so just anything that's related to making your internet service work all of this you can receive an e-rate discount under category two in addition to the equipment itself you can get a discount on the maintenance of that equipment uh there will need to be software upgrades or equipment upgrades done over the years there may need to be repair work done yeah my favorite example if a squirrel gets in the walls and chews through your cable network cable you need to have it replaced and rerun um all of that can a maintenance uh can be you can receive an e-rate discount as well to be clear this is only on the actual work performed when they have to come and do something so if you pay like a monthly fee to have a it person on call like $20 a month and they'll come that monthly fee isn't eligible but if they come and then have to do work and there's a specific work order with okay we came in and we replaced the cable and it cost this much that actual work that was done is what you can receive a discount on uh you do have to pay attention if you have a multi-year deal with the company if you have a multi-year deal with the company or it's through your uh internet service provider and that's a multi-year contract you can only apply for this one year at a time for each funding year so you would take you know if you say it's a three-year subscription we're just going to do the first year the first year of our e-rate and we've got to do it again with second and then again for the third and then for both category one or two there's all the extra taxes and fees and all those extra things on your bills the universal service fee that i mentioned similar to that um if you are having equipment sent to you anything involved with the shipping uh training as far as it go training your staff or your it people to run your internet network that kind of training um and any installation fees there might be uh you can have that come along when you purchase the equipment or it could be a third party that does it uh either way you any of that kind of installation charges can be uh are eligible for e-rate discount now all of these category two things can be very uh intimidating there's you know that that network closet your cables um we have many libraries who are just i don't know what that all is i don't know what's in there it's not my thing uh i wouldn't even know what to say what to tell you we have well we have this great resource that's been made available through a grant through the iMLS the toward gigabit libraries toolkit specifically for rural tribal small libraries who do not have their own IT people some of our libraries are lucky enough to have an IT IT staff or an IT person but if you aren't you're one of our many many independent libraries that just is doing it on their own this is a great resource for you uh anyone can use it of course it's just free out there there's a link to it on our e-rate website and this takes you through a question and answers thing for your um tech doing your technology interview in inventory so questions and answers asking about what's in your closet with what are the uh brand names on them or the serial numbers on them for you to help you figure out what you actually have and then you can use that information to plan for improving and and upgrading your internet doing a broadband improvement plan uh staff here at the library commission were involved with the development of this uh holly waltz who is on our computer team here at the library commission she was part of the group that worked on this so if you do have any questions about what's in your uh network closet how to use this broadband toolkit what do i have and what should i get to upgrade holly waltz here at the Nebraska library commission would be the person to call or email and talk to about that she can guide you through all of this here um but it's an awesome resource for anybody to use just to keep track of things and once you do that inventory you have it as a record of everything too and then you can update it when you get something new and just have an ongoing tracking of everything technology um internet related that's in our building as i mentioned earlier category one in uh erate is at um there's no limit on how much you can ask for just whatever it costs you can get a discount on category two has a budget and the word budget i think is a little misleading because the explanation of it it's not exactly kind of a typical kind of budget as you think of so i'll explain it here for you hopefully it'll make it clear so usack calculates now for libraries a five-year budget for category two products and services so they say here's a chunk of money you can use over a five-year period um each five-year period is a designated period it's not five year one doesn't start the first year that you apply we're in a certain cycle at each time so right now we're in the 2021 through 2025 five-year cycle so between 2021 and 2025 usack says your library has this much money to spend in that time frame at 2026 it all gets recalculated and you start over again for that next five-year cycle um you can receive discounts on the cost of any of your category two services and equipment up to that budget amount uh you can spend more than what that budget is that's okay you may have a budget amount of 25 000 and your project is uh 50 000 that's okay you'll just only get a discount up to the 25 000 that you have been allotted in your e-rate account in your e-rate online e-rate is all applied for online in your profile there they will keep you use that keeps track of your e-rate category two budget so it will automatically deduct from your amount that you have you start out with whenever you spend something so it will keep track of you and let you know you'll be able to look up how much you have left to use your on budget is determined when you first pursue a first 471 um in whatever budget cycle that is that's when they first calculate and say okay as of today you have this much but it's only good through this cycle so if you applied in 2023 for category two funds for the first time you have through 2025 to use it so you have three years of three e-rate funding years to use it in as opposed to if you started in 2021 you could use spread it out for five years um you don't have to use all the money one year you can as I just said you can spread it out decide that for 2023 we're just going to update our some switches and then 2024 we'll do some routers you know you can you pick and choose and do things each year if you know you have a library construction project coming up if you're building a new building or building an edition or doing and building a new computer lab you could use all of it up in one year potentially to do that some kind of big project and that's okay use it all up in 2023 that's fine you're just done until your until the next five year cycle in 2026 if you need to buy anything new again at that point but if you do a whole new lab right now you're going to be good for a while you don't need to upgrade anything for a long time so how much is this budget uh for public libraries it is based on the size of your library building so you take the total area and square feet all floors everything in your building and you multiply that by the the but they call their multiplier four dollars and fifty cents that's what it is right now that may change for a future cycle but that's what it is right now so you can get this number of your square feet if you have blueprints for the library somewhere through you know from the city of what size your building is and so that you can then do this math and figure that out but there is also a minimum budget of $25,000 everyone no matter how big their library is or how small their library is will get at a minimum a $25,000 pre-discount budget um and when we get into the math of that you'll see how that matters budgets you can be you can have your budget recalculated at any time uh if you do do an expansion to your library and now you have a bigger building you're going to want to let you Zach know so they can adjust your budget based on the actual real size of the library now you and that would be request requesting a replacement budget a category two replacement budget so you can make that change at any time if something changes on your size your side as far as what the size of your library building is so using real math for this your library is 3,500 square feet 3,500 times 450 for dollars and 50 cents is $15,750 but there's a $25 minimum budget so you actually have 25,000 and this is what they call their pre-discount budget so this is the the base amount and then you have to deduct your discount rate from that to see how much you actually have to spend the discount rate is always applied to anything you're doing e-rate so for this example we're saying the library only has a 50% discount rate so the library will get $12,500 to spend in category two services during the five-year cycle that we're in if your discount rate is higher it would you know you do the math appropriately for that so so this is this how the category two budget works as i said and i said they keep track of it for you in your e-rate account you'll enter into your profile what is the library square feet and the math will just go it's done for you in there so you don't have to keep track of it yourself does anybody have any questions about this uh the category two budgets are a little or it is different than the category one where it is just a street it costs you this much we'll cover this percentage of it and then you're responsible for everything above that this you do have a set amount of money that you've got available for you to work with so any questions about category two budgets uh category one category two e-rate basics that i've covered so far type into the question section i'll give a minute or two um to see if anybody has any questions oh good someone just said not right now but it's making sense awesome at least i'm making sense e-rate can be a confusing thing to to uh follow but hopefully going through it today we'll understand it all in the end all right so there are some other things you do need to pay attention to do to and be aware of are related to e-rate and one of them is SIPA and filtering SIPA the Children's Internet Protection Act because this is federal money you are required to be in compliance with SIPA and this is related to having filters on your computers blocking restricting access to anything that will be harmful to minors on the internet this is specific to everything any of your internet access and your internal connections so your basic monthly internet and anything that makes your internet work uh oh wait oh let me go back and ask this question before i jump ahead too far so someone has a quick did have a question here about the category two budget um okay okay so the question by the category two budget says if i have $25,000 for the five-year period do i have to spend $25,000 or can i just spend the $12,550 so you'd only spend the $12,500 at $12,500 is what you're allotted to spend um what you are given to spend um they take off half of it because of what your discount is so you'll see your budget says you have $12,500 to spend and it will deduct from that um you can spend all of it if you don't spend it it doesn't roll over you just start new at the new beginning of the next five-year cycle with whatever the calculation is going to be then they may do a different one for all we know so um you have $12,500 to spend on category two services is what this math comes out to i hope that makes is clear it is i i'm the term budget i don't i don't know what else they would use because there's a budget of $25,000 but they say you only get 50% of in in this case example if you have a 50% discount you only get 50% of that to spend because of your discount rate we take off the discount part and then you just have the other half to spend um okay good that makes sense all right so we'll go back to SIPA so uh you need to be in compliance with SIPA for your internet access and any of your um your category two in category one um is your access and then your connections um SIPA can be a uh controversial topic to some people depending on your point of view about what it is for some libraries it's perfectly fine put filters in all the computers make sure none of the children get to anything they shouldn't all the way to the other extreme of it is censorship it is blocking access to something on the internet our library will never do that um just not a thing that's fine your your your you don't have to if you don't want to but if you do not have you're not in compliance with SIPA you're also not eligible to apply for e-rate however uh SIPA is not really that complex and not really that restrictive if that's something you're concerned about if you um because the the act itself the Children's Internet Protection Act is not very detailed uh the whole thing itself if you print it out as 12 to 14 pages long um it's for both schools and libraries so you have to look for the right part in there for libraries versus schools uh and some of the restrictions are they're um pretty vague uh it does require oh you need to have an internet safety policy this is something you may possibly already have and hopefully do basically the it's just something that says people cannot do things illegally on our computers um whether they're children's or adults um you can't do anything to hack into our computers all those kind of things about just being safe on the internet and then you do have to have the tech what they call the technology protection measure that your filter uh USAC the SIPA does not dictate what filter to use uh there are free ones out there the ones you can pay for the ones you can install on each individual computer there's some that go on your server uh sometimes that's run through your internet service provider provides the filter for you anyway possible um it also does not specify SIPA what you must specific websites that you must block or filter doesn't say that at all the federal government they did not say here's a list of sites you have to block what it says is you have to block images that may be harmful to minors now that's visual depictions only so that's again that's great we don't want you know children getting into that kind of thing of course however there right now is no software product that i know of yet that can accurately do that can uh cannot tell the difference between a person who is standing there naked or a person is staying there wearing a flesh colored dress so uh we have to do the best we can with what we have which is basically software that either blocks certain words or certain domains certain websites that have been put on like a blacklist so you know they are bad to go to those kind of things and all of that you can tweak to your level that you want at your library from the highest for the children's computers to the lowest to your staff computers or turned off completely and this is a key too that many people do not know about