 All right. Hello and welcome to our e-rate basic training for funding year 2014. It's the upcoming year. I am Krista Burns. I am official title is Special Projects Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission and one of my duties as Special Projects Librarian is to be the state e-rate coordinator for public libraries. So any libraries who are applying for e-rate, interested in e-rate, anything related to that I handle. I see that we do have in the session this morning some people from schools and that's fine. The basics of what we're going through to this morning here in the training will be applicable to you as well. The basics of how the program works, but there are specifics to schools that I do not know the details of because that's not what I handle. Here in Nebraska, we do have some of the Department of Education, Sue Ann Witt, who is the specific person in charge of helping schools apply for e-rate. So if you need any specifics for that, she'll be able to help you. But the basics of this will be fine. I also see we have people on the line who are from outside of Nebraska. Hi from, what do we get here? At least two of you out there that are not from Nebraska. And that's great too. As I said, the basics of this will be fine for you, but there will be things that are specific to Nebraska and Nebraska Public Libraries in the session because that is who I serve specifically. So you will have some things here that will be specific to us to find out how that would be handled in your state. You need to just connect with your state e-rate coordinator. There's one in every state in the country. So what we're going to go through with this training today is the basics of e-rate. It is just a two-hour session, so it's going to be pretty quick. The first part of it will be what e-rate is, how the program works, what it's all about, what you need to think about before you even apply, before you decide that you want to get into the program. Some of you may have already been doing it and know some of this stuff. Some of you are brand new, but it's a good refresher for anyone. And then the second half, we'll go into the actual forms that are involved in looking at each one of them so you can see what is needed for each of the forms. So let's get started with our e-rate training. All right. What is e-rate? E-rate is a federal program that gives discounts to schools, libraries, and actually healthcare providers as well. That's another part of it that you don't hear much about, to give discounts on your telecommunications, your basic telephone, local long-distance cell phones, fax lines, and internet access, your monthly internet bill that you pay, whether it's fiber, DSL, cable, whatever, all of that internet-related services that you have. And it's funded through something called the universal service fee. If you look on bills that you get, you will see that there is a fee, it might be abbreviated USF or universal service or whatever. All the service providers pay into this, and all that money is gathered together to then divvy out and divide amongst the schools, libraries, healthcare providers to give them the discounts on the bills. Now it was created originally by the Telecommunications Act 1996. So the first year that people could apply was 97, which was then applicable for the next year, 98, whenever you're doing e-rate, you're thinking about applying for what's coming up in the next year, getting your discount the next year. It ordered the providers to supply services at a discounted rate, and this is the official code and rule in the FCC if you ever want to go and read it. The FCC establishes the rules, how it's going to work, what they need to agree to. And as I said, it's public libraries, elementary K-12 schools, healthcare providers is a section for that. And there's also even programs for low-income people in high-cost areas in the country where internet and phone is so hard to get that it's really expensive. So the FCC oversees the entire program, all the rules come down from them, they decide what's going to happen. And then there's a company called the Universal Service Administrative Company, USAC, which has been created to actually administer the e-rate program. So whenever you hear from them, that is who you'll be hearing from. You'll get letters from USAC, you'll get emails from them, depending on how you communicate with them. So they're ones that run the entire e-rate program, along with the other ones, like I said, for the healthcare providers, low-income, high-cost. Specifically within USAC is the Schools and Libraries Division. That's what we're, who helps us out for e-rates. So all schools and libraries are bundled together into one area called SLD. But most of the time we talk about USAC as who is in charge of it and who, and that is who you hear from. So the FCC sets the rules. They set the rules originally back in 96 when the Telecommunications Act was first put out. And then every now and then they do do updates to it. There are changes and improvements to the rules. Now every year things don't change drastically, so you don't need to panic in every year to learn new, you know, what is the changes this year. Usually there's just minor things. But every now and then there's some big updates. Back in 2010 was the last time there was a large update that was the sixth report in order was done, was released in 2010, which became effective with 2011 funding years. So we've been doing these new rules for a couple of years now. But that was one of the sixth time that this major change had been done. So it is not very often when huge changes go into the system. Once the FCC sets up the rules of how things need to be done, then USAC develops the specific procedures. They figure out what we need to update in the forms, what we need to change in our procedures, what we need to tell the schools and libraries, how they need to do things now, how that all becomes different. Once they figure out they want to do it, they then have to send it back to the FCC for approval. So it's a kind of back and forth every year for any minor changes. And of course for the major changes from this big report that went through. So there's a little back and forth. Sometimes there's some delays of getting some of these changes totally through. The e-rate funding year always runs from a July 1st of any year through June 30th of the next year. So for example, right now when you're starting to apply for e-rate new, right now you're thinking about the funding year 2014, which starts in July 1st, 2014, and runs to June 30th, 2015. As I said earlier, you're always thinking of e-rate as you're thinking to the future. I'm going to start working now on my forms and my application to start us so that we can get this discount next summer. You're never getting your discounts right away for now. You're always thinking ahead when you're thinking of e-rate. Originally they had a cap and for a long time they had a cap on the funding available, $2.25 billion. But finally with that new report in order they did in 2010 they realized that inflation is a big deal and it's affecting libraries and schools. So now it is adjusted every year and there is more money allotted to the program. And you can see the amounts here as of 2013 it was officially brought up to $2.38 billion. That's the funding year we're in the middle of right now. They've not announced yet at least that I've heard what it's going to be for 2014, but it will be increased as you can see each year. There's more and more. If there is any unused funds on a previous year like all the money doesn't get given out it can be rolled over into the next funding year. Now having said that it has not happened very much in the recent couple of years. Some of you may be in a situation where you have not heard yet if you've gotten your funding even for 2013. 