 Good afternoon, and welcome to E-Rate. What's new for 2018? I am Krista Porter. I am here at the Nebraska Library Commission. I am the Library Development Director, is my title here at the Library Commission. Just recently became that earlier this year. I am also the State E-Rate Coordinator for Public Libraries, and that is one of my many duties as Library Development Director, and that is the capacity that I am presenting to you this morning. I'm just double-checking my settings here. I handle training and consulting and hand-holding and anything you all need for doing your E-Rate. That is my job here. We do also have someone in Nebraska who handles the same kind of consulting and training and assistance for schools. I do know I think we do have some people, I'm just checking my registration list. We did have some people that signed up from some schools, but look like they haven't logged in yet, but if they do come in later just let them know. There's specific the Department, the Nebraska Department of Education handles training and consulting for schools in Nebraska. In other states it's handled sometimes the same people, but the basic setup is the same. Basically how it works is the same for both, so this workshop will work for schools as well for anyone who does watch it live or during our recording. Get right into our presentation then. It looks like everyone is sitting ready to go. What we're going to do here for this presentation is going to be a basic E-Rate introduction. What is E-Rate? What it's all about? Why would you use it? And then some specific details of some forms that you use. This will hopefully be good for both beginners, someone who are brand new to the E-Rate program, so you have no idea what's going on with it, why you should be doing it, what is it all about. Hopefully that will help with that. And also for our veterans of the program so that they can just be reminded of things that always helps to remind of certain things that are happening or how to do certain forms. And there are always tweaks every year to the program, of course, as we enjoy, as we know. So there may be some changes that you will notice. So what is E-Rate? E-Rate is a federal program that was created out of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In that act, the FCC dictated to, said that schools and libraries and also some other areas, healthcare facilities, needed affordable telecommunications and internet access, telecommunications being telephone and anything related to receiving internet. As I said, it was from the Telecommunications Act of 1996. So the first year that you could apply was in 1997 and the first year anyone received funding, received these discounts was in 1998. So as a program that's been around for a while, not forever. So we do have some people have been doing it for a long time, 15-some odd years, and some are just getting started with it. The monies for this program comes from the Universal Service fee. This is one of the many fees, taxes that are on your phone bill, your internet bill. Your service providers also pay this fee. You may see them listed as USF fee, a Universal Service. Sometimes I've even seen it very rarely listed actually as E-Rate fee. So everybody pays into a pot of money that is then used to give discounts to schools and libraries. The FCC, as I said, runs this program. They are the one that oversees the program. They create the rules. They decide what you need to do. All of that. They create, send out, they created this company USAC back just in the beginning to administer the E-Rate. So this is a non-for-profit company that actually runs all the day-to-day operations of the E-Rate program. As I said, there's actually some other programs as well that USAC runs. There is one for health care facilities, so that health hospitals and health care providers can have discounts. One for high costs. So people who are living in areas where internet is really expensive. And for low-income, the Lifeline program. So there's other programs that USAC also runs. We and the schools, K-12 schools, and public libraries are under the Schools and Libraries division of USAC. And that runs the E-Rate program. E is the acronym put together for it, meaning education related. Generally though, when I talk about this, I talk about USAC as doing things. USAC does this. You're going to reply to USAC, because that's where all of the information that will come, any contacts from them, emails, whatever, will come from USAC. So the FCC sets the rules. And they send out produce orders, as they're called reports and orders, with any changes and the updates and things they want done to the program as a whole. Now, there haven't been very many of these done over the years. Actually, we're only at the sixth report order was the last one before this modernization. So in the entire life of the program, they've only made major changes a few times. This one, the modernization report order that came out in 2014 made huge changes. This is where a lot of our changes are coming now that things that we're dealing with. Anything in this presentation that is in green, I attempted to make it in green. Anything that was as a result of those orders, everything else is the usual things of how E-rate is done and hopefully things you'll recognize. So there was a couple of different reports and orders that came out that made changes. The idea, the general overreaching idea, was to modernize and streamline the program. Try and make it easier for libraries and schools to apply. Make the forms easier to use. Put it all online. So everything is available online to everybody. So there's quite a few things that were mixed up in that. So the FCC puts out these orders, use that, then figures out the procedures of how they can make these things happen in actual reality and then submits them back to the FCC for approvals. There's a little back and forth between them before everything is finalized and then you get the result of that and what you're supposed to do. So who can apply for E-rate? All public libraries in Nebraska are eligible libraries and library systems. So if we have libraries with branches, the main criteria that you, SAC, puts on that is that libraries must be eligible to receive LSTA funds, Library Service Technology Act funding. In Nebraska, all public libraries are eligible for that as a trickle down from the Library Commission receiving LSTA funding to provide services to all of you. You use those services so you're eligible to receive services funded by that. Schools and school districts also eligible and if we did have consortias, groups of entities, if a bunch of libraries got together to get a discount on internet access or schools got a discount on some sort of connections or equipment, you'd be able to get discount as well for those consortias. E-rate is funded, E-rate commitments are done on what they call a funding year. So which always runs from July 1st of a year through June 30th of the next year. So whenever you are thinking about E-rate, you're always thinking to the future. Right now, the E-rate forms are available to start applying for the next funding year, which is funding year 2018. So that's what we're talking about today. So you're thinking in July of 2018, I have something I want to get a discount on. I have something I'm going to be paying for, something I'm going to be purchasing, and that's what I'm thinking about when I'm starting my process right now in the fall of 2017. And every year, the funding year goes that way, July through June, July through June. There is $3.99 billion available for E-rate funding. I don't know why they don't just round that to four, but I look it up every year every time, and that's what it is. It's officially $3.99 billion. It is adjusted for inflation. If they need to, if they need more money to fulfill all of the applications that come in, they can roll over some unused funds. They do have funds set aside so much with savings account that you would have. So there is funding from previous years that can be used if they go over the need. If the need goes over that $3.99 billion. Now, the first thing I always tell libraries and looking into doing E-rate or seeing about doing it again is to figure out how much of a discount you can get. How do you calculate that? Libraries can get anywhere from 20% to 90% off of their costs. Nobody can get zero and there isn't 100% discount. Nobody can get 100% off. 90% is the highest. And there's a couple of different things you take into consideration to calculate your discount. You can calculate this yourself offline, as we would say, to figure out what you could be getting. But within the E-rate system itself, when you go online to submit your forms, it will do the calculation for you and tell you what it is as well so you don't have to do the math within the system. The discount is based on the school lunch, the National School Lunch Program. This is the free and reduced lunches that the children receive in school districts. The FCC needed something to determine where, who should get the most money, where is the neediest area potentially in the country. And there are many ways to determine various poverty levels. They decided to pick this, assuming if there are more children that are eligible for the school lunch program, the free and reduced lunches, then that is a needier area and will give them a higher level of discount. Something key to notice about this, that it says number of students eligible, not the number of students who actually apply. Because that number could be different. The government figures out which families based on their income are eligible for this. And then it's up to them to decide to apply. Some don't need to. They have other income, other ways to pay for the lunches for their children, or they don't want to apply for due to the stigma. There's various reasons why they might not. But this is just what we're looking for is the number that are eligible for it. So it would potentially be a bigger number. Also, something else to notice is you cannot include pre-K kids. So it's only kindergarten through senior 12th that you can count up. After you know that number, then you combine that with whether your library is considered urban or rural based on U.S. census data. So actually going back to the school lunch numbers. The key, also another key to that, as you can see what it says here is the school district in which the library is located. This means where the school district, where the library is physically located. You may be near a couple of different school districts or two different ones and you serve kids that are from both school districts. And that's great. But to do your calculation for e-rate, you look geographically physically in what school district does the library physically sit. And that's the school district's numbers that you look at for doing this calculation. So where do we get this information? Easy for us. On the Nebraska Department of Education website, they actually post all the numbers. They put up a spreadsheet and I've given you the URL here. You should already have a copy of this presentation. If not, you can see it later on our website. I also have links to all of this on our e-rate website. The Nebraska Department of Education posts every year the numbers for the school lunch. They post a spreadsheet that shows how many children are enrolled, how many are eligible for the reduced free and reduced lunches, and then what that percentage is, which is the number you need for e-rate purposes. This is a great thing, makes it so much so easy for schools and libraries to look up and find these numbers. In the past, I've heard the horror stories that it wasn't always this wasn't always this way. Some of these school districts did not have the numbers post. They didn't even post it at all. And you'd have to call them call the superintendent call the school district call the schools and find out what their numbers were, which would sometimes confusing. Sometimes these schools did not know that they were supposed to get what the numbers were, you didn't get the right person. They didn't want to give out the numbers due to privacy issues. None of that is actually an issue. We're not getting actual numbers about who is receiving these free and reduced lunches. So there's no privacy issue for any children being outed as being part of the program. There's no specifics even on that e-rate needs of who is getting it. And on the spreadsheet, there isn't either. It's just a total number of children that are eligible. So it's much easier. So you go to that website, find your district. There's a spreadsheet that has each school individually, but it also has a district's tab, a district's sheet within the spreadsheet. You want to go to that, find your school district and find the percentage. And then you can look up your urban or rural status. This is based still on the 2010 census data. They haven't updated it, so that's what they're using. Most areas in Nebraska are rural, which is good because that does give a slightly higher discount in some areas. And then you use USAC's discount matrix, which is, there we go, this, where it shows you where you can take those numbers and figure out how much of a discount you can get. So you can see here, even for schools that have up to 49%, haven't even crossed that 50% of the students eligible can still get 60 to 70% off on via e-rate. And you can see here urban and rural and some levels, urban or rural gets a slightly higher discount. You also see the top here listed category one and category two. Those are, and we'll get into that in a second, those are the different types of things you can get an e-rate discount on. They're broken up into two different categories. And you can see for some of them, the discount is the same, but then as you get higher up, it does have a little difference. So this is how you calculate what you could possibly get a discount on. Here in Nebraska, most of our libraries fall in the 60, 70 to 80% rate range. We have a few that are down less, down to 40 or 20. And I think we've maybe had one or two at a time, at times that have reached up into that 90% level. But generally, we're between 60 and 80% here in Nebraska. So that's a really good discount. That's a really good discount to get on your internet service, your routers, anything you're buying for the library related to the internet. So definitely something to make sure you keep applying for. Any questions yet about e-rate or calculating your discount or what it's all about? You can type into the question section of your GoToWibbner interface. So what is eligible? What can you get an e-rate discount on? What is e-ratable? Every year, the FCC publishes what they call their eligible services list. This is a list of everything that for that current year is eligible to be applied for for e-rate. They post it on their website and this long annoying URL there that you'll be able to just click on later is where you can go to look at it. They publish a new list every year because they do evaluate what's going on in the world. What is coming up as a new way of getting internet? What is some new piece of equipment libraries need to use to get their e-rate or get their internet working? So they're always tweaking it. They do pay attention. They listen to schools or libraries or the public telling them about different things that they think should be included on the list or things that might need to be removed or modified. So when you are looking to apply for e-rate, you want to make sure you're looking at the correct eligible services list for the year you are applying for. On this website where they have that I have here, they list all of the lists from all the years back going out to the very beginning. So if you're curious about what was eligible in 1997, take a look at it, but make sure you look at the one right now that says it is the list for 2018. It will be at the top of the page. Often, many times, you are working on multiple e-rate funding years at the same time. Right now, some libraries are still finishing up their 2017 e-rate while they're applying for the 2018. So you may need to refer to a previous list depending on your situation and what's going on. So make sure that you just make sure that you're looking at the right one when you do code to the page. Now this is something that did have a major change to it as a result of this modernization order that came out in 2014 in that they have reduced the list, the size of the list. Previously, as you see here, starting for 2014, the list was almost 50 pages long. It was this huge packet of information and it was just unwieldy. You could not really find anything in it. The only way I was able to even search to find anything was to go on to the online version and just do a search in the document to see where is the thing that I might be looking for and what's eligible and what part of it is. They said, you need to streamline that. It's too crazy. People just can't even work with this giant document anymore. So now they've gotten it down to eight pages, about eight, maybe nine pages depending on how you print it out. Basically, they said what happened over the years is as people are asking about things they could get, you know, what about this? Can I get this discount on? But what about that version of it and back and forth and back and forth? They kept adding all of these things every time every year when somebody asked. So it became very in-depth and they started adding to the eligible services list things that were ineligible, things you could not get an e-rate discount on. So half the list was actually, here's what you can and half of it is here, what you cannot, which was just getting rid of Gillis to try and work through all of that and then also tacked on the end was this huge glossary of all the different terms, terminology you might use. So they said make it simpler. People want to go to, they want to know when they go to that list, what can I get a discount on? Everything else can be elsewhere and now that's what it is. When you go to that list, you'll see a little bit of an introduction of, you know, why some things are on there, some recent changes, but then basically it is just, here's everything that's eligible and it just boils it down to those eight to nine pages. And basically the idea is, if it's not on this list, it's not eligible and you know, you won't be even be able to apply for it. What's actually good about the new system as well, where you have, do all these forms online, is that anything that is from that list is automatically just available in the online form and you just choose from a list, boom, boom, boom, what is eligible, click the ones you want and add them to your application. So that makes it a lot easier as well. The services themselves, as we had seen in the previous slide about discount, are divided into what they call category one and category two services. These used to be called, for anyone from who's in this historic, previously, priority one and priority two. Still basically the same breakdown between them as before, but they just renamed them as categories. Category one is getting the services to your library building. So this is your monthly internet bill, your monthly telephone bill, anything related to getting that connection to the building. Category two is once you have that connection set up, how do you get it to all the specific devices within your library building. So the cabling and the router and the wireless access point and the network server, anything you