 Hello everyone and welcome to the new E-Rate, preparing for funding year 2015 and beyond. I am Krista Burns from the Nebraska Library Commission. I am the Special Projects Librarian here. That is my title here at the Library Commission. And one of my duties as Special Projects Librarian is E-Rate. I am the State E-Rate Coordinator for Public Libraries here in Nebraska. And now I do see on our list of registered attendees today we have people, lots of libraries from Nebraska, which is great. We also have some schools. That's fine too. This workshop you're going to go through will be the basics of E-Rate. So if you're new to E-Rate, you'll find out exactly the steps to go through. It will also be including a lot of the new things that are coming out from the new E-Rate modernization, new changes coming up to E-Rate. But if you are school here in Nebraska, I don't actually handle consultation and training officially for schools. It's great that you come to this session here and anybody who's watching and recording later. But most of this will be specific to our public libraries because that's who I handle. However, the basics are the same for everyone so that will be fine. If you are here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Department of Education handles training and support for all our schools. Sue Ann Witt is the person on staff there who you can contact in Nebraska. I also see we have people who are from outside of Nebraska and that's great too. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Nebraska where it's actually not snowy or anything yet right now today. It's been kind of cold. But we have not been hit by any of these great storms going on across the country yet. But welcome to our E-Rate presentation. As I said, this will be appropriate to you as well but be aware that there will be some things that are specific to Nebraska and to Nebraska public libraries in the presentation. But the basics of E-Rate and the new things happening will be appropriate in effect to everyone. Having said that, let's... Oops, hang on a sec here. There we go. So first up, what is E-Rate if you're brand new to E-Rate? E-Rate is a federal program that was created by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. So the first year you could apply for E-Rate money and discounts was in 1997 and the first year anyone received funding was in 1998. So the program has been around for quite a while. The Telecommunications Act, one of the parts of it indicated told telecommunications, telephone, internet providers that they must provide cost effective services to schools, libraries. Also parts of it have to do with healthcare facilities, people in low income areas as well. So the E-Rate program came out of the Telecommunications Act and it provides discounts. What we're going to talk about here today is mostly public libraries and also schools because we're kind of linked together in the program. The E-Rate program is funded through the universal service fee. This is a fee that you'll see on your phone bill, on your internet bill, your service providers pay it as well. One of those being of the 10, 15 different fees and taxes that you pay, it's on there. So we all put in money into the program to create the funding that then is divvied up amongst the libraries and schools to receive it. Now the FCC is in charge of the program. They're the department in the U.S. government that oversees the program. A not-for-profit company was created to administer E-Rate, the universal service administrative company, we call it USAC. Within USAC there is the schools and libraries division which is who handles everything for public libraries and the schools and that's who we deal with. They handle E-Rate. Other programs that are part of USAC are for healthcare providers as I said for people who are low income and people in high cost areas, places where it's really much more expensive than normal to receive phone and internet services. I would think they'd be something like Alaska somewhere it's hard to get to. Now E-Rate rules are set by the FCC. They decide what will happen, what the program should do, and then USAC and specifically within USAC for us, the schools and libraries division, they take the FCC rules and policies and make them into actual procedures, figure out the forms we need to fill out, how they're going to process things, how that all works. Every now and then FCC, every year pretty much actually there's some sort of updates to the program, little things, minor things, new things you can discount on, tweaks to the forms, but every now and then there is something big that's what has happened this year. We have an E-Rate modernization report and order that was officially adopted in July earlier this year. It's been talked about for quite a few years now that's been leading up to this. You may have heard it described as E-Rate 2.0 or E-Rate modernization closing the Wi-Fi gap, that kind of thing. There's various things that's been discussed, but there's been a lot of discussion and articles and things written about it about these changes that are coming. So this is what we're going to be talking about a lot today, mixed in with our basics of E-Rate is all these new things that are coming. Anywhere in this presentation where I've tried to make it where it is in green text, that is the new things. So new things as of this modernization report and order from earlier this year. Everything else is the way E-Rate has always been. Now this is only the seventh time in the history of the E-Rate program that there's been some major update and new report and order like this. The last one, the sixth report and order was in 2010. So it's been a while since there's been a major change. That was another time where some forms were updated and major changes, bigger changes were done. This one I think has even more changes coming to it. So we'll be talking a lot about that. So FCC sets the rules, USAC figures out the procedures and then they submit those procedures they've come up with back to the FCC for approval. So it's always back and forth, back and forth until we have our final procedures. And as we go on this afternoon you're going to find out that there will be some things we don't know yet because we're still not sure when things are going to be happening or what's going on with the stuff. So who can apply for E-Rate? All public libraries are eligible for E-Rate. Here the basic rule is you must be eligible for LSTA funding in some way. Here in Nebraska all public libraries are eligible so every single public library in the state is. Any schools and school districts they would be eligible as well. And if you had consortias where you can get groups of public libraries or groups of schools together. For example to do a discount purchase on something or who just worked together for other reasons they could also apply as a group as well rather than the individual school or library. Now first thing that you want to do, so that's just the basics of E-Rate. First thing to figure out is calculating your discount. So to calculate your discount figure out how much of a discount you can get on your products and services. How much of a discount can you get? You can get anywhere from 20 to 90% off of your services. This is your phone, your internet, other wiring, anything and we'll get into the specifics of what is actually eligible. The discount for a public library is based on the percentage of students that are in the school lunch program. This is the free and reduced program for lunches free and reduced lunch program for kids in your school district. And this is specific to where the public library is located. Now you may serve students from other school districts, from multiple school districts, and that's fine. But to calculate your discount you look at geographically where is the library located and what school district that is and that's the numbers that you look at. In addition to that you look at whether you are urban or rural. In Nebraska most of our libraries are rural. Naturally we do have a few urban areas. Lincoln, Omaha, maybe some of the larger cities would be considered into the urban. But most of them fall under rural, which is good because rural areas get a larger discount. So to figure out the, to actually make this calculation you look up your national school lunch numbers. Here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Department of Education now posts these numbers onto their website. So you just go to the DOE website. I posted a link there. I also have a link on our e-rate webpage that I'll show you later. There's a spreadsheet. They post every December. So you have the most recent numbers for the upcoming year. And you just look up there, look up your school lunch numbers for whatever your school district is. And you need the numbers for the entire district. If you've got an elementary, middle, high school, all those have to be included. And just for the district your library sits in. And as it said in the previous slide here, you need to also not include the pre-K. For e-rate purposes for doing this calculation pre-K numbers don't count. So when you look at that spreadsheet you'll be able to see that they do sometimes include pre-K numbers. And you'll have to just call the school district and find out if there is any, if they have numbers that are different that do not include the pre-K. I just want to do a check. Okay. So after you find your school lunch numbers then you look up whether you're urban or rural. Now currently on the e-rate website there is a listing of all of these states and then the counties within the states showing who is considered urban or rural. But one of the changes coming with the e-rate modernization in the new order is they're going to be basing this information on 2010 census data. They're going to have a tool, a lookup tool, basically a search online where you can look up and see what you are considered. This great little tool is not available yet. So right now you can't look up yourself to see what they're going to consider you as urban or rural for the upcoming year. But you can use what's up there right now to get a basic idea of what you probably considered. The Census Bureau defines definitions may move some people who are on the edge of urban and rural areas. 2500 is where the populations of 550,000 people are more urbanized areas. 2500 to 50,000 are called urban clusters and they think below that 2500 is rural. Now some people think they have issue with this. 2500 can still be considered rural and was previously. So there may be some tweaks yet to this to be done. This is still up for discussion about we'll maybe not even talk about urban clusters or they'll do some other breakdown. But when the tool is available you'll be able to look up what you are. Right now you won't, you'll have to just go with what you know what you were before to get an idea of what your discount will be. And then once you're done with, when you've got those numbers you have a discount matrix determine your discount. And this is the matrix to figure out what your discount could be. You'll see there is what they have here. Category 1 and Category 2 is two different columns here and this has to do with the kind of services you are applying for. And we'll get into details of that later. So whether you are doing Category 1 services or two different kinds there's a difference. You can see the only difference actually is this highest level discount for Category 2. Other than that it's the same across the board. You can see the percent of students that are eligible for the school lunch program and then figure out whether you're urban or rural then what your discount is. And you can see for rural for many up until about almost halfway up there you get a little bit more of a discount. Okay before I go on I do want to just make a check. I did have one person who has just said that they are having trouble with their sound. Can some people just let me know, I assume are you guys hearing me? Can you just say yes on your questions? Just don't want to hear from a couple of people. A little sound check please. Yep, yep. Okay it looks like everyone is hearing me. Okay cool. A bit choppy sometimes. Comes and goes yeah that could be some of our, you know we're on the internet. Great, thank you very much. Looks like this person just needs to log on and off and they'll be able to clear it up. Thank you very much. Okay, so that's how you can figure out how much of a discount you can get. Now the money that is available when you are doing e-rate is, the funding commitments are done on the e-rate year. E-rate is done by funding years which went from July 1st of year through June 30th of the next year. So right now when the applications you'll be putting in now in the fall for the upcoming year you'll be looking for funding that you will receive starting in July 1st 2015 and that will go through June 30th 2016. So whenever you're applying for e-rate you're always thinking to the future. Not I want to get a discounted bill that I got today or from last year's budget. No you're always thinking ahead. So you have to be thinking about right now I'm doing these forms so I can get money next year and on and going forward. Now the amount of money that is available as I said it comes from money that we all put in. There is and then money goes to run the program. The money that's put forward to be available here is divided now up into two different categories. This has to do with the type of services that are available. Category 1 has about $2.45 billion worth money available in there. This has been the basic cap for e-rate. Usually there's about 2. something billion that's been available. Every year it goes up by based on inflation which was nice. Included this inflation increase back in 2010. And then this usually is divvied up between all the services. This year as part of the changes they've pulled out some more money into the program. Another $1 billion specifically for category 2 services. This is part of their push and this will get more into and a bit to about more money for broadband, more money for wifi basically getting more internet to everybody. So category 1 services now has 2.45 billion and there's another $2 billion, $1 billion will be used in 2015 and $1 billion in 2016. Now in addition to this just last week of the week before, I forget exactly the date, the FCC chairman made a new proposal to have another $1.5 billion pulled out and allotted to category 1 to putting more money up in that pot. There's going to be a meeting later this month of the FCC commissioners to vote on that and if it goes through then we'll have a little bit more money even for category 1. Now we're talking about billions of dollars here which sounds huge and it is huge. However, every year there's not been enough money still to go around which is why they pulled another $2 billion out of the money they had in a savings sort of thing in reserve, money was in a reserve to increase the budget. Every year there's been more applications that can be funded. In the last two years category 2 services have actually not been funded at all. As you can see here it says category 1 they do first, that's your basic phone and internet, your basic getting your internet to your building and if they need to they can pull from category 2. If category 2 exceeds what is available, it's been allotted to it then they do it based on discount rate. The higher discount rate is you get higher priority to getting the funding and then they go giving out money until the money's all gone. In the last two years they have not funded any category 2 so only basic phone and basic internet they did not have enough money. There wasn't enough to go around, there's so many schools and libraries needing these discounts. So they put more money into the program now. Hopefully that will cover what everybody needs. We'll wait and find out. As I said they've got another 1.5 billion will hopefully be allotted to the program and that will help as well. Next up is our eligible services list. What can you get an e-rate discount on? So what is e-rateable? Every year the FCC publishes their eligible services list and this