2013 funding here did start on July 1st. However there are more and more applications coming in from more and more schools and libraries and it takes them a lot longer to get through all of them. So usually nowadays there's not any money to roll over and it's taking longer to get answers to people. So just keep that in mind also when you're applying for E-rate. Just because the funding starts in July that does not necessarily mean that's when you might start getting your discount in your money. You will have to be able to pay your full cost of your bills just in case they haven't gotten to your application yet. Now who could apply? We're talking about just the schools and libraries section here. Libraries and library systems basically the ultimate rule is if you're eligible for LSTA funds, library service technology funds, and in Nebraska that's all public libraries. So every single public library in the state becomes eligible because all of you receive services via the Nebraska Library Commission that are provided via LSTA funds. Every public library, schools and school districts, individual schools can apply, school districts as a group can apply, and consortia is if libraries or schools want to get together to get discounts already or good deals on telephone or internet then they can apply as a consortia as well. How big a discount can you get? You can get anywhere from 20% that's lowest up to 90% of your cost. Nobody, there's no 100% so you'll get it completely free. You can get up to 90. Here in Nebraska are most of our libraries fall between 60 and 80%. So it's pretty good amount. We have some that are down to 20 and they still apply. A few that get up to 90, not very many, but they run around 60 to 80%. So it's definitely a good deal to be able to get this discount and get this money. So this is the first thing I always tell libraries to think about before you're deciding you want to do e-rate is how much of a discount is it going to be? And is that discount and that savings on your bills for your phone and your internet worth it to go through the work that we'll take to participate in the program? It is an ongoing program with forms that you'll be submitting throughout the year. It's not just a one-time deal and you're done. You do have to keep up on it. But if you're getting a good discount, 60, 70, 80%, that extra work could definitely be worth it to your budget. Now to figure out what your discount is, it's based on the National School Lunch Program. The FCC decided we needed some sort of indicator of who were the neediest areas in the country. And the neediest ones will get the most discount and they just decided to pick if there are a lot of students that are eligible for the school lunch program. That means that the level of poverty in that area may be higher, so they'll get a higher discount. So for libraries, you'll look for the school district in which your library is located, where it physically is located. And look at the school lunch numbers for that, how many students are eligible. And this is very important that it's where the library is physically located, not necessarily what schools or school districts you serve. You may have people from students from other schools that come in just because of where you're physically located because you're right near the border or something or you're the closest one. And that's fine, but your e-rate discount is based on where physically the library is. In addition, it's how many students are eligible, not necessarily how many apply. Not all students or parents want to apply for the program or do, so it's not the ones that actually have just how many of them are eligible for the program. So that could bump you up as well. In addition, you have to remember that they, for whatever reason, do not include pre-K. So if there is pre-K kids included in your numbers, then you'd have to subtract that out when you're figuring out your percentage and doing your math for it. In addition to that, then you combine that with whether you are urban or rural based on U.S. census data. Most libraries in Nebraska are rural, of course. Urban is would be mainly Lincoln and Omaha areas in some of the levels that makes your discount a little higher for the rural, if you're in a rural area. Now, how do you actually do the calculation? These are some URLs here. Yes, there's a lot to write down. Don't try and scribble it down now. You do have the presentation you'll have to look at these later. Here in Nebraska, the Department of Education hosts all the school lunch data on their website. This is a great resource that they've done. So you can just go there and look up all the numbers for the schools that are in the school district where you are. Apparently, I've heard in the past, before I started doing this, that that wasn't always the case. I've had some librarians come to me, have said to me, I just can't do e-rate. It's just too much of a hassle to try and get these numbers. The school won't give them to me. The superintendent just is hard to deal with. They don't understand what I'm asking for or why, or they're concerned about privacy issues. They say, we can't give out this information. It's private information about these students. None of that is actually accurate. No one is asking for the names of the students, who they are, any data about them. All that you need to know here is how many students are enrolled in the school, one big number, and how many of those students are eligible for the program. That is it. No personal data is given out. And if you go to the Department of Education website, you can see that it only gives that information in the spreadsheet. And I'm going to go here and show you, there we go. This is our Nebraska Library Commission website. And I just want to show you briefly on our menu here. We have e-rate, and there's a specific page about the e-rate program. And I'll show you some more of this later. We have information about the basics of e-rate, previous training I've done, when this training is done, the recording will be put on the website. And then specifics about the different forms required for e-rate. And here what I wanted to show you is I have the link right here for the Nebraska schools, free and reduced lunch counts by school. It brings you to the Nebraska Department of Education website. And if we just scroll down a bit. And the second section here is the free and reduced lunch counts. And they actually have their new numbers up for 2013-2014, which is great. It's just a spreadsheet. That will open. There we go. And you see all this has it. Let me scroll back up to the top. All the information here is the names of the schools, how many students were enrolled in the school, and how many people, the percentage of them that received the school lunch number. So there's nothing else in here. There's no personal data, just numbers. So this is where you can go to get all that information about your national school lunch program. Okay. So once you have that number from there, you get your numbers from there, then you figure out if you're urban or rural, USAC has on their website a place where it just lists every state and every county in every state. So you can see if you're urban or rural. And you can also find the district matrix to determine what your discount is using those two numbers. They also have on their website a link here that you can go to if you want to. Something to help you do the math if you need to, because you've got multiple schools in your district. You're going to need to calculate them all together. There's a little help thing there. This is the discount matrix then. Once you find out what percent of students in your school, just in the school district where your library is located, you figure that out, figure out if you're urban or rural, and then you'll know how much of a discount you can get. You can see here for some of these up to 49% students eligible, rural areas get a slightly higher discount via the E-rate program. So, like I said, first thing you want to do, figure out what your discount is, and see if it is worth it for you to go through and do all of this work to be in the program. So next is what is eligible for E-rate? What is E-rateable? Not sure if that's a real word or not, but it works. Every year, the FCC publishes what they call their eligible services list. It's a pretty long document, about 45, 50 pages long, and it lists everything that you can possibly get a discount on via E-rate. So, if it's phone, if it's internet, whatever, and this is updated every year, so you have to make sure when you are applying for E-rate that you are using the information, the eligible services list for the correct year. They will have on this URL that I gave you here, they will list all of the previous years as well. So, you can always go back and look at other ones, but make sure you're using the current one. And this is important because, as I said, they do update things every year, and they do try and keep up with technology, how things are changing, is some new way of doing internet or phone come up. Things like voiceover IP did not exist back in 1996 when this program first came up. Wireless internet, fiber, all these new things. They try to keep up with new technologies and new ways of doing things and make them eligible if they can. So, always make sure you check this list and see what is E-rate, E-rateable. And I'm going to go through some of the things that are not in the entire list. Like I said, this year, I believe it's about 48 pages long. So, it's a pretty huge list, but I'm going to go through some of the more common things that libraries may be applying for. Now, these services are divided up into two different groups based on what they call priorities. Priority one, priority two. And this is where you're going to start getting into what are you getting E-rate for and what categories it fall into so you know how to apply for it. Priority one is the most common thing that libraries and schools apply for. Your