need to get that internet connection to all the different computers or laptops or tablets or whatever that will be using it in the building. So you can kind of think of the difference between category one and two as the wall of the building, of your library building. Category one is up to the wall, category two is inside the walls. And they do have more details about this in the eligible services list itself that we will get into the details of in a second here. Now one big thing that is changing that many of you may have heard about or be or may be dealing with is reducing, gradually reducing support for voice services. This is your telephone service that is gradually being phased out of the program. Now the FCC had decided in the modernization report in order that they put out in 2014 that they realized, as many of us already know, there is a huge Wi-Fi gap, broadband, internet gap. Many many areas in the country do not have fast enough, strong enough, good enough internet service. And they wanted to help these areas get that service. They decided they wanted to focus on providing broadband, fast, strong internet service to everywhere that they can. In order to do that, they decided they needed more money from the program because they were not able to provide services to everyone previously. And a way to have more money available they figured was to phase out the voice services. They not saying that it's not important, but saying that they wanted to refocus what e-rate is for. Have it be for internet-related things, not telephone and voice-related things. It is working. So far they have had enough money to fund all their applications from when they started doing this in 2015. So that's great that it's working. It is still causing a hardship to many libraries. This is something that school districts, large school districts, large library systems did protest against. Whenever the FCC puts out a report or order, you can make comments to it. And many large organizations and even smaller ones said that this is wrong. We need our telephone support. Telephone is an essential service at our library or school. And if we can't get this, keep getting our 70, 80, 60% discount, we're going to have to cut budget somewhere else. The FCC listened to those comments but did decide to do this anyways. We don't know if things will be switched. If it will come back, I wouldn't hold my breath on that. But this is the situation we are in now. Previously, I'm going to go back to the previous slide, the way e-rate was distributed out is USEC will look at category one services first and approve all of those that they could. And then they would look at category two with whatever money was left over. You may remember, if you've done e-rate in the past, that there's always the announcements that priority two is what it used to be called, is going to be funded only at the 85% level or the 90% level, meaning only in schools and libraries who had that high of a discount calculation would even get their category two funding. Anyone less was just out of luck because there wasn't enough money. And that was how it worked because there's so many requests for the telephone service. So now that they are not doing that and they're gradually phasing out the monies that go towards phone, they are able to actually, for all the applications that were submitted correctly and approved, everyone got their money. So it's working, it is a little hard to deal with, but it's just something we have to figure out and work with for now until they maybe change it back or not, as I said, I don't think so. What is currently eligible for category one? Anything that can get high-speed broadband internet to your building to your library. So whether it's cable, and this isn't even a complete list, just some of the more common ones. So cable, modem, DSL, fiber, wireless internet, satellite services, anything that you can get to get that internet connection to your building, you can get your e-rate discount on. Now specifically related to fiber, a little explanation here about what that means, definitions coming from USAC. Lit fiber is something that is already there, fiber-based service, you get that from your service provider just like you get any other kind of internet connection and you pay a fee, monthly fee to get that. Dark fiber, this is something that is the same fiber lines that were laid, that were there for the lit, but they haven't been turned on yet. When these companies put in the fiber connections, whether it's through your city or to your building, they put in more than they needed at the time they were doing the construction. If you remember this happening in your town, digging big trenches, laying in the fiber and the cables and everything and then having to rebury it all, they didn't want to go in and regularly add more and more, so they right off the bat put in more than they needed at the time. Only turned on some of these lines, some of these fiber connections and left the other ones off. The ones that are still off are called dark fiber. So they are there waiting to be used. What you can do is you can find a company, contact a service provider in your area and see if they own these fiber connections and contract with them to turn them on and connect them to your library building and then that becomes the lit fiber that you then use. The costs for getting that turned on, you can get a discount on, you can get an e-rate discount on because there may be some fees for them to turn it on and of course if there's extra construction needed to bring it to your building. If you are applying for the dark fiber, and you can see here there is instructions from e-rate says to choose when you're asking for it in your first form in the process, both dark and lit. Even if you know that well it's just dark fiber that I'm looking for, that's what I want to find what's going on, that's okay but keep your options open just in case there's already lit fiber that's out there that you just weren't available, weren't aware of. So when you are considering reaching out and seeing if there's any dark fiber you'll just make sure you choose this choice that is a combination of both and you'll see that when you get onto the form. Another way that you can get your fiber option is a self-provision network. This is where you as the customer, you as library actually owns it all yourself. If you don't contract with a separate company, you hire someone to get it connected to you but then you own and run that network yourself. I don't know many libraries in Nebraska that may go this route and do this actually running your own internet network but just so you know this is something you will see coming up on your forms and that's what that's referring to. As I mentioned a special construction anything related to installing the fiber dark lit self-provisioned vision whatever to your library is also eligible for e-rate discount. So if you do need to do these one-time costs it's not just your monthly bill that you can get an e-rate discount on but your one-time construction costs of getting the connection actually put your library, any project management fees, any costs related with you know preparing for all of that can be done as a category one request as well. Now related to the special construction USAC does know and realize that construction companies don't always necessarily work on the e-rate funding year as July 1st to June 30th of a particular funding year. They know that because of schedules and coordination it just might not fall into that time frame and they take that in consideration and they say that anything that you do need to do can be done up to six months prior to the start of an actual funding year that you're applying for so anything after January 1st. So for example if you are going to be looking for dark fiber or lit fiber and you need construction done and you're applying for the 2018 funding year that officially starts in July you can work with your provider to have that construction done at any time during 2018 really. You just have to make sure that you do follow through and get that service with them when July 1st does come along. So the voice service phase down they gradually decided to reduce support for telephone starting with 2015 by taking 20% off of each of the discount each year so you'd gradually have 20% off more and more each year as you can see in this chart. So the first year everybody still is getting almost everybody except for the very lowest level we're still getting a discount just 20% less than your main discount for your internet and then each year went down another 2020-20. This year the only the libraries that would get a discount at all for telephone would be anyone at the 90% level as far as your basic calculation and you get 10% off still on your phone and then next year everybody's out it's done there's no longer any more voice services. And this is anything that carries a voice service any sort of connection so your local long distance 800 service plain old telephone service that's what POTS is an acronym for satellite phone wireless cell phone service anything that's related to the voice and this is what e-rate is really about is what is the service you're getting that's what they are talking about when they're when you're getting service from getting a discount through e-rate so for cell service it would be the voice connection but if you have data that would not that would be okay because that's internet related so there is that difference there. So if you have and so if you have multiple lines that are carrying things you got to make sure that it is the the circuit that's carrying the voice is what is having the phase down anything that's internet still get your full discount no problem there. So that is our category one services any questions questions about category one what is eligible what isn't anything that I've already mentioned today go ahead and type into your questions section of your go-to webinar interface I can see that here I'm on computer and answer your questions drink no all right so we're going to go on now to category two now category two services work a little differently in the category one as as far as how you calculate your discount. Category two as I mentioned is anything to bring your broadband in your building anything to connect all of your computers to your network to your internet all of that. The way they they give you money in category two is something they call five-year budgets they create a budget for how much money you can spend over a five-year period and then you can deduct from that as you're going through the five years and I'll explain more detail about that in just a couple of slides so it works slightly differently than just getting a discount on your bills the way it does for category one. This includes things on internal connections which is all your physical equipment a new way of getting internet managed internal broadband services and basic maintenance the ongoing maintenance repair upkeep of your internal connections. So specifically internal connections include all of these things basically all the physical equipment that you might need to get your internet throughout your library so wireless access points cables firewalls networks switches routers racks uninterruptible power supplies and any improvements or upgrades necessary to keep these things working and software related to that now generally speaking we've potentially looked into this but where you rate things like software like microsoft word and excel and databases that you subscribe to online are not eligible but software that's related to making your internet work to making your network work that is what is eligible so if you do have to pay for any of that or do any upgrades related to that that is something that you would be able to get a discount on because it's related to getting your internet service. Something else some new way of getting having an internet connection manage internal broadband services is what urate calls it. I honestly I didn't know what that meant when I first read it so I did some searching online and found out manage wi-fi is also what it's called. Basically this is having a third party completely run everything related to your library's internet connection and you have nothing to do with it no monitoring no keeping up the equipment or anything all of that is just handled totally by this separate company. You just contract with them and let it go and they handle it for you all on their own any problems any issues they handle that for you. So if this is something that you hear about in your area some new company company coming in with this kind of service look into it and see what it costs and you might be able to switch over to it and get a discount. The other thing under category two is the basic maintenance of these internal connections any repair upkeep a replacement that you need of any of this any of these this equipment that you've purchased so if you need to replace a router because it died if a squirrel gets into your walls and choose through your cabling you need to have that rerun replaced all those kind of things you can get a discount on as well. So this is just the ongoing upkeep of just keep having this equipment. Now this is something that you have to have already somehow contracted or arranged for in in some way so sometimes it might be our internet service provider as part of their service to us provides us with this kind of repairer and support and upgrading great that's included or you have someone a separate person in town that you deal with that actually will come in and do this the local IT company or local IT computer store will come over and do the work and that's great you have to have something set up with them ahead of time something some contract with them but then you only get a discount on work that is actually performed so when they actually have to come and do any of this upkeep or repair for you so for example if you're paying a monthly fee of say $20 a month to have them on call that's not eligible for e-rate but if they do have to come into your library and then they tried you the hourly fee and the cost for the the parts and labor all of those costs that is then what you can apply for and get a discount on. Now the last thing that you can get an e-rate on is something that could be in either category one or category two and this is all of your miscellaneous things. All your taxes and fees and surcharges and everything that you pay extra on your bill beyond just the I pay $50 a month for internet all those are eligible for e-rate discount as well so make sure when you're applying for e-rate you tell you sec this is how much it's going to cost me don't just put down we pay $50 a month for e-rate put down we pay $58.72 a month because of all these taxes and fees and you get a discount on all of that anything related to renting or shipping anything related to that having to do with your internet services training if you need to send if you are have to have someone on your staff who is your network person and they monitor all of your internet and they need to go to a training workshop or to learn something that cost can you can get a discount on as well. Also something new installation and configuration of new certain new products new new equipment previously when you purchased the actual piece of equipment the router the wireless access point the cost of installation had to be part of that deal so normally you just got it from your service provider as part of having them now you can have someone else install the equipment if you want to they know that there is you can buy routers and servers online now from amazon or anywhere go out to Best Buy and then bring them to your library and have someone come in and install it now that that installation can be you can get an e-rate discount on that as well because they know this is a way that some libraries are working to get their internet all set up so that's category two was available for category two services any questions about those before I jump on to calculating your category two budgets and figure out how much money you get for them all right let's go on to our category two budgets so budgets is kind of I find it has been a confusing term to use basically what this is it's a I I describe it as kind of a pretend budget that e-rate is calculating for you and saying we think you could spend this much money in the next five years on all of these category two type services this equipment the construction and everything and we're going to calculate that for you and then we're going to say you can use it over the next five years however much you need each year depending on what you might be purchasing you might have a big project you're doing and you spend it all on the first year because you're building a new building or something that's fine you might have bits and pieces you want to buy throughout those five years and that's fine as well this category two budget you can start at any time starting back as far as 2015 through 2019 as your first year this is only through 2019 because this is their first time doing this and that's their first five-year period they're going to see how it goes by 2019 there will be more instruction on how we're going to be going to the future basically did this work did everybody understand category two budgets did it work to get the money to them and then decide do we start another five-year cycle right now we don't know but this is so we have to just gotta keep our eyes open so they calculate a budget for each library and I'll tell you how that's done and just the next slide and you can receive discounts on the cost of your category two services up to that budget amount you don't have to limit what you're purchasing up to that amount so if they say you get $15,000 it's not that you can only spend $15,000 you can have a project that is bigger than that that costs more than what your budget is calculated at and that's fine you'll just only receive a discount on the first bit that is e-rate in your e-rate calculation so if your project costs $20,000 and your e-rate budget is only $15,000 you only get a discount on that first $15,000 the other extra bit you're on your own for so you're welcome to do whatever you need to and you'll just apply for what you can what e-rate will cover now to calculate the budget for a library right now this does say for funding year 2017 which is the previous year not the one we're applying for yet this is because they haven't announced yet what the number is going to be for the upcoming year this cost is adjusted each year for inflation and since we're not we don't have the form available yet to do this we don't know what it's going to be but you can guesstimate at least a little bit based on the current years when they first started this the pre-discount budget is based on the size of your building how big is your library how many square feet and this is for all floors everything within your library walls and you take $2.35 multiply that by the number of square feet and that gives you your discount budget they do have a minimum though that they want to meet they don't want to be giving me they have decided that we're not going to just do little bitty amounts to tiny tiny libraries we do have a minimum of this wonderful awkward number $9,412.80 as I said this has been adjusted each year for inflation the first year that they did this it was $2.30 that was 2015 so you can see it's gone up a little bit each year we can assume it might go up for inflation in 2018 to 