is a list of everything that you can get an e-rate discount on. The list does change every year so that's what they do one every time. They do try and keep track of what's coming up new in technology what things need to be phased out maybe to make it more applicable to what's going on in our schools and libraries. You can find the list on the schools and libraries division website. There's the URL for that. You'll find this year's upcoming list and all the previous years too. It's important to keep track of the previous years because sometimes you're still working on those applications and need that information. Now this is also part of the modernization of e-rate is streamlining this list a lot. Last year's eligible services list was almost 50 pages. Officially 49 pages long. It was huge. It also included a glossary of all the terms which was helpful. A lot of stuff about what wasn't eligible really all sorts of more. They wanted to streamline things to make it much easier for people to figure out what can I get an e-rate on and what can't die. So this year it's only 8 pages. Pretty easy to print out the whole thing and have it on hand for you. So it's just much more like basically taking out a lot of the extraneous things and extras about well this used to be eligible but it's not so we're changing it. Really down to just this is what eligible. If it's not on this list just don't ask. This is the deal. Of course every year they will still update it again as things change but this is where we're at right now with the list. And this is where we get into the two categories. They've divided all of their services into category one and category two. Previously if you've been doing e-rate before this was called category one and priority one and priority two. Still basically the same things are in each category. They've just not called it that because we call the categories anyways. So category one but then there's an easy way now to differentiate which one is which. Category one is the services that bring your connections to your building. Your phone line that gets the phone connection to the building. Your internet line and internet service that gets to the building. So that's providing it to the building. Once you're inside the building and distributing out that connection and those services to your different devices, your telephone, your computers, your servers. That's category two funding. So that's once you've gotten within the building. Your wiring, routers, anything you need to do to get everything connected. Providing that service out for people to be able to use. Now this is one of the first big changes is this category one and category two and the increase in pushing for broadband support. One of the major things that FCC is doing that they have decided is very important is they have determined and we all may know this just from our own experience. There's not enough internet going to schools and libraries out there. It's not high enough bandwidth. It's not fast enough. There's not a strong enough connection to many of the rural places. Maybe some of the urban places just can afford what's available to them. So the FCC has decided to really change the focus of the e-rate program a lot by focusing on not just providing for telecommunications and internet, but really focusing on broadband and internet services. So that's why there's a lot more money being put at extra two billion dollars being taken being provided for category two. That's making those all the connections inside your building that are for the connectivity and that way the basic money that's been available to category one, a lot more money for the actual getting the broadband. As part of this in order to do this, one of the things they've decided to do is phase down support for voice services. This is your telephone. So your basic phone lines, local, long distance, fax line, anything that's voice service related is going to be gradually be phased out of the program. That's one of the new things that is a huge change for a lot of libraries. I know it's not something that's being taken happily by anybody in the schools and libraries. I do understand the concept and their reasoning for we need more money to get internet to make that better for everyone. One way we need to get this money is to phase out other things that we just can't be providing support for anymore. Rather than just taking it away immediately, they are doing a gradual phase down. However, there's a chance that it won't be a permanent thing and I'll get to that in a bit. I went to an e-rate training that is put on by USAC earlier last month and I don't think there's anybody but the FCC who thinks that this phase down is a good idea. So there's a chance that it could not end up happening. Here in Nebraska, we have a little over 100 libraries. I think we're at 111 now that apply for e-rate. All of them apply for telephone. And about 64 or 65 also apply for internet service. So this is going to be a huge impact on our libraries. We'll see how it goes. And I've got some more details on that coming up. In addition to that, they are eliminating outdated services, things like pagers and things that they just aren't going to provide service at all for. So we'll see the details of that coming up. Okay, so first up, category one. These are the things that are eligible for category one. A lot of these carried over from previous years. Not a lot, nothing much new here. Getting your service to your building. So your broadband cable modem, DSL, if you have fiber, satellite, your telephone connections, T1 lines, whatever way you have of getting wireless, getting your internet and phone to your building is eligible for under category one. So any of these things you could apply for. Pretty basic. Second thing about category one is the phase down of the voice services. Now the way they're doing the phase down is each year, based on your discount rate, it will be reduced by 20 points just for your telephone. So 20 points in 2015, 20% off more in 2016, and so on and so on. So if your discount rate is actually calculates out to 80%, you'll only get 60% off on your phone bill this year. And then 40% off the next year and the plan is on and on until you're down to zero. However, in the e-rate modernization order, the FCC did actually say we will do this reduction for 2015 and 2016 and then we're going to evaluate. So they are going to look at it and see is this working, how is this affecting our schools and libraries, was this the right way to do it. That will be I think our chance to voice our opinion on what we think of it and let them know that this is not working, that I've been had to cut out certain services. So a lot of the comments that were at the training I went to that were directed both the FCC and USAC people were there, were about telephone services are essential services in our schools and libraries. This is not something you can just not have anymore, go off and do something else. Fact services are essential services. Libraries all over the place provide fact services on a regular basis. Everyday people are coming in to use the fax machine just to, they need to fax something. There are many government departments that only accept things faxed to them, not scanned and emailed, contracts, important papers, whatever. It's still a major essential service. So there's a lot of comments that have been made to the FCC about this process here of the phase down. Not many of them good I'll say. So this is something that will be evaluated in two years and we will have our chance to hopefully convince them that is not a good idea and it's doing bad things, been detrimental to our schools and libraries. However, you do have to account for it for the next two years at least. So do your calculation, you're going to pay a little bit more on your phone bill for the next two years and then hopefully we'll see if things can be fixed for that. And these are the kind of phone services that are included in the phase down. Your local, your long distance, 800 number, POTS is plain old telephone service, satellite, wireless, you're cell phones for your staff, all of that will be phased down. Data and text messaging is handled differently though. Now things that are completely not no longer eligible, these are not phased out, phased down at all. This is where your text messaging directory assistance, paging, call blocking, all the things listed here and then web hosting, if you pay a company to host your website, voicemail, email, all of these, they're just eliminating completely. They're really focusing on bringing the internet, bringing broadband, higher speed, higher bandwidth to the libraries and in order to do that they had to take big changes and just eliminate a lot of things outright. So this is the things that are just no longer eligible at all. So for category one we have things that are totally eligible, still eligible at your full discount, phone services that are gradually being phased down so you have to look at that 20% reduction and then things that have been eliminated completely. So that's category one, getting your service to your building. Now category two, this is your internal connections, things getting your service once it's gone through the building out to your different computers and devices. They are doing this completely differently in a whole new way of calculating what your discount is. And it took me a while, myself, to figure this out. I was very confused by their wording and how they do things. So, but then I kind of had a revelation here and figured out how to describe it to myself, at least to figure it out. Category two, instead of saying, normally when you apply for a service, you say, here's the service I'm getting, it's going to cost this, and then they give you your discount off, 60%, 70%, 80%, whatever it is. For category two, they're switching completely and they're having you create a budget. Now this is where I got confused, because to me the word budget means we're giving you money, a budget to spend. It's not exactly what it is in e-ray purposes, it is a fake budget is what I describe it as, where they're saying, this is how much you could spend and then we're going to sort of give you that as this is what you think you could spend on this, we'll give you a discount off of that. When I get into the math here, you'll see exactly how that works. This is also a budget for five years, so you're thinking about for the next five years, I can spend this much money that I could potentially spend and that's what I'm getting a discount for. This is set up for 2015 and 2016 and then again they're going to evaluate it and see how it's working out. A lot of the things going on in this new e-rate modernization order feels a lot to me, they're doing all of this, we'll do it for the first couple of years and then look at it. We'll do it for the first two funding years and look at it. It's like a pilot project, that's what I'm describing as now. They're testing it out for see how it goes and then we'll see if we need to tweak things, which is understandable. So for the first two years you'll have this budget. Category two includes all of your internal connections, your basic maintenance, having service done on them. This isn't category one, that still works the same way as it traditionally has. This is just for if you jump to your category two. Now how much of a budget can you get? Four libraries, now schools are different so if you're in school you'll have to check with the school people about this but for public libraries the way they're figuring out how much budget to give you is based on the size of your building. So bigger building, get a bigger budget. They figure internally you're going to need more money to get everything to all the different areas of the building. $2.30 per square foot is the amount they came up with but there's a minimum of $9,200 if your library is less than 4,000 square feet. So that is great for little libraries. Minimum everyone will have a budget designated to them of $9,200. Now this can be recalculated each year. If your size of your building changes, which seems like well how would it change? You may add an expansion onto your building. That means you'd have to change your budget or you may move into a new building that's been built and it's a different size. That would be a reason hopefully you wouldn't lose space and have to go down. I know sometimes libraries need to reduce area and give them space to other departments in the city or whatever but hopefully they wouldn't go down. But it is adjustable depending if that does change. Now here's an example of how to do this counter calculation. Your building is actually $3,500 square feet. $3,500 times $2.30 is $8,050. That would be your budget. However there is the minimum, the floor they call it, of $9,200. So this library, their budget is actually $9,200. That's their pre-discount saying you could spend this much money and your discount rate will give you off of that. In this example, their discount rate is 50%. So they actually get $4,600 in e-rate funds to spend on this category two services. Now this is $4,600 over the next five years. Remember that it's not for that single year. So you're thinking not just ahead one year like you do a lot with a lot of e-rate things but for five years worth how you would have to spend that much money. So it's this big budget of $9,200 will give you $4,600 in e-rate funds and now take it and spend it on whatever you decided was going to be your category two service. You can use this in any way that you need. It doesn't have to be spread out evenly over those five years. You could use it all in one year if you wanted to. If you decided we're going to do a huge construction project, we're going to update everything all at once this year and all that money gets spent in one year, that's fine. Or you can use it as needed. Whatever you need to do over the five years it can be adjusted to whatever, however you divide it up. Now what are the things that are specifically available in category two? Internal connections. All of these different ways of getting your internet throughout the building. Antennas, cabling, firewalls, routers power supplies, uninterruptible power supplies, wireless connections. All your controllers are doing a wireless network. Anything you need to improve or upgrade to support these connections that you have to. So if you already have connections set up and they need some upgrading or just some updating you can do that as well. In this case, software that is eligible is software that runs the servers or runs the programs. We're not talking about software like Microsoft Word or something like that. It's the software that actually keeps all of these computers running, all these connections running for your internet. So these are all the things that are eligible as internal connections. Things that are no longer eligible that have been eliminated from the program are these kind of things. Servers, software that was for all the servers, voice over IP, telephone, video, storage devices, all of these things are no longer eligible. They previously were on the list of internal type connections but they are now saying only these type of internal connections are what is available are eligible and not these. Now something new they've come up with, well E-Ray hasn't come up with, it's a new way of getting your internet service is managed internal broadband services or also called managed wifi. This is something where if you don't have the staff time or money or expertise to run your whole internet system and you're basically just, we've got internet, that's about it, you want to do more. There are companies now, third party companies that will take care of everything for you. You just say we want internet, we want it at this speed figure out what we need to do and do it and they will run it for you. They do the operation of it, they manage it, they keep things up to date, they do any installation of everything, they just take care of it all for you. You can just Google this, I did myself because I wasn't exactly sure, manage wifi even though it says just wifi, it's for broadband as well. You can find