telecommunication services would be your phone, your fax number, if you have a cell phone that's provided from the library, 800 numbers. Anything that's phone-related, a local long distance can be there. If you have something via fiber, that's also telecommunications accessibility service through priority one and internet access. Internet access being your monthly internet bill, whether it's for you have satellite or DSL or fiber, however you have it, your monthly bill. So that's called priority one. They are all funded first. So when applications are sent into USAC, they look at all of them. They set aside the priority one ones and start looking at them first to see about giving out the discounts and the money for them. Then we have our priority two services. Priority two services are more the behind the scenes type things is how I describe them. Internal connections, your actual wiring, your construction if you had to have a new computer lab built in the library or if you had a computer lab upgraded. If you had a new library built, that construction cost related to the internet and the phone that needed to be installed into the building would be considered a priority two service. In addition, basic maintenance of those internal connections, meaning upkeep, upgrading service if there's damage or repairs need done, that kind of thing is also priority two. Now, priority two funding is only funded after priority one is done. So after these applications come in, if there's any priority two requests, they set them aside and look at the priority ones first, get them all done, then go back and look at priority two. In addition, they also see how much money they have left to give out. Because this program has become so popular and with some of these changes like from that report, the order, the update that was done in 2010, they've streamlined the process. They've made the forms easier to submit. They've taken out extra questions and things that aren't necessary. A lot more schools and libraries are applying so there's a lot more need, which means there's not enough money to go around sometimes. So for priority two is funded beginning with the neatest applicants first, meaning the ones with the highest discount level. If you do that calculation, figuring out your school lunch program, plus if you're urban or rural, that discount that you are eligible for, they look at that and the highest ones get the priority two funding. So every year you will hear some sort of announcement that says, priority two funding is being approved at the 89% and above level, meaning if your discount is 89% and up, they'll start to look at yours to fund it. And below that, you just won't even get your application looked at. They just have to do the math to figure out how much money do we have left over to give out after doing all that priority one and that will let us know how much we can possibly do for priority two. So I don't say don't apply for priority two. It doesn't hurt to try. If you're doing some sort of big construction thing, do it anyways. You never know where that's going to fall every year. It's going to vary. And if your discount is pretty high, 70, 80, 90%, you could get it. If it's low, there's a more of a change you might not, but it wasn't hard to do it anyways. But just look to see if you're doing some of these kind of things. Are you going to be next year? And you've got to be thinking to the future. Not, we put it in a new lab this year. You already missed it if that's happening. You've got to think about what are we going to be doing next year or the year after? Are we building a new library? Are we going to have new computers installed? Are we going to update our computer lab? Are we going to change our phone system from a hardwire to a voice over IP? What are we going to do? And if you are going to do some of those kind of things, more construction behind the scenes type stuff, think about applying for priority two. Other than that, what you most commonly will do would be the priority one services, your phone, your long distance, your local, and your monthly internet access. Now specifically for priority one, under telecommunications, as I've been saying, your local and long distance services available is eligible. Voice over IP, if you use that for phone, that is eligible. Cell phone, provided by the library, not your personal one, of course. If you have text messaging, voicemail, all that all cost extra, that all can be included as well. Now if you do have internet on your phone, that's a separate cost, a separate charge, you're going to want to do that under internet access. IA, that's what that applies, means there. Because that is actually an internet service. Even if it's coming through your phone, it's not considered telecommunications, it's considered internet access. You can apply for that separately in the internet access section of your application. As far as how you get things, DSL, T1 line, satellite service, this is just a few lists of the kind of ways you could be getting your data transmission. So look and see what you have, look at what's listed in the eligible services list, and that would be something you could apply for under priority one. Internet access, your basic monthly internet bill, whatever you pay monthly to have your library connected to the internet. Other things that you can also include in this, if you pay extra to have email service to someone. If you have wireless internet too, doesn't have to be just the hard wired, you're wireless if that's a separate company or a separate charge, you can apply for that. Web hosting, if you are paying some company to host your website, that is an eligible service as well. That's helping get the internet to your users. Now, things that are not eligible, there are some things you've got to be aware of that are different, is basically the difference between what is and isn't eligible internet related, is getting to the internet, those kind of services are related, but what's on the internet, you cannot get a discount on. So if you subscribe to databases that you pay for monthly, that content type thing, you cannot get a discount on. That's not what the purpose of e-rate is for. E-rate is just to get you to the internet and once you're there, that's all on your own. Website creation fees, if you pay someone to host your website, that's just having server space where it can sit on so it's available, but if you pay someone to actually design the site or add content to it, that is not something that you can get. E-rate discount on. Curriculum software, that's things that like schools, may use or universities, blackboard, Moodle, those kind of things that you might pay for, but extra software, that is not eligible either. Anything that you use to create or edit internet content, if you pay for a WordPress database or WordPress system to keep your website updated or keep your blog going, any of that kind of cost, that is not eligible. So basically for internet, as I said, what you're thinking of is if it's getting you to the internet, that's eligible. If it's the stuff and the content on the internet, that is not eligible. Now, on to priority two, this is the extra things, the behind the scenes in the walls type stuff, internal connections, cabling equipment that gets the internet to your classrooms or your labs or whatever in the library. There is a rule for this called the two and five rule. This is not the kind of thing you can apply for every single year and it's not the kind of thing you would probably be applying for. You're not going to build a new library every year, I wouldn't think. You're not going to update a need to update your lab every year. So the Institute of Rule to keep people on the up and up about this, that for this kind of funding and internal connections, you can only apply for it and receive it once, twice, in every five year period. So if you apply once this year for 2014, you can apply again, but only in the next five years. You'd have to wait. And ideally you wouldn't be needing to apply for this anyways because it's not the kind of thing you would do. Obviously some people were trying to apply for it every year, maybe construction lagged or there are problems with companies they worked with, but there is this rule now that you can only do it in every five year period twice for this initial connections. Everything else, your basic phone, internet that you're doing, you can do every single year, not a problem. In addition to the internal connections themselves, the construction, the equipment, the building itself, there's basic maintenance. This is ongoing maintenance. The two-in-five rule doesn't apply to this. This is the kind of thing that you'd need to keep up on a regular basis. If you have to pay to have something repaired, if you have to pay to have a computer fixed, if a squirrel gets in the wall and chews on your cables and you need to have them redone, that kind