36 cents 37 cents potentially when they first did this it came out to a nice round number for the minimum and it was great but now just doing math this is the minimum that they want it to be is the $9,412.80 so in a real life example your library is 3,500 square feet you multiply that by $2.35 and you get $8,225 however there is a minimum that they'll pay to all libraries so your actual budget is going to be $9,412.80 if your square feet calculation came up to more than that 9,000 that's just what it would be math wise you can just do the math so you do use your discount rate in conjunction with this budget that they've created for you however so you figure out what this budget is how much you're going to have for your five years and then you apply whatever your discount calculation percentage is in this example they just to make it easy for the math they used 50% discount rate so this library is 3,500 square feet they get the minimum of the $9,412 but they apply the only get that's your full budget they're saying this is how much we think you could think might be good for you to spend and you now get 50% of that discounted off so you actually receive $4,706.40 and funds to spend so they say here's how much you can spend 94,9400 your discount we will discount half of that and you'll get that much money whatever your library's square foot is will you know it'll adjust appropriately for that so it is a little is very different from how you calculate category one category one is just this is my bill and take it will use this example take 50% off of it and that's what I'll pay for category two they say here's a chunk of money a pretend chunk of money that we think you might spend take your discount off and this is how much you'll have to spend this is calculated also within your e-rate account online and they do track when you spent money and just deducted off of that amount as you go so you know how much you spent and how much you have left so you they will keep track of that for you which is nice and they said you can use this however you want best whatever best suits you for what you're doing in your library so if you're building a new building or a whole new computer lab being upgraded you might spend your entire budget in your first year and that's fine you just won't be able to do any category you won't be able to get a discount and any category do sort of two services for the next four years because that was your five-year block you can divvy it up evenly between the years and find something to spend or just go and use it as you go we have one library here in Nebraska that actually seems to be doing that last year they bought a whole bunch of routers like 13 routers and they're just basically stocking up equipment this year they're buying a bunch of switches 10 switches that they know they need so keeping your equipment up to date is a way of doing it as well so look at what's available in category two as potential things you can buy and see if you might need to be replacing those at any time in the next four or five years and you can put them in buy them and then you get the meta-lower cost these budgets are recalculated each year based on your square footage if it changes hopefully it doesn't go down but if you were expanding building into building moving into new space you would then have to redo the calculation based on whatever your new square footage is to make it accurate so that's our category two budgets any questions about those they can be a little confusing yes but as you're actually working through them using them each year it does get make more sense all right so there's a couple of other things that you do need to pay attention to when you are applying for e-rate technology planning is one that's actually no longer required it's a little trick I guess it used to be there's a reason I mentioned this here is because technology plans did used to be required for e-rate purposes you had to write a plan you had to submit it to me I approved it and then you were allowed to check that off on your e-rate forms and say yes we are doing we have a plan they no longer require this it was a big hardship for some of our small libraries they just don't have the time or the people to create a plan every few years but it's still a good idea to have one I will advocate for that of course it keeps you on track with what's happening with your technology what you might need to be planning for we've just bought new computers we've got to make sure in four years we are prepared to buy replacements potentially those kind of things also specific to Nebraska if you are working on being accredited an accredited library you can earn points towards your accreditation by having a technology plan that's one of the boxes you can check off so no longer required a still good idea to have one also you may still see it mentioned on some forms there's still some holdover where some wording has not been changed yet so anywhere you do see it you can actually just ignore it now but I just like to make sure you know that it was out there in case it pops up somewhere and you're confused the other thing that you do have to pay attention to is SIPA the Children's Internet Protection Act in order to apply for and to receive e-rate funding you do need to be in compliance with SIPA this is talking about filtering this is the filters that you have on your computers blocking certain things from the internet compliance with SIPA is required for any internet access or internal connections previously because we had telephone that was did not need to have SIPA compliance because well there's no internet coming through your phone it's just voice service so there was the those for that you didn't need to be compliant but only for anything internet related this being the last year that anyone can even get the littlest bit of telephones or a discount I'm kind of switching to saying basically anything you want to do almost anything you want to apply for for e-rate you have to be compliant so this counts for your basic monthly internet charges and all of that equipment that you purchase that has to do with getting your or internet so everything category two obviously is is related to getting receiving your internet so all anything in there you got to be compliance in compliance with SIPA and anything internet related under category one SIPA is a point of contention in many libraries in many areas people have varying opinions on it all the way from don't talk to me about filtering it is totally against my values libraries are about freedom of access to information and everyone being able to access anything they want to its censorship I don't want to talk about it up to protect the children from everything block it all and everything in between your libraries may have varying opinions on that whether your staff your boards your community standards may vary and that's fine you need to decide for yourself if this is something that you can figure out how to comply with in order to get these discounts and still have everybody be happy and accepting of it now to our benefit in the e-rate world SIPA is a really really vaguely written act it doesn't have a lot of specifics to it it's pretty vague and that works to to our advantage it does not say here's a list of all the websites you have to block it doesn't say block YouTube block Facebook block these things it just says what kinds of things to that need to be blocked it doesn't say what you have to use to block them the the second item here technology protection measure that's the filter itself if there is no list of here's all the acceptable filters you can use you can use anything that's out there that works for it so it's pretty open for what you can do it also does not say at what level things need to be blocked so it does not say everything must be blocked at the high security level on your internet on your on your filter whatever it's doing it does leave it to local choice local values and situations in your library you may have children's computer room and you may have adult computer rooms or computers in different areas of the library and you can adjust it for each of those areas what it does say is you have to have a filter of some sort whether it's physically on each computer whether it's coming from your service provider whether it's a software package on your computers on your routers whatever on all of the libraries computers in some way so anything that is your own computers if a patron comes in with their own laptop they don't have to have a filter on it that's not your responsibility it's only have anything that your computers do that filter has to somehow be on there once it's on there then you can decide at what level you put it at do you put it all at the highest level for the children's computers potentially do you put it at the lowest level or turn it off for your adult computers or yes even your staff computers anything that receives the internet service that you're getting an e-ray discount on or uses the internet equipment that you're getting the e-ray discount on has to have a filter on it but then that would include if your staff computers even in the back room access the internet but then once you install it or have it on there you can either turn it off put it at the lowest level whatever works best for you and potentially no one even knows that you ever had a filter installed because it really doesn't block anything and you still get your e-ray discount you have met the compliance the requirements of SIPA sounds a little wonky I know it sounds like it shouldn't work that way yes however they wrote this very vaguely at the times I'm sure that you know the idea was protect the children make sure that nobody is watching anything bad or porn or anything too violent however when they wrote it they either knew that it was going to be hard to do or just didn't know how to write it strongly and so we do have ways that if you are concerned about filtering and censorship you can work around it and get your e-ray discount this is how I teach SIPA it isn't necessarily how some people may want me to who are you know really for this but I am here to teach you how to get your e-ray money and this is how it works this is how it's written so that you can do that so if you're not sure about filtering if you don't at your library I recommend investigating it there's information here on the e-ray website I also have information on our e-ray website about SIPA and I can also talk to you about it if you need some more advice on what does work and what doesn't work and you know how I can make it happen and so I can get my e-ray discount or to help you explain it to someone in your community who might not think you should filter or think you're doing it improperly I can help you navigate that but this is something you do have to think about when you are thinking about when you're doing e-ray now any questions about that I'll open that up just in case anybody wants to ask questions about that nothing right now all right that's cool don't forget if you have any questions as we're going you don't have to wait for me to ask go ahead and type it into your questions section I'll grab it as you know it comes up so now that we know the basics of e-ray what's it all about what you can get e-rayed on what the discounts are things you need to be taking into consideration now let's get at the actual applying the e-ray forms themselves there are four forms that you need that are related to applying for e-ray everyone submits the first three on this list no questions asked there are a few little things the fourth one will depend and the extra one there is a one-time only form so that's why I put it kind of its own separate area and we're going to get into the details and the specifics of all of these so this is just a very brief overview of them on this slide here the form 470 is what you're submitting right now it's available now you can start you can apply for it right now and say you're looking for someone you're looking for a service to get an e-ray discount on 471 is a second form which is when you decide it on what service you're going to get and what provider you're going to get it from that form is not available yet it won't be even available to you until most likely sometime in January of 2018 the date to be announced yet 46 is the third form this is after you've been approved for your e-rate you then tell USAC that you want the monies this is you do have to say yes we would like it why might you not want e-rate to get the money there are situations where that does happen so you do have to confirm with them that you do want to receive the money the fourth form there this is the one that depends you see I'm getting my discount we're all good to go and now giving my money you can either receive a discount as right from your service provider right off the bat it's a discounted bill that you receive and you pay that or you pay your bills in full and get a reimbursement later and I'll get into more details about that that's what that extra form here now the 498 is having to do with your reimbursements which if you may recognize the phrase bear that's the bear form build entity applicant reimbursement I think you at one time reimbursements are now done via direct deposit so you will once have to provide e-rate USAC with your banking information and that's what the 498 form is for that's one unless you change your bank information bank account info that's the thing you don't have to do once the other forms you do every year it's an ongoing process every year you have to reapply for the next year and just keep doing it rotating throughout the year this is a timeline of the forms and in what order you do them in as I said right we start off with the 470 and we're not going to get into too many of the details here on this slide because I am going to go into each step through the other slides we've got in the presentation but this is just a way that it shows you at least where things go and in what order we also have this timeline on our website I strongly recommend going there and seeing it there we have a general one that just tells you in general what time of year each thing is done and then we will have one specific to each funding year with specific dates and there are deadline dates that do apply for each year and we don't know what those are yet because they have not been announced but and I'll get into the specifics of those in a bit so we don't have specific deadlines yet for the forms for this year but you can start the process and I strongly recommend doing it don't wait get your 470 out there get it done and then wait for the deadlines at least you know you've met the deadline and then we'll know hopefully soon what how everything else falls out so related to these forms you must keep copies of everything related to applying for e-rate for 10 years after the last date of service this is something that also changed you can see it's in green it used to be a five years that you had to keep them now it's 10 now obviously since it was originally only five years if you don't have 10 years going back from now that's okay it's going to be 10 years from you know eventually you'll have 10 years worth of paperwork and e-rate forms and everything it is from the last date of service which means the end of a funding year which is that June 30th day is always the end of your funding year so for what you're applying for right now which is for funding your 2018 you will need to keep everything related to that through June 30th of 2029 that's 10 years yes that is a long time but you do not have to keep piles and piles of papers in binders or in file cabinets you can keep things electronically if you want to they don't care USEC does not care how you keep these documents just that you are able to get them to them if they ask for something you actually see behind me on this side these binders here behind me that's my old e-rate binders from previous years and that's how it was done in the past actually before we had an online system all these forms were done in paper done in paper mailed out they mailed things back to me as well lots lots lots of paperwork flying back and forth now it's all online in the online system or you can keep them scanned and online on your computer on a flash drive on a hard drive somewhere wherever you want to for things that are contracts for recurring services that have to do with the current funding or you have to keep those as well so for example if you signed a contract originally with your service provider back in 2010 and it applies to this year's e-rate you still need to keep that contract through 2029 because it has to do with this year's e-rate application so think about those things anything you have that's related just make copies put them in the file folder with the ones that are for this year and just keep those kind of things organized SIPA if you do do anything with SIPA documentation proving when you purchase the filter when you had it installed all of that of course you'd have to keep forever as well because that's going to apply to every single year that you apply for in the future and these are the things that we're talking about that you need to keep any forms that you submit any letters that you receive any correspondence from USEC asking you questions now a lot of these things now may be coming to you electronically with the new online system that e-rate has they will save all of your forms in there they will contact you within there you'll apply to them within that account all of that online counts for keeping it they have said that they will hold everything in there for the 10 years just like they said that you need to however I do recommend keeping your own copies locally you never know if their system is down what will be their version of the system in 10 years if something will get lost in some sort of translation or in transition you never know doesn't hurt to just get yourself a pdf copy download something save it onto your own computer at least so at least you have your own version of it any bids you receive any companies that contact you with contracts or agreements correspondence with them when you're having equipment delivered invoices delivery receipts all of that basically anything related to something you've got an e-rate discount on you need to keep for those 10 years now e-rate has a new e-rate portal new as in a few years old called the e-rate productivity center the acronym is EPC which is pronounced epic this comes from them how epic it is is to be determined that's my ongoing joke for the last few years we're still deciding some parts of it are great I would call epic and great changes some things still need work and we'll see as we go through here now as we look at each of these forms which things are really useful and helpful to us and which things are still a little starting in 2016 with funding year 2016 all forms almost all forms are submitted via the epic system the e-rate productivity center there's still one form that I'll talk to you about later that is still in the old legacy system as they call it it's also online but it's just not in epic yet they just haven't been able to program it to work in there yet hopefully next year cross our fingers easy to get to portal.usac.org is the website the URL to get directly to your epic account now why did they make this change this was one of the things that was asked for from the FCC dictated from that report and order in 2014 get everything online bring us into the 21st century so many places you can