lots of companies information about this. This is something new that wasn't listed previously as an eligible service and is now as part of category two. So this is a third party, they come and run everything, nobody at the school is the staff person for it, maybe just you talk to them about what you want but they run everything for you. So this is something good to look into. I think mainly for smaller libraries who really don't have the staff time or expertise to handle running a whole network of computers and it's only going to get worse or better depending on your point of view. More and more computers, more and more internet, so many things government, applying for healthcare, applying for unemployment insurance, applying for jobs, all these things are going online strictly now and you're going to need more and more computers and more and more bandwidth to be able to handle what your citizens in your town need. This is a way you might be able to get some other company to come in and do it for you and then you can get an e-rate discount on it as well. Now basic maintenance of internal connections is something that's always been available for e-rate support. This is your basic repair upkeep, keeping your wiring up to date. My favorite example, if a squirrel gets in your wall and chews on your wall cables, you need to have that repaired, that kind of thing you need to have done. This is something you would have a contract with someone, maybe your internet service provider might be some separate company, some local tech person in town, whoever, but you have a contract ahead of time with them and then if they need to come in and do any of this, you can get a discount. However, the discount is only on work actually performed. So if you have a contract and you pay them for, for example, a monthly fee just to be on call, that monthly fee is not eligible unless they have to come in on that month to actually do the work and then of course they invoice you for that amount of work that they do, that would be eligible as well. So this is the kind of thing you'd have to pay it out ahead of time and then you'd get a reimbursement afterwards to reimburse you for the discount for the work that was done. Now the last thing that's available under eligible services, it could be either category one or two. This is all the miscellaneous stuff, your taxes, your fees, your surcharges, all those extra things that are on your phone and internet bill, all of those fees are eligible as well. So make sure when you are saying to e-rate for your basic category one telephone and internet services don't just say this is how much the bill is for monthly but also all the taxes as well because you can get a discount on them too. Shipping charges for anything, any equipment they get sent to you, training specifically to enable people to be able to use the new services. Not like training on how to use Excel or training on how to use my Facebook account but if you need to train your staff on how to run the network or how to use the servers, that kind of thing. Something new to this, installation and configuration of your equipment was always eligible. However, now it cannot be provided by someone else. Previously when you bought the equipment you had to arrange for the installation if you wanted to e-rate discount on that installation charge. It had to be all part of the deal. Now you can have somebody else come in and install your equipment for you. This is a great thing because you can get lots of equipment now anywhere for free. On Amazon, online somewhere you can find routers and servers and things that you're wiring and get it at a really good price and have it just shipped to the library and then have someone else come in and install it and you can discount on both of those things. Both the cost of the equipment itself and the cost of the installation charges. Now one other extra thing that goes along with what's eligible is pricing transparency. Something new added in the e-rate modernization order. For those who've done it before, there's a section of your second form in the process, the 471, called your item 21 attachment where you specifically report exactly what service use are getting a discount what you are getting and how much it costs. This has not been searchable anywhere before. I can't even look it up anywhere. If I want to know what you reported, I'd have to ask you to send it to me. Now this is going to be part of your form 471 and all that information is going to be gathered and posted publicly. This is all public information afterwards when you complete your e-rate application. Anyone can look this up, but now they're going to put this out as soon as the 471 forms are submitted they're going to gather all this information and post it. This will be great for libraries and schools. I'm not sure how it will affect a lot of things in 2015, but I'm thinking in the future. You'll be able to see how much your service provider is charging for the same service to anyone else. For example, if you can see what you're getting for internet at a certain speed and then you can see the next town over what they're getting they're paying less to the same service provider. You might want to have a conversation with your service provider or if you find out that they're paying less to a different service provider, you might want to either negotiate with your own to get a better rate or switch to that provider that's doing a cheaper price. You'll be able to see this not just locally but anywhere across the country too. You'll see a lot more openness and transparency of all the pricing out there. In reaction to this, the vendors and service providers are going to have to start offering a lot more competitive pricing. You're going to be able to tell before you choose who you want as your provider exactly what's going on to my neighbors, what they're charging everyone else, and do a lot more negotiating with them about what they are charging you and what you're willing to pay because you'll know now, oh, so-and-so library two towns over is paying only this much for that same speed of internet, why am I paying more? Something about this is important as well. Vendor contracts, lots of times they have non-disclosure agreements or they prevent you from sharing pricing that can no longer be in any contracts, new contracts that you may sign. They have to take out any of that wording. The only reason this might not be posted is if there are any specific laws or statutes or something that bars publication of this price data. Here in Nebraska, we don't know of anything like that, so check that out in your own area to see if there is other, but otherwise all of this will be publicly posted everywhere for anyone to see and check out and do a lot of price comparisons. So I think this will be a very good, one of the very good changes to ERA. So anybody have any questions yet? Questions, comments about anything, type it into the questions section of your go-to-webinar interface. Anything about what we've talked about so far, which is what is ERA, what your discounts are, what's eligible now in this category, new category one and category two. Give you a couple of seconds to type in. No? Okay, we'll go on then. So once you know the basics of ERA, what your discount can be, what's eligible, eligible, there's a couple of other things that people need to look at. One of the other things that you do need to look at, oh sorry, a question did just come in. How do schools calculate category two discounts? Okay, I handle the public libraries, I believe schools have a per student charge. It's how they calculate it, how many students are eligible or how many students are enrolled in the school, but I don't know exactly. You'd have to check with your department education people or your school ERA people about that, sorry, I don't know exactly how the schools would do the calculation since I handle just the public libraries. But I do know it's per student but I don't know exactly the number off the top of my head. So technology planning is one of the other things you need to look at that I look at when it comes to ERA. However, technology plans for the future are now no longer required. Is that your cheers? This is something that a lot of libraries struggled with, that technology planning, having to write a plan, having something available every year. If you were applying for internet services you had to have a plan for ERA as far as they're concerned, they're taking out this there, somebody says they're doing a happy dance, yay! Uncle head. So they're no longer requiring it, trying to make ERA as easy as possible for people to apply for. Now, having said that, it is still a good idea to have one. We still will promote to you that it's a good idea. If you do have a technology plan and you want me to look at it and evaluate it and give you some tips or advice on what could be better about it, I can do that. Technology plan is really good for just keeping track of where your technology is at at the moment, what you need to think about for the future, what you're going to be planning for over the next three, five years of when these computers get old, when will we bring in and buy new ones. So it's still good to have a plan. Also here in Nebraska, specifically if you are looking to be accredited, to be an accredited public library and going for the new version of accreditation, you can earn points towards your accreditation level if you have a technology plan. That is one of the things that you can check off and say, yes, we have one and it will give you more points towards getting a higher level. So just to think about that, that it's still good idea to have, but for e-rate purposes, no more technology plan is required. Now one of the other things you need to be aware of and look into before you are getting involved in e-rate is SIPA. This is the Children's Internet Protection Act. This is where we get into the filtering of the computers at your school or library. For most schools, it's a pretty done deal. It's pretty straightforward. They do filtering as far as just keeping everything protected to this children. In a public library, it's a little bit more of a complicated discussion because you've got kids and you've got adults both using the computers and you have to decide how we're going to do this. Now SIPA is required if you're going to apply for anything that is internet related. So your internet access in category one and all those internal connections in category two, you need to be compliant with SIPA in order to apply. Let's just do the raise of hands. There's a hand raising thing in the go-to-webinar interface. How many of you do have filters in your libraries that you're using? You're already filtering. Just use the raise hand option there. Many of you do. A little more than half of the people attending. We've got 27 people logged in right now. That's pretty good and that's pretty common. Some libraries do. Some libraries don't. There's varying reasons in the library world for doing that and not doing that. Some people do it because it can be a total local decision. Your town, your community, your board is really, yes, we must filter. We must protect the children and of scurridory. Some people go these completely opposite ways. Some librarians go the filtering is censorship. Censorship is bad. We are all about freedom of information. We will never filter. I have a list of I know certain libraries in Nebraska. I just don't even mention it too because I know I'll get it helpful that they do not want to filter. However, whatever your philosophical reason or business reason is for or political reason is for filtering or not, my job here as your e-rate coordinator is to get you e-rate money. I'm going to tell you what I think of SIPA and basically how to use it so that you can still get your e-rate discount. Complying with SIPA is actually really easy which is a great benefit to us. SIPA itself is a really short 12-14 pages long, the actual act, depending on how you print it out. I've read it and it doesn't say very much. It's very vague as well which is great for us as well. It requires only three things. An internet safety policy which you probably already have one of those somewhere in your library policies that says what you can and can't do on the computers, what you don't do anything illegal, don't hack our systems, those kind of things, how to be safe in chat rooms and what not. Second thing, technology protection measure. That's the filter itself. All it says is you have to have one. It does not say that you have to any what particular kind. There's no list of here's the acceptable filters to have. There's no list of here's the only place to go to buy filters. They don't say that at all. It just says have one. So it could be on individual computers. Each workstation has some sort of filtering software installed. It could be at your server level, on your router level. Your internet service provider can provide it from them right off the bat before you can get your internet. So whichever way it works, it has to be just something. And there has to have been some sort of public notice or meeting and agenda item on your board meeting, whatever. Letting your citizens know we're doing this now or we're thinking about doing this now. So that's it. Just those three things. It also doesn't specify under the technology protection measure what level your filter must be at. Generally they have low, medium, high security or something where you can whitelist certain sites or block certain sites. There's all these different ways you can tweak it. What the actual SIPAA Act says is it must block, this is interesting, the wording. Block visual depictions of anything that would be harmful to minors. Basically to be blunt we're talking block porn. Obviously yes, block the porn from the kids. Nobody would argue with that. However, in this day and age, unless anyone can correct me, we do not have the technology to block pictures. And SIPAA says block visual depictions. We don't have the technology. We don't have anything that can look at a picture of a person and say, oh, that's a naked woman rather than, oh, that's a woman in a flesh-colored dress. It's not smart enough to do that. So we do the best we can with blocking certain sites that we know are bad, certain domains, IP ranges, certain words that might come up in a search, these kind of things that we do. So at that level of that, you can have it at any level just as long as it has the ability to block the visual depictions. Now, when you think about that, yes, the government has enacted put out this act, the SIPAA Children's Internet Protection Act and has certain criteria that we are unable to meet. There is nothing that will block visual depictions that are harmful to minors. Yeah, think about that for a bit and let's move on. So we do the best we can. The fact that it doesn't specify what level it means, you can install filters in your computers, and I've had libraries and classes that tell me this, and no one even notices. They're on the computers, they're turned on, but they're at the lowest level possible, and nobody's rights are infringed on, nobody is being blocked or censored from looking at things, and nobody even notices. So if you're against filtering, you can still comply with SIPAA and get your e-rate funding by doing something like that. Also, SIPAA specifically says you must be able to turn off the filter for any adult who comes to you and wants to do some bona fide research, is what they call it. You don't have to interview them and say, well, what is it, you know, privacy issues? But if they say, I'm trying to do something here and it won't let me through, can you unblock this? You can go see what it is, and then you do still have your own internet policies and things. If they show you, I want to have this triple X porn site unblock, you might want to say, no, we don't allow that, it's our own local rules. But if it's something like, this is a website about breast cancer research, which has been documented, filters will sometimes block, then you go and unblock it. So as far as the, this is censorship and we're going to be stopping our citizens from