of thing can all be done. And if your security updates and things, if this costs you something, you can apply for that as a considered basic maintenance in priority too. Now, one thing you do have to do for this is you must have a contract in place with some company or some individual to do this ahead of time. It's not the kind of thing where you can on the fly say, oh, yeah, the wall, you know, squirrel get in the wall. Let's call, you know, Sue down the street. She knows how to do this kind of networking stuff. We'll bring her in and then we'll get E-rate to pay for it. You have to already have a contract with Sue in place when you apply for E-rate saying, if something happens, she'll be the person we call. And that would be part of your application. In addition, you can only apply for actual work performed. So if you pay Sue, for example, $10 a month to be on call for your library, that cost cannot be paid unless you have to actually call her. You know, so for two months you might have no problems, don't need to call her, nothing needs to be updated, nothing broke. Those are not the ones that you can get a discount on. But then the third month, there's just a storm and something breaks and you've got to have repair done, then that's the one that you can get your discount on. And of course you would pay it ahead of time and get a refund after the fact, because this is the kind of thing you can't predict, but you can put it into application as priority two as a just-in-case type thing. In case we do need to use this service and have this work done, we can get some of our money back for it via the E-rate program. Now, in addition to the basic priority one and priority two services, there's some miscellaneous services that fall into either category. So I set them out separately in the eligible services list. Training is one of these things. If you need to train someone to be your network person, your server person, and they need to be trained for something that helps keep the Internet going or keep the phone system going, that training can be eligible for E-rate. Training for just your staff to like, for example, to learn how to use a program or learn how to use a database or learn how to use email, that's not something that's eligible. It's training for the people who are keeping your Internet going. That kind of training is one of the miscellaneous charges that you could get a discount on. In addition, any of the taxes or surcharges that are on your bills, those are all eligible too. So when you are doing your application and telling E-rate, telling USAC, this is how much it's going to cost us next year so that they know how much money they might need to get to set aside for you. Make sure you include these taxes. Look on your phone bill, see all the different taxes there are. Look on the eligible services list and see if they are listed there, and then you can include those as well. So if you pay for 911 service, telephone relay service, any of these kind of taxes, this is just some of the things. Those are things that are eligible. In addition, which I find interesting, the universal service fund fee itself, the fee that you pay the money into the program at the very beginning, you can get a discount on that too. So you pay it in and then you get some of that refunded back to you from the program. A little back and forth kind of bureaucratic thing there. So look for that on your bills as well. So we figured out what our discount is. We've looked at what we might be able to get for E-rate and what's eligible. Now there's a couple other things that you also need to look at before you decide to jump in to do E-rate. The first one of those things is technology planning. Technology plans are of course always a good idea. We do recommend them. We do do some training on it here and have some help on our website about this. For E-rate purposes, if you're only requesting priority one services, your basic telephone and your basic internet access, you do not need to do a technology plan. This is a change starting in 2011 from those new rules that went into place from 2010. So for previous years, you would have heard that you have to have one for E-rate purposes and would have had one in place. Since 2011, you only need them for priority two services. So if you're jumping down to those internal connections, having construction done, having new building built or a new lab updated, then you would need to have a technology plan in place. These are just the basics for E-rate purposes and what are needed in a technology plan. I'm not going to go through into details of this. I just put it in here to let you know that it's something for you to look at and be aware of. Most of our libraries in Nebraska, actually this year so far, every single application has only been for priority one. We did not have anyone do priority two services at all. Excuse me. So I don't go into this in detail, but just to be aware that if you ever do jump down to that priority two, you will have a technology plan in place. Now, we hope you have one anyway. As I was briefly saying, we think it's a good idea. It's always good to keep up on what's coming up in technology, what your library needs, how you need to think to the future, and we can help you with that too. We have, USAC has on their website the criteria, which is basically this, my little short blurbs here about the four elements. They have it much more written out on their website. And we also have on our website, a play in the Nebraska Library Commission's website, a web worksheet and some help guides on doing technology planning. And if you do need any help, you can always ask me for advice as well. So just think about that if you do ever jump down to that priority two services. So for e-rate purposes, priority one does not require a plan, priority two does. There may be other reasons why you need a plan. There are other, like I said, just for your own use, and there may be other things that requirements, other things that you participate in that require a technology plan that'll be a whole different issue to deal with. But for e-rate purposes, it's just your priority two services, not the priority one. Now, the last thing to think about and look at before you decide to jump into e-rate is complying with SIPA. This SIPA, being the Children's Internet Protection Act, this can be a controversial topic for some people. For some people, it's pretty cut and dry. For some people, it's unsure of how to deal with it, what they should be doing or shouldn't be doing. For e-rate purposes, I'm going to tell you what e-rate requires and how you can meet e-rate requirements to comply with SIPA, the minimum you need to do for that. What you want to do beyond that is your own local policy and what you decide to do in your libraries. Now, in order to, you need to comply with SIPA if you are applying for internet access, so that's a priority one service, your basic monthly internet bill, or if you're doing priority two, internal connections, construction, updating your lab, building a new library, building that kind of thing. So for both of those, you need to comply with SIPA. Basically anything internet related is what SIPA has to do with. Telephone, telecommunications has nothing to do with it. There's no, this doesn't relate to that at all. There are three basic things that SIPA requires and I'll get to the details of that in just a second here. Safety policy, a technology protection measure, that's the actual filter that you're using itself, and some sort of public notice where you announce that you're going to be doing this. There is information on the USAC website for SIPA. That's the URL there, so you can see their whole write-up and instructions about it. Now one good thing about SIPA, I think, and some people may think it's just that totally, but it's very short. It's only about 14 pages long. If you go and look at it in the actual full text of it, I have a link to it on our e-rate website. It's not very long. It's not very detailed, which works in our, to our benefit in our favor. Because it is so vague, there are some very minimal things we can do to be compliant with it to then get our e-rate discount on our internet access. Now one thing to mention first, that there was a new report and order the FCC put out related to SIPA in 2011. This was the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, which updated the original Children's Internet Protection Act. Had a few changes to it, nothing major. As I said, I deal with libraries, so I look at this from the librarian's point of view. And what's great about this update, there were no new requirements for libraries. So for anyone in a public library, you don't have to worry at all about this new rule. Our important order here, FCC 11-125, there were no new rules for libraries. However, there are changes to things related to schools. And one of the things I do like to bring up, because