apply for things with online forms and web-based things and have an online account to track everything there have been versions of online access in the past for e-rate a couple of different iterations of it that had some things they weren't as all-encompassing as this hopefully final version that we have there was online places to go for each form but there was each their own sec their own form their own place to search for everything well this all of your forms every single form you submit and access to it is in one place anytime usac contacts you for to ask a question for clarification for anything they will contact it'll be within the system and you notices and reminders you'll get will be in here you reaching out to usac to ask your questions of them of their customer service is all within there so it is really slick that they have everything in one place now so you just have to remember one place to go to to do all of your e-rate something else that is great about it excuse me is that you can use this from any type of device you want to and from any web browser previously if you any of you may remember doing e-rate in the last few years in a previous version of submitting forms online you could only use internet explorer to submit your forms it was the only browser that was guaranteed to work it was actually the only browser that their government programmers programmed behind the scenes to work unfortunately you could use firefox or chrome to submit and it kind of looked like you submitted it but it didn't actually process through in the end and we had too many libraries who thought they had submitted something assumed it was in and actually wasn't and there was a lot of back and forth and having to extend deadlines for things because people didn't realize they could only use explorer badly designed badly programmed definitely now with this new system they contracted with a company that does this for business does these online interfaces and online services it's not something that was necessary that was actually originally programmed for e-rate so there are still some parts of it that look a little like that don't seem to make sense to us they've kind of tried to shoehorn in e-rate into it so there it is a little not unintuitive in some areas but it is definitely better than what we had it's all relative and you can use any browser you want to if you like chrome or firefox or in an explorer or safari whatever and any device your computer your laptop even if you want to use your cell phone that you could I wouldn't recommend applying for you know submitting forms on your cell phone it's a little small screen there but you could check up on your application just look up something see if a notice has been sent to you definitely you could log into your account from there if you wanted to now to get started with this USAC creates an account for whoever was doing your e-rate previously based on the contact info on a previous form this would be I believe it was either 2016 or 2017 they would look and see who submitted a form and then automatically create an account for that person they were sent an email saying hey you've been sent up with an account in Epic go ahead and start using it one person is the account administrator they are in control of whoever adding new users keeping everything up to date oh actually it was the account administrator the original one was whoever did before this used the system whoever submitted the 471 the second form of the process in 2015 that person was the one who was set up with an account so it was a few years ago once they are set up they can add users update information about the account bring in someone new to do it whatever it is they need to do to access it you can have organizations for independent schools and libraries school districts library systems most people most in Nebraska we are independent libraries each library just has its own individual account something that you used to have need to have was a pin number that randomly generated letters and numbers thing that you could never remember what it was I was actually in one of those binders behind me there you go is my little piece of paper with my pin you do still need that for one more form that one that's less stuff they're in the legacy system but for the Epic system you no longer need a number that is generated by e-rate you create your own password and you make that up yourself so much easier mostly for libraries to use then as an account administrator the main person you can then create as many other users that you want and there are various levels that you can have people have access to a full user so they can do everything in the system complete forms file them certify them whatever partial can do some work on the forms about actually submit them and then view only where people can just go in and look at things most of this kind of breakdown is for a larger organization so you may be at a larger library that has different people that have different authority to do things so maybe you have a tech person or someone at your library who knows your internet that you need that submits creates the form and knows what services you need or what equipment but then you want your library director to be the one that actually signs off and actually submitting it in that case you may give people different levels most of our libraries in Nebraska though is you're just a single person you're the one that does it all full user pretty much what you'd be doing all the time so you can get to it from that URL I mentioned to you but also this is the USAC website the main page for schools and libraries specifically usac.org slash sl schools and libraries and you have a couple of different places that you can get into in the upper right there's a blue button EPC button over there and then at the left and the under in the menu is apply for e-rate as a link when you click apply for e-rate you actually get a second page which talks a little bit about the epic system and the e-rate program but this is also where you would go if you need a new account created for you if you don't already have an epic account if a previous person who did do it has left the library and didn't pass on to you their login info you would need to contact them underneath the epic button there to the right it says new users contact us that is where you can reach out to e-rate use act to give you a new account now it depends and if you need to do that as a new person if you many some of our libraries you have a generic email address to log that you use or the director has a generic email address you know like library director at so-and-so public library.org if that's the same email address has been used before your login username for epic is that email address you can just use that reset your password and get yourself set up working it however if you have been issued a new email address specific to you potentially like with your name like mine is crista.porter at Nebraska.gov I would have to contact if my previous account administrator a previous person at my library hadn't already set me up with an account I would have to use this link to contact usack to get me a new account you just let them know I'm the new director I need access to my account they may ask you for some proof or something and then you get set up for it but when you go to login you click when you're ready and you've got your login info use that epic link button there's a short little here's the terms I agree and then you type in your username and your password now you can see here my username in this screenshot is crista.burns at Nebraska.gov is some you know I got married last year so my name has changed but my username for this is still the same um if you do or if you are using the same email address as I mentioned this is where you've got that forgot your password link this is where if you're using the same email address as the previous person but you don't know what their password was that's perfectly fine click that forgot your password link it will ask you for your username which is your email address and then it will send you and eat you one of those if you've ever done this before the usual here's the link to click on to reset your password and you can make up your own password now there are some rules to this password as with many places that are doing online things now the things that they think make our passwords more secure you do have to have an uppercase letter uppercase lowercase a number and a special character yeah special character meaning like an asterisk an exclamation mark those kind of things also you have to change this password every 60 days this is not something that you sac asked for this is not something that we like we did complain about this when this company that we set up with said that was one of the rules how it worked and we said we need to eliminate that that's a hardship that's ridiculous how I mean sometimes libraries are doing aren't doing forms even every 60 days there's lag between each form you have to do and they're gonna not gonna remember that they need to change the password they well they just wouldn't as they said that's something built into we just can't do anything about that so that's one of the things we just have to go with however what's interesting is they only keep and I can't remember if it's either four or five of the most recent of your passwords saved in their system and knowing that you've already used it and can't reuse it also you only don't have to change very much to to have a new password in this system what we why I recommend is make up some sort of a standard format so like pub live exclamation mark e-rate the e-capitalized one the number one it's great when it says that you need to read to change your password just change that one to a two pub live at pub live exclamation mark e-rate two the next time three then four the whole rest of that password can stay the same all you have to do is change one thing just that one number and once you've rotated through one two three foot one through nine you can go back to one again by then they've forgotten all your previous ones I strongly recommend doing that way don't drive yourself crazy I've had many libraries who every time I if I need to help them and I ask for their password to look into their account they've made up a whole new thing you know like puppy 17 exclamation mark wow and then the next time it's cows are yummy question mark 72 you know whatever you don't have to get that crazy each time and making up a whole new password with all different things just set up a format and just change that number every time easy when you are due to renew just change your password it will promote prompt you once you've tried to log in with your current one it'll pop up a thing saying your password's already expired or it's due to expire and let you change it so that's one of the things that with this new system is not the best but we work with it so once you do have figured out whatever your past login is going to be we sign in to our epic account and here is our landing page this is where you start off with whenever the first time you log in you'll be at your landing page this is your home page for your whole epic account anywhere you are in your account here if you ever see this logo the universal service administrative company logo with all those blue boxes you can click on that and it'll always bring you back to this landing page where you started on my screenshots here this is just the top half of the page we have you can look and we're going to go through all the specifics of all these different sections across the top there's a blue bar with some menu items the upper right you can see there's links to starting all different forms you want to do and working with your users and organizations then in the middle we have you can look up different notifications have any of your forms been submitted information about your entity that's you as a library below that is my tasks which I've done a second screenshot of the next session these are forms and things you are in the middle of working on that you haven't completed and submitted yet and then at the bottom is oh you can customer service cases if you've asked any questions or if they've asked you anything this is where they would be listed and then looking up your actual forms themselves what have you submitted what their status is now we're going to go through every part of this so you can see what they are all about so at the top we have our blue bar and there's five different menu items across the top here news, tasks, records, reports and actions first item is news now when you click on the blue bar up here for news you get some useful things and as some of you may have discovered some not so useful things and this screenshot it's actually kind of good these are SL and news briefs schools and libraries news briefs that have come up from my screenshot every week USAC sends out a weekly newsletter so to speak on through email and into your Epic account with just what's going on recently here's some upcoming deadlines here's a quickie how to evaluate an application how to submit a form articles written in there however also mixed in here could will be anything that has been about other libraries what if a library submitted a form if a library has received a notification about something if somebody's updated their info e-rate information is all public it's all publicly posted out there so anybody can know about it and it all dumps into here in this one general news thing news category so it's not very user friendly at all so even though it's right up there in the top bar we do not recommend using that and I just learned this honestly last month at an e-rate training that I went to and I don't know why somebody didn't tell me this before but there's a way to get just your library's info going back to your landing page right underneath the logo there's a welcome and then your library's name if you click on your library's name there then you get this is information about your organization and it's got its own little sub menu down here where it's got its own news link when you click on this news link then you get just your library's items just your notifications just your questions in here you can see I've got the library commission's 46 notification letter was sent the 46 was certified and way way at the bottom that's acknowledging that the 471 was done and then it cuts off so that's how you can just see your library's information which is what most people really want they want to know what has been sent to my library where am I at in the process is has you sat contacted me about something so even though it's right up here we do just don't click on that news at the top of the blue bar just the skip it do it this way instead go to your library's name hit its news and you just see the information for your library now the second option up in the top blue menu that's just you know that's when that tip there maybe the price admission for this whole workshop that some people had so much trouble with finding just their library's information another thing though that is be very useful is tasks the second part of second item on your blue menu up there this is forms that you were in the middle of working on if you've started a form and you had to get you got pulled away as you're working through a form the system will save as you go so if you realize oh we have to look up something I forgot to look this up before I got in here to submit the form that's fine you just log out of your account and you can go find that information and come back and continue where you left off here or if you get interrupted you're in the middle of doing something and a bunch of kids come in and need help in the library and you have to you know go help them or if there's a fire drill or something you know whatever works whatever happens this is where they save as you go now many people have been having trouble with this as well because any time you start a form it automatically puts it in here so going back to our landing page and this is just just a back a few screens to show you up here in the upper right it has our FCC form 470 471 486 this is where you click to start a new form and as soon as you click one of these it the system immediately creates a form in your tasks for you to start working on even if you haven't entered any information into that form yet yourself it has pulled information from your your personal account for you your organization information into that so then it started creating a form for you a lot of people are getting caught up in the confusion with this and that they keep clicking over there when they want to go back to a form thinking they'll go back and find their list of forms but that's not how it works every time you click on there it creates a new task for you so you may have multiple things here of a 471 or a 470 but you're really only working on one of them and I've had some people they've got like 10 15 different ones here and they don't know why what it will also do is when you have something in the tasks the system will automatically start sending your reminder emails letting you know hey you've got this task that you started this form you might want to continue with it you have this form to create and it can get confusing however and I'll show you when we get into a form here you can clean this up and delete all the ones that are in here that shouldn't be if you know which one is you're actually working on or can figure that out by going in and looking at each one of them the ones that you don't want to use there's a discard form button in the forms you just click that it'll say are you sure and you can clear it out of here and clean it all up so if you do have a lot of these tasks floating around or you keep it in the email saying you need to create this form because it just takes this phrasing here create FCC form 4701 and it just kind of it just spits that in mindlessly to an email to you which looks like I need to create a new form another one of the bad things about this system it's not what it really means it just means it's pulling from this and saying here don't forget this is out there it really means you need to continue with that form so take a look at your tasks see if you got some that are floating around there that shouldn't be and discard them if you're not sure let me know I can get into your account and look at them and let you know which ones I think are real and which ones need to be cleared out third item across the top is report records this is a kind of this is where we get into shoe horning array into this system there's a lot of things that are records reports and actions actually that are just dumped into various places because they didn't know where else to put them and they just kind of that fall into there all your forms are here where you can get a list to get into this is where you would get into any forms you have submitted in all the different areas you can look at appeals if you have put one in different entities consulting firms customer service cases and this is another page that's longer than fits on my screen this is the second half knowledge base so articles about different things that you might want to learn about with e-rate list of service providers here whistleblower cases is somebody doing something they shouldn't be in the system so a whole bunch of different things there and we'll see where some of them are useful to you to go in and look at the fourth section over is reports this also has a