getting to the resources they want, the SIPAA Act actually accounts for that. Now, we do have a question here, does the technology protection measure have to be on by default? It does have to be installed on all the computers, and this is also a thing that some people, yeah, it's, like I said, SIPAA is short, it is vague, and that does work for us in many ways, but in some ways you look at it and you're like, well, that doesn't really work. It has to be installed on all computers in your library that connect to the internet, meaning staff computers as well. However, once you install it, you can turn it off. If you staff computers, they need to get the internet, they don't need anything blocked, you just install the filter, turn it off, boom, that complies with, that follows the SIPAA rule of any adults who need to ask for it to be unblocked, they can ask for it and you have to unblock it for them. So it doesn't have to be on, has to be on at some point, and then turn it off is basically what I think would work for SIPAA compliance. But it does have to be installed on, the wording is vague, it just has to be installed on the computers that are owned by the library, on its computers. We have asked the FCC to clarify to please say, but what about this? What about the adult only computers? But if, you know, we've got a children's room, that's the only place the children go, can we have it not be in the adult or the staff people in the back room, come on, we're not going to block those. The FCC has chosen not to answer our question and not to specifically say, well, yes, this, not that, they hold their, it's still under consideration the question about what exactly. Which I understand from their point of view, it's a sticky area to get into and wanting to be able to say, yes, this, no that. They're just saying read what it says and try and follow it basically is what I think they're going with. So that's the basics of it. Do filtering, don't, whichever works for you, but if you're interested in e-rate funding and you think it might be a real help to have 70, 80, 68, 70, 80% off on your internet bill, look into it if you're not already doing the filtering. There's information on the Schools and Libraries Division website. I've got the link right there for that so you can go there to get more details about it. One thing I do, and also we also have information on my e-rate website here at the Library Commission that I'll show you in a bit. Information about SIPA, about filters and links of where to find filters. I don't recommend a specific one. I don't actually know a lot about the ins and outs of them and I wouldn't be comfortable doing that anyways, but I can get you to resources with evaluations and to help you decide what might be best for you. Now one other thing I do mention to our libraries here, there was an update to SIPA. In 2011, there was the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act that had some new requirements updating the original SIPA Act. Not a huge number of changes. A lot of just clarifying and some wording. For libraries, zero new requirements. Don't have to do anything different. You're still just have a policy, have a filter, have a public meeting of some sort. For schools, there's one new requirement that I bring up to my public libraries just so that you're aware of this in case you encounter a situation related to it. Schools now are required to have courses, curriculum that is for anti-bullying, how to be safe on the Internet, how to interact in chat rooms, things like that, cyber-bullying. They are now required as of 2012 to have some sort of courses and curriculum teaching the kids the right way to be safe on the Internet. This is only a requirement for schools, however not for libraries. However, if you have Internet safety classes and things you're doing at the library, that's great. Go ahead and do it, definitely. But this order did not require you to do it. Schools are required. I mentioned this to my public libraries because I know that some of them have had incidents or could have incidents with people who have come in and said, hey, why aren't you teaching this? You're supposed to be complying with these orders and the government is telling you you have to teach these classes and why aren't you teaching my kid how to be safe? And you, as a librarian, can say, we don't have to do that. We are a library. The schools are the ones that were required. Go and talk to the school and they'll take care of teaching your kids that. So just want to bring that to your attention so you are aware of that in case it ever comes up in your area. And also you might want to check in and see what the schools are doing. Work with them maybe if you've got a lot of kids using the library. You can work together on doing some of this training and safety. So that's SIPA. So those are the basic things to be able to have to look at as far as getting started with e-rate. Are you complying, do you want to comply with SIPA for getting your discount on your internet and your internal connections? No more technology planning. And then all of the things that you're eligible for, category one, category one, category two, all that. So that's the basics of e-rate. Now, for the next half of our session here, we're going to talk about the e-rate forms. The actual forms that you would submit throughout the year are to participate in the program. So there are four basic forms in e-rate. Three out of the four of these you will always submit every single year, no matter what. The fourth form it will depend. And when I get into the specifics of that, we'll understand how. 470 is your first form which you can submit now. It is available now for the 2015 funding year online. That's just announcing to the world. I'm looking for someone to provide me with this service. 471 is when you tell USAC, I have picked a provider. This is how much it's going to cost me. That's when they, after that point, they evaluate your form and decide if they're going to provide you, approve it or not. If you are approved, then you do a 46 saying, great, we'll take the money. I am receiving the service and we definitely want to get the money. And then the fourth form is my bills have been paid or I've just figured out how to pay my bills, give me my actual money. And this is where you tell e-rate whether USAC, whether you want discounts on your bills as you receive them from a provider or you want a refund check, reimbursement check after the fact, after you've paid your bills in whole. So first three forms, everyone does. And I'm going to go through all the details of them more specifically. And then the fourth form, it will depend. Starting this year, all forms can only be submitted online. Previously there was online and paper versions and if you wanted to, you could submit your e-rate forms all on paper if you wanted to. Print it out, print out a PDF, fill it in, mail it to USAC. Starting with this year, you can no longer submit forms on paper. There are PDF versions of them available for you to look at so you can get used them as a cheat sheet, which is great. I always recommend that and I've done that myself too. Have it print out the actual paper version of it, the PDF so you know ahead of time all the questions you need to answer and what information you need to fill in. And then go online and input all that information. As I said, I do this year. I actually do the e-rate application for the Library Commission here so I do go through all these forms just like you do. So I do go through the same process that you do of doing these forms throughout the year. But starting this year, everything has to be done online. Online is great. There's a lot of help, pop-up help, built-in calculations are done. It's just much easier. I know some people did not like to do online forms. Interesting enough I've had more than one library say well I can't do it online because my internet is not fast enough. It's not good enough. And that makes me chuckle and say well maybe if you applied for e-rate for your internet you can get higher. It's faster internet. Kind of a catch 22, yes. But starting this year you have to do it online. Now, having said that you can still do one part of your form in paper. For every e-rate form that you submit there's the form and then there's the signature and certification. There are two separate sections and sometimes people forget to do the second section in their online forms. But you do the form, you fill out all the information in the form, you hit the submit button and then it asks you okay now how do you want to do your certification? Do you want to do it on paper or do you want to do it electronically? Electronically you would do it if you had been assigned a PIN number. Everyone who does e-rate forms online is given an electronic PIN number a personal ID number that is your electronic signature. If you don't have a PIN number for yourself, you're the new person doing e-rate at your library then you would need to get a PIN number. The way you get a PIN number is submitting your signature, your actual paper signature, your handwritten signature on paper to e-rate and then once they have just that once on file then they send you in the mail, a little postcard that has your PIN number and then you can use that to submit everything else online. And that serves then as your official electronic signature for all your signatures and certifications for e-rate. So for now, if you're the new person doing e-rate, if you're the new director, if you've just been handed this from someone else, you can't use someone else's PIN number because that's specifically their electronic signature. It's legally their signature. You need your own. You do the form online, go through the point where it says submit and then it will ask you paper or electronic certification. You pick paper, print it out, mail it into the address. For us here in Nebraska it's like our local office for USACAs down in Kansas. Mail it to them then they'll send you a PIN number that you can use for all your future. If you already have a PIN number, you've been doing e-rate for years and years, just go ahead and do the electronic one and do it that way. So for now for 2015 you can submit that certification on paper. They're working on a new procedure where you'll be able to request a PIN number online. So you won't have to ever mail anything into them. But that's coming. I don't know they haven't said much about it so I can't tell you anything about that right now except that it's coming and for now you can still get your paper one, do the paper one and do the PIN number. Now this is the screenshot of the website to apply for the Schools and Libraries Division of USAC. There's some good basic information here on latest news updates. They have these news briefs, links to things. There's a PDF of acronyms and terms that you might want to look at. The search tools is where you can search to look up your status of your e-rate application. There's also a whole section about the e-rate modernization order so if you're interested in reading it or reading all more information about it, feel free to click there. But for applying online you just click on this Apply Online link there at the top of the Resources and Tools section and that will bring you to this page which is your page to submit all of the e-rate forms online. You'll see each form has its own four blue buttons at the bottom there where you can create new forms. You'll notice you can also continue in complete forms. It does save as you go. So if you're interrupted while you're doing a form or you realize, whoops I don't have this information. I need to come back to it later. It's okay. You just close out the browser and it's saved as you go and use the continue in complete option to log in again. In order to do that each form does have, after you've entered your basic info, name, address of the library, contact person, it assigns an application number and a security code to that specific form. You'll need those two numbers to be able to get into the form again. Security code can't be looked up for you. It's not something that's saved anywhere. I can't look it up. Usex on customer service people can't. You'll need to have either write down or print that out to make sure that you have it to get back in again. If you don't get it written down and you forget it or lose it it's not horrible. You just have to start over with a new form. You won't be able to pick up where you left off. You'll also see on all of them it has the notify complete as a button. Like I said, people sometimes submit the form and think, I hit submit. I'm done. Walk away. They're still not finished. They sometimes need to go back in just to do the certification, which is your official signature and agreeing to all the legal stuff having to do with this. I'm the one allowed to do this. It's all accurate information, etc. A couple of other things to be aware of here on the online form. I've got this link to the form's page for instructions. They're instruction books for each one of these forms too. Longer descriptions of what the form is for, what the questions mean, where you can find more information, what they really want from certain questions. If you're having some difficulty with answering a question, I recommend going there to looking at the instructions. That's also where you find the PDF versions of the forms. Remember, these are just for your reference not to be submitted the PDF versions of them. When you guys call me and ask me for help and questions, half the time that's where I go to figure out if it's not a question that I've had to encounter myself and not sure off the top of my head what the answer is supposed to be, I go there all the time to those instruction books. Something else to be very important, that's very important to be aware of, the very first bullet here on the above the forms is use Internet Explorer and above. Other browsers may cause errors. Personally, I think that should be in bright red, text, bolded, italics, flashing, whatever. For now, all of these forms must be submitted using Internet Explorer, i.e. you can get into them using other browsers, Firefox, Chrome, whatever. However, you will most likely encounter problems. I've had people call me saying it's not doing the calculation it's supposed to automatically do for whatever and it's because you're not using the browser that they recommended. USAC, they have limited resources for their programmers and their programmer time and they've only had the time to have all of these forms working for Internet and tested officially on Internet Explorer, so they don't recommend any other browsers that you use. You will have problems, you may think you submitted a form and you really haven't. I've had that happen too, some people say, but I know I hit submit and I, well, what browser were you using? Well, it was Chrome. Well, then that's why. It really gets submitted. If you didn't get a confirmation and you didn't see that pop up, things aren't working correctly, most of the time that's going to be your problem. So, i.e. is what you need to use for now. Things are changing for the better though and we'll get to that. But for now, keep thinking i.e. Every time you do file a form, USAC sends you back a letter in the mail. Yes. You are required to submit a paper, they respond back to you in the regular mail. However, they do this so that you have documentation in paper, they make sure it gets to you, and they also do this color coding, which is great. They alternate every year, every letter they send back to you in response to a form. When you submit the 470, the first form in the process, they send a letter saying, we received your 470. You do the 471, you get a letter back. The 486, get it back and forth and back and forth. The letters summarize what you entered in the form, so you can double check them and make sure everything is correct. And it's just your notification that yes, it's officially been received. They color code them each year, rotating between pink, blue, canary, pink, blue, canary so that you can keep them organized. Here at the Library Commission, I keep our files in binders and I can see each