SIPA is there is a clause in there that states that for adults who need to do bona fide research or use it for legal means it can there there has to be a way to turn off the filter so um they don't have to tell you why they want it turned off they just have to say i am an adult and this is blocking something i need to get to can you turn that off so you have to have that ability to go and either unblock that particular site or turn off the filter on that computer however it may work for you so there's no there's no criteria in SIPA that tells you what level of strength the filter has to have you can put it at the very lowest level on all your computers and it hardly blocks anything that's in compliance with SIPA and you're good for e-rate and your and your um users will probably never notice uh important thing to note is all of your computers that have access to the internet have to have the filter installed this does include your adult computers and it does include your staff computers every single computer in your library that has internet access however you can turn it off on any of them that you want to so what you do is you turn it on install it on everything and then just unblock the ones that your staff are using of course if they don't need um blocking and your adult computer is possibly if you want to have those unblocked uh so some key things that maybe people don't realize about it and the third thing you do need to do is have at some point have had a public notice or meeting letting your community know you're doing this this could just be an agenda item at a board meeting on a library board meeting saying hey we've we're doing SIPO this is the filter we're using and you only have to do that once uh once you've done that meeting once you're good to go even if you change the filter well you might you might need to talk to your library board about um the previous software we're using is no more go around or we found something better you want to upgrade that kind of thing but you only need one public notice there's a lot of detailed information on the USAC website about that as well that's my short and sweet uh introduction to how SIPO works related to e-rate um as I said it does not have to be very restrictive for your um users if that's a concern for you my job here is to make sure you it should help you as best I can get an e-rate discount so that's my explanation of how SIPO would work for that purpose as I mentioned earlier there are multiple forms in the e-rate process that you must apply um you must submit throughout um the year and we are going to go through all of these this is just my this is just the basics of them the first three forms in the e-rate process everyone does no questions ask one two three four seventy four seventy one forty six everybody has to do the last form it will depend on how you're receiving your discount and I'll get to that and then there's one extra form um a 498 if you're going to receive reimbursements you have to provide a reimbursement directly to you rather than your service provider discounting your bills automatically uh you have to provide USAC with your banking information so your first form in the process the 470 that's what we're doing we would be doing right now that's available now and that's just putting out there saying we're looking for someone to provide us with this service your second form your 471 you'll do that in the spring there's a certain window of time called the filing window where you can then tell USAC here's who we picked then USAC um reviewers will review your application let you know if you've been approved or not if you are approved then you do the 46 to say basically thank you I would like the money and then you decide how you're going to receive the money with a final form um the 474 is a form to for your service providers who submit and so that they can give you a discount on your bills then they get reimbursed from USAC for what they've discounted you uh the 472 that's what we call our bear form and that's where you are just getting the money directly from USAC just to your library and that's why you need that bank information well they need the bank information and we're going to go into more details about all this is just the quick one slide version of it all there are document retention rules in the e-rate program you must keep copies of anything for 10 years after the last date of service last date of service being being the end of a funding year so for that June 30th so for the fund the year we're applying for right now 2023 you need to keep documentation through June 30th 2034 that seems like so long from now but uh any contracts you signed you also need to keep now sometimes if you have a contract you signed years ago and it's just a it's a month to month and every month you just keep going and going you don't have to re-sign a contract every few years that contract you still have to keep a copy of through that end date as well that June 30th 2034 so you may have signed a contract back in 2010 that started your internet service with this company that's great keep a copy of that somewhere related to your 2023 funding year you know make a duplicate of it and put in that file uh SIPA you just keep forever because that always applies to everything so any of your uh something that shows here's what we have as a filter here's when we had our meeting just keep that always uh you do not have to keep these things in paper though that's a key unlike this you know very scary looking picture here files and files of paper it can be electronic so a folder on your computer a flash drive you keep a server somewhere else make a scan of something anything um and put it there you just need to be able to get to it if use that does come in when I ask any questions um they do regular they do uh random they call audits it's not like an IRS audit like you did something wrong it's a checks and balances type thing where they randomly contact libraries and say hey we just want to know how it went and so show me your contract from you know 2023 and anytime over the next 10 years they can come back and ask you about a previous 10 years any any you know thing after the last 10 years so just keep it somewhere where you can be able to access it um as I mentioned there is your online account online where they keep things as well but some people do like to have their own backup I highly recommend it in case there's some reason they or their system is down and someone's asking you for something or something happens to it you have your own copy as well and the kind of things you need is basically anything related to your e-rate the actual forms you've submitted um any documentation or see from usec all of that now comes to you in either an email or in your online account and all of it has usually there's a pdf version you can get and then save for your in your own files if you want um any bids any live any come if multiple companies contacted you about uh supplying a service to you contracts you ended up signed of course whenever you made a decision about picking a company over someone else that choice when he has equipment delivered uh invoices shipment of things all of that you must keep copies of all right so that's all the base a lot of the basics of the start of e-rate now we're going to get into the actual online account did anybody have any questions yet before i jump into showing you the e-rate portal and how you do your e-rate so all of your e-rate forms are submitted online through epic the e-rate portal epic is that is the acronym for the e-rate productivity center it is a one-stop shopping for everything you need to do you submit your forms e-rate contacts you you ask them questions reminders places you can upload contracts or invoices things all done with this online site we recommend you use chrome or firefox not any other browsers those the only two that are guaranteed to work 99 percent of the time and that's the url to get to their main page it's usac.org slash e-rate when you are first set up with your your organization your library is first set up with an account in epic a it's an individual has to be identified as the account administrator someone who is in charge of making sure everything is up to date and correct in there and who does most most likely does all the application submitting this would most likely be the library director sometimes you're lucky to have some other staff person you put it off onto if you have an IT person or assistant director or some other staff person who you want to be in charge of it that's fine that's one person has to be an account administrator they can then create additional accounts users for other people who might want to be who you might want to have be involved in your e-rate um applications uh and there's different levels of activities that you can allow someone to do so full permissions you can do everything you can submit complete forms submit them update anything in the organization your library's account and um until with any e-rate communications uh partial users can work on forms but they can't certify them some cases you might have someone who's in charge of um who can fill out all the forms but up to the point where you certify and actually officially submit it only the director can do that final thing maybe do a final check on the form if you have if you want to have split up duties that way you can and then there's an option just to view only where people someone can look at everything in there but they can't update anything so as i said usec.org slash e-rate is where you go to to log in to your e-rate account and there are two blue buttons once you get there that i've indicated here with the red arrows to sign in they're they're they both do the same thing uh this uh one across the top that always kind of sticks around there as you're going to other pages on the website but this on the main usec page also has a sign in button on the lower left they both go the same place doesn't matter which one you click on so when you first click on that you will get this screen as your first thing and uh we're going to go through some very important reminders and how to use this to log in you'll note here that there's these eight steps right in the middle there that you immediately jump to and see oh okay this is what i do i click continue i forgot password i reset my password however you only do that the very first time you're signing into epic the first time ever i don't think they make this obvious enough bold enough uh they need to make it in bold flashing bright red i don't know because you only have to reset your password when you first go here the very first time you sign into an application so after you've done that that very first time you ignore all of this and you just hit continue and go ahead and log in now you will be um nudged to reset your password regularly uh every it's either 60 90 days it will say hey your password is expired your passwords do expire and then you will have to reset your password but only if it tells you hey yours expired you need to check select a new one you've gone through this and other websites i'm sure so uh i'm the reason i'm being very i'm getting into this a lot is because i've had way too many libraries librarians come uh contact me about urate and say oh yeah well every time i go to log in i reset my password i'm like no no no you don't have to do it every single time only the very first time after you after you're a regular user just ignore that pretend that once we're there it just doesn't exist and just click continue i am going to show you here though for your first time using it what you do do you would do so if you go to continue then it gives you where you can type in your username and password collect so you would check uh click on forgot password and type in your username your username is your email address there's nothing no special name or anything you make up it's just whatever your email is uh addresses and you click that reset via email button and it will send you an email you've done this many times before i know i do i've done it many times when i forgotten just forgot a password i can't remember it gotta reset it they send you an email you use that link you know it only works for an hour so you gotta get to it quickly and then um you will use that link it will take you a page where you can type in what your new email or new password is going to be they do have rules and passwords have to be eight characters long and have an uppercase lowercase uppercase letter lowercase letter number and a special character um you know dollar sign or asterisk or something so once you have done that then you go back here and you ignore all that forgot password stuff hit continue again and then enter your username your email which is your email address and whatever password you created and so from now on every time you go and log in after you've done that only that first time you just ignore all that just hit continue type in your username and go if your password has expired as i mentioned the system will tell you that you need to um uh change it it will the next screen will say oops that's expired pick a new one so only do that if it tells you don't do it regularly every single time you log in please um after you do your username and password you gotta check that box to accept their terms and conditions and then you can sign in uh e-rate for their epic system does have what we call that multi-factor authentication uh extra verification code you may be using this on other systems on other data uh websites that you use where they send a code to your phone potentially and then you get that code and type it in um usack has an option to send to your email address we recommend using that not your phone because this is your personal phone unless you happen to have a work one you don't want to have your work e-rate connected to your personal phone just use your email address so you type in your email address and it will and tell it you want to send you that code then you go back over to your email and you will have this one time verification code message that will come through with your code here and oops and you'll note this says it will be only valid for 10 minutes after 10 minutes this particular code expires so every time you log in you do have to get this new code get a new code what i do as soon as i've used this one and i've got myself logged in i immediately go back and delete this email from my email i don't even want this one floating around in there and me accidentally trying to enter that code and then it doesn't work and then i get frustrated because i can't log in this one's not going to work anyways after 10 minutes so after i've used it i go back and delete it uh but to use it you take that code go back to where you were logging in enter your passcode and then verify it and then you're in your um in the e-rate system so there is the two step verification now in um usac they started doing that summer 2021 when you do get logged in here you will see there are actually two