quick link back to your landing page if you're ever unsure of where you are or you don't see this logo to pop yourself back to the landing page just go to reports you always have this blue bar across the top no matter where you are in the system you can use that to get back to your home page for both your 470 and 471 after you've submitted it you can actually make changes if you realize after the fact oh wait I made a mistake our phone number was wrong or put the wrong amount in you can make a modification request and those are all here they also have funding progress reports you can see how your funding is being processed this is something that is a work in progress they may be they're trying to think of other reports that you might like so if you think you might know something send an email off to their customer support of if there's something you think you might like to look up for some reason that you can't already do in the system let them know and the last item across the top is actions this is where you can contact their customer service to create a whistleblower case if you know there's any violations going on and you can look up your 470 and 471s here as well to take a look at them now back to your landing page and the upper right you'll see notice there is this little silhouette head silhouette up here this is where you can get into your user account so you as a person using this system if you just hover your mouse over that head your name pops up if you click on it it actually brings up where you can go into your profile modify from some settings things like time zone and you can sign out of the system now I recommend always signing out whenever you're done it does have an inactivity timer of 60 minutes but it doesn't hurt just to keep getting the habit of when you're done click here click to sign out and you're out of the system but to go into your profile this is your personal information about you you do have or you can this is obviously another thing that they have some sort of like social aspects of the system that you might want to use I don't use it for anything as you can see you can put in a headshot of yourself here you can put this picture in the background to be different if you want to to edit it I had someone who said they actually put for this profile picture which always appears in the upper right I think it was a picture of their dogs because they were whenever I do e-rate it's so frustrating I want something to make me feel good and smile so I always have my dogs looking at me up there so you can do that with you can put anything in there we don't really use this to interact with each other for e-rate purposes the way this might be used in other companies who are using this type of system for something else but so do with it what you like but to modify your account there's an edit profile button here and there's a related actions button here you can get into manage your epic user profile this is information specific to you as the user and you can see here you can change your name phone number title address and then if you scroll down a bit from here just that's just the rest of the address information so if you are a new library director coming in or a new person coming into a library doing e-rate and the previous person has left but you're using the same email address remember I said you can go in and change the password to whatever you want by doing that forgot password because you're still using that same email then go into user profile and change the name to you first name, last name, phone number, job title all of that can be changed so if you are doing that go in here and you can modify that to be correct and that's all that's in there in your user profile it's very basic info what's great is all that user profile information is automatically pulled into a form whenever you submit it in the e-rate system you can also if you are adding someone so example someone new is coming on board who you want to have access to the e-rate system or you are the outgoing director and there is a good transition where you can just give a new person access manage users from the landing pages where you would do that you can create a new user add and remove existing ones and then update their permissions what you do have to do first is check in this box to select the organization that they are going to be in now for these independent libraries where you are just a single library this seems a little silly to have to check yourself because you are the only library but this system is also for school districts with multiple schools or libraries with multiple branches so you would have to say where they actually are but if you want to create a new one you just check that box hit the create a new user button and then you just get the same thing blank info just like that was on my user account that is already in there fill in all the info at the bottom of the screen now that you are creating a new one is the user permissions that you can set full user where they can do everything partial where they can enter some data but not actually submit all these different variations that you can possibly have set and you can set it specific to each form depending on what is appropriate if you are the one person doing everything or you are setting up someone who is the one person that does everything they actually also have over the left the apply all pull down where you can just say full rights for everything and then boom boom boom it will just set it full for all the way across so set this however is appropriate for whatever you are setting up you can also back to your landing page manage your organization information this is if everything about your library so when you click manage organizations from the top there similar to doing a person's individuals you check in the box and then you click the manage organization button and then you get information about your library so if you move into a new building you might need to change your address phone number whatever you can do all that at the top here even if your library's name changes maybe you are now it's a memorial library to somebody or some reason you're changing it you can change that in here latitude and longitude you do not have to worry about that is so if you don't know what your latitude and longitude is so your library don't panic that is something that can be used to figure out your urban or rural status if necessary but you can see at the bottom it actually also has that as a separate thing this is where it's pulled in from the census data or you can select it yourself here if you think it needs to be changed scrolling down that page you've got your mailing address for the library other contact information email address website URL if necessary scroll down a little bit more and you've got library information this is the type of library that you are and you definitely want to go in here and make sure this is correct for your library whether you're public or private and then anything that applies to you that you do if you are have a bookmobile if you have a kiosk your main library will always your your library will always be a main branch and then you might have other things that you'd put in here this is the one for the commission so we choose the state library agency because that's where we fall under this is also where you enter the square footage of your building that is used to calculate that category two budget that we talked about earlier I don't think this is accurate for the commission I just wrote 10,000 as a placeholder but this is where you would enter that information and then it automatically pulls from this to do your calculation once you have this account here all set up and ready to go you don't have to enter any of this information again on any of your forms it automatically pulls it from the organization account info the last bit of this page is your school district that you're associated with this is to do that discount calculation as well and it's not already listed here you've got a search here where you can look up what is in your zip code and where you are to figure out what your school district is and then the last thing on here is this FCC registration number this is a new thing that libraries need to have part of this new system and it will automatically fill into your forms once you put it in here anyone doing business with the FCC now has to have an registration number and put it on their forms this is something apparently that's been around forever for a long time but just now e-rate is deciding to use it you can look up your number here I've given a link to it here which is a very as you can see not easy to remember link but I also have it on our website so you can go there and click on it if you need to so that's the basics of your epic account and all the different things that you can look at in there any questions about that before we move on to the actual forms all right we're getting to the homestretch here well the going through the actual forms themselves so I know this is probably what you've been maybe waiting for so the first form in the e-rate process is the form 470 this is a form that is available right now in the fall actually it becomes available to use in the summertime so it's been available for a few months now it officially opens a competitive bidding process is what it does so this is as I said earlier public everyone out there can see it the only ones that would care to look at it would be service providers however now when you're submitting a form 470 what you're doing is saying officially what you're saying is we are looking for someone to to provide us with this service whether it's our monthly internet bill a piece of equipment installation whatever now you may be thinking well there's only one company in town that does internet for us this is kind of a moot point there's not competition and that's okay you'll just say that that's who the company you end up going with is the only one that's in town when you go on with the other forms but in order to get your e-rate discount you do have to go along with the process play the game officially open a competitive bidding process even though there won't be any competition on the other end other extreme end of that you may actually get contacts from providers that you've never heard of before this has happened with many libraries in the state and I have people mention this every workshop in person that I do company from Alabama is contacting me and wanted to give me internet service what is that this company who is only serves Omaha is reaching out to me in Scott's Bluff and what is that all about why are they even bothering I can't tell you why they're bothering I can guess my guess is there's a lot of competition out there now lots of little companies coming up and they're just doing a phishing expedition for anybody that they could possibly provide services for a company may see your application and say oh we serve Nebraska I'm going to reach out to this library and offer more services then you respond to them and say hey you sound like you got some good prices here I'm in so-and-so you know McCook Nebraska what can you do for me oh we only serve Lincoln and Omaha is what they may say in response okay that's fine then you just delete those emails and don't deal with them so you may end up this is what's been happening recently in the last since I've been doing this actually since 2009 is how long I've been doing E-Rate consulting here at the commission companies are coming from out of the woodwork so you may have that or you may have the other extreme where nothing nobody contacts you because there's only one company in town and you just have to deal with it but like I said you just go through the steps to get your E-Rate discount there is some situations where you do not need to do the 470 every year potentially if you have a contract that you've signed with an internet provider with a specific start and end date meaning as you we will lock you into this price for the next three years and then after those three years you have to sign a new contract with us for the next three years then you only need to do a 470 for the first year the year that you are looking for the service getting them for the first time every other year that you're in that contract you've already got your provider you don't need to look again you don't need to open up the competition again and you don't want to do that because you will be bringing yourself make yourself open to the new company coming in and you've got to start all over if you have a contract an agreement with a company which is typically what it is when you're an individual in some libraries where it just goes month to month you don't sign a new contract every year it's just yeah we signed up with them back in 2010 and they're our provider and you just monthly pay and nothing really changes that's not this situation that is when you would need to every year reapply let you rate no you're still doing it the company let them know they're still providing you the service this is where you specifically signed a contract that has a beginning and a hard end date and then when that is up you're going to have to renegotiate with them again in that case you wouldn't do the 470 you'd start with the 471 just letting you rate you say no yep we're still with them on year two yep we're still with them on year three another situation when you might not have to submit a 470 as this goes into the FCC trying to get libraries having good fast cost effective cheap internet access if you can find a company that provides you with this particular setup where the cost is $300 or less a month and your speed is at least 100 megabits per second download and 10 upload then you do not have to actually open up for competition you can just say I found a company that does this I'm good to go and you just skip the 470 and go with the 471 and start with that form now when I first started talking about this a few years ago when this first became a thing most there wasn't this isn't the kind of thing that's available 100 megabits per second it was unheard of or not they weren't there yet I had one library up in Norfolk actually got excited actually when I first did this which I was surprised and they said oh my provider offers us 90 megabits per second I wonder if I can get them just to go up 10 more if we can go with that then everybody skips this whole first process and none of this competition and you get to skip a whole form for everybody and unfortunately we found out what happened with that but so look for this if you can find somebody doing this also confirm that they're going to stick with it when you do get to the 470 so you're going to want to make sure this is a definite thing they're going to be able to offer you that speed and it's all good when you get to the 471 which won't be until in for us in 2018 now to start your 470 now we're going to go through the actual steps of going through an example of a form 470 going through all the different pages of it let me know if you have any questions as we're going if there's something you're confused about you're not sure where I'm clicking on type it into that question section I want to make sure everyone knows what we're doing as we're going through this form here so to start a new form 470 you click on the FCC form 470 link up here in the top there we go and then it creates a new form for you right off the bat it has put this into your tasks instantaneously we haven't even typed anything in yet and it's already in there if you realized you didn't want to start this form it was a mistake I just wanted to back out or I was really trying to get into when I already started I didn't mean to check up here this here on the lower left is where you have your discard form button click on that it will confirm are you sure you want to discard it and you say yes you want to make sure that you clear out anything from here as I said earlier because you don't want them to keep sending you email or reminders to finish a form that you didn't really mean to start in the first place so what you do to enter on this first page if this is a form you're doing is a nickname this is something that you create yourself whatever you want it to be you're not going to remember every time that form is created for you a new 10 digit number is associated with it so it'll be FCC form 470 number 784-32794 whatever you're not going to always remember all those so you give each form a nickname to indicate what it is for so something you'll remember so you can tell when e-rate contacts you use that contact you with questions which one they're asking for or for your own reference which tell you different years forms apart so for this one for example I labeled this one FY 2018 470 so I know this is my form 470 for funding year 2018 once that's entered on the right here you've got save and continue save and share that would be if you needed to send this to someone else to look at that it has to do those different permission levels so if you can enter the info but someone else has to approve it that would be the save and share generally you're the one person doing it so you just do the standard save and continue the second page of the form is nothing for you to enter this just pulls in information from your organization's info so all that stuff we had for our library you'll also notice across the top there's this bar that will move along as you move through the form basic information service request technical contact info etc etc as you're going through the form you'll see that bar move along so you know where you are in the process so save and continue this one the next basic info is consultant and contact information consultant information is if you pay a company to help you do your form there are companies out there that will help usually larger organizations like a large school district or a large library system they will help them submit their applications because there's just too much to do generally though for libraries here in Nebraska I don't know of anybody except for briefly for a while ago in the past Omaha public used a consultant but they switched so you wouldn't put anything in there but you would enter contact info are you the main person and you say yes or no and if you say yes it is automatically pops in your info from your user account save and continue again to the next page and now we're on to our service request and this is where we put in specifically what service and what thing that we are wanting to get an e-ray discount on we can do category one just click on that blue button there that blue box click on that to do category one or we can click on to do category two or we can do both if we wanted to in one form up to you which way you want to do it if you wanted to combine one big 470 that has everything or if you have some reason to separate them out you may need to do may potentially do category one right now because you know I've got a monthly internet bill easy to just submit a form for that and be done with it but I'm going to do a category one category two later because I need to go back and figure out what kind of if do I need to buy some routers or some switches or some cabling and I'll come back and do a second 470 for those things for this example I've done both so you can see a little about how they both look but once you've selected which ones you want to do save and continue it's going to ask you about an RFP request for proposal or request for quote is sometimes called this would only come into