section of the binders a different color. So I can tell, and when a letter comes, I can tell. What's important about this is you will be working on multiple funding years at the same time. So you will get a letter, for example, you submit your 470 now, you're going to get a yellow letter from USAC saying we received it. You may still be finishing up doing your forms for 2014 year and you're getting letters related to that as well. Those will come on blue paper, so you'll be able to very easily tell just by looking which letter, which year a letter is from. The letters themselves come in white envelopes, the envelope's not colored, and it's a half size, like a half piece of paper size, oversized type envelope. The USAC logo on it so you can keep an eye open for that, but it's also as a window on the front of it so you can see the colored paper in there. So previously they did not do this color coding. I've been told before my time I'm good. They only did white paper like traditional and it got very confusing for people. All the letters look very similar and you have to read very closely to make sure what year it was about and there's a lot of confusion and people not getting things done. So they finally one year someone came up with a genius idea I think of this color coding of letters. Now all of these letters and forms and anything you do related to e-rate must be kept for documentation purposes and this is something new 10 years. Previously it was for five years you had to keep them. This is in case USAC or FCC wants to come, needs to do any check up on what you're doing. Officially an audit. Now an audit in e-rate terms does not mean the same thing necessarily that might mean for example IRS terms. It doesn't mean you did something wrong. It just means they are doing checks and balances, making sure that everything's working properly in the program. So they will go and randomly pick libraries and say we're going to go and check up and make sure how your 2013 e-rate went and just make sure did the process work for you, was there anything we could have fixed any issues that you may have had. They're now saying they needed to keep it for up to 10 years after the last date of service. In e-rate terms last date of service means the last day of their funding year, which is always June 30th of a year. So starting now in funding year 2015, you'll need to keep any of your forms, your letters you receive, any paperwork related to it. You'll have to keep through June 30th of 2026. If there are things that relate to this funding year, for example since you signed a contract previously like in 2010, but it covers this year, you need to keep that contract still because it relates to the 2015 funding year. That's what you've got to think about. Anything that relates to this year. Now you don't have to keep piles and piles of paper, they don't specify you have to have papers. I mean I said I use binders, that's just our way of keeping track of it here. You can have it electronically or in paper. So if you want to have no paperwork, you want to go completely paperless, that's great. Scan everything in, recycle the paper itself, and then just have everything somewhere on a hard drive, on a file, in a folder, on a server that you can access. You just need to be able to access it so that whenever USAC asks you for some particular piece of documentation you can get to it and send it off to them. The only exception to that is your SIPA. Just keep on holding on to that forever, meaning whenever you purchase your filter, when you had your board meeting, the one agenda that said it was on the board meeting agenda, that kind of thing, your fallacy for your internet use policy, just keep all of that anyways. Now the kinds of things you do need to keep. As I said, any forms that you've submitted and the letters received back from USAC, any other correspondence from them, if they ask you for more information, if they contact you to ask questions, keep all of that. If you receive contacts from different companies and service providers and contracts you've signed, hold on to all of that invoices, delivery of equipment, all of these things. Now some of this stuff may not be something that normally you would have in your files contracts, invoices, bills, those might be something your accounting person or your city clerk holds on to. If you aren't sure you'll be able to get something from them or you're not sure they're going to keep them for 10 years, tell them to at least make a copy for you so that you can put it in your e-rate files just in case you need to have access to it at some point. Now this is a timeline of forms and deadlines for specific to the upcoming funding year, 2015, so you keep track of what's going on basically when things are the different forms and when they're supposed to be. Funding year, as I said earlier, is your July 1st, 2015 through June 30th, 2016, so when you're submitting your forms right now, that's when you're thinking about getting a discount from. One thing that people ask me about right off the bat with e-rate is what are the deadlines for the forms? When do I need them submitted by? Well, the deadlines for the first two forms in the process, the 470 and the 471, are actually based off of the second, the 471's deadline information. The 471 is only available to submit during a certain time of year. It's not available year round, it's usually only available about two and a half, three months, and the dates vary each year, so it's not the same every year that it's going to be due. Right now they've announced the window dates, so if you don't know the deadline for the 471, you don't know the deadline for the 470, because the 470 has to be submitted 28 days before the, oops, the 470 has to be submitted 28 days before you submit the 471. You give a waiting period for people, vendors, and companies, and I'll get into the details of that for people to contact you. So you have to do the 470, wait 28 days, then do the 471. Once we have the 471 window dates, we'll be able to figure out the 470 deadline, because we'll take the close of the window back up 28 days, that's our deadline for the 470. As I said, and I just checked this morning, they still haven't announced the dates, but USAC has said the window will open no earlier than January 7th of next year. So, you know, at a minimum, that's the earliest, it's going to then make the window be open to sometime in March, so sometime in February will be the deadline for your 470. I will announce on our mailing lists for the live, for our systems and our blog and everywhere when they do announce the dates, but it's not been announced yet. From what we've heard, they really just want to make sure they have all the technical things behind the scenes with all these updates and changes happening, totally in place and working correctly before they actually put out these specific dates. But we're looking at January to March, most likely for 471, making the deadline for the 470 February. Having said that, don't wait to the deadline, there's no reason to. You can do it right now. The form is available. Go out there, find it online, submit it, get it done so at least you know that's one thing checked off my list of things to do. Once you do your first two forms, as I said, that's when USAC will review the applications and then they send you their funding commitment decision letter, FCDL, that tells you whether you got funded or not. They do have a date for this. They have set a target date that they want to have all these letters sent out by September 1st of next year. Generally, as I said, your 471 are going to be due by March and they're saying by September they'll have everyone have an answer. I think this is great. I don't know how it will go. I can tell you right now, as of December we still have libraries in Nebraska have not received their letter for 2014 yet. They have not received their commitment decision letter yet. Applications are still being evaluated. So this year and previously years that's been the history. They have been a lot of delays on getting those letters out. However, as USAC has said, they've hired extra staff. They're having, they want to have this be, they don't want people to wait anymore. So as part of the modernization streamlining make it a better program, they've set themselves a goal of September 1st. Let's all cross our fingers and hope that it actually happens because that would be great that we don't all have to keep waiting and waiting and waiting. Having said that, even if you get your letter not until September or even later, your funding still goes back to July. If you get your letter after July starts, that's okay. You'll still get money going back to July. You'll just get it as some sort of a credit or a bulk refund back to you from your service provider. You don't get your funding from when that letter came out. It is retroactive to when the actual funding year starts. So this is just a basic timeline you can follow and now we'll get into the details of each individual form and you can see exactly what they're all about. Any questions yet about the basics of the forms before I get into the specifics of each one? Type into your question section of your GoToWebinar interface and I can check your questions there. Alright, we'll move on. I'll keep an eye on things here if you have any questions. So the first form in the e-rate process is the form 470. The purpose of the form 470, the official purpose is to request services. You are opening a competitive bidding process. You are putting out to the world two service providers that exist out there saying we are looking for someone to provide us with this service. Whether it's our phone lines for three phones and one faxing line in the library, internet service at 25 megabits per second minimum, whatever it is you're looking for. This is what you put on your 470. You say whether it's for your own library, network, library system if you have multiple branches. So you just give all the details of what you're looking for in your 470. And as I said, this has to be posted 28 days before you do your second form the 471. This 28 days is your competitive bidding process time. This is the time, enough time to give any possible service providers time to reach out to you, to find you, and offer you their service. Now having said this, you may not have very many options anyways. I know many of our libraries in Nebraska, there's only a single phone company in town. That's it. There isn't someone to choose from. Same thing for internet service. There's only the one company who provides what we need at the library in town. And that's fine. You may end up just picking who your regular company is and that's fine. You don't actually get multiple bids or people contacting you trying to offer services. But you still have to, for e-rate purposes, play the game, go through the process, submit the form to do this. However, you might start getting contacts from companies you have not heard from before. When I started doing this training in 2009, I suddenly, I started getting a lot of libraries. That was my first time doing this training. And they said, you know, I never heard from anybody ever before until now. This year suddenly I've got all these companies contacting me and I never did before. What do I do? Well, you got to check and see if these companies or anybody you can work with or not. What happens, it's happening a lot, I think. This is just my personal evaluation of the situation. It's getting more competitive. There are more little companies out there providing these services and the bigger companies are trying to expand into all these little towns that they can. But they're not really sure what they're doing exactly. A lot of these libraries end up telling me, well, yeah, I got a call from so-and-so and I thought, oh, that sounds like a great price. I could totally do that. And then they called them and said, I'm from so-and-so town in northeastern Nebraska and the company says, where? I've never heard of that town. We don't serve them. Why would we? And he said, well, you contacted me. What I'm seeing is a lot of it's like a fishing expedition. These companies are just reaching out to anybody who might be asking for the service that they provide in any big way. And they said, oh, we serve Nebraska. Well, they mean like, Lincoln and Omaha. So that may happen. So you'll just have to keep your eyes open. They may also offer you services you don't even ask for. I had that happen here at the library commission. We submit e-rate for local long distance phone and our 800 numbers. And that's it. That's all I submit e-rate for. And I've gotten contacts from multiple companies, big ones like AT&T, Verizon, offering cell phone service. We didn't ask for cell phone service, so I just ignore them. And you can. You don't have to respond to all these bids or contacts you have. Look at what they're offering and see if it even applies or not. So you got to do it for 28 days. You submit the 470, wait 28 days. As I said, we don't know what the actual deadline for the 471 will be because we don't know the application filing window. But no earlier than January 7th will be that ultimate deadline for the 471. If you do get contacts, bids, keep track of them, look at them, see if you do need to do an evaluation of some sort. If you do, and I'm going to show you how to do that here in just a second, you'll use price as your most important thing, but not the only thing. And I'll show you how that works in a little bit here. Now on your 470, all libraries have a build entity number. This is like a code number assigned to the library. If you don't have one, if your library's brand new in e-rate, you can get one by calling the Schools and Libraries division at the 800 number. If you've done e-rate before you'll probably have previous forms, you can look it up. There is also a section on the SAC website where you can look up build entity numbers, then numbers. So look up your library there first. And if you're not sure and see if it's there, if you don't see one for yourself, then you'd call and have one assigned. Also, this is where your PIN number would first come into use. As I said, the official electronic signature for you, you would use that when you're doing the signature and certification part of your form. Now originally I said every library has to do the first three forms definitely. However, there's one new thing, new, this new modernization order, a new way where potentially you might not have to do a Form 470. The whole purpose of e-rate to give a little background info to this is to get you cost effective, good services at a good price. And the FCC has determined if you can find some company offering this particular deal that's here on the slides, then you don't have to actually do an open and competitive bidding process and get any other companies involved at all. Basically they're saying this is a great deal, take it, don't even bother looking at anyone else. Now what you need to have is the cost of the service is $300 or less a month, which comes up to $3,600 a year, and the bandwidth is at least 100 megabits per second downloading and 10 megabits per second upload. And then the price is being commercially available, meaning it's out there for anyone who wants you to purchase this type of service. Now if you can find a company that is offering it at this price and at this speed, then you can skip the 470, you start your process in January with the 471 reporting that this is what deal you've got. I think this is awesome, this is going to really help a lot of libraries. However, I'm not sure how this is going to actually happen right off the bat. Price, I don't see being a problem. There are a lot of libraries already paying $100 a month or less for their internet service, not a problem. The bandwidth is where I see the issue. 