it could become an issue in your school, or in your library, is one rule of that schools need to have as part of their internet safety policy to provide actually education and classes and training to the students about online behavior, cyber bullying, how to be safe online, what you should do, how to interact with people. So schools are now required to do some sort of training, have something that educates their students about basically how to be safe on the internet. This is not a requirement for libraries, however. So if you actually go and look at this rule, the new report and order that came out in 2011, you'll see that it says schools must, this is this, so it's all related to schools. The reason I bring it up for our libraries, however, is that some parents, community members may have heard about this update and come to your library and say, you need to be providing training and cyber bullying and safety on the internet to my child and you're not, so I'm going to report you and you can't have your money. That's not true. You can provide that kind of training if you want to. If at a library you think helping the minors in your library be safe on the internet is a good idea, that's awesome. By all means, go and create a class and do some training and workshops on it. However, you are not required by this new SIPA rule to do that. If someone tries to come down on you and say, you're not providing this and you're breaking the law, you can tell them, actually, no, this is for schools that are required to do that, not us here at the library. If you want to complain to someone about doing it, go to the school. And if you want to, go ahead and grab a copy of this report and order and hand it to them so they can read it themselves if it gets to that stage. So I just want to let you know, because I have heard some libraries having this issue that why do we have to not, you know, people are telling us we have to do this and I'm not sure about that and you're right, it's only the schools that are required. But please, as a library, go ahead and teach some of these classes as well if you want to. Now onto the specifics of what is actually required under SIPA. First thing that is required is an internet safety policy. Now, you may already have something like this in place that addresses all these issues listed here. Lots of libraries have your computer use policy or your just library use policy, what is allowed and not allowed on the computers or in the library. And these are the issues. This is what SIPA says, you must address these issues. Access by minors to inappropriate material, safety of the minors when using different services, hacking, don't let them hack your computers, what will happen if they hack your computers, giving out personal information of minors, don't do that, and restricting their access to materials that are harmful. So all SIPA says is you must address these issues. They do not tell you how. However, they don't say you must have this filter on and you must do this. So it's nice and vague. That's one thing that, as I said, I think it's good about SIPA is how vague it is. It's up to you to decide how you're going to address it. You just have to somehow, somehow have in your policy these issues, you say what will happen to deal with any of these kind of issues. Whatever it is you want to have to deal with it, that is what you have to do. Like I said, if you already have a policy in place, you don't have to write a new one for your rate. Just use the one you have. Just check it to see if it covers all of those issues. And then you can just say, there we go, that's good. We've got our internet safety policy, and it meets these SIPA requirements because it addresses all of these issues on this list. Now, the second thing that's required is the technology protection measure, the filter itself. This is either something you install on each individual workstation, something you may have at your server level, at your network level, maybe something that your internet service provider provides to you. Some sort of a filtering technology or blocking technology. One other thing here, they don't tell you what kind of, what product to use. There is no thing in SIPA that says, here's the list of what's allowed. Here's the list of all the products and the filters that you can use. They just say have one. There are tons of them out there, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view. And every library situation is going to be different. So we also don't give specific recommendations for ones, any filters, but I do have also on our website links to lists of them and comparisons and evaluations so you can decide what works best for your library. A couple of things also that people I think aren't aware of that's related to the filter. First, and I'll jump down here to the third bullet here. It needs to be able to be disabled. A lot of people, their issue with SIPA and the filtering issue in general is they do not want to filter. Filtering is censorship. I refuse to censor. Just not going to do it. And I am willing to give up my discount for e-rate purposes for my internet because that's bad. Well, SIPA requires that you must be able to disable and turn off the filter when someone is an adult and they say a adult is 17 or over, comes and asks you to turn it off because they need to do research on something. This is something I think that some people don't realize that it's not just you're putting in a filter, you're blocking, you're censoring end of discussion. It's not. It can be negotiated. Someone can come to you and say, I need to get into this website that's about breast cancer research and because the word breast is in it, it's blocking me. Then you can, of course, go and quickly go ahead and turn that off and give them access to everything they need. It does not become censorship in that way. It actually dictates in SIPA. You've got to be able to turn it off and someone needs something to get to something that is legal. Now, the second thing here on the second bullet here is something that's interesting. SIPA itself states that you must protect access to visual depictions that are obscene child pornography harmful to minors. This visual depictions is, I think, the important phrase here. We don't have in this day and age yet any filtering software that can do this. Yes, the government has said with SIPA you must protect against visual depictions knowing that, or maybe not knowing that, there actually isn't anything that can do that. There are some products out there that may look at colors in a picture and say, oh, there's a lot of tan color in this picture. It's possibly a naked person blocking it. Well, it could be a picture of a woman in a tan dress for all they know. It's nothing that's smart enough to do that. So unfortunately, what we have to do is to try and protect against those things is use filters that do block via other ways. Words that are in the text on the screen, particular domains that we know are bad. So we kind of have to play the game of, well, this is the best we can do and it'll hopefully block out the right things and we'll see what happens in the end. But with all these filters, you can set up whitelist. You can pick and choose and adjust them to whatever level of filtering works for you. You can have it on the lowest level of filtering that maybe nobody will ever notice. But as long as it's there and it's installed on your computers, you're good to go. Something else to be aware of about this is these filters do need to be on every computer in the library that has access to the internet. This does include staff computers, adult use computers, not just the computers in the children's section. You can't just put it on them and not anywhere else. Anything that the internet that you're getting a discount on from e-rate, that internet, any computer that it's going to, they'll have to have the filters on them. However, you can always disable them for your staff because they need to do their work or for the adult computers because they need to get to the pages they need to get to. But they do just need to be installed on all of them to begin with. Now, the last thing you need for SIPUP is some sort of public notice or meeting or hearing letting your community know that you're doing this or that you're going to be doing this. Could be an agenda item on your board, most be board meeting, a notice in the paper, just something that you have to announce that this is something you're going to be doing. Now, if you set up these filtering things that did this five years ago, this is not something you have to do every year. You just have done this once and saved the documentation that it was done and then so that you have that in case anyone at USEC ever asks, did you have a board meeting? Did you announce this? Did you do something? So it's not the kind of thing you do every single year. Just make sure the first time you do it, you