different areas you can go into e-rate productivity center or emergency connectivity fund the emergency connectivity fund was a is a was a special fund that was set up to health libraries purchase hotspots and actual devices it's different money from e-rate but it was run by usac that makes sense usac runs multiple programs usac runs the e-rate program to give schools and libraries discounts on their internet service in response to the covid-19 pandemic the FCC set up the emergency connectivity fund and that was special money for schools and libraries to apply for to get hotspots and and actual devices laptops and tablets that program is closed no longer can apply for that but libraries are still in schools are still finishing up the process so it's still shown there for doing e-rate you choose e-rate productivity center and you just click on here and that will then bring you into your applicant landing page and this is everything about your account and um i know this is very hard to read we've zoomed out so you can see the whole page and we're going to focus in and jump into more of these some of these sections in here so you can learn more about i just want to show you everything that's on that first landing page of yours the first thing we're going to jump into here is under my entities and about the middle of the page it has your entity number this is also known as your build entity number this is a number that's assigned to your library when it first becomes part of e-rate similar to a social security number for a person that is your your number for your whole life this is the library's number for its whole life for its whole time of being working with e-rate uh it is something that should be will be at every form you submit uh you sac will often ask for it when they're asking you questions and for you to confirm which library you're talking about um your build entity number is the code number that's for your library and it's shown right there on your main login landing page in case you don't know what it is also at the very bottom of your page here there's this search feature i get this question a lot libraries saying i don't remember what i did before i don't know what to do for e-rate this year you know you only do it once a year it's understandable you might not remember but you can look up all of your previous e-rate forms in the epic system of right from here so 470 471 486 all the forms you have be submitting um you would choose from there and then you'd choose an appropriate funding year here i looked at my back to my 2021 and then it will show me what forms i've submitted of in 2021 that were 470s over here on the right you'll see there's a status incomplete is the first one and certified is the second one certified is the one that actually got submitted and done and incomplete was one that i probably started working on and didn't finish and didn't actually submit um and that's okay um it's just kind of out there still it just is and we can get rid of it if we want to but just wanted to show you here uh certified is the one you to look at your actual form and you would over here on the left under nickname the blue that's a hot link uh link that you can click on you click on that and then you'll see your full form for that year so i highly recommend if you can't remember whatever you just do the same thing the next year this upcoming year as you did last year i'm just applying for my monthly internet go look at last year's form right on here and just do the same thing if last year's form worked perfectly for you just duplicate just do the same thing i mean you can always look it up there uh this does only go back to 2016 that is when epic first um was created and was first used so it doesn't have all your forms going back potentially you may have been doing it you know longer than that but that's as far back as epic goes because that was the first time you could use epic to apply so it's only back to 2016 in the system now up here at the top of the of your account you will see some items your news tasks other things you can do uh this news item is useful but clicking on up here in the blue bar we do not recommend this will give you news about every single library every single application in the system not just your own libraries the urate program is a public program anyone online there's places online where you can anybody can look up and see what's going on in the system and this just shows you everything you want to just know your library's news your library's notifications instead what you do is over here in the upper left very underneath the uh USAC logo it will say welcome and your library's name click on your library's name there and then you'll be in your library's account with a whole bunch of different links here and news is one of those choices if you click on that then it's only news about your library not about every library in the system also i'll show you here this is where i mentioned you can look up your category two budget this is where you'd be able to click on that and it would then tell you how much you have in your budget how much is left how much you've used that is where you could double check that information in there you can also look and see what your discount rate is because a lot of different a lot of resources here in your account so click on where it says welcome in your library's name to get just stuff about your library also at the top here is the tasks if you ever see that and there's a number of parentheses that means you have something to do um the first one here it says i've got a 470 that i need to certify still uh submitting certifying your form and submitting it are two separate steps you fill out the form you've still got to certify that you're officially legally signing electronically signing the form so that's telling me go here and finish this form um these other ones i did a service provider change and then i've got a couple of uh 470 ones that i had started now this is something that can be nagging and annoying potentially uh as i mentioned i showed you earlier when i looked up 470 back from 2021 i had an incomplete one and a certified one the e-rate system as soon as you start a form they create a task for it they say okay here's something you're working on we're going to track that for you you can go in and out of forms as you're as you're working on them and it saves as you go which is great except if you started a form and then didn't finish it and then went started a whole fresh new one that old one is still out there and it's here in your tasks and usack will send you regular reminders emails to your email account saying new task create form 471 you can see this is contract test contract test 2020 and there's this one here they'll keep nudging me saying hey this is still there until you either finish it and submit it or get rid of it you can delete these forms i discard them from out of here so um we recommend i recommend if you ever see a number here go and double check see if it is actually something you're supposed to be doing like working on the certification for this form that i was working on or is it something old that i just want to discard if you click on the actual form itself you can go into it there's a discard form button and then you clear that out and these email managers don't come to you anymore uh so just pay attention when you are doing that to make sure it is something you don't need anymore and just uh get it out of there um it's also confusing another confusing thing in the wording of e-rate which is typical where it says new task create a form 471 it sounds like it's telling you uh oh it's time for you to create your form 471 that's not what it's telling you it's telling you you've already created one you want to do you want to continue we're not we're nudging you to continue with it the wording could be definitely be better because it's very misleading it sounds like it's telling you it's time to do that but it's not it's telling you you already started this don't forget to finish it hopefully that helps um so also in your applicant in your uh account up here in the upper right is your own personal profile information so clicking on your library's name gets you your library your organization's info up here where this head silhouette is is about you this is also where you can sign out whenever you're done you can always log out and you can go to your profile here to update information about yourself if you need to make any changes when you click on that button this is a screen you get kind of nice looks like you can put a headshot here whatever and there's a button to edit your profile however down here in red it actually says don't use that edit profile button in the middle underneath the picture use the manage epic user profile button on the upper right instead this system that they are using for epic it's great it's a great database it's a great thing it was not built from scratch just for erate it was built for other things and tweaks have been made to it and so things work a little differently i'll say in some places so just follow the instructions this red here is actually what it says in there i added the red arrow to show you this is where you actually have to go if you click this edit profile button it'll just bring up information of your your profile info but you won't be able to actually make any changes to it you have to use this button in the upper right and when it does you'll see now all these fields are editable so if you need to and you can change anything about yourself except for your email address since that is used as your username that is locked in if that does need to change though i will show you how to fix that but if you do need to change anything your name phone number the address all this information about you you can if you want to make any updates and hit submit so that's about you if you are the account administrator you can manage any other users add new users as i mentioned update there's change any of their information so up here in this group of menu items here there's the manage users button and it will show what the organizations you have your all mo all of our most of our libraries here in Nebraska just have one thing listed here it seems like a weird in-between step you have to do but for things like library systems or school districts that have multiple locations they would have each of their locations listed here if you're just an individual independent library it's just your single location so you do have to select yourself click on the box and then we're going to create a new user you can also add and remove if staff leave you can get rid of them or manage their permissions and adjust what they can do but to create a new one i've done here's one where i've shown you i'm adding my assistant director giving her an account in here to use uh when i put her email in here once i create this account the system will generate an email and send it to her saying hey an account has been set up for you it's been created for you in the epic system please go here and finish creating it by uh select choosing your password so that's that first time using it you've got to do the forgot password create your password because you had an account set up for you for the very first time this is the top of the screen for creating a user under at the bottom here it's cut off because it's long but i'm zoomed into here is those user permissions where you can decide what people what someone can do can they have full rights for something partial view only whatever you want uh for yourself as account administrator if you're going to be doing all the applications i would do you can apply all and you can do full rights for every single thing if you want to um or you can if you have some other staff doing it you can pick and choose which forms they can do the 498 that's that banking information maybe that's something only the library director should have access to this also only matters if you have multiple people doing e-rate if you're only a single person doing it and you're in charge of everything you just give yourself you're the only person you're the account administrator you give yourself full information to everything so you can do everything now i mentioned if you need to change email address um or something like that uh there's also oftentimes very often there are staff turned over at libraries old director leaving new director coming on board uh you may have the same email address still because many of our libraries have just a generic so-and-so public library at gmail and that's perfect if your email address is still the same great you can um log into here and if your library direct your previous directors give you the password you can go in and log in and change just change the user information to your name uh if they haven't given you the password but you have access to the email account for the library you do that forgot password link and make force it to send you that email to then give yourself a new password uh but if your email address changes so example your email is actually your name like mine is at the library commission christa.porter at nebraska.gov a new person came into my position they'd have a different one with their name then we would have to do more changes here uh if there is a good transition and the previous director is happy to create a new account for the new incoming director and there's like some crossover and they know who it's going they know who it's going to be they can practically go in here and create an account for the new person coming in so they're ready to use it when they start working at the library that would be in your perfect scenario if it doesn't work out that way old director leaves there's a break new director comes in then you would contact usac they've got customer service phone number that i it's at the end of the slides here and you have to call them and say and explain what happened they know it happens all the time and you just say i'm the new director at so-and-so public library i need access to my library's e-rate account and they will work with you on getting you connected in there but if you have a good transition or a crossover this is how you can modify that you go into your library's account where you click under where the which says welcome the library name and then you click on these three dots over here and it opens up this uh menu with other things you can do for the account one is modified account administrator you want to change that and you want to manage general contact those two items so account administrator as you see it says here you can transfer it to another person so if you know you're leaving and you know who the new person coming in is and they're going to have a different and they're going to have a different email address you'd want to go through this process you can see here i did this as an example for myself for different reason though as i said we use names for email addresses here at the commission when i got married my name changed my last