100 megabits per second is not really very common yet, but this is what the FCC says is minimum that schools and libraries should be having. I'm going to predict, and I hate saying that, but I'm guessing that for 2015 not many places are going to be able to find this because of the speed, but now that this is out there as a possibility, vendors are going to start offering it, I think, because if they can get more libraries on board with getting internet and getting it at this speed, they'll want to offer it. So if this is something that's available and you can get it from a vendor and then get the e-rate discount of 70, 80% off on this $300 a month cost, you'll probably go for it, and that would be great. I had a library, I did this workshop in person up in Norfolk who told me, she perked up a lot when she saw this actually, and most people who were like, nobody offers that. She says, well, my provider is giving us 90 megabits per second right now. I think I'm going to go call them. And that's great. If they're almost giving you 100, this might be the thing to bump them up. Tell them, if you give me 100 megabits per second, we can skip this whole bidding process, this whole competition thing completely, and you're locked in as my provider. So look for it. Like I said, I'm not sure how many, if we're going to see that kind of speed being commonly available yet, but I see it coming in the future because of this great being able to skip doing the 470. The cost can also if it's something new for your library, any installation charges, and any equipment if you need to have something pumped up or improved, that can be included in that annual cost there too of that $3,600 for the year. So something to look and do. Now the new Form 470 is available online, as I said, it's available right now if you go out there and submit it. Not many changes to it. Those of you who've done it right before, you'll recognize that it looks pretty much the same. Just a few tweaks. That managed internal broadband service, that managed Wi-Fi option in category two is now one of your choices. They took out the certification for tech plans, updated that document retention to 10 years. So just a few minor tweaks were needed to the 470. So not a lot of changes there. One new thing is being required to provide an email address. On your 470 and actually on all your forms, you can specify your preferred mode of contact, meaning if USAC needs to contact you for more information to ask any questions, whatever, what would be the best way to reach out to you. And you can choose phone facts or email. And that's how they'll reach out to you to ask questions. However, since they're doing all these forms online now, they're going to track you based on your email address, and they're going to require that you at least enter an email address, even if that's not your preferred mode of contact. Now after you submit your 470, you will be sent back a receipt notification letter for 2015. It'll be on the yellow paper. It summarizes what you entered in your form. Look it over to see if any changes need to be made. It tells you on the letter how to submit changes to them. Do look it over and make sure you are entering this information yourself in the form, but we're all human. I made a mistake on one of ours a few years ago. I mistyped my phone number for one of our phone lines, so I had to submit a fix, a correction to them, so you can do that. This also will tell you then what your allowable contract date is. What is the date, 28 days from when you officially submitted the form? So you'll know once you get this letter how long you have to wait to do your second form with the 471. You definitely don't want to jump that 28 days. If you do your 471, the second form, too soon, your application will be denied. You did not give companies and vendors enough time that required legal amount of time with 28 days to get the cup possibly contact you. So when you get this letter, do your 470, look for this letter, when it arrives, check that date. Mark that date in your calendar, whatever you need to do to let yourself know that this is when I can now do the second form in the process, the 471. Now I mentioned, there we go, competitive bidding process. If you do happen to receive multiple companies contacting you saying that they can provide you with the services you asked for, then you do this competitive bidding. If you don't receive multiple ones, that's fine. You just go with who your company is. So after that allowable contract date, after that 28 days, you just collect all these bids as they've come in. You then evaluate them, pick who you want, sign a contract if needed, and then do your 471. Now the competitive bidding process itself must be fair and open. You treat all the vendors the same. They can't help you submit your 470, they can't help you submit any of your forms, they can't give preferential treatment to anybody. You have to, if they ask for information, you have to make sure everyone has the same info, like what speed are you looking for, or anything you need to make sure everybody's given the same info. When you do your evaluation, you need to compare the different bids you might receive and using costs as your primary factor. Not your only factor, and I've got an example of that coming up. And make sure you document everything. If you do use some sort of a comparison chart, keep a copy of that with all of your information and documentation for this year. If you just pick the one company that you've picked, write a memo to yourself explaining we picked so and so phone company because they're only phone company in town, and put that in your files. Just have some document that records what you did. So that like I said, if USAC ever comes to ask you for any more questions, anything about it, you have the why you made your decision. Okay, we've got a question that came in. Can you automatically ignore any phishing emails that start out, do your school when you're a public library? If it's something that's pretty obvious that they're not even paying attention to what you are, I'd say yeah. For example, all of these contacts do have to be in response to your 470 and say in responding to what you asked for. That's kind of the point. Your library you put out, you're looking for something and they respond. I've actually, I haven't done my 470 yet for the library commission. I already received an email a month or so ago from some company in San Diego, San Diego, California, wanting to know when I'm going to do my 470 because they wanted to know what was going to be coming. And I'm like, whoa, that's, first of all, no, you cannot be involved. I can't give you any preferential, you know, and you didn't respond to the 470 as you are legally supposed to. So in that case, yeah, I'm just tossing it out and not going to respond to them at all. Besides the fact that you're in San Diego, you're some little company in San Diego, I'm pretty sure you can't provide phone service to a state agency in the state of Nebraska. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm confident on that. But yeah, if it's something that's obviously just spam, yes, you don't have to take that into consideration at all. You're going to use your own evaluation and look at something. Is this a real contact? Like, I get some then once I do my 470, it's obvious they've looked at it and they say, here is a, you know, attached is a spreadsheet showing what we can offer you for each of the services you asked for. So it'll be pretty obvious. Or we are so-and-so company and I'm contacting you, you know, Sue Smith at Townsville Public Library to offer you blah, blah, make sure it's specific, yeah. Actually, the ones that I pay attention to for us actually reference the 470 application number. Officially, not just a generic, did you do a 470? We can offer these services. They've actually officially said, in reference to your 470 application number, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, yeah. So yes, if it's obvious, go ahead and just ignore the ones that are not real bids. Okay, so here's an example of how you could potentially do an evaluation. This is just one example. You don't have to do it this way. This just gives you an idea of what kind of things, how things could work. As they say, for USAC, for e-rate, price has to be the primary factor, but you can take other things in consideration as well. As we all know in personal and work, things taking just the cheapest price is not always the best choice. You have other factors, other things that are important to your decision-making process, and that can be part of this. USAC wants you to take other things into consideration, not just take the cheapest, but the most cost-effective when it comes, when you take everything into consideration. So this example, we've decided these are the things that are important to us. Price, of course, if we have prior experience, do we know them? If they're good at the environment, if they're local or not local, all these kinds of things. And then you assign points to them. Price has the most points assigned to it, making it the primary factor. But it's not the overwhelming one that can, you know, just be the cheapest of those, is what you go with. And then in this case, we're saying we've got three different vendors that contacted us. And then we look at their value of their applications or their bids and their quotes and their letters and just assign points. A lot of these would be very subjective points, of course, to them and total them up. And you can see in this example, vendor two got a full 30 points in price, meaning they were the cheapest. However, vendor three, when you took into consideration all the other factors that are important to you, they end up with the highest total points. That's the one that you can go with. And if you have this chart to show to, if they ever ask, this is not something you have to submit when you do your 471, when you do your next form, just in case someone ever asks, why did you pick so-and-so company over this company? You have this filed away somewhere. This is how you can tell them why. Sure, they were the cheapest, but we had no experience with them. That's really what looks like what knocked them off the contending for this, is that we have no experience with them, and we'd rather go with somebody we have previous experience with, because you know them. You know what they're like. You know what their customer service is like. That's another thing I keep thinking I should add to this, customer service experience with them that might go under prior experience. If you've heard about a company in town that has really bad customer service, your friends have told you, your other businesses in town say, no, we're with them, but we had to because the boss decided, but their customer service is terrible. They never respond to our questions. They don't fix things, blah, blah, blah. You can give them a horrible price, a horrible, you know, number of points for that, and they don't, you know, just because they're cheap doesn't mean they're the best. So this is just an example of how you can do it and explains the whole price being the primary factor, but not the only one. Definitely take all different things in consideration. So this is if you need to do some sort of comparison. If you did get multiple bids from different companies that were actually valid, actually submitted for what you asked for, and you need to actually make a comparison and decide, well, I've got to prove why I pick so and so. Now part of your reasoning maybe, we're going with a company we've been with for the last 10 years, and it's just going to happen, but you'll still need something that proves why you pick them still over other companies, and this would be a way, you know, put together a little chart like this that you can file away in case anyone ever does question or ask about it. Okay, there we go. Okay, so the second form in the process is your form 471. This is where you actually tell you sec who you've picked. You report who you've picked, what services you've gone with, and how much they cost. This is also the point where you actually finally put down what is your discount calculation. Using the school lunch numbers from before, this is where you report that. And you do your compliance with all the different program rules on this form. As you said, this is very important. Wait for the 28 days after the 470, and after you've got some sort of contract or legally binding agreement and writing. This is something new as well. It doesn't have to be a contract every time of course. Is this some sort of memo or just a quote? Whatever. It's something that is signed. If you're going with your regular company you've had for years and years, there probably was a contract signed at some point. You don't have to always sign a new contract every year if you're in a month-to-month situation, but there's something on file somewhere that's fine. What's also good about this is if you forget to do that certification signature for your 470, which as I said, sometimes happens, you still can submit that even after you've done your 471. You have to the end of the 471 following window to do both certifications for 470 and 471, and have your 471 form in. So they do give you a little more time for that. Now, if you do forget to do things like this, this is another great thing about USAC, and they will send your reminders. If they receive 470, and then after a certain period of time you haven't got your signature and certification part, you'll get a letter saying it'll be on that colored paper too. We have not received the certification for form number, blah, blah, blah. Please go on to our website and do it, and then you can use that certify complete option to actually finish off submitting your form. Now, the 470, I said, the first form not many changes to it, it's still pretty much the same. The 471 has been where the major changes come in. This has been where a lot of the work has been done with the modernization and streamlining of E-Rate is with this form. This is the first form that's having complete overhaul. If you've done E-Rate before, you won't recognize it. It doesn't look the same at all anymore. They're completely redesigned. It has more help and error messages. You can actually save yourself. I said they save as it goes, it does save as you go, but you can hit a save button, which I know to a lot of people, me included. I feel much safer when I'm clicking save rather than trusting it to have saved as I was going. The basic format and what you're submitting is still the same. Your build entity info, who's the services there, the details of them, everything is still in there. One thing also that is a huge change to this, which is a great change, item 21 attachment that I mentioned earlier, which is where something extra that you submitted is no longer a separate part of the form. Let me explain. For 471, up until now, you had the form, you had the certification and signature, and you had a second thing, this item 21 attachment that you had to do. So three parts to the 471. Every other form in the E-Rate process has two parts, the form and the signature. This one had this extra item 21 attachment. Before my time, this is some sort of bureaucratic thing. The item 21 attachment had the service provider you've chosen and how much it costs and a narrative description of what the service was. This is the local and long distance phone service for so-and-so public library. This is the internet service for so-and-so public library. All of that information, except the narrative description, was already entered into the form itself. It was duplicative. It was annoying and confusing. And a lot of people did the form, did the certification, figured they're done, not realizing there's this extra little attachment that also needed to be done. Now, to eliminate that kind of confusion and issue, it's just part of the form itself. It's not a separate thing. Awesome. Cheers. Yes. This is a great service. And it's no longer actually called item 21. Anyways, it's just called narrative description of your funding requests. Much more clear than just item numbers. So that's one huge change. No more blocks or item numbers at all. Going along with that, not calling out item 21 anymore. No longer block 2's item 17, block 5 this. It's just the actual words describing each section, which normal English language type things. So you have navigation at the top of your screen. Like I said, this form, 