have this kind of meeting or public announcement or whenever you did do it, hopefully somewhere it was a discussion in your community about should we, should we, that kind of thing. And you just need to have a record of that. Any questions at this point about what we've gone through so far? What is eligible for e-rate? How you get the discount? What the discounts are? Doing your tech plans? Dealing with SIPA? Anybody have any questions? You can type them into the questions section there and I can grab them and answer your questions. Okay. We're cruising along pretty good here. We're right on time. So, now we are going to jump to the forms themselves. We've looked at what is, you need to think about ahead of time, how the program works, the basics of it beforehand, what you need to think about. And now we're going to go into each of the specific forms that you would use for the program for applying for e-rate. Now, there's four basic forms and depending on your situation, you may do two, three, or four of these forms. You won't necessarily do all four, but these are the four forms that are the process from beginning to end. And I'll explain as we go to each one why you may or may not be submitting each one. The first form in the process is the one you'd be doing right now, this time of year, in the fall. First form, form 470, letting service providers and USAC know that you want to receive some sort of service, your phone, your internet. And I'm going to get into a lot more details about these later, so this is just my little quickie overview. Second form is when you tell them who you picked for your provider, so your service provider and what service you're getting. The third form is confirming that service has started, that you've actually started getting your phone or the internet. And the fourth form, the final one is where you actually ask them to give you your discount, to give you your money, how they're going to do that. All of these forms are available online. I strongly recommend submitting them online if you can. It goes a lot faster. You don't have to worry about mail delivery. There's lots of pop-ups and help things that help you get through the forms. So you can get advice right as you're going through it. Speeds it up a lot. They are also all available in paper however, too, if that is the way you prefer to do it or if you need to do it that way for other reasons. But they're all available online on the USAC website. This is the page for the school and library section of the USAC website, usac.org-sl for schools and libraries is a URL. And you can see here, this is just a screenshot of it. There's lots of information about the program here. There's acronyms and terms, which is really great, like a glossary of all those terms and words and terminology they use. I strongly recommend taking a look at that for your own reference. The eligible services list, like I said, all of those are available. Trainings that they have, the forms themselves, you can figure out deadlines, all these different things here. And then they have updates. They do a news brief once a week. If you want to keep up with what's going on in e-rate, you can subscribe to that, get an email every week. And then here they just announce all the different things that might be coming up. But what we're talking about right now is to apply online. There's a link right here that you would just click on on the main schools and libraries page. And that brings you to, there we go, this page where you have links to all the four forms that you may need to submit online. Now the first thing to be aware of, and this is very, very important, and I'm sure some people will make faces because I do too, you must use Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, that is the only browser that these online forms are tested and programmed for. We have, as state e-rate coordinators, ask them, well, lots of people are using Firefox or Chrome or something else. Can you get them to work with that too? And they just do not have, the answer has been they do not have the program or time to do that. They've got all these forms they're doing and these are just the four that you use. There are other forms that get used as well for special purposes. And on the service provider side, your service providers, well, you're submitting all these forms, they're submitting all their forms as well. So you need to, they just had to make the decision, we just do not have the computer program or time to test it and make all these forms work in other browsers as well. Sometimes you may cruise through and start doing them and I've had people do this, I've had libraries where they start using it and they are using Firefox or something else and they go along and they think they've submitted it and then something, an error comes up or they get a server error or they get an email from our contact saying, we got your form but we didn't get all of it so you need to redo it and they think they did and it's because they weren't using IE. So you may think you submitted it, you really haven't. Just make sure you do use Internet Explorer to submit the forms. I just have a question, what some of us know if we had any issues with IE 11? I don't know. I have not heard that there have been any or anyone's tried it yet so I'm not sure unfortunately. You see they do say here and they six or above is just kind of a generic that is what you need to use. I have not seen anything about people trying to use it and have any problems yet. Sorry. I'd say try it, see how it goes. If not, there's always the paper versions or they may, I know there's a new version of the 470, the first form that will be coming out soon within the next month or so. So if there were any issues, that may be what will address them but I have not heard specifics, sorry. So that's the first tip. Definitely you have to use Internet Explorer when you come to this form to do the online version of it. Excuse me. The second tip I have is there's a link here to the required forms page. This actually sends you to where there are PDF versions of all the forms. They are all available as a paper PDF form if you want to do it that way. You can use those as cheat sheets. Print them out because you can see all in one document are all the questions you need to answer, all everything that's on there. And if you have that, you can then use that and then copy it over into one of the online forms. In addition, on that page, there's also instruction guides, booklets that are 20-something pages long of more in-depth explanation about how to fill out these forms. What does this particular question mean? Where can I find the information to answer this question? As I said, with the online forms, there are pop-ups and help things built in, little question marks for more information type thing. But I personally find these instruction guides to be even better. I actually refer to them myself more than I do to any of the online stuff to find tips and instructions. Question number 17b, what am I supposed to say? I find that even better. So I strongly recommend using those instruction books to help answer any questions you may have about any of the forms and what you're doing on them. Now, this is all the four forms that you could possibly submit are here. You can create new ones. You can continue in complete, which is great. As you're going along doing all these forms, they save your work as you go, which is great. So if you get interrupted, if you get a phone call, if there's an emergency in the library, if you realize, oh, I forgot to gather the certain bit of information I need, so I need to go get that. You can always come back to continue the form later. In addition, for all of them, you'll see there's this button called Certify Complete on all of these forms here, the first three. Every form that you do has the form itself to fill out, and then a second part, which is the certification, which is you're actually signing off on the legalities of it. It is a two-step process for all of these forms. So you have to submit the form, submit the certification, submit the form, submit the certification. Sometimes people forget the certification part. They skip it. They think they've done because they hit a button that says submit, which is true, and you've submitted a form, but you still have to do the certification part after that. What's great about this system is USAC will keep track of that and contact you. So if they've gotten your form and haven't gotten your certification, they'll let you know. And they've built into the system this Certify Complete button. So if you've already submitted the form and you realize you forgot the certification, the official legal signing off on it, or they've contacted you and told you you have, you can go hearing and do that. Now, for each year in the process, USAC, for every form you submit, USAC sends you a letter. So you send them a form. They send