name changed and my email address changed so at a certain point my old email would no longer work and e-rate usac would no longer be able to email me notifications about anything so i had to go in here and create a new account for myself so my previous account was my christa dot burns at Nebraska.gov my original one i created a new account all the same info but with christa dot porter as the email address email address becomes your username so i went into here and i checked moved the checkmark to my new one hit continue and it confirms the current administrator at christa dot burns will now become christa dot porter submit i received an email then at my christa dot porter email address i said hey a new account's been created for you go in and select your password so you can use it and then from then on i use christa dot porter to login and do everything for the library commission's e-rate accounts i did the same thing for the general contact so there's two different places the account administrator and general contact that you'd want to do that same thing for and it's the same process burns to porter confirming it's going to change from burns to porter so depending on your situation at your library when new staff are coming in and whether or not an email address is going to be different you may or may not have to go through all this but i wanted to show you because it has happened for our libraries so for making these updates to any updates you need to make to your organization the USAC has what they call their administrative window it's a certain period of time when you are allowed to update things you cannot make changes to your library's account information at any time of the year just willy nilly only during a certain period of time it has to be done before the filing window opens for that second form in the process the e-rate form which is when you are picking who your provider is going to be and confirming what your discount rate is and everything everything has to be locked down by then so that nothing can change in the middle of that so the number of students that are in your school lunch program your square footage for doing category two services all of that has to be locked down and cannot be changed in the middle of things after the process starts in the second form that window is open right now it opened in october and it will close right before the filing window opens for the 471 usually that sometime in january of the year so right now you should go in and double check and just make sure everything's correct 99 you know nine times out of 10 it's all fine because nothing has changed since last year but you just want to confirm that and make sure before they close that window because after it's closed you're done check that square footage definitely school towns will come from your school but you can check and see if they're in there so as i said verify just verify if the library has changed if the library's name has changed for some reason addresses change mailing address any of that and definitely the square footage to change your organization account same thing as doing your users but there's a link up here in the menu to manage organizations you check the box in front of your organization name and then manage it and then this is all the different things you can change you can change the library's name address we don't use the latitude and longitude that's just something from other uses other companies who may use this software if you think your urban or rural statuses should be different and then this is a very long page so i'm going to be i've got screens shots rolling down here's the second in the middle section of the page if you want to add a phone number or a alternate email address you can add that here under library information you want to make sure your your options here are correct as well you're a public library make sure that's checked if when you are an independent library like most of the libraries we have in Nebraska except for our two systems which are Omaha and Lincoln you are also the main branch you're the only branch but you are the main branch you're gonna want to make sure you have main branch selected here as well that way they know you're you're it you're the main main one if you have a bookmobile or a kiosk somewhere that was what you would check here if you're a tribal library of course you should check tribal and then below this is where the square footage is for your category two budget information make sure that's correct just in case you think you might want to do a category two application it's okay if you don't end up wanting to but have this ready just in case your school district that is used to calculate your discount will be listed here if it's not or if it's wrong you can do a search and find the right one and then an fc registration number this is a number that's required for anyone doing business with the FCC and there's links on our website for you to look up yours if you don't know what it is if you make any changes make sure you hit submit all right any questions now about anything we've talked about so far the basics of e-rate category one category two budgets working in all of your profile in your epic account anything about epic i can answer any questions you have now we are so go ahead and type into the questions section but does anybody have any questions you want to ask right now before we jump into we're going to get into in the second half all of the e-rate forms step by step so the first form in the e-rate process is the form 470 this is one that you will be working on submitting right now it is whoops my sides go hang on hang on there we are okay that's better let's try this again so the first form in the e-rate process is the form 470 this is the form you'll be submitting now it becomes available every year on july 1st when the funding year starts when the it opens up for applications but you can work on it anytime most libraries do it about in the fall sometime october november december is when they start thinking about it so it is available now for you to submit the purpose of the 470 is to describe what you want to receive and request those services officially you are opening a competitive bidding process now that can seem intimidating and a lot but that's okay we're going to get into what that means and whether or not you can end up doing that this is a form where you say here's all the different things i would like to receive an e-rate discount on in the next year the 470 i described as a wish list it is what you would like to get everything you put on this form you do not necessarily have to end up with like i mentioned earlier when we're talking about category one services you have to ask for lit fiber and dark fiber you'll also want to ask for just what you're currently getting regular that's for all those different things but you'll pick one service of course in the end and that's what you report on the second form your 471 saying what you ended up with so the 470 be like a wish list also what kind of equipment you might be looking for in category two uh do you want special construction that you need done something major this is just putting out feelers you're not committed to anything when you do your 470 if you put this out there and you receive bids that are crazy high expensive your city says we can't even if you know we can't afford the what's even left that we would have to be responsible for that's okay you can just say never mind i'm not even gonna go through the next step this is just checking things out seeing what's out there and doing a little fishing expedition to see what you can get and what it would cost there are some cases where you do not have to do a 470 this would be if you're in the middle of a multi-year contract you do not want to submit a new 470 for the second third fourth whatever year of a contract this is for a contract that has a specific beginning and end date of a multi-year contract very often times service providers will say if you sign a contract with us for three or five years you're locked into this price and it will never be raised over that time and that's a good deal you want to do that the first year of that contract you would do a 470 to start things off saying hi you know hey we want a service great but every other year after that you don't want to because you do not want to open a new bidding process because you're already committed in a legally bound contract to a company so you would get to skip the 470 you don't do that get competitive bidding you start your e-rate process in the second form so for all of these subsequent forms years of that contract you start wait until the window opens in the spring in January sorry January and then you do your 471 every year letting e-rate know yep we're still that contract so that company still that contract you have to do that every year but for all those other you would not do the 470 also if you can find this deal you do not have to do a competitive bidding process USAC set this up because they wanted to encourage service providers to provide really good high-speed internet at a good price at a cost effective price and they said if you can find something that is $300 or less a month and gives you at least 100 megabits per second speed then you do not have to do a competitive bidding process and see if there's any other company out there you can just go with the company you know that offers this same thing you skip the 470 you start with the 471 where you say here's the company and they cost this and they give you this fastest speed boom you're in so I did say the very very beginning that every library had every applicant has to do the first three forms these are the only two cases when you do not have to do the 470 if you get this deal and for following years in a multi-year contract the first year you would of course do it to start things off so the 470 is submitted the link to a start it is right up here in the top click the FCC form 470 and when you click there you get into the first page of your form now I mentioned earlier about those tasks that appear up here as soon as you click that button that says form 470 the system creates a task for you even if you have not entered anything typed anything yet it says oh you started a form and even if you at this point here we've gone no farther you haven't entered anything you can say wait I'm not ready to do this let me log out or close it or I got distracted or got interrupted it will start sending you reminders saying hey create that form 470 that you started if you in order to stop that you would go into your tasks and use this discard form button I mentioned that earlier so anytime any of those tasks that you know or you don't really need to finish that form anymore you actually did it go in hit discard form it'll give you a confirmation are you sure you say yes it deletes it from your tasks and it'll stop sending you those nagging emails but in this case we are going to do this form we enter a nickname here this can be anything this is for your reference so you can track this particular e-rate form the system will doesn't give an application number to this form it's a 10-digit number that will probably be impossible for you to remember but you will be able to remember in this case I wrote FY 2023 470 is my funding year 2023 form 470 so that's just anything you want to call it and then you do save and continue save and share is only used if you are the person who can complete the info in this form but you can't act and you need to share someone else like your director to let them double check and make sure it's okay like I said 99% of our libraries they're just the one person doing this so you just do save and continue and go through the whole form so save and continue you see it's assigned it a form number you'll notice there's a bar across the top here that shows you where you are in this process of this form so which step you're on so you can see how far along you are and this is just confirming information about your library from your library's organization info so this would be where you can check and see is this all correct and if it's not go back into your organization account and fix things that's also the things that can only be done when that administrative window is open you notice also at this point if you wanted to you can go back so you can always go back to a previous step in the form you can discard the form at any time you've gone along even if you get farther along at any point you any point before you've actually certified and signed and sent it in you can always discard but we are going to save and continue this is where you say if you have a consultant or on who the contact person is consultants are people you can pay companies big school districts or library systems do this oftentimes there are companies that you can pay to do your e-rate for you if it's a large complex application i am your state e-rate coordinator so i will i consult with you and help you but i'm not that kind of consultant you don't pay me to do that job for you it's just part of my job here to the state so i don't count for that if you don't have a consultant that's fine you just leave it blank if you ever did that's in your organization profile but you are the main contact person you say yes and it will automatically pop up your user information here and then we save and continue and now here's where you choose what category of service you're going to be asking for you can do category one or category two or you can do an application with both i'm going to do a demonstration here of them both together if you you can do so you can do more than one form for 70 if you want if you want to you can have one be your category two so you keep all that together and one be your category one and you keep all that information together for your own many libraries do it separately just to keep things separate and easy to figure out this is the category two is all that equipment i'm just going to work on that one category one is just my regular monthly up to you what works best for yourself for this demonstration i'm just going to go through showing both so you can see how everything works for both of them so we're going to save and continue this is where you can add an rfp a request for proposal for anything you're doing um you can say no we don't have anything it's just a regular monthly internet service that we're getting a discount on nothing special or you can say yes you have something more complex more might if you're doing a major project uh if you're doing building a new building adding a computer lab doing any of that special construction where you're having new fiber run to the building you may have a you're going to have a larger document that explains here's everything that needs to happen all my requirements what the city is doing etc etc there is a narrative box when you get a little far in the form but that's a lot to take all in there uh easier thing to do is you create a document separately that has all this up written out