play if you're having generally when you're having a large construction project something that has so much more to do that you can't fit it all into the the spots they give you on this form and you've put together an official document saying we're looking for a major construction company to build on your library and here's the 20 page document that explains that but we want to get an e-rate discount the things we can you can upload that to the system there's an upload option on the right and then anyone who looks at this form for e-rate purposes will have all the information they need to decide to respond to you with any sort of bid for my purposes for this example I'm just going to say no and go on to the next screen but you can do that there if you have that's your situation so we save and continue that and now this is where we can put in the specifics for each category we've got our category one ability up here and category two below if I'd only selected category one I wouldn't have an option down here to do category two and the same way if I'd only done the form for category two I wouldn't even have an option up here at the top to do one so it says there are currently no category one service requests which is correct because we haven't done any yet so we need to add a new service request on the next page it has a pull-down menu for what you can choose but before that it gives you definitions and information about each service request at each function that you can possibly ask for so this is really useful it didn't used to be in here and I'm really liking this part so as an example if you're doing what we had mentioned earlier if you're doing least dark fiber you must use dark and lit just your choice to do provisional networks what counts for cell service and voice service here at the bottom so basically definitions of everything something that has been confusing people libraries a lot over the last few years as we've been doing these new versions of the form and so what to use for your basic monthly internet and there's three options that seem to fit that category but cause confusion the first one down here about the middle is transport only no ISP service included then there is internet access and transport bundled and then there is internet access ISP service only some internet companies separate out the transport that is the physically getting the the connection to you and the service itself as the two different categories and just for whatever reason how they do it if your company does this you'll know because there'll be these weird different different things you have to that will be listed out on your bill the transport cost is this and then this is that and also as you can see here it gives information about does not include commission internet service other than least dark fiber so they give lots of tips look for these things in the system here any of these tips generally speaking though for your usual monthly internet you're going to use this middle choice internet access and transport bundled that covers your usual companies that just provide you with everything they get you the connection to your building and they get you the service that rides on that connection so that's what we recommend to do now if as you're going along later on you realize I meant something different or I talked to my provider and it's actually something else that's okay these things can always be changed you can always cancel a form and start a new one if you even if you've submitted it that can be done sometimes depending on the change that needs to be done you can go in and do a modification don't panic if you're you find out afterwards that something is totally changed we can always work with that so I'm going to close up this little these definitions here there's a little you arrow down here and then open up the pull down menu for all the functions that are available so this is where you can have your lease lit fiber internet access and transport bundled transport only cell services at the bottom voice services at the bottom for this first one I did internet access and transport bundle my basic monthly bill so I click on that and then there's the add button over here to the right and then depending on what you choose it's going to ask you some more questions to give a little specifics so it's going to vary in this case it wants to know a quantity number of circuits and it tells you what the unit is for that quantity how many internet connections are coming into the library we only have one and then it has your capacity this is your speed minimum and maximum that you want and this actually if you open up these pull down menus goes all the way up to gigabits as speed because that is becoming available in many places around the country now so choose what your minimum as you want and your maximum you could possibly get now for for doing this I recommend doing your maximum of actually over what you're currently getting now so for example if your company is giving you 25 megabits per second say you're looking for 50 say you're looking for 100 maybe it doesn't mean you have to commit to that when you actually choose your service the 470 is like your dreaming what can I possibly get the 471 the second form is when you specifically pick what you actually went with and they can be different but the 470 does have to encompass what you say in the 471 so make this bigger than what you could maybe even think you could get because you don't want to you knock yourself out of it by saying well we only need 25 and then your company says well we actually offer 50 now that's great but if you didn't put that on your 470 you're only getting an e-rate discount on up to 25 megabits per second speed you can still pay for and get the 50 from your provider but you only get a half the discount because you didn't put that down on your 470 so think big on the 470 and don't worry about it on the 471 is when you'll say what we actually ended up with number of entities served this has to do along with the you know school districts and libraries with multiple branches but generally you're just one and then do you need this installed and do you need to maintenance on it or not um if this is our monthly internet and it's all we're that's what we're still get or we've been currently getting we don't need these I just said no and then you click add it then reloads that previous page and you can see it started it's started a little table showing what you just created now if we want to add another service request under category one we hit to click this add new service request button again and this time I'm going to do the voice service even though I know it's going away I'm just showing you how can you add another one so I choose voice and it asked me something different unit it says users this means number of lines we have two phone lines let's say it's only one single entity and the same thing it's the phone service we already have we don't need it installed we click add and now as I did the second one to our list to our table there and you just keep going as you want to add all those different category one services if there's maybe you're going to investigate getting fiber you'd want to add that as a choice or whatever there is a narrative right beneath that this is a free text box where you can type in more info if you need to I wrote here monthly internet service public library and local and long distance telephone service for public library so not a requirement but if you think there might be it might be helpful to put in a little bit more detail you can put that there if we scroll down from here we've got this installment payment plan question is next right before the category two this has to do with all the special construction getting new fiber lines run or something connected to your building these are high can be very expensive high cost and USAC knows that you might not be able to spend you know have that whole chunk of money and they just want to know if you're going to be doing an installment plan you can arrange with your provider or your construction company to do an installment payment plan on those kind of things and if you're going to be doing that you can let USAC know that here but if you're not you'd say no now we're going to add service category two service same thing as category one we click that add new service request button and then we get a different look because it's what is available in category two we've got our internal connections the basic maintenance of them and that special brandage managed internal broadband service I'm just going to do an internal connections one and you can see here I open up the pull down menu and this is where I've got all this different pieces of equipment that I can get routers switches racks cables wireless access points whatever I started out with some cable so I wrote cable chose cabling from the pull down it's going to want to know how many feet I want I wrote 500 I have no idea if that's accurate for what you'd need to do like a new lab or whatever so don't quote me if that's not right yeah manufacturer you can choose a certain brand or manufacturer if you have a preference if you want to there's a you open up to there's a huge long list if you don't pair you can just say no preference number of entities or just a single library still and in this case yes I would like someone to install it because I don't know anything about installing internet cabling in my in my library so yes we do want that installed we click add and now under the category two it's got that started that table started now I'm going to add a couple of more services here I'm not going to go through the whole process that I just did for category one and two because I think you can see that's it's the same every time it's just specific to what service you're asking for so I've gone through a couple of times now and added a router and three wireless access points and you can see they just add them to the list so you would then just go through your category two and for every piece of equipment you think you might be getting this year that you want to do you would add new ones to there when you're done this is a view of the full page pretty hard to read here I'm sure but this is the one you see what it looks like as a full screen you've got your category ones at the top your narrative if needed installment plan and plan I said no and then the category twos at the bottom so that's the full view and basically you just go through that and just keep adding things as you need to for whatever you're going to want until you're done and when you're done you notice the bottom that there's a save and continue button you hit that and it goes to the next step in the process and you can see the blue bar across the top has moved along technical contact person do you have a specific person separate from you who you would prefer that they call with technical questions do you have a techie person you know if you're the director and you're like you know big picture but you don't know the details of how many cables I need this is what you put in here if you don't you can say no and then I'll just contact you but I said yes and you can have them have their own epic account if they need to be in your e-rate system for some reason that would depend some tech people they don't care about e-rate they just know the your network and they don't need an account but you can enter their details manually if they don't need access to your epic account and that's what I've done here so storm is my IT person there's her phone number and email address and that's who they can contact for more info save and continue on to the next page state or local procurement requirements is their next question this is if there are any local or state laws that require how you can look for services sometimes there may be depending on you know for bigger projects like a building project that would be something you'd have to look at in your local or city or county rules and see if there is something along there for the state as a whole there isn't so I just said no for this if there was you would then let them know what those rules might be and that's the last step of the form of information that you're adding and now instead of saving continue we can review the form before we submit it and what it will do is it will generate a PDF if this was a active screen it's got that little swirly there on the middle that would be going around and around like they do when a PDF is trying to load and it's waiting unlike any other PDF in the world it will not automatically pop up when it's done you have to keep checking and that's what this refresh button in the lower right is you're going to have to click that and see if it's done if it's not it'll just reload this page still showing it's generating and you might have to click it multiple times I've generally had to do it two or three I click it I wait 20 seconds click it again wait another 20 seconds and the third time it comes through you never know you're just going to have to keep clicking until it is ready you could also up here on the top save a draft at this point and wait and come back if you wanted to but when it is done you'll get this instead instead of showing that it's still generating it will have a link to download it and then a box to check certifying the information is correct here we have our options to what we can do to certify at certifying it is signing off on the legalities and submitting it send for certification is if you need to send it to a different person that's when I was talking earlier about multiple people I can enter the info but my director has to sign off on it situation but if it's just me the continuous certification is what I would click right now it's not a dark blue button it's kind of grayed out because I haven't checked this box yet because I haven't looked at they want you to look at your PDF if you're sure that it's okay you can just check the box and go ahead but you can also click on the link there and get a PDF it'll just open it up for you and this is all the same information that we entered in our form our library info our contact info the different requests that we did service one category one category two and then our technical contact down at the bottom this then you could this is just a regular old PDF printed out down save it whatever you wanted to you can also save a finished version of it later but once you're sure that it's all good and ready to go you check in that box and then you continue to certification it's now once you've checked that box that button becomes active for you it'll pop up and we'll say this will send you directly to certification are you sure you want to submit you say yes and then this is this full screen of what you're going to get this is all those certifications this is all the legalese that you've got to check off on saying yes I agree to all the rules of the program I'm not trying to break any of them we are an eligible library blah blah blah I'm going to zoom I zoomed in a little bit here so you can see the specific certifications on the 470 you just have to check every box there's no well no thinking you should realize you're agreeing to all the legalese but every single box does need to be checked before it will let you certify I certify the applicant includes libraries I certify that if there is an RFP it'll be available I reviewed all the rules I'm going to follow them etc etc once you've selected all of them this blue certify button in the lower right will become clickable just like previously and when you click on it you see it's blue then the little scary legalese thing pops up false statements on this form are results in civil liability and or criminal prosecution that's true it is you know this is a federal program so this is just a scary you know make sure you weren't lying or try and just you know steal anything many money but you do say yes just submit the form and then it submitted what you can do now is you can and that's the last step you can look up the form back to your landing page at the very bottom it says FCC forms and post-commitment requests I've zoomed in on that you can now look up and see the status of your form to make sure that it's been if you're iffy if you're concerned this is what I always do you can look up all the different types of forms down here 470 471 the funding year and then you'll get results here you can see I've got two 470s that came up one certified one incomplete the certified one is the one that I've done it was good it got submitted the complete one is one that I haven't finished either I still need to or it was a mistake because I just started it but didn't finish it one of those ones floating around in my tasks in this case I use the commission's account to test forms and see how things work so I was working on a 470 so that's what some that's how the nickname can be important too you can see what you are doing for each form potentially and decide if it's something that you should be continuing with or not here now you can click on the nickname and you will see the web version of the full form similar to that PDF but here and then you can print that out if you want to or download it scan it whatever you need for your records any questions about the 470 submitting it you still all out there I hope once the 470 has been received by you sec you will receive a receipt notification letter this is a misnomer now that everything is done with the epics within the epic system within your online account previously it was a physical letter that was actually mailed to you and came as a piece of paper in the mail now it's all done within your online account it summarizes what you submitted and you can make changes if you need to it also gives you a very important date the allowable contract date because we were are officially opening up a competitive bidding process we need to let give potential companies tie a certain amount of time legally to contact us the FCC has determined that is 28 days so you have to wait 28 days before you can do the second form in the process the 471 and let them know who you picked basically you're letting any companies contact you potentially this letter will let you know what that date is it comes to you here in your news telling you FCC form 470 was successfully posted this begins a 20 day competitive bidding process the allowable contract date is and this is ours for 2016 426 2016 this is very important you can not go and do a 471 before that date if you do you've a lot some libraries jump the gun and go ahead and do that and if you do that too soon you will knock yourself out completely of getting any any rate funding you'll be just you'll be your application will be turned down so always make sure you wait for that time to pass before you jump ahead and do it this is also where if you wanted to you've got links down here to make any changes if you need to the 471 what's a really cool thing about the new system is when your allowable contract date is reached they will proactively email you which I think is awesome and this is actually sent to just your regular email account this isn't just within the epic system so you don't have to keep going in there and checking going in there and checking this is just a screenshot from my email where it's told me epic notification allowable contract date reach and it tells you the date's been reached you may now close your bidding process and go and go on to the next step which is the form 470 it also does put a copy of that in your news so you have a