you a letter saying a receipt, notification type letter saying, we got your letter. We got your form. Here's what you said on it. You send them to submit another form. They send you a letter back saying, okay, we got the next one. So there's always this back and forth. They color these letters, color code them by each funding year so that you can keep track and keep track of what letters and what information is coming for each year. The reason for this is because you may be working on multiple years at the same time. It's not going to be a funding year starts, it ends, then you start the other one. For example, right now, you're starting to apply for 2014, thinking to the future, but for some libraries, you're still wrapping up 2013. As I said, some libraries have not heard yet if they've been funded, so they're waiting. So you're going to be getting blue letters that relate to 2014, pink ones that still have to deal with 2013, and you need to be able to keep track of that. To help you do this, they started color coding them blue, yellow, pink, blue, yellow, pink, alternating throughout the years. Originally, they did not do this. I think they started it in 2006, if I remember correctly. So they finally got smart that it would be a good idea to help people to keep track of this. So for example, here's letters that I've gotten for my 2013, and they're in pink on pink paper. These letters that will come from USEC will always be in the mail. They're not going to email you. They might email you a confirmation of confirming you submitted it, but the actual letter with all the information that you need is going to come physically in the mail. The envelope will be white, but the letter inside will be pink. So once you see something on colored paper, you'll know it'll catch your attention, and you need to look at that letter, read it, see what the next step in your process is. This is something you can do to help keep everything organized as well. I have binders, and each year is a different section, and each year has different colors in it, so it's kind of easy to eyeball it and keep track of what year everything relates to. Now, as far as keeping track of these forms, how long do you need to keep them? You must retain copies of anything related to E-rate for five years. E-rate does do audits. They do checks and balances type thing, keeping up track of what's going on. They are allowed by FCC rules to go back five years to double-check on anything. So you have to make sure you keep thinking as things going back five years, and it's five years after the last date of service, meaning the end of a funding year. Our funding years run July 1st to June 30th. So you think about June 30th, five years ahead. That's how long you need to keep things. Once the oldest year has aged out, you can toss, recycle, shred, whatever, get rid of all that old stuff. You see that cannot come back to you for anything that's more than five years old. So over the funding year we're applying for now, 2014, you have to keep things till 2020. So stick them in a file, put them in a binder, scale them and put them on your computer, whatever you want to do. And that's something important, too. Some people are keeping piles and piles in paper. You don't have to keep them all in paper. You don't have to keep them in electronic or paper format. USEC doesn't care how you keep it, just that you can get whatever document they ask for to them in some way. So if you want to not hold on to all these letters and all your forms, that's great. Scan them all in. Have them on a computer drive. Recycle these and get rid of them. And that's fine as long as you can have them. Here's my folder of all my 2013 stuff, and you can get whatever they need to ask for. Something also to think about is it has to be anything that has to do with the currently funding year. So for example, if you signed a contract in 2009 and it is good through 2014, you still have to keep that 2009 contract also through 2020 because it had to do with the funding year 2014. It was a multi-year contract. It kept things going. And so that has to be kept along as well. So you've just got to think about what had to do with this year, anything, no matter how old it is. For example, as you saw in all that SIPA-related things, anything related to SIPA, you've got to keep forever. You don't redo SIPA every year. You just make sure once you comply with it, but it's going to apply to every single year for the life of your, as you're doing E-rates, you always have to hold on to all that documentation. Now, the kind of things that you would keep is anything, basically. Any of the forms you submit, print out copies, keep copies of them, scan them in after you've printed them out. Any letters that USAC may send you, whether it's in paper, whether it's an email, anything that is related to your E-rate application from them. If you get contacted by service providers, bidding on your services, offering you service, any contracts you sign with them, anything that has to do with that, any, if you have construction done when you're talking about those internal connections, anything related to the equipment that's delivered and the work that was performed, save all of that. Basically, anything related, vaguely E-rate related, hold on to. Now, some of these things may have other D and other areas in your library files as well. Contracts, service agreements, your city might hold on to them, or your business manager or your secretary, whoever might be in charge of them, and that's great that they have them. But for E-rate purposes, you should also get a copy yourself to keep in your E-rate files. They may not have the same retention requirements of the five years as E-rate does. And you don't want to depend on someone else keeping track of it and having what you need. They may have tossed it, filed it somewhere else, gotten rid of it. Make sure you get your own copy to put with all of your E-rate stuff just in case you need to refer to that again. Now, the different forms that are available that you need to do and the deadlines, we have a timeline here on my website. I also have another more in-depth timeline that talks more about it. The funding you're currently applying for, as I've been saying, is 2014. The first form, another something that people ask for too, what is the deadlines for these forms? The deadlines every year vary. It does not do the same dates every year. And that can be confusing, of course, because it does vary. The way the deadlines work is actually based on the second form in the process, which is the form for 71. This particular form, the one where you are telling you, Zach, who you picked as your service provider, what service you've picked, it's only available during what they call the filing window during a certain couple of months period is the only time that you can submit it. They announce every year what that filing window will be, and once that is announced, then you know when all the other dates fall. The filing window was announced for the upcoming year, and it's going to be available January 9th and close March 26th. So forms for 71 can be submitted between January 9th and March 26th. Once we know that deadline, as I said, we can then work out the other ones. The first form in the process is our form for 70. This is where we are putting out pretty much a request for quote or quest for proposal, asking for bids, asking for service providers to provide a service to us. So you're making public, we're looking for someone to provide this service. Now you may have someone who you always work with, your regular provider or the only provider in town, and that's fine, but for e-rate purposes, you do have to announce we're looking for someone. And then legally, you must wait 28 days before you can pick your provider. You have to have an open bidding process, and I'll get to more details about that in a little bit here. So you post your 470, then you wait 28 days to give everyone equal time to respond, and then you do your 471 in the second form, telling them who you've picked. The 28 days is when USAC sends you your receipt letter. You're right now it's pink, but for those of you who are going to be blue, telling you we've got your 471, it will also say here your 28-day deadline ends on this date, date so-and-so, and that is when you're allowed to do your second form of the process. In addition to that, you do have to wait for the window to open, of course. So if you submitted your 470 in October, 28 days later, it's not January yet, but you still have to wait until January. But the deadline then, based on the 471 deadline being March 26th, the last date you can possibly submit a 470, the first form of the process, and have that full 28 days available is February 26th. So the ultimate deadline for starting the e-rate process for 2014 is February 26th. Having said that, don't wait until then. Do not wait until the last day. There's no