and then you just upload it here if you're interested in doing that special construction with state matching funds that we have through the public service commission again hollywood will help you create a rfp we have a template of like you know basic fill in the blank here's the basics of what it should say and you just enter your library's info and then put that in here so again reach out to her and she can help you with that so if you do want to do the rfp you click yes and then there is up here where you can click and drag or click that button and get to navigate to wherever you happen to have that document saved and here i'm just showing and doing it as an rfp example i've uploaded this um after you do have it uploaded into their system you save and then you can say if you want it to be applied to all automatically to all new category one or all new category two services uh you can do both or just one on this case i'm going to for this demonstration say for category one rfp has nothing to do with that that's just my monthly internet but for category two i've got a larger description of what i'm doing with all this equipment that i want to purchase so i have that automatically attached and we save and continue and now since we said we want to do category one it says there are no service requests yet we have to make one so um and you see here is where that narrative is where you can type things in you can see at this point trying to get that all in there or maybe a lot if you have a lot of qualifications we recommend just doing that separate rfp document but here we are going to add a new service request and the the e-rate forms now have this hierarchy hierarchy type menu where it digs down and tries to help guide you to what you want to do um we will we're going to do our basic monthly internet so that's i seek bids for internet access and our data transmission service um the other one is for network equipment that would be for doing that kind of special construction and once we seek bids for internet access any of the different kinds of services we can ask for the first one is your basic usual regular monthly we have cable dsl whatever our month just are full internet internet access without data transmission and data transmission only without internet access those are for special cases that usually for large school districts they're getting because they have so much they're doing they're getting different parts of their internet service from different places so it's split up 99 percent of the time you're just doing that first one you're just doing your regular monthly no big deal so we'll choose that and then we have here where we can choose offered by one service provider or bundles the package or data plans or wireless adapter air cards for mobile devices uh data plans and this wireless type thing would only be in areas that as it says here do not have broadband connection so very rural areas oftentimes use these data plans to provide their internet service rather than contracting with someone like great planes or aloe or something to get their internet service from a company so you would only do this if you were in that very very rural situation and you have to prove that there is no other company that we can get internet from and we have to use these data plans and air cards so we're doing what is the typical which is we have a company we want to we want to go with a regular company so once we choose that then we've got to give our details about what we're going to get quantity is how many connections how many internet connections to my building usually there's just one number of entities i'm just a single entity so just one do you need it installed activated and configured if it's something you already have and you're just continuing year after year you would say no if something new you would say yes you can on the fly add that rfp if you decide oh wait i do want it but if you don't you can leave that blank and then you would do your minimum and maximum capacity that would be your speed now in this example i've done minimum 25 megabits per second speed and maximum one gig for uh this speed you have to make sure that whatever you're going to end up with this speed will fall in that range of 25 in this case 25 megabits as a minimum one gig is a maximum uh if you end up with a company that says oh actually we offer five gigs that's awesome but you only ask for e-rate discounts up to one gig you wouldn't be able to get the e-rate discount because you ended up with five so like i said earlier 470 is your wishlist what's the maximum you might get uh and you want to make sure whatever you end up with falls in there so for minimum same kind of thing at the end if you say i want a minimum 100 megabits per second and a company your your company says well we only offer 50 same thing you could lock your you you lock yourself out of getting e-rate so just think big here and that's okay it's going to be anywhere in that range there is speeds below 25 megabits in my example and above one gig here too so just make it as broad as you can so then you'll cover all your bases make sure you get what you want if you save and create another request it's just a duplicate of this one i just don't know what the reason is for that uh but we do save request and then you'll see it will go on to um it starts a little table showing here's the first thing you've asked for you've asked for data transmission internet access and transmission minimum 25 megs megabits per second max one gig or a single entity we only want one internet connection and in this case i said yes we want i'm doing something new i want someone to install it you know it's now a question popped up here about installment payment plan this is for if you're going to do special construction charges and they let you do things in installment payments you would say yes if not you would say no what we're going to do next so we're going to add another category one request because we weren't interested in fiber getting that this internet this first choice i did is just for anything not fiber so we're going to do a second one and um okay seek bits for internet access or data transmission and we're going to go down to the third choice of searching data transmission only um and this is where you get your fiber and you see i sleep i seek to lease capacity of dark fiber strands or lit network dark or lit fiber and now you see here it gives you two options your least dark in your lit as i mentioned earlier they got it both so it'll make you do that um it does say it does not include the equipment needed and that would be it's just saying this is only the service itself if you need you know the routers them all those kind of things you'd have to do that yourself of course the same thing you only want one connection things are slightly different place uh your single entity yes you would like someone to install it because i'm going for new fiber minimum and maximum capacity and you can see here by default this was checked because i had checked that when i first uploaded the rfba i said apply this to all category two um applications or all fiber applications yeah so wait okay no i chose this one i'm sorry back up i chose i clicked on these because i decided i do have something more in depth in that rfb for doing um the fiber i chose automatically haven't added to the category twos which we haven't gotten to yet i'm sick um and then we save this request and now you'll see we've got our lit fiber dark fiber and then anything else is what the other one is um that so those are all the different kinds of um possible internet connections you might have so this is if we were looking for getting fiber you'd want to make sure you do that so that you have all your bases cross covered in the end you'll pick one of these which is when you end up with when you do your 471 as i said we're gonna say no we're not doing any sort of installment payment plan and we save and continue and now because we said we're also going to do category two it's giving us category two option it's just like category one what we're going to it's going to be for category two type services all that equipment so we have our options for seeking bids for equipment uh for basic maintenance of the equipment and then a third option here that hadn't mentioned yet you can run your own internet service internet connection i don't think anyone here will do that so we will not be getting into that so we're going to do equipment needed and when you choose that the next thing it gives you is a pull-down menu of all the different types of equipment you can get erade on so as i mentioned before cables racks wires routers switches firewalls wireless access points power supplies anything everything you might need so for our first one we are going to pick cables so the cable to run through our new computer lab for example um and this is done the quantity is in feet how many feet of cable do you need i don't know if a thousand is a good amount i just put that in for example so a thousand feet you can choose a manufacturer if you have a preference if you know anything about this um it also says it always says or equivalent that is because when you place this application like now in november by the time you get with the company who's going to do this next spring or you know summer they might need to pick a different brand they might have to change and you want to make sure you always have that covered if you say i only want belton and then the company says well we use 3m oh well then you don't get your erade discount because you specified a particular brand um in the erade form itself all of the choices say company name or equivalents you can't have it um only be that what you wear you have to pay attention to this and make sure you have it correct is in that rfp if you do put together an rfp like we've had attached here make sure anytime you mention brands or models or makes you say or equivalent in our template it has that for you um we're a single entity yes we want someone to install it you'll also notice over here now because we're in category two please select this option if you want to create an accompanying category two basic maintenance of internal connections bm ic is basic maintenance for this equipment so i said you can have the discount on the equipment and on the service of that equipment here it prompts you to create an additional one so you can get that service covered as well and it just adds everything down puts it all in there automatically for you and then we save this request and now for category two you see we have two things listed one is the equipment itself one is the basic maintenance of that piece of equipment now that was just for our cables we now have to go in and for every other piece of equipment we want we have to do this set that same process over and over again so if you want to switch routers power supply etc etc you just do it over and over again for each one i'm not going to do that over over again here i only i just showed you how to do it once but you just do the same thing choosing the appropriate piece of equipment but here is what it looks like after i've added a few things so my cable is there i did i want a rack i need racks but i only need one i decided i need a new router and i want to get three switches so quantity three so i just did this over and over again when i did the racks back again added a new service request for routers and a new one for switches you can do whatever you want each year whatever you're thinking of upgrading in the next year we've had some libraries who they did we're updating all of our routers like large library systems so they asked all i did was a category two request for 10 routers one for each branch and the next year they did a request for 10 switches now this year updating our switches you know so they just were gradually upgrading things it'll depend on what you're doing in your library what you're going to do here if you're going to do a bit at a time or if you're doing like i said building a new lab or if you want to do that special construction and upgrade to fiber you're going to want you need to make sure that your equipment can handle the new fiber speed uh this is this issue that many libraries have had they get a faster internet but that's not what's coming out to their computers because the equipment is too old to handle the new speed it's not it can't handle that fast you're paying for the fast one gig speed but only 25 megabits per second is coming out because your equipment is too old that equipment in the building you've got to get upgraded so you may do a little you know all those different pieces so once we're done with all of the different pieces we want to do in category two uh we save and continue then we'll ask us for who is our technical contact person if we have one if you don't have an extra separate tech person you would just say no and then any questions will come to you as the app whoever the applicant is um if you do have an a contact person you can give them an a user account in here if you think they need access to your e-rate forms for some reason if they don't need access to your e-rate forms you talk to them separately about just what you're having done they don't you don't need to create a whole account in here for them there's no reason for them ever to log in you can just enter their details manually like i did here i just typed in luke's info and um added it there and then i save and continue and it's going to ask about state or local procurement requirements we don't have any state ones you would have to know if you have anything locally that requirements about how you have to do bids and request them and anything if that's comes up and that's the last piece of information we put into the form and we now review our form 470 and what it's going to do now for you to review it's going to create a pdf and that will for you to look at and double check all the information um this will take a few minutes and i'm talking literally 60 seconds 90 seconds more depending on what time when you're doing it so whenever it is ready it will appear in your tasks so keep refreshing the page go to tasks refresh that page off over and over you know wait 20 seconds or so to see if it's there but eventually it will pop up and it will be this that says certify form 470 as opposed to all these previous ones that said just create once you have one that says it's time to certify then you click on that and it will give you these certification options you'll note here it's actually not available it's not that bright blue you can't actually certify until you check this box sort of find the information the pdf is correct so this here is a link to open up the pdf if you want to you don't have to open the pdf you don't want to uh if you just want to double check everything you did is correct you can if you know i just did all this right now i know what i did you can just check the box go on but to look at the pdf it's basically it's just the same information you did online just