471, will be available in January. That's when the window opens. So we don't have...we can't see it yet what it looks like, but I've seen screenshots of where they are at in the process when I went to training. They don't have that available yet even to show because they're still working on it. So some tweaks could be made to how it looks. But across the top of the page, there's just basic information, discount calculation, funding requests, certifications, and signature. The four basic parts of the form. This is much more in line with many other online forms you've probably submitted, not these blocks items the way the previous e-rate forms were. Also, the questions are responsive. They'll know what you answered previously in a question and ask you follow-up questions that are appropriate. So for example, if you say you're just submitting a form for an individual library, it won't even ask you questions about being a consortium. Previously, you still saw those questions and it confused people. Now you won't even see them. They also lead you through the application more kind of like an interview. Is a consultant assisting you, asking you questions rather than just putting out a fill-in-the-blank of information that you don't even know what they're asking for? This consultant question is very good that I'm glad they're making it easier. Previously, you'd have just, it would just suddenly ask you for consultant application reference number and consultant address and name. So many times I have libraries call me and say, what is, who's my consultant? I don't know what to put here. Well, there are companies and individuals out there that you can pay. You can hire them to do your e-rate application for you. This would not be your service providers themselves. These are separate companies that will do this on your behalf. If you have a really complex form or you're some huge like multi-school institution or something or multi, so many branches that you just can't, you know, have anybody on staff who can do it, you can hire these people to do it for you. However, if you're just doing it yourself, you don't have to hire a consultant. Now I am the state e-rate coordinator for libraries, if you're from Nebraska, so I do help you with this. But I'm, you're not paying me. I get paid as my job. So I'm not a consultant. I don't have anything like that. So if you don't pay someone special extra to do this, you would say no. An consultant's not assisting you. There's lots of pop-up help. Little I for information you can click on. It will have a little pop-up box with more instructions and help. That's great. There's a timeout feature for 25 minutes. I think it was shorter before. I don't remember exactly, but you have 25 minutes of no activity, meaning if you walk away or something, you will automatically time out. Use you another 5 minutes, and it will save your work, and time you out, and you'll have to log back in again. Something else to be aware of. Because of the discount calculations being different now for your phone, which is being phased down and everything else you're applying for, you will have to do, if you're applying for both phone and internet or phone and anything else, you will have to do two different 471s. You'll have to submit two different forms, because you can only report one discount calculation per form. So you will have to do a 471 for your internet service, and you would say our discount is our full discount of 80%. Then you have to start a whole brand new 471 and say, well, our discount is for phone, so our discount is actually 60%. So you'll have to do two because of that phasing down. Now to help with that, which is really great, USEC has realized this is going to be a hardship for people. You'll be able to copy and paste from one 471 to another, so that's great. Just enter the information once, copy and paste it to another one, and you'll be able to do a template. Enter all the information that will be the same across forms, name, address, library, contact person, and then just upload that template into the form, and then all you have to enter into it is the specifics that are different from each one. So yes, it will be a hardship. Yes, you'll have to do two, but they've come up with a couple of ways to help and make it a bit easier on you. Also about the responsive questions, if you do a category one form for just your basic phone and internet, it won't even ask you those anything related to category two, meaning what your square footage of your library is to figure out that budget and everything. It won't even ask you anything. It'll only ask you those questions if you say this is a 471 for category two type services. Now, these last couple of things that are updates to 471 are the awesome, I think these are the best changes. First, I told you every time you do a form, you get an application number and a security code, and you need that code to get back in. Many odd times people forget to get that code. They lose it. They print it out. They won't write it down. Now, you need to do an email address. As I said, they will automatically email you your application number and security code, so you can't lose it. They'll send it to whatever email address you just said that is your email, and you'll have that information. So there's really no way for you to hopefully print it out, lose it, write it down yourself, lose it. They'll send it to you automatically. Also, I did say before you have to use IE. However, starting with this year, 471, you can use the browser of your choice. Yay. They've been, as I said, this has been completely overhauled, and they finally have because of this e-rate modernization and the FCC really being dedicated and making things easier and simpler. They have put the work and the programmer time into making the 471 work with IE and Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. So whichever browser you use, you will be able to use the 471 on. If you don't have the most recent version when the form is launched in January, and yeah, when you get the form live in January, as soon as you try and go into it, it will check your browser and check the version and let you know if you update or not. Now, this is only for the 471. The 470 is still IE only. So for the first form, you still have to do just use Internet Explorer. Hopefully in the future, it will also be majorly updated like the 471, but this is the first form that they're doing this with. So that's awesome. Now, one other thing I do mention related to the 471 is something new that was added starting in the 2010 update. FCC registration number. Anyone who has done business with the FCC has been assigned this number. You may not have a clue. Not know that you have been assigned this. Many people don't. Starting in 2010, FCC said they want this number included on the E-rate forms, and it isn't an option, an entry, an item on the 471. But you might not know what it is. I didn't know what it was for us. Since it's the FCC and it's about doing business with them, I went to our business person and asked her, and she had no idea what I was talking about, so I had to look it up. But the FCC has a website, has a page on their FCC website where you can look up what your library's registration number is. And if you don't have one, you look up your library and can't find it, you can request one. It's pretty instant. I've had libraries do this where they didn't have one. They send the request in not even a few minutes later. They've got a registration number. So just bring that to your attention. It is something new and different, and most people don't have a clue what it is. Just let you know you can look that up. Now, when you are submitting filling out your 471, each thing that you request is assigned a funding request number. So if you have your telephone service and your internet service, that's two different funding requests you're asking for, and each of them is assigned their request number, and it's given on the form. Also, service providers have ID numbers, just like your library has a build-in today number, and you have a pin number. They have a service provider ID number, SPIN. You can look this up on the USAC website too, but some providers have multiple ones. If you're using the same provider, you just can use the same SPIN from previous forms. But if you're not sure and you see multiple ones when you look them up, I recommend calling the company and asking which one am I supposed to use. They may have certain reasons why certain SPIN numbers are only used for certain services or for certain companies that they work with. Now, in response to getting sending your 471, you do also get a four IRC acknowledgement letter back. It'll come on that yellow paper. Same thing as the 470. It summarizes everything that you entered. Use it to make corrections if necessary. Now, once you have put in submitted your 471, that's when your application goes into review. And this can go on for months and months and months. This is when you wait and wait to see if they're going to approve your application and give you the money or not. They check the application for correctness for the services you're done. This is when they may contact you to ask you questions. They may send you an email or a phone call, whatever way you said, and say we need additional information. You didn't answer this question or we think you answered this question wrong or we want to get more information about this one. Now, if they do contact you, I'll tell you, it doesn't mean you did something wrong. It just means something needs to be tweaked necessarily means you did something wrong. It could mean you just need to tweak something on the form. When they contact you, they're not trying to trip you up or make it harder. They're trying to get you the money. The whole purpose of this e-rate program is to give away this money. This money is designated for e-rate and that is it. It can't be used for something else or switch to some other government program. They want to give out this money, but they want to make sure it's done correctly and to the right people and to the right services. They don't want anyone to come back again later and check, look at what they did and find out you did that completely wrong. So they make sure and ask you questions to make sure you get your application submitted fully and completely so that you can get your money and have your discounts. So don't get scared if you get a letter or contact from them. Just answer it. If you're confused about the letter you can contact me and send it to me and I can look at it for you. If you're in Nebraska Library you can contact me. If you're in your own state, if you're not in Nebraska, look for who your state e-rate coordinator is. Each state has one and contact them to help you out with your applications. But I can answer any questions you have. I can look at the letter or interpret it into English to let you know what they're looking for. Sometimes they CC me on these when they're emailed, but not every time. To our Nebraska Library, sometimes I'll receive a copy. Sometimes I don't. I haven't been able to figure out what the reasoning is between getting it and not. Why I do sometimes why I don't. If I do get one from you, I will proactively email you and I'll look at the letter and I'll proactively contact you even if you haven't asked me and say, I took the liberty of looking at your application, here's what they're looking for in case you're wondering. However, if I don't contact you and you're curious contact me because I might not have gotten a copy of your letter. Like I said, I don't know why they do it sometimes and they don't. So this is the point where they review your letter. Program Integrity Assurance PIA is the organization, the section inside USEC that does this so you receive contacts from a PIA reviewer. After they have gotten all the answers they need and decided what they're going to give you, they will send you a funding commitment decision letter. This will come on the color paper and it tells you if you've been funded or not or how much. They might reduce your funding. They might make some tweaks, whatever. You might receive more than one. So look at it and see if it includes all of the funding requests that you asked for. If you ask for a phone and you ask for internet, make sure there's information on there about both of the requests. This is the point and after this, as soon as you get your funding commitment letter you do your next form in the process, which is the 486. There's no reason to wait. In this case there's no deadline. There's nothing to wait for. There's no 28-day waiting period or anything. As soon as you have that in hand you can sit down and do your next form in the process, the 486. This is also where if necessary, if they deny you or reduce your funding for some reason, you can do an appeal. You would appeal to the schools and libraries division of USAC first. If they deny your appeal then you go to FCC. You have 60 days to do an appeal if necessary. FCC has been doing more of these but it can take a long time to get an answer. This is not something where you send in the appeal, they get it, they come back to you in a month and say, oh yeah, in a month. Yeah, here's your money. We're talking it could be years before they get back to you. So don't expect to get your money right away if you do an appeal. It may be a lot of back and forth convincing conversations with them about, well it was this and no it wasn't that and yes we did it and no we didn't until you can get an answer. So with the rate, even though it's a great program, lots of discounts, be prepared to pay your bills in full just in case. There's information on the USAC website specifically about how to do an appeal and I can help you through that as well. I've been helping a couple other libraries with that already. Now once you have your funding commitment decision letter, as I said the next thing you do is your form 486. You immediately sit down and do that. It just is letting USAC know yes, we've gotten our letter and yes we have our services and yes we want to receive the funding. And this is also where you do your compliance with SIPA if it's necessary, if you are doing something internet related. You have 120 days after service starts or the date of the funding commitment letter to get your 46 in. So if your funding commitment letter comes in June, July, August, September as they're talking about, that's when your deadline is. If you get it before July, October 29th is a deadline for it. So your deadline is going to vary based on when your commitment letter came. But 120 days is plenty and there is no reason to wait. You just immediately go ahead and do it. It also, you get a letter back from USAC saying we received it for 2015, beyond that yellow paper. Same process as all the other ones. There's a lot of repetition in this program. Now once you've done your 486, you would also turn around and talk to your service provider about doing either a 472 or 474. These are the forms that have to do with getting your money. You have a choice of how you want to receive your discount money. Either a reimbursement check after you've finished your bill in full or you can have your reimbursement be on your bills as you get them. So discount it immediately by your service provider. If you're doing a, if you want a discount on, you want a reimbursement check, sorry, you as the applicant would do a bear form build entity form and you submit that and then you pay all your bills and then you submit this at the end of a funding years when it would be. So you pay your bills in full throughout the whole year. Then you submit a bear form, get a reimbursement check back. You have, this is another one of those 120 days deadlines. You have 120 days after the last date of the funding year, June 30th to get this in. Also ends up being an October deadline. However, if you want to just receive discounts on your bills as you get them, your service provider would submit the spy form, their form and then they get the money from USAC and then pass on the savings to you on your bills every month. Okay. So why would you choose one or the other? It's going to depend a lot on