letter in there as well and you know your contract date has been met has reached but I think this is really select I really like this one I stood this is the kind of notification that's good to get not unlike the ones from your tasks that are not really tasks that you wanted to do this one is very very useful so competitive bidding process I'm going to try and go through this as quickly as I can because generally most of our libraries Nebraska don't end up having to get into this because you just have the one company in town it's the one you're always going to go with and that's fine you don't have you don't necessarily have a competition but as I said at the beginning talking about the 470 you do have to go through the motions of the process for e-rate in order to get the funding so you do your 470 you wait 28 days then you look and see if you didn't get multiple contacts if multiple companies did potentially contact you and you evaluate them choose who you're going to go with if you need to sign a contract sign one if it's just your same company you might just have a little email conversation with them it's like hey we're still doing this great we're on board and then you do your 471 now the 471 this is something ah went too far that has as it mentioned here an application filing window the form 471 is only available during a certain small bit of time during the year runs for about 75-ish days and it varies every year it's only available for that short time and it varies as to when that window as they call it opens and closes right now we don't know what that is they have not announced when it's going to be we think it's going to be sometime in January 2018 for this year which means it would close sometime in March exact dates to be determined to be announced this is something related to this that a lot of people ask me regularly is what is the deadline for submitting the 470 what is the deadline for starting my e-rate process because that's what the 470 does right and the deadline for the 470 is related to the window for the 471 whatever the end date the closing date of the filing window is 28 days before that you just count back 28 days that's the deadline for the 470 because that's the latest date you can possibly do a 470 and then still of 28 days before you can do your 471 the last date you can do your 471 so that's the deadline however we do not recommend that you wait that long please please don't if you do wait until the deadline for the 470 the only date you have now to do the 471 is the final date of the window if and guarantee too many people do wait that long or just for whatever reasons have to their servers at the USAC will get bogged down might be slow they might have issues with the diss system there might be a power outage at your library you can't get online to do it there might be a blizzard and you can't get to work to do it there's too many things that could happen that could cause problems with you not being able to get it done on that last date because that is the last possible date and if you miss that date you are out of the window they call you can submit outside of the window but you are way down on the possibility of getting your funding and you might just get rejected completely because you were out of the window so don't wait for the 470 deadline don't even wait for it to be announced go back to your library tomorrow you know today we're we're ended in pretty late in the afternoon tomorrow go back and start working on your 470 now there's no reason to wait get it in get it started get that count started in those 28 days then you know definitely the window opens in January you would have gotten those 28 days and then you can just jump right into the 471 when it does become available that's my strong recommendation to you to just jump on right away don't wait till the last minute when that window is open I will announce it everywhere when when those dates are announced I will announce it everywhere so you will know when it is open when is the actual deadline for the 470 but I checked right before we started today this webinar they still haven't announced it yet so keep your eyes and ears open for something for me competitive bidding back to that quickly must choose the most cost effective bid this is only something you have to do if you have more than one company that contacts you and they are actually responding to something you actually asked for in the 470 so for those companies like I said that don't actually serve our area toss them don't even worry about it if you reach out to them because they look like they're in Nebraska but they say we're only in Omaha delete them you don't have to even do this if you have somebody contact you and they offer you something that's not what you put in your 470 for some reason I had this happen a lot with the library commission I actually submitted the e-rate application for the commission we applied for telephone every year we have now phased out of that because of the discount going down I would regularly be contacted by companies offering me cell phone service we don't have cell phone for the commission we had local long distance and a couple 800 numbers and that's all that was on our 470 application you receive notifications saying I am contacting you in response to your form 470 for funding year 2018 and here's the services we offer and they'd say we got great cell phone plans and these are rates and whatnot I didn't ask for phone for cell phone I can just delete those and ignore them so only you only have to deal with this if you receive more than one contact from companies actually serve in your area and actually offering you the services you asked for the key is that it's cost the most cost effective bit and here is a chart that gives you a definite example of how what that means cost effective isn't always just cheapest you taking consideration multiple things to decide who you're going to go with you do want to look at the price but there are other things that are going to be important to you prior experience are they your current company are they flexible on giving you your discounts are they good for the environment are they local or not you decide what these things all these things are that matter to you assign them points giving price the highest number of points but not the most so you can see here price gets 30 points everything else is 20 or less and that's correct and then when you get your potential bids you compare them give them their points based on what you put over here you can see here vendor number two got the full 30 that means they're probably the cheapest but vendor three got the higher number of points in the end and that's the one you go with and you can see here the key here was there are current company this is a new guy in town this is what you can assume here from the these guys getting zero and he's having a full 20 and this is correct for you getting picking this vendor the fact this is one cheaper USAC will be totally fine with that if you do have multiple contacts do something like this to document why you chose who you chose because USAC can come around and ask for more information about why you picked who you picked that 10 years that you have to keep documentation they can go back 10 years to double check on something you did if they want to this vendor vendor number two may notice you picked a different company and they may go to USAC and say hey we know we are cheapest in town why didn't they pick us we want an investigation and they may ask you well can you explain why you picked vendor three or vendor two if you have this you're good to go you just show this to them and say well here's why this was our decision making process we took price into account the most but there was other things that mattered and you're good like I said there's a 95% chance you'll never have to do this most likely you'll get this situation no bids or only one if you receive only one bid that's fine you can just go with them you don't need competition you're required to find another company to compare just write yourself a memo or email yourself a note saying only so and so contacted us that's what we're going with if you didn't get any bids this happens often where your current provider just assumes you'll continue with them then you can then you can reach out to them and ask can you just send us something submit something let us know that we're going to continue because I need some documentation to prove to USAC and ERATE if they ever ask that we're still going with each other so this is a more likely situation but I do explain the competitive bidding because in case that comes up you'll know what you're talking about so any questions about the form 470 before we move on to the next form now we officially have about 10 minutes ish left in the session we did start a little late however because of my mistake of having the wrong links sent out so we did start a little later then we did start exactly at 130 like we're supposed to so we will probably go beyond 4 p.m. or official original start time but I just want to make sure I get everything in here I will everything is being recorded however so if you did only say you're only going to do this till 4 that's okay if you need to leave don't worry of recording all the way to the end you'll have the archive that you can watch if you for anything that you missed at the end so the second form in the ERATE process is the form 471 this is the one where you let USAC know who you ended up choosing this is the discount calculation is put in here you say who you picked how much it's going to cost from them what you ended up going with at this point USAC recommends this is when you would contact your provider and confirm exactly what you're getting what the speed is going to be for your internet what you're going to be buying from them if you're going to be doing how the everything is going to be installed construction if any of that needs to be done and talk to them about how you're going to be invoiced that's how you're going to receive your discount discount on your bills or reimbursements and we'll get to that in a second also just to remind you this is after the 28 days has passed after you've got an agreement in place then you do the 471 if I knew the filing window this would have the dates on my slides but it's to be announced because we still don't know and this is the one that you do do this every year but you wait those 20 days and you wait for the window to open you can't even get into the 471 until that window opens so you can't jump the gun for that at least it's just not even physically able to do it now to get to the 471 it's just like the 470 it's the upper right for the 471 and all the other forms in the process I do not have the full screenshots of the whole process like I did for the 470 because as I just mentioned for example the 471 you can't go on with it's not available but I've got some info about them and details these are things also you won't be doing until next year anyways but you click the 471 that looks very similar to the start of the 470 you've got your bar across the top that will you'll go through the different parts of the form give it a nickname and go on to the different to enter all the information about your funding request you'll see the second part is your entity information that's your library's info that's automatically dumped in there and then your funding request is the next part I do have a slide here though that explains how the funding requests work each thing that you ask for an e-rate discount on is a specific funding request so your monthly internet bill your monthly voice services I bought a router I'm having construction done each of those things is a separate funding request they are each assigned a funding request number as you create them in the system after each one of those funding requests is created then you have to put in the cost information the details about how much you're paying for so this is kind of a there's two parts to a funding request creating the request itself and then putting in the costs this is a place where some people kind of get lost they've created the request and they don't know why it's giving errors if you haven't entered money information that's the best way I can describe it and at cost amount in a 471 you haven't finished creating a request and it's a multi-screen multi-step process too like you mean like on the 470 where you had to do multi-steps to get something in there same kind of thing you got to create say you're looking for a service and then the next screen what it costs what the next service is and then what it costs and on and on for each one one at a time now this is the one form though that for category 1 and category 2 you do have to submit separate 471 forms you can't do them all on one form like you could for the 470 this is because of how that discount calculation is done for the category 1 it's just a discount up percentage off for the category 2 it's that budget their system can't do both of those kind of math on one form so if you are applying for both category 1 and 2 you'll do a single potentially a single you can do a one a single 471 but when you get to the 470 I'm so sorry 470 when you get to the 471 you'll have to do two one for all your category 1 services and one for all your category 2 services you'll then put in you'll choose your different types of services this case is internet access digital transmission and then the line items is what it's talking about the specific cost of each thing those funding request numbers are important to remember to know about because that is when USAC may call you with questions that's what they'll refer to funding request number so and so each service provider has what they call a spin number this is something else to be aware of service provider ID number sometimes they may have more than one depending on what services they do sometimes they just have one it's for everything sometimes for whatever reason they want to be identified as a different company for different services so if you're doing something new with them they've never done before you might it would be a good idea to double check to make sure what spin number they want you to use otherwise you might not get connected with your rate might have a little disconnect there if you don't have the right one if it's the same you know you're just doing your monthly internet and it's the same one you've been doing for the past five years you're probably fine to go but anything new double check with them after you submit your 471 just like the 470 you get a receipt not notification letter acknowledgement you can make changes to it if you need to it goes into your news item just like with the 470 and this is where you can make any changes if necessary and this is where you go into application review this is where you wait this is where USAC then will look at your application and see if it's everything's correct on there see if your services are correct if you are eligible this is where they may contact you to ask for more information so basically the 470, 471 and they use it back and wait and this may take months and I do mean months and months and months there are some libraries for the 2017 funding year which actually did start in July that as of today are still waiting for their answer from USAC on if they're going to get a discount or not this is a long ongoing process they have generally 60 some odd thousand applications to go through so it can take some time especially with all the new things so you do need to be prepared to pay your bills in full at the beginning of the funding year just in case it takes them a while to get your application so keep that in mind as you're applying for e-rate if they do contact you for more info this is the group in USAC program integrity assurance who will reach out to you they will send you you will get an email to your regular email address that says we have a question go into your epic account to answer it sounds kind of weird and convoluted but they want all the questions and answers kept in your account in one place so you guys both have the same one place to go find everything so you get an email that says that they're going to give you 15 days to respond if you can't get back to them you can get an extension so don't panic if it takes you a long time or you don't know they tell you where to go to answer all the inquiries in your form so this is just a step to go into it and there's a link actually from the email that gets you to there related actions respond to inquiries is this is the mail is the menu option I don't have screenshots of that because I haven't had any questions since asked of me but that's just to give you an idea of where to go now if you do get these and you don't know what the heck they're asking for or you can't forget how to get to it this is where you call me USAC for whatever I suppose for legal reasons likes to write a four page letter asking you for more information when it could be like three sentences it's just there you know like there's legalese I call it USAC ease they it's long drawn out sometimes it's hard to interpret what is it they mean what do they really need from me if you're on if you're unsure if you're confused if you can't figure out what they're asking for contact me this is where I help libraries a lot I can get into you give me your login info I can look in your account see what they asked for and I can translate for you that's probably like 50% of my job as e-rate coordinator public libraries is translating USAC anything from USAC for you guys for the libraries so if you get a immediately let me know if you're not sure and I can work with it on you and we can get an answer to them so that you can get your funding so do not be afraid about that don't panic sometimes it's just they weren't sure about something they might want a copy of a bill just to make sure you're just a spot check type thing you never know what they may be asking for and it doesn't necessarily mean you did anything wrong it just means they need clarification on something with all the new rules and things going on it seems to be coming up a lot more often but that's what I'm here for we can get you through it we can get your answer to them and get things moving along now once they are done with their evaluation they've gotten all the answers they want from you they are ready to give you their answer you get a funding commitment decision letter once again not an actual letter it's a notice that comes to your epic account and this tells you if you've been funded or not or if it's been reduced whatever you may be get more than one of these they may break up and I've seen this happen now with libraries they may look at your category one application services first get all that done and then go back and look at your category two so you may get a funding commitment decision that's just about your category one things but you're still waiting on the other one so just getting one of these doesn't mean everything's done you need to look at it and read it and see what exactly they funded for you this is where some people lose it in the process as in they get this funding commitment letter it says you have been funded for this amount of money congratulations and they say yes I did my E-rate I'm done no this is not the end that is actually just a notice saying we have set aside this much money this money for you you need to let us know if you want it and that's what the info is used to prepare your 46th that form I told you about the third