here in pdf form that you can then just scan through and look at and see if everything is correct this is just you'll note the draft of your form even though you have this here as a pdf i do not recommend downloading this one to save for your records after we're done submitting this you'll download the certified one that at the very end will have a time stamp and date on it saying this is the actual final official form of certified and submitted this one's only the draft so do not bother saving this one it's not necessary it's just for you to look at to make sure everything's correct if it is all correct you check the box and you know there's two options here send for certification and continue to certification could be confusing send to certification means someone else who has a user account in your epic system in your organization is the one who's authorized to actually certify and submit the form up to here we've just entered information in the form continue to certification it means you're the person who can actually sign off and submit this form most of our libraries don't have multiple people working on this so you wouldn't do the send you do continue because you're certifying this it will confirm are you sure you want to do that yes and then you get this long thing with all the legal stuff this is just all the rules and everything that you the gallery that you have to agree to so all of these little boxes you have to check off you'll notice way in the lower right there is a certified button again it's not bright blue yet because i haven't checked all the boxes so i just zoomed in here so you can see what those look like um you certify that i'm allowed to do this and this is just all the rules feel free to read through these i'm not going to go through all of them this is just all the legal things that you're agreeing to that i am allowed to submit this form on the authorized person i promise to follow all the rules etc etc etc once you've checked all of them the blue button then becomes the certified button becomes bright blue and you can click on it and this says false statements may result in civil liability etc etc don't do anything illegal basically and you say yes and it goes back to this page and it's gone then you've submitted the form but want to make sure that it's in there and you want to get that pdf you go back to your landing page where you first logged in this logo here anywhere where you see the usac logo on the screen you can click on that and it'll bring you back to your landing page so we're going to go way down to the bottom here and we were going to use this search feature to look up 470s submitted and this is an example of just doing it in previous year 2021 and you'll see the different statuses here if it says certified it's done and submitted yes um so you would click in on click on the nickname that you created that's a hotlink and then it shows you now on your screen here here is your form that you submitted now if you want a nice pretty pdf rather than printing out this webpage up at the top here it says generated documents when you click on that there'll be this link that says original version you click on that and then you have a pdf and if we scroll to the bottom of this one here's all these certifications and here's the certified timestamp so this is the version with that on it so it's your actual fully submitted form that's the one that you want to save for your own files once you submit this you receive a receipt notification letter that comes up in your newsfeed it summarizes what you entered so you can double check it there as well you can also make any changes or corrections they call these ministerial typo type things so if you just did something minor you can make a change um if you do something major that's wrong you realize that after you've certified it then you should submit a whole new 470 correcting you correctly and um reach out to usack and say i need to not have that old 470 be out there because that was wrong information also in your new 470 in that narrative section where you can type something in add a note that says uh please disregard previous 470 this is the correct one this also gives you what is called your allowable contract date the date when you are um how many days uh 28 days after you submitted the form uh what this is is the you have to wait 28 days from when you've done the 470 before you can do the 471 which is making your choice and picking you who you're going to go with as your service provider and confirming all that information this is something very common with competitive bidding practices you have to give all the vendors a certain a good amount of time to see that you posted it to get their responses to you so that everyone has time to get all their everything into you um and just that they so that you have everything ready to evaluate the FCC has picked 28 days is that amount of time that you have to wait so after you do 470 you sit back and wait 28 days before you do anything else in the e-rate system it will on your receipt notification it tells you that it's right here the allowable contract date is whatever uh what's also good is they also send you an email letting you know when that date has been reached so you know when you can go on to the next form uh in the process and and take the next step this 28 days is very important before you have to wait those 20 days before you select your service provider sign any contracts do anything that is illegal if you break that 28 days do something jump uh jump the gun ahead of time you um you know it's fine if you sign a contract early you go with that company but you've knocked yourself out of getting e-rate because you did not follow the e-rate rules of waiting the 28 days so after you've submitted your 470 then you are in the um it's the competitive bidding process uh competitive bidding this is that formal process where you pick service providers uh what can happen is that multiple companies will reach out to you saying hey we have this service we offer that kind of internet we'd like to give it to you and here's our price uh you collect all those bids collect all those contracts emails contacts emails whatever but you got to wait 28 days before you can make your choice uh if you someone has a question that's okay they can ask you questions and you can answer them if it changes anything with your what you've put out there you would have to do an update to your um information that you provided most of the time it's just clarifying information if they have questions uh for you but you just wait for those all to come in and after you have reached those 28 days then you can compare them and make your choice and for e-rate rules you have to choose the most cost effective bid using price as the primary factor and that's the key and i'm going to show you how to do that here in a second right now uh fair and open bidding process means you have to treat all vendors the same everyone can have access the same information uh companies vendors service providers cannot be involved in writing your 470 and entering the information in your form 470 so you can't contact your company you want to go with and say okay what do i put in this form to match up with what you offer me that's illegal because they are helping you create a 470 that they will then get that's collusion that's something you don't want to um what you you can look at their information and just see what is available you can reach out to them and not not in the in saying i'm doing an e-rate but saying what are your you know i need to know do you offer fiber so i know if that's something that i should put on here um but you can also just say i want to try for a fiber and just see what happens you don't have to know ahead of time that fiber is available some people some libraries are finding out this way for the first time that fiber is available didn't know about it wasn't um advertised so i recommend just do your 470 add in that fiber and that high speed looking for one gig five gig as a max whatever you want and seeing what you know companies say oh yeah we do that and you didn't know uh as far as the cost effect most cost effective bid cost must be your primary factor but not your only factor uh you always you never want to just go with the cheapest for anything there's gonna be other things that are important to you when it comes to purchasing anything and this is a way it's just an example of making comparison of uh and making sure that price is the most um is a primary factor in your decision making now if you do receive this is only if you receive multiple companies that reach out to you if you only have one company in your town or one that reaches out to you this whole thing is moot you don't need to do that but if you do have multiple uh you do something like this uh these are all the things that are important to me a vendor has a chance to earn up to 100 points i have a i have a a lot at a certain number of points each thing each item and price gets the most points it's not half it's it's just got to be the primary so you can earn up to 30 points for price but less for everything else that makes it the primary factor so prior experience have you worked with this company before have you ever heard of them uh price for other things are they good in the environment are they local etc etc can be anything you want these just some examples i have so in this case i had three different companies reach out to me and you can see vendor two is the cheapest because they earned a full 30 points but vendor three ended up with the highest total points so we can go with them as you can see here this prior experience with vendor is what put them over the top way over the top um vendor two is possibly somebody new never heard of them don't know anything um or i have heard of them and i've heard only bad things that's you know this is a subjective thing of experience so uh you would decide even though vendor three is not the cheapest they were much better in that area much better with prices for other things obviously pricing here is a big thing um and ended up with a higher point so you can choose this company even though they were not the cheapest if you have to do this keep track of all of this that you made these choices that you made these decisions that this is how you compared because vendor two if they wanted to they could come back to usack and say hey we know we're the cheapest how how could they go with the other company this is your proof of why you went with the other company because you chose them based on other factors not just price um so keep this in mind if you ever end up having to do some sort of a comparison now there are some situations uh some special situations that might come up uh what if you have an existing contract with the company and you're jumping into e-rate in the middle of that contract that's okay you don't have to wait to start a new contract uh what you do is just do your 470 wait your 28 days just like usual but then your current contract is one of your bids that becomes one of your bid responses officially if you receive other company's bids then you just have to compare that to the other ones um to make your decision and if the existing contract is winning bid you're good to go to continue e-rate with that company um this is where this comparison here and prior experience uh maybe being local those kind of things would give your current company your current contract and had a you know it would earn more points than a brand new company you've never had experience with so that is where this would come into play what if the city pays for the library's internet you don't pay it yourself that's okay too you can cost allocate out what is not the library's internet service so you would only get a discount on the portion of the internet that is going to the library building uh this is sometimes reflected in actual statistics your search provider may have statistics that so that show this internet goes to the library this goes to the town hall this goes to the firehouse and they can say there's the library's portion and just that part you can get a discount on um you can also estimate it if you have to um but you can you only get an e-rate discount on the part that goes to the library not the city's entire internet bill but it you can um do that what if you only have one bid or none that's okay too you don't actually have to have a competition if you only have one bid that's it you can accept it just write yourself an email or a memo that states something like only one bid received in funding your 2023 so this is who we went with if you have not received any bids and it's after that 28 days then you can reach out to companies and ask them to send you bids up to that 28 days you just have to sit back and wait for them to contact you but after the 28 days has passed you've given them all the legally amount legally required amount of time then you can contact vendors if you know there's a company and they haven't contacted you you know they're bringing fiber and like aloe is spreading throughout the state you could then reach out to them um or if you your current provider has responded you're going to want to reach out to them and say are you still there we still doing this okay we need just need a confirmation that we're all still on the same page and they're going to be continuing but make sure you pass that 28 days so on or after that allowable contract date your 28 days then you close the competitive bidding process i've had asked this before there isn't really a there isn't a process or a place to check a box saying commit bidding closed is closed you just do that yourself you say hey it's the 28 days now i'm going to make a choice um there's nothing that you send out to like notify bidders that the bidding is closed um they should know the 28 days but then you can evaluate them you choose sign a contract if necessary if you need to be doing something new and then do your 471 but also only when the application filing window opens so this is a second timing thing that you have to know about is the 471 is only available during a certain time of the year for about three months it generally falls january uh to march of each year so you can do your 470 wait your 28 days sign a contract but then you have to wait for this window to open to be able to do your 471 the 471 is actually not even available for you to do anything with it won't work until that application filing window officially opens so depending on how early you do your 470 there might be a bit of waiting time for that time period to come the second form in the process is your 471 and this is where you report to you Zach who you've picked what service providers you're going with what services you're going to get this is where your discount calculation shows up on your form something to be aware of a little pro tip here what's on your 470 and 471 must match so i mentioned earlier giving that range of speeds whatever you ask whatever you say you're going to get on your 471 has to