how you handle your money at your library. If you think there's a chance that a check just sent into the city or to the library might not filter down and make it to the library, meaning doing the bear, you might want to just do the service provider and then you know you're getting a discount every month. So it's going to depend. If you're sure you can get the checks and they'll be sent on to the library or they come directly to the library because you handle your own funding, then that's fine. You can do the bear form after the year is over. So it's going to vary which way you want to do it. We like service provider forms because then you don't have to do anything. They do the form. They give you the discount and there's not much less paperwork back and forth if you do the discount on the form. So this is where I told you there's four forms in the process. You always do the first three, the 471, the 471, the 46, always do. The 471 will depend on whether you're getting a reimbursement check, you do it, or you're doing a service provider, they do it. Discount on the bill, they do it. Now something new is going to be changing with this, with the bear form, doing the bear payments, the reimbursement check afterwards, not 2015, but next year. The way the money actually comes is for both versions through the service provider, meaning you submit a bear form to USAC, they send the money to your service provider and your service provider cuts you a check. We actually get a check here at the library commission from Windstream, that's how it comes. So the money always filtered through. It kind of makes sense because the Telecommunications Act said it directed service providers to give discounts, so all the money is being filtered through them. However, there have been some problems with that process over the years, some providers not passing along the money, some libraries haven't really fight for it, lots of delays, and they've decided once again, streamlining, modernization, we're going to take out the middleman because it doesn't really make sense with these bear payments. The money should just go directly to the library. It's 2016, it will. You won't have to have the money go through the provider. However, USAC only does bank transfers, not actual printed checks. So you'll have to have a bank information that you'll use to fill out a form, so more like a direct deposit type thing, and that's how the money will come to your account. So this may change your decision, affect your decision making on how you'll do this as well, in that do you have a bank account where they can direct deposit something into and it goes to the library. If not, you may need to switch over and do the search provider invoice and have discounts on your bills. So this is something coming not 2015, not the current year, but one year ahead. Now after you submit, if you do do a bear, you get a bear notification letter, a letter is sent to you and to the provider letting them know that you've chosen this choice, made this selection, so they should know. Also, you will receive quarterly reports of all the money that USAC has sent to your provider, whether it's for the search provider invoice to get you a discount on your bills, or it's the money that they're supposed to be passing on to you in a check. You'll have a report that will tell you this. Whenever you get that report, check your bills. If you're supposed to get a discount, make sure you're getting the right amount. Make sure you're getting exactly what USAC sent to the provider. If you're supposed to get a check from the provider, make sure you start getting that check from them. Wait a bit, of course, and see if they don't send it to you properly. Then, check in with them, contact them and say, hey, I got this report that says they sent you the money. Now one thing I did want to bring up that I missed earlier about the 46 is 46 is a point where a lot of libraries get confused and miss the form. They get their funding commitment letter, this letter here saying, we have some Friday with your money. You've gotten the money and they think, we're done. You don't have to do anything else. Here's the letter that says we have been given our money. The letter doesn't say you've been giving it. What it means is you've been allotted that money. We've set it aside for you and now you have to let us know if you want what you want to do with it. Sometimes you might change your mind. You might decide, oh wait, we're not doing that anymore. We changed our service provider. We got a different deal. They decided to give it to us for free. Whatever, something changes. So don't lose track of things when you get to this point and say, yeah, I got my letter. I'm done. You've got to go on and do that 46. So as I said, three forms definitely. Fourth form will depend on how you do it. Okay, and once you got that last form figured out and done, you're done. You've gone through the whole year of e-write. Yay. So anybody, before we go, I just got a few last couple of things to mention. Anybody have any questions right now? Questions, comments, anything you want to know about that I've mentioned, anything you want me to go back and go over again? You type your questions into the questions section of the GoToWeber interface. Anything you're confused about, not sure about? Somebody says, I don't think I've been getting the quarterly report. How do I check? Good question. I don't think we can check. I would say call, hey, that's not our next slide. It's helpful for you, call USAC at their client service bureau and ask. Tell them you don't think you've been getting it. I'm not sure I've been going to someone who shouldn't, who knows. This also is the one thing, unfortunately, the quarterly report doesn't come on the colored paper. It comes from a different area in USAC that doesn't use that kind of thing, so it will just be on a regular white paper, so maybe that's why it's gotten lost in the process. But if you're not getting it, call OCL or client service bureau here. Client service bureau is USAC's customer service. So here's the number 888-203-8100. Contact them and ask them where that is or see if they can send out a new one for you. It's not something... Now, there's nowhere online. You can look up and see what's been dispersed to the, what's actually been sent to the providers. You can look up and see what was designated to be sent, but not that it's actually been sent yet. So contact them and ask you. They do also have an online form if you... They don't have an email address to send to, but you fill out this email online form and then they'll respond to you via email. So if you want to start an email conversation instead of calling it 100 number, you can contact them that way. And this is also just the URL for their main website with a lot of information and resources on there. Also, just a few other things to check on. Schools and Libraries has a news brief, a weekly email that they send. I recommend signing up for it. It just tells you what's going on in e-rate, what deadlines are coming up. Sometimes there's lots of little articles about how to calculate your Category 2 budget. So lots of useful information in there. Only once a week, year-round. If it's not anything useful to you, just delete it. There's information on their website, the whole application process from start to finish. So that can help you a lot like the timeline we have. And our Library Commission website, we have here our own e-rate website that we can...has lots of information as well. Which I'll bring up here. There we go. I just want to show you this first. I have a couple questions I'll get to here first. Ah! Is there a place I can check if I sent in all my forms for the last funding year? Or do I know if we are current? Yes, you can look that up online. I'll show you that in just a second here. Okay, I'll answer that question first. So this is our Nebraska Library Commission e-rate website where I just collect up a whole bunch of information that can be useful to you. Information about the modernization order, if you want to read up on it. Our current funding recipients who have been approved to get money. I have the online training that I do. This training is recorded as I said. It will be posted here on our website for you to look at later. And then I have links to all the forms that you can submit. The way to go to submit them online. Each forms individual information. And also to help you with submitting these forms, links to look up that FCC registration number. To look up the schools and free lunch counts at the Department Education website. The eligible services list is on here. So I try to link to everything that you need. And this is what you're asking for. Where you can look up where you are in the process. They've got search tools on the USAC website. There we go. Where you can look up. The data retrieval tool is the most comprehensive. You can look up your, put in your build entity number and get and choose the funding year and see everything about your application. So I'd recommend that if you just want to know a whole process of what you're doing. I think that was your question there Amy was, do you know where you're at? I'd say look it up there. If you're not sure about it or can't understand the spreadsheet go ahead and ask me and I can interpret that for you. You can also look up here. You can look up your build entity number, service provider numbers. You can look up a particular 470 or 471 to see the status of it. So that's where all that information is there. Also I told you I have SIPA information on here. Information about SIPA and resources for looking at filtering info if you want to. We still have info about tech planning here if you are doing a tech plan. Oh where's that link too. The e-rate news and updates, the weekly this is where it is on the USAC website where they have their weekly news briefs that you can sign up for. But we also have here in Nebraska a e-rate mailing list. It's just things posted specific to Nebraska libraries. Generally the Department of Education posts a lot of things on there updating about who's still got to submit forms, what deadlines are coming up. So if you want to keep up to date it's not very busy so it wouldn't overwhelm you with anything if you did choose to sign up for that. Now I have a couple other questions that have come in here. What happens if you change phone service after you start the e-rate process? We currently have Windstream the city will be changing us to spiral communications. I don't know that one in the future. It's going to depend on when the change happens. You will need to know who your provider is going to be. Ideally what you should do is know who your provider is going to be before you do the 471 because that's when you have to report that. So the deadline for the 471 is going to be sometime in March. So look for when that's announced and possibly try and talk to your city and say I need to know by this week that deadline before that deadline better who we're going with so that I can get the e-rate discount. If you change after that that's going to be a lot harder. The only reason you can do service provider changes is if there's like not just with pictures but with someone else it's things like the old provider went into business. We have to switch or someone else took over their business and we've got switched to a new one. That would be the only extreme reasons why you'd have to switch. If after you do the 471 and you start getting, even after you start getting money you switch then you'd have to contact USAC and tell them okay we've ended up, our city changed us, wasn't under our control. We need to stop getting the e-rate money now because we're no longer with that provider. Still has to be the provider you reported in the 471 has to stay your provider for the whole year or to get the funding for the whole year. If they don't stay you switch, it's okay. You just have to stop receiving the funding and you can contact USAC about that and then you just have to restart up the next year with the new provider as who you designate. Okay, sorry I was just reading a longer question that came in. Okay, I think I know. Yes. Okay, the question is this is my first year doing e-rate. I filled the 470 last month. Now the 470, the new e-rate, this is my aside, the new e-rate and the new form for the 470, the new online form just went live I think in November 21st. She said she did the 470 last month so it's probably before that date but the letter that came, the receipt notification letter was on blue paper which is the previous year's color. I guess I mistakenly applied for the wrong funding year since it wasn't on canary paper. Is there a way to cancel this? Basically what to do. It depends on what you did when you submitted the form. Now you could have used the previous form to submit an application for the upcoming year. The form that was available previously online would also only give you a choice of the 2014 funding year as an option but there's a question in there which is item number 13 where you can say this is actually for funding year 2015. You could have submitted early if needed. Some libraries need to do it early in order for the whole process and their budgeting to be done correctly. So if you said an item number 13 in your first 470, this is actually for funding year 2015 then you're okay. However, yes, the letters will now still come on the old blue paper because the system is not smart enough to know that you meant it doesn't read that. It just says it's a 2014 form so we send blue paper but it is for the 2015 funding year. You just have to look at it. However, if you didn't say in that item 13 this is supposed to be for 2015 then it's going to be confused and think you did something weird for last year and then yes, just do a brand new 470 on the new online form. It'll say it's for 2015. It'll work properly and then you can call USAC and explain to them. There we go. What happened? Call the 800 number and tell them you want to cancel the first one. I would recommend canceling the first one because you're going to start getting this. Everything's going to be on blue paper and somebody get confused and just might be easier just to say cancel the first one. Read it all over again on a new form and then everything will be good. That make sense? Any other questions? Yes, she's perfect. Thank you. Just jump the gun. Yeah, and that happened a lot of people because there was an online form available out there for the 470. It just was the last year's form, not the current one. So, any other last minute questions that you have? This is my contact information if you need to reach out to me. 800 number here in Nebraska you can call me at. I'll go to our main front desk. The transfer to my line, I'm not here. I have voicemail. I will call you back. And there's my email address too. As I said, if you are not a Nebraska library, each state has their own state e-rate coordinators. Look for who yours is and contact them for specifics about how to do e-rate in your state. Also, if you're a school, like I said, the basics here cover everything, but there was a lot, of course, specific to public libraries since I'm the work for the public libraries. In Nebraska, go to the Department of Education. Sue Ann Witt is their person. Other states, I'm not sure you'd have to check and see. Some places it's the same person does both schools and libraries, and some it's separated, so I don't know you'd have to check on yours. Any last minute questions while you still have me here? All right. Okay, then that will wrap it up for this year's e-rate training for the new e-rate. Lots of changes. Yes. Oh, somebody's saying my head is spinning. Yeah. Lots of changes. There's a lot to e-rate. It's an ongoing program. It goes throughout the whole year. Yes, you do have to keep track of it throughout the year. Lots of changes coming this year. Hopefully, this will help guide you through some of them. If you do need any help, call me. Email me. That's what I'm here for you for our Nebraska libraries to make sure you get through this process and make sure you get your e-rate money. That's our goal. On that, thank you very much.