form in the process where you say yep we want the money you set aside for us so don't like think I'm done I got my I got my notification I did it all you still gotta let them know that you actually want the monies after this so when your funding commitment is done you will get an email sent to your main your personal email account not just within your epic account so that's nice a little nudge saying hey your funding commitment letter has been done and it will say you need to go into your epic account to generate the notification and look at it and see what it all says so when you log into your epic account up at the top of your landing page you choose under notifications your fcdl funding commitment decision letter whatever the funding year is and once you enter those two then it will automatically just reload the page and list your notification letter here when you first bring it up it has the data was issued and then over on the right it says generate notification you have to click on that and then it will reload the page and now it says view notification and it says who generated it and when it's just some weird technical thing behind the scenes similar to reviewing your pdf of your form your 470s that you need to just have it generate generate that officially you can then view it it will then bring it up pop you over to your news where it has this thank you for your funding your application this postcontain your funding commitment decision letter just some general stuff about it and then this is longer than my screen below that I'll link to information about it and then this here with a little paper clip this is a spreadsheet with the details about your money how much you're getting and what's for it's also listed out here in more general terms that it is this is the total amount we were approved for zero denied and what the funding commitment application form identifier was the details of it so you can look at this if you can look especially if you want to otherwise all this information is there in your e-rate account already and ready to dump into your 486 if you don't agree with their decision if you think you were denied incorrectly or reduced incorrectly you can do an appeal there's information on the use sec website about how to do that you'd appeal to SLD which is USACS Schools and Libraries Division if they don't approve your appeal then we bump it up to the FCC they're pretty good at this looking at them and evaluating them it can take some time though this is not an instantaneous oh let me check oh you're right that box just ticked wrong two days later you have your money appeals take a long time they've already gone through that long process of evaluating your application when they did that the PIA review so be prepared to pay in full or have your bills out there until this process does end let me know if you want help with that so once you've got your funding commitment letter you've generated it you're ready to do your 46 where you are letting you sec know that you want the money what is awesome about the 486 is that all the information you need is already in epic and just auto fills your 46 form there is practically nothing you have to enter yourself this is one of the huge great awesome things about the epic system 486 up in the upper right-hand corner of your landing page same thing you have to give it a nickname but in this case you do have to choose what funding year you're looking for and who you are as a contact person once you got those in there it automatically on the next screen lists all of your funding requests the things that you had created on that 471 of the specific details of each item that you were getting what it costs and everything and the fact over here on the right you can see FRN status funded these are all the things that have been approved for you they're up here at the top if you needed to do a search you could but you don't have to if it's already bringing up the right ones and then all you gotta do is select them you gotta check in the boxes in front of them and mark all of them and to add to your form that's a little gray button here you can barely see says there's also a button that says add all four if you just want to click that and do them all at once once you do that they just it just pops them down to the bottom and they are now selected so you've got to check them all reload the screen the atom the screen reloads once you've got them listed as selected then it will let you go on to the next step of just finishing up the form easy see all of these funding request numbers you don't even have to enter them they're already there for you what they were for what the amounts are it's already all in there certifications in the 46 or something you've got to pay attention to unlike the 470 and the 471 where you just kind of check them all because they all apply this is where you've got to pay attention and make sure you check the right things otherwise your form could be held up in the process early filing is only if you happen to get your funding commitment before July 1st and that would be great if you did then you're doing it early as in we're answering all these things and submitting it before the funding year starts it's after July 1st you don't check that sip a waiver is if you're you got to read these certifications here waiver of sipper requirements for the second funding year in which you have applied for discounts so when you are first getting started with doing internet and complying with sip but they actually do if you don't already have filters in place and you're working on figuring out how to do it they give you three years to do that first year is your first application second year you're still in the process third year you've got to have it in place and be able to certify that you're in compliance if you don't then you've got to step back and not get any of those monies so this is only if you're in that second year the next screen of certificate and there's a second screen certifications in the 46 the first one is having to do that technology plan we just ignore that now and leave it blank it's still kind of hanging out there the other two boxes you just check off these are the legalese of yes I'm complying with the problem program the SIPA certifications this is where you've got to pick one and you've got to pick the correct one we had quite a few libraries in the last year for some reason 2016 that selected the wrong certification they said they didn't need to be in compliance even though they were applying for internet their applications have been held up it's been some weird either people picking the wrong one by accident or some technical thing behind the scenes we're not sure but double check when you select these you'll see here this green the button here says preview you can double check and make sure you check the right one before you actually submit the first one is I certify that I'm in compliance with SIPA because I'm doing internet the second one is another one we're in the middle of working on it that second year and the third one is that it does not apply because we're only applying for telecommunications telecommunications meaning telephone which is being phased out so unless you're doing just phone because you're one of those last few people still holding on you've got to be one of the other two either you're in process of becoming in compliance with SIPA or you already are in order to do e-rate so just be aware of that pay attention make sure you check the right boxes there now the deadline for the 46 is 120 days after service start date which is July 1st generally or 120 days after you get your funding commitment letter if it comes after the July 1st date now if end of October ends up being the deadline for if you've gotten the letter before July 1st sometime in the beginning of October you may get an email from me nudging you if you have not done this yet I do pay attention I can look up and see who's done their forms when the deadlines are coming up I can you know see that you still need to finish something and that your deadlines coming up and I will proactively email you directly this is not just a general hey everybody make sure you check I specifically look up and only email to the specific libraries who don't have their form in so you will get an email from me potentially saying you're receiving this because you've not done your 46 yet and that means you haven't you must go in and do it so pay attention if you do hear from me I do this this is part of my job is to nudge you and make sure you don't miss any of your deadlines so you can get all of your monies you will get a notification letter sent to you and your service provider in response to doing your 46 just like all the other ones and that's what this is your form 46 notification letter is available has been posted and you can go there into your Epic account and look at it if you want to any questions up into here we're almost up to the last form in the process all right the last thing you need to do for your e-rate application is the what they call the invoicing this is 472 or 474 depending on your situation you can either repay your bills in full and get reimbursement afterwards or you can research provider discount your bills right off the bat if you are going to pay your bills in full you would submit what they call the bear form the build entity applicant reimbursement form if you are going to be getting discounts on your bills your service provider would do the spy form the service provider invoice form that at this point this is the one where I told you the third the fourth form fourth forms in the process depends on your situation if you're doing the spy they're just going to discount your bills you don't have to do anything it's the service providers responsibility to ask usack for their reimbursement and then pass on the discount to you and your bills if you're doing the bear form it also has a deadline that happens to be the end of October as well just like the 46th but this is 120 days after the last service date June 30th you see they kind of fall one day from each other if you haven't done a bear form for a particular year I can look up and see if you haven't done that and if you've whether or not you've gotten the service provider form done and I will send you an email about that as well at the beginning of October so you might get multiple emails from me at the beginning of the month of October one saying hey you still haven't done your 46th for the current year and one saying hey you haven't done your bear for the last year pay attention read your emails like I said I'm trying to make sure you get everything done by your deadlines now bear payments now are only done by direct deposit so you do electronic bank transfers into whatever bank account you say issue checks that would go through your service provider and then to you no more that's just all online so you do have to provide them with banking information this is a one time thing form 498 you go in and give them your the usual banking info if we ever done direct deposit for your job you know it's your bank account information routing numbers all the usual that you will need to know your federal employer ID number tax ID number that your payroll person someone at the city may know that if you don't know it something new you'll have to know also is have is a done's number done in brad street number this is also used to doing business since you're doing direct deposits with the government you can look up to see if you already have one and apply for one if needed this kind of number and also that way back with the beginning of that I talked about the FCC registration number these are instant almost things that just take a second you plan from online and you have an email and you've got your number the 498 is in a different form than everything else it's not up here with these other ones because it's a special case form you go to the your name underneath the logo related actions here and then about half way down the page is create the form 498 and I'm not going to enter show you any of this with our bank information but as you can see it looks very similar to the other forms you just go through the process of the financial contact info organization numbers remittance information that you build your banking numbers all that and submit it after you submit it they will ask you for some sort of proof just like when you do direct deposits you do need to do a avoided check or in this case they'll also accept a bank statement so you'll get an email this isn't as you can see this is an email sent to your regular email address not within the epic system saying we need the documentation and they send you to a specific secure website to log in and up and put this information it is not in the same epic system with all of your other stuff so it is kept safe and secure elsewhere once you update that information then they will issue you what they call an ID number the 498 ID and you'll be able to do your bear the reimbursement form you get your discounts all this is only necessary if you're paying your bills in full and then getting a reimbursement after the fact if you're just getting discounts on your bill from your service provider you don't need to do any of this they're just giving you a cheaper bill so this will only depend the bear form is the one form that is that I mentioned that is still in the old legacy system it's not in the epic account the epic system yet so in order to get to your bear you have to go over here on the main use sec website under forms it's a 472 you see it's a build entity applicant reimbursement bear form you can file it online I'll also mention here while I'm showing you this in this form section use sec has a lot of really good user guides and help and videos about how you use all their different forms I strongly recommend looking at these if you're unsure about how to do anything in a form they're all updated for the new versions of the forms I actually use those myself many times and you guys ask me questions about where do I put input this why do I input this this is where I go to but to do a bear you file online here and this goes into the old legacy system you may remember it this is where you will need the one place you still need that old pin number if you don't remember it you've lost a piece of paper you need a new one you just call contact use sec from their website and they can get you a new one you will get a notification that your bear has been submitted and then you'll start getting actual and this is actually that the bear online form has been accepted so you know that it's been submitted you'll also get quarterly reports that will let you know what has been deposited into your bank account or and or what has been sent to your service provider that they should then be discounting you pay attention to these reports they come in your email this is the one that we got for the commission so just your regular email account not built into your epic it's a e-rate program remittance statement in this case it shows all of the bear payments that we had received if there was service provider invoice ones where they had been in money would list those pay attention to these reports and compare them to the bills you're getting from your service provider if they're supposed to be giving you a discount make sure they are this letter being sent to you means usack has sent them money said them the money that they should then be cutting off taking off of your bills when they send them to you double check all that make sure it's happening also double check that these got deposited into your bank account I actually sent this to our business manager and she told me not even in a day or two that oh yeah it was already in the bank account it's that quickly for the direct deposits of the bear reimbursements so pay attention when you get these and that's actually the last step of the e-ray process is getting your monies yay so I just got a last last few slides of some info but does anybody have you haven't had any questions the whole time I hope that's okay I hope I'm not going too fast or too anything do you have any questions you want to ask me before we wrap up I've just got like I said two or three more slides is just some info type into the questions section and I can answer any burning questions you have about e-rate right now before we wrap up for the afternoon are you out there hello I see you I guys logged in all right well if you don't have any questions that's fine if you do need to contact USAC to get an epic account to get a pin number this is their 800 number their client service bureau is what they call their customer support you can also submit a form online oh okay oh good we have a comment thank gosh people are there no questions right now someone says I just appreciate you're going over everything thank you I thank you very much I especially like your tip on finding out finding just our library's forms yes it's there's so many different parts in this epic system it sometimes can be hard to navigate it and I hope some of these screenshots and some of the things on the presentation will point you in the right direction thanks for that comment Beth schools and libraries news briefs I'd mentioned this when I was showing the news this is a weekly newsletter if you want to get from them it's usually only a couple of pages long like I said information about upcoming deadlines tips and tricks about things that you can do how to do things in this in the application process they do have a nice application process let's say I have a copy of it here flowcharts I suppose you call it a nice colorful flowcharts there we go that you can get on their website this shows the libraries process and the service provided process so if you're interested in that that's the application process there these are the two things listed here e-rate central and funds for learning these are both companies that do these are like those consultant companies that I mentioned where you can pay a company to submit your e-rate application for you however they both do have really good free information on their websites health guides instructions rewriting of some of the e-rate stuff I actually use both of them myself sometimes when I can't even myself understand what e-rate where USAC has mentioned or the FCC has said they've really helped me out so I do recommend those if you want to if you need more help about something and of course me they can contact me that's what I'm here for the 100 number here at the library commission my email address we do have an e-rate website where I've got a lot of links to these things that you might need the spreadsheet for your school lunch numbers from the department the Nebraska department of education where to get your FCC registration numbers where to apply to all the forms timelines of everything the recording of this this session will be posted onto that website as well so you can have access to that and the PowerPoint that I used here all of that will be available is available on our website so that will officially wrap it up for today e-rate what's new for 2018 webinar please do call me email me if you need any help as you're going through the process it's not an easy process I know but it is a very fruitful process if you do get that discount and that's my job that's what I'm here for is to get you your e-rate money and I can do whatever I do whatever I can to help you navigate and get through it successfully so thank you very much for attending and good luck with e-rate