have been mentioned on your 470 the right speeds in there the right pieces of equipment all of that has to match up okay here's a good question here how do i figure out what equipment i need to ask for without talking to the internet company that's a good question you can talk to them and say hi i'm interested i know i have this equipment and i'm interested in upgrading you know what would i what would i need to upgrade you just do not mention it in the context of applying for e-rate um also i mean that would be one thing you can do if they want to contact them i would also recommend contacting holly waltz here at the library commission that's one part of her job here is to help you evaluate what you have and give you advice on what would be the next upgrade for your equipment so um you can contact us here you can also look at a server provider's website and see what they might recommend on on their page they may have information out there yeah be very clear that you're not talking about any of this in relation to applying for e-rage or anything that is just a general contact or just to play it safe contact you know here contact holly here at the commission and she will look at what you have help you do that use that toward gigabit libraries toolkit she'll probably recommend going through that as well um and that would be a way to um help you do that too yeah so talk to a company just keep e-rate out of the conversation the key is you're not telling them that you want to give them like a head a leg up on anyone else when it comes to providing submitting that e-rate application that 470 all right so interesting that you mentioned that right now because the next thing here is at this point with a 471 then you do want to contact communicate with your service provider so 470 no 471 you pick them now you absolutely do want to make sure you what is what is going to be specified in your 471 make sure you can't talk to them about how you would want to receive your discount discounts on bills rather than reimbursements afterwards so um after that 28 days that's when you can definitely talk to them in relation to it being e-rate related sounds very redundant as far as e-rate is concerned um so you filed 471 um when to file it after it's been 28 days since the 470 if you've had to sign a new contractor document and during the filing window uh as i said that's usually mid january to mid march uh they use that usually doesn't announce these dates until sometime in december so um there will be there's a weekly news brief a monthly news brief that e-rate sends out a newsletter type thing that you can sign up for and it will they will announce it there i'll also announce it on our mailing lists and everything that we have as well so that um you'll know when that filing window is open and i give reminders about everything when it's open when it's closing all of that what's also great is when you have reached that allowable contract date that 28 days after you filed your 470 e-rate the system the epic system will proactively send you an email to your email account saying you have reached your allowable contract date so this isn't just in your news section in your in your epic account this is proactively sent out to you um so it's just a little nudge saying hey 28 days now if you if you're ready you can go on to the next step it's also in your epic system as well but i love that that they've got that e-rate or that email that goes out to you and to do your 471 um it is in the same place as i said up where the 470 is um but as i said it's not live right now so i don't have screenshots of it there is a lot of good training and videos on the USAC website that shows the steps to go through it uh for you but i'll just give you some information about it here today uh the 471 um it can be a little confusing because it is a two-step process you have to say what service you're getting and you have to say how much it's going to cost a lot of people get stuck in this they they do they say oh we're getting internet we're getting um cables or our um switches or routers and they just go on to the next step of the form and they say error's coming up and like what i said what i'm getting if you haven't gone in given a price of what these things are gonna cost you haven't finished doing the funding request so there's step one say what you want to get and then you have to go deeper like one step into that form into that funding request to then enter how much it's going to cost so make sure you've done both those things and then it will let you continue the form another thing with the 471 is you have to do a separate 471 for each category of service category one and category two for the 470 we could do both on a single form but because the actual way the funding is done category one being just you get a discount whatever you buy and category two being that budget they have to be two separate 471s because they are calculated differently the math is done differently and it just doesn't work in the same form so if you're doing both you'll do a 471 for all your category one your basic monthly internet and then you'll do a second category form 471 for your category two all that equipment that you might be purchasing after you do the 471 you also receive acknowledgement letter same thing you can make corrections minor corrections if you need to you can request reductions to what you put in there if you put the wrong amount but not an increase if you did something completely wrong then you would need to do a new 471 all from scratch and then contact USAC saying please cancel my previous one I made a mistake this is and this is your receipt acknowledgement letter in your USAC or in your news section where you give you all the information and then it tells you what your next steps are the system will always tell you where you got it next which is nice once you've submitted your 471 then your form is in application review this is where USAC's program integrity assurance section is what they call it PIA review looks over your application this process can take months you may do your 471 now do your 471 in January and then you just have to sit back and wait and it will possibly they may not get to it until March April May June July August September sometimes even later in the year so just sit back and wait they will review your application check make sure everything's correct on there verify that it's all eligible they may reach out to you with questions this is where you may receive you'll see emails from them saying we have an inquiry to in on your account and go in and then they will have a link to go into your epic account to see what that actual inquiry is what are they questioning if you don't understand what they're asking in this this is in those inquiries or if something you do it's confusing or you're not sure how to get to it this is where you contact me I can help you translate their USAC ease as I call it if you just explain they have a tendency to take like four paragraphs to explain something that should have taken two sentences but that's you know federal government legal stuff so if you're not sure what it says reach out to me I am copied on these pia inquiries sometimes sometimes they only send them directly to you and not to me don't know why if I receive them and I have a chance to look at them I will proactively reach out to you and say oh hey I saw this came in here's what they're looking for if I don't reach out to you and you're confused contact me you may have only gotten it and I didn't get that email and then you can forward it to me and I can check it out and help you answer the questions but definitely respond to their questions they usually give you 14 days to get back to them so you have a good amount of time if you don't they will just have to work with the info they have and there's a chance they might deny your application because you didn't give them more info or answer their question or clarify as I said this application review can go on for months and it may go on past the start of the funding year July 1st being the funding year that's okay even if they don't get your application reviewed until after the funding year starts you will receive your full discounts back to July 1st you just get credit for those it's always starting on July 1st no matter what it just sometimes might take usec longer to get through all the applications and get to yours and that's all right when you when they have gone through it they will send you your funding commitment decision letter this is sent to you in an email and it's a pdf attached to an email an actual letter you know if you're funded or not you may receive more than one especially if you did more than one application like for category one and category two if you have any issues with it like if they don't fund it or they make it less like reduce your funding for some reason and you disagree you can do an appeal of it and I don't explain all that here but I can help you with that if that does come up so this is the letter you'll get it's an actual email sent to you so you don't have to keep going into your account and checking they'll just send it says usec funding commitment decision letter available and it is attached there's an excel a little excel spreadsheet detailing it and then a pdf that is attached and here's the letter itself says how much you're getting and it says your next steps what's the next thing you're supposed to do how to appeal if you wanted to and then a little more detail about exactly what you're getting and what it will all be for as soon as you receive that funding commitment decision letter you sit down and do your form for 86 there is no reason to wait there is no deadlines to wait for no window to wait to open there's no no reason at all this is where a lot of people lose it in the e-rate process they've received a letter that says hey you're getting your e-rate you've been approved yay and applicants think great i'm done i did it no what that letter actually means is we've approved your application and we set aside the money for you but you still have to tell usec that you want the money confirming that you want to receive it why would you not want it yeah things can change six months down the road some provider may have decided to give you e-rate internet for free for some promotional reason uh yours you've decided wait i can't afford the extra that i need to provide for it um what i'm responsible for hybrid's been installed for free to my community because of all these other grant monies out there and so we no longer need the e-rate all these reasons can happen but you have to do so if you do want it you have to do um your 486 um so this is notifying usec that services started on july 1st and you do your official compliance with SIPA on this form what's also great about this form that and i hate that so many people miss this one so often is it's the easiest form out of all of the e-rate forms to submit everything you need is already in your epic account you don't have to actually enter anything pick things it just auto fills into the form based on what you said you were going to get in your 471 so easy quick not a problem but people forget so to do the 46 it's right up there in the top as well form 46 um you give it a nickname you choose the right funding year that you're applying for you choose yourself as your contact person when you get to submit you choosing what your um your funding requests there is these search bars up search options up here but you don't need to use them because you said you're doing for whatever funding year you picked it's going to automatically show you here down below these search filters here are the different applications we found for that funding year for 2023 for example uh so you can just skip these scroll down you'll see what you're what you asked for and you'll just check in the box in front of the one you want to actually do or if you want all of them if there's more than one you add it and then it will bump it down to this selected FRN's number FRN is funding request number that's where you want to put these saying um these are the ones available I gotta select the ones that I want to receive and now that one that I picked is now duplicated down here for me to um process through and this 486 um you don't need to check in the box again down here where it's selected this is only if you wanted to remove it that's your only option here you've whoops you've selected it up here added it bumped it down there awesome you go on and continue the certifications on the 486 there's two different sections here so I want to bring that to your attention the first two are just all the legalese just like what you did on your 470 and on your 471 they have the same kind of thing check them all but then there's the SIPA certifications this is the one you have to make sure you select the correct certification for some reason this is also a place where people are checking the wrong ones um sometimes I don't know why I I think there's some sort of technical issue because they're pretty clear what each one is um but double check and make sure the first one is I certify that as the date of the start um we have complied with their requirements of the Children's Internet Protection Act this is I am in compliance the second one is we are in the process of um being in compliance that is because you the USAC does actually give you up to three years to become SIPA compliant they know that can take time to pick filters get things installed so the first year you do e-rate you can say yes we're going to be in compliance but we're working on it the third one is I am not in compliance because it's not applicable uh for e-rate used to be for telephone communications and so non-internet related things um that would be what that was for uh but unless you're in the middle of becoming SIPA compliant you're going to do the first one and make sure it says the one that says I have complied with the requirements um if you do check that one where you're just getting started you got to make sure you're compliant by that third year otherwise uh e-rate will come back to you and say well you didn't get your compliance you need to return the money for the last couple of years that we've been discounting you because you didn't end up completing your compliance if you do check the wrong one here and for some reason it comes up sometimes that's one of the things that PIA review will contact you about when they're um they actually the review will this gets reviewed also just like PIA review during your 471 if you check the wrong one here you'll get an email from usax saying hey we have a issue with your 486 and then it will have you go into your epic account and say you selected this as your SIPA if you meant this we're in compliance please check here and say yes and we'll fix it for you so you're not completely out of luck if you've done something wrong they will they don't understand things happen and they'll give you a chance to fix it so pay attention to those and get them fixed after you submitted your 46 you get a letter that a letter sent both to you an email and to the service provider letting you know that it's been processed this is what the first service provider needs this form before they can start discounting your services too so this is also where libraries start noticing why haven't my sir why am I start not getting my bills discounted and yet I always have before it's because you didn't do your 46 they'll send an email it'll be in your news section as well there is a deadline for when you have to do your 46 buy in order to receive your discount and it's 120 days after the service start date that july 1st date or whenever you get your fund into commitment decision letter if it's later remember I said sometimes those letters will come after the service start date you'll still get your full discount so just give you a big credit but the deadline for your 46 is 120 days after service start date or funding commitment decision letter if it is before that july 1st October 29th will be your deadline so that's something to think about every year the end of October you're going to have to have that 46 done by I pay attention to this for you in October beginning October I look up all my libraries in Nebraska and see if they've done their 46s and if they haven't I proactively send you an email this is something I do every year so if um you haven't done it I'll let you know if you don't get your form in you're not going to get your hearing discount nothing's going to process through so keep an eye out for those kind of emails from me at the end of October the last uh set of forms forms for e-rate is your invoicing forms as they call them 474 and 472 these are there's two different forms for you to tell usack how you want to receive your discount you can easily receive a discount on your bills automatically from your service provider or you can pay your bills in full and then get reimbursed after the fact from usack we recommend if you can get that discount on your bills have your service provider do it because if you do the 46 is the last form you have to do every year the service provider has to do the 474 because they're giving you a discount then they use the 474 to ask e-rate to reimburse them for what they're discounting you service provider always gets paid in full when they're doing e-rate just part from you part from usack possibly so if this is how it's going to be done the service provider does it you just wait for your discounted bills you're done at the after doing the 46 but if they don't do that or if that's not something that works for you you can be reimbursed afterwards and that's when you do the infamous bear form build entity applicant reimbursement form you pay in full then you submit this afterwards typically this is done at the end of the funding year so you'll pay your bills in full throughout the whole year and then after June so in July then you would submit a 472 a bear to get reimbursed for that whole previous year you can do it monthly every month submit one for each month one at a time if you want to it's a lot of work but it's allowed you can do that just every month submit a new one so you get reimbursed right away or you can just pay it all in full and get this big reimbursion back and this is the one that's filed by you as the applicant this also has a deadline that 120 days is a typical time period that they use obviously it's 120 days after the last service date so after June 30th or whenever you did your 486 that could have been later so that bumps the date later that's when you confirmed that things were going to be happening this also falls on the end of October October 28th is 120 days after June 30th so at the end of October you may get two different emails from me I also pay attention to this for my libraries from the public libraries I'll go and check and see if anybody from last year has not gotten invoiced yet has not done their invoicing or as far as USAC is concerned have they've not received any forms telling what to do with the money you did the 46 but nothing happened after that so I'll send you an email about this too so you may get two different emails from me one saying for the current year you have to do your 46 still to start things and for the last year you got to do your bear because as far as USAC is concerned you haven't gotten anything they haven't sent any money out now if sometimes your service provider just hasn't done their part you may have spoken to them may have been receiving discounted bills and that's great you've been receiving discounted bills and you get an email from me talking about this and I explain this in the email you can ignore that service providers themselves sometimes are late in submitting their form this one to USAC that's not your responsibility if they haven't gotten their money back but they've been billing and discounting you that's on them to get their money back and you are it's okay so look for those emails at the end of October for me to help you not miss any deadlines each year and I said this is a direct reimbursement from USAC if you are doing it this way they only do electronic bank transfers no checks mails or anything it's just a direct deposit just like when you do direct deposit for paychecks so if you are doing this you do have to do an extra form and just once this isn't an every year thing unless your banking account information changes you do a 498 one time to let them know if we ever do bear forms and need reimbursements in the future this is the bank account to put the money into ask for your basic banking info basic information the name bank account number routing numbers you'll need your tax ID number it also requires something called the Duns number a Dun and Bradstreet business number you can get this for free doesn't cost anything you can look up if you have one or apply for one on Dun and Bradstreet's website just something that the FCC requires when we're doing these direct deposit type things now the 498 is in a different place than all the other forms because it's not a form you do every year the three forms you do every year for 70 71 and 46 are all up here this form the 498 is over under that welcome in your library's name when you do that if you choose related actions you get a whole bunch of things you can do and somewhere down in there this is about in the middle it says create FCC form 498 now if you go here and you don't see that as an option that means you already did it and you've already you know some libraries I've had who did this when this first became a thing a few years ago and they forgot that's okay if it's not there you've already done it if it is there you need to do it and this is like I said only if you are ever going to be getting money reimbursements from use. I'm not going to go through this form because I don't want to put in banking information but it's your usual you know contact financial contract contact bank account number routing number etc etc after you do this 498 in your epic system then you have to provide the verification your documentation whenever you've done a direct deposit type thing you've always had to give avoided check or some sort of proof in this case you can do a copy of avoided check or a bank statement whichever you have and there's a separate website they have you go to do this so that it's kept separate from all of your e-rate things for security purposes so there's the url to go and do that bank validation so you do your 498 in the epic system then immediately pop over to their e-file system and upload your documentation and then you wait for them to set up your id and that can take a few weeks sometimes so make sure you plan ahead that you have this ready in there. I recommend if you ever think you might need to get a reimbursement just hit the second carer and then it's good to go for whenever that comes up as something whenever the needing a reimbursement comes up. After this is all set up then you'll be able to do your bear form to request reimbursement. Changes were made to the bear form last year it used to be a separate website with a special pin number to log into we don't have that anymore there is now in your epic system but it's not fully there you have to request it's not automatically there you have to request access for it there's an excel spreadsheet that you fill out with your info and you create a customer service case in your epic account and make that request there's a link right there to where that spreadsheet is on the USAC website for the bear form access. Once they notify you that your access has been set up then when you log in remember when we did this way at the beginning and there were two choices e-rate productivity center and emergency connectivity fund now you'll have a third choice for doing your bear and when you click on that it asks for your build entity number that entity number and then you can go in and do your bear form. Bear form is also pretty easy it is all the information same kind of thing it's already in the system you're just going to pick the right ones that you want the reimbursements from the right funding requests. It's a very simple and easy just like that 46 where everything's already in there and you're just kind of confirming which ones you want. You will receive a notification when it's been processed and you will start receiving um displacement reports quarterly reports from USAC they were mailing them they come through email now letting you know what they've sent out so if you your search provider has said they will discount your bills USAC will send your report showing you how much money they've sent your provider so compare that to the bills you're getting discounted to make sure that it's coming through okay correctly because if USAC's paying your search provider they should be giving you the same discount it's also confirmation of them sending something to your bank account so you can then also compare this report to what ends up in the library's bank account to make sure that that is all matches up as well and so the invoicing is the last step in the e-rate process yay all right so that is the last step does anybody have any questions there's a lot to go through i know do you have any questions about doing your 470 471 46 uh lots of numbers here uh the invoicing forms that i can answer now we have about um like i said that's the end of the steps of the e-rate we have about 15 minutes left of our workshop time today so i can answer any questions you have now if you have them uh type into the questions section of the of the go to webinar system there and i can answer your questions i'll give you a few minutes to get things typed in if you want if you're thinking of anything um before i grab things up for today any questions you have about any the steps that i mentioned about category one category two uh special construction anything that was uh confusing or anything you wanted me to get into more that you thought i would that i haven't yet if you were expecting me to talk about that i didn't mention yet all right that's okay no problem you you all know where to find me so i will just do my last couple of wrap-up slides here um like i've been mentioning we have an e-rate website uh and lcnetnebraska.gov slash e-rate where you can find lots of links to information about the forms uh links to where all the forms are all the information everything i've mentioned in here today um e-rate does do training themselves they did a fall training series in the end in october and beginning of november uh recordings of all their trainings are on there i also mentioned videos and web webinars that they have they have step-by-step tutorials for each form as well so about like five minute long videos usually so if you want to see some of these forms um actually done live uh like things like the 471 that i wasn't able to get screenshots of yet today of course uh you can go there i highly recommend that they're really good to see um how to go through the steps as well for each form nice little short videos there and some of the forms do have their own user guides pdfs of user guides instructions um not all of them but um a lot of those resources we link to there um i also have a link to the department education website with your school lunch numbers um how to get your fcc number and done at brats your numbers anything you need um is linked off of our e-rate website uh you can also i've mentioned having to reach out to usac to for any customer support they've got an 800 number or um there's a contact us link in your epic account that you can use to submit a question to them there so if you need any help if you're confused about anything um like i said when you need to ask for new you know access to something you can definitely reach out to them and then of course a reminder of their main e-rate website there um it's okay if i'm not available to answer your questions you can reach out to them um if you prefer to talk to me first reach out to me and there is my contact information here at the commission phone call email i will get back to you on it um or check our e-rate website if um for anything else that you might want to look for so it is um ah good thank you for someone just made a question comment great session i thank you for going through this process for us i always need a refresher i that's why i do this i do the same thing every year i don't really have a basic class a basic workshop and in advance because everything's the same for everybody and like i said you do this once a year i do it repeatedly with libraries over and over again helping them so uh then that's what i'm here for is your state e-rate coordinator for public libraries is to show you make sure you can be reminded on how to do this each year you all have a lot on your plates um hopefully this will help you get through one of the things all right and um this has been recorded a recording of the workshop will be available after all of the live sessions are done i've got one more tomorrow um so probably uh next week because i've got to have to do some editing uh will be when i will put up the recording of this um if you feel um you wouldn't want to benefit from watching it again and yes if you do someone does that help travel of questions down the road absolutely i know this is a lot ill at once to get for you to go through um so you might not know what your questions are now but as you start getting into your forms and each step definitely reach out to me um and i can help you i do sessions like this where i can do a go to webinar session with you where you can do some screen sharing so i see your screen and i can guide you through the forms like i said any or quite any emails that come from usac if you need help answering them or understanding them that's what i'm here for reach out to me and um i will get you through the process that is my job is to make sure you get your e-rate funding all right so thank you everybody for joining me today for this workshop and i hope you go and apply for e-rate good luck with your applications thanks