reason to. You can do it today. You can do it tomorrow. I've already submitted the one for the Library Commission. In addition to teaching this, I actually do the e-rate application for the Library Commission itself. If you wait until February 26th, you're cutting it way too close. If you want to do it online, guarantee their service will be overloaded. Other people will be doing it the last minute as well. You might get dumped out of the server and then have to figure out how are you going to submit it. Same thing on March 26th. If you get your 470 in February 26th, then the second form is going to be the same situation. On March 26th is the date you'll have to go and try and get your second form in. And if you don't meet that deadline, then you're out of luck for getting your e-rate for the year. You've got to get it in by that March 26th date. There is no doing it late. Well, you can do it outside the window, but you get put definitely to the bottom of the pile, and most likely not even getting your application reviewed at all. So, yes, February 26th is the official deadline. There's no reason to wait until then, though. Do it now. Do it tomorrow. After this, do this afternoon. Do it when you have free time tomorrow or next week. Get it in before the holidays. And then you know you're good. You know you're waiting and pulling your time from March 26th. Then you just wait for your 28 days to be up. Wait for that January 9th window to open, of course. And then do your second form in the process. Other than that, all the deadlines and everything else fall. They do. And you'll see a lot of the same thing here. 120 days after something is when a deadline comes up. So that varies as well. The third form in the process, you have 120 days after your service starts. The last form in the process, you have 120 days after the last date of service. So those kind of things just have that kind of rotating deadline as well. So all these deadlines and dates will vary every year. You just look at what the window has been announced and look at the dates that they give you on these letters. These letters give you all the information you need to be able to do the next step in the process to figure out what you need to do next, to figure out what your deadlines are, to know what's required. These are a goldmine of information. Okay, so now on to the details of each of the individual forms. I'm going to go through each one one at a time. I'm not doing every single form step-by-step here. That would take a lot more time than we want to do here. I don't want this to be a four-hour workshop. But what I do do is go through the basics of them and highlight some of the things, the common things, that people seem to have problems with or get confused about so you can get through the hard parts of the forms. The easy parts, I'm not going to go through every single step of those here. So the first form in your process is the form 470. As I said, the 470 opens up your competitive bidding process. It lets service providers know that you are looking for service, that you want to receive whatever kind of service. Local phone service, long-distance phone service, fax line, cell phone, monthly internet service, whatever it is that you want, you put down that service that you're looking for on this form. Now, as I said, you can, you may have a provider that you always work with and that's fine if that's who you're going to be going with but you still have to put out this form. You may only have one company in town. You don't have a choice. And you still have to put this out, though anyways, it officially opens a bidding process that you might not need to go through that might not even actually happen but you do have to just still go through the steps and follow the process, excuse me, the process that you require. Now, as I said, it must be posted for 28 days to let everyone, every provider, learn about it and get in contact with you before you can choose your vendor, sign your contracts and then do the form 471. As I mentioned before, this year for 2014, February 29th is the ultimate deadline for 470. Don't wait, though. Don't wait till February. Do it now. Do it in December. Maybe if you're too busy with the holidays, do it in January. You've got plenty of time to get this in and not be rushing around on the deadline. Now, one thing also to be aware of is, and this is where we're getting into, do you submit every form or not? If you sign a multi-year contract, for example, many people are getting multi-year, two, three, four-year contracts, locking in a price with an internet service provider for internet. If you get one of those contracts, you would not then post a new 470 every year of that contract. You've already locked in who your provider's going to be and your service is going to be for that many years. You don't want to reopen the bidding process every year. Form 470, you would only be submitting if you're doing something that's a monthly bill that doesn't have a multi-year contract or when this multi-year contract is expiring, you're going to need to submit a new one to start the process again for the next multi-year contract to be able to go into effect. For a multi-year contract, you would do a 470, you'd start your process actually with a second form each year of that contract. You'd start it with the 471, basically just letting USAC know every year, yep, we're still with them. That contract's still in effect. It's still good. You don't open up the bidding again when you've got that multi-year. You only do it if you're doing something that doesn't have a multi-year that's a month to month. That's typical for telephone, it's a month to month. You may sign up with a company, but it's not a multi-year contract with a start and end date. It's just, yes, we're getting phone service from you things and you pay it monthly. With internet providers, you keep on getting contracts that say from this year to this year, so 2014 to 2016, you're locking at this price. In 2016, we'll talk again about a new contract. That would be a multi-year contract in that case. Now, on this form, you will have to put in your build entity number. This is something that if you've done it right before, you have one. You've got your previous forms. You can find it there. You can also look it up on the USAC website. They have search where you can look up what your build entity number. This is similar to like a social security number for a person. It's assigned to the library building whenever you first start doing e-rate. So if somebody started doing e-rate for your library five years ago, that's the number that you keep using. If you're brand new to e-rate, never done it before, you can call the schools and libraries division at USAC and get a number for yourself. Another number that you may have or you may need to get is a pin number, personal ID number. This is a pin number that you can use to actually certify and sign electronically any of the forms that you submit online. So you don't have to send them in in paper. You can do everything electronically online. If you've been doing e-rate, you have one of these for yourself. If you have never done e-rate before, if this is your first time doing it, you're going to have to submit the first form that you do whichever form it is in paper. The certification part of the form, you need to submit in paper. Remember I said, whenever you do a form, there's actually two parts to it. There's the form itself, and then there's the certification, and it's actually a two-step process. You can submit the form online and then print out the certification. They will give you an option for this and mail it in to them with your actual handwritten signature on it. Once they have one copy of your handwritten, they call your wet signature, then from then on, they just put that on file for you, and they issue you a PIN number. It comes in a little postcard thingy like this. It looks like one of those when you get checks in the mail from the IRS or something. It's just a little postcard thing, and it will give you what your PIN number has been assigned to you. Then from then on forward, you can always use that PIN number to submit everything online. You never have to mail anything in again. Now, PIN number is assigned to you in your job at this particular library. If you worked somewhere else and did E-rate, you can't use that PIN number. That is for when you worked there. You need to get a new one at the new library you're at. Build entity number never changes. That is something that was assigned to your library years ago. If you would never have to reapply for that one, that's just a done deal, but your PIN, you need a new one every time you jump to a new library. Okay, I got a question here, Ruth. Do you mean if I have never applied for E-rate or the library at work has never applied for E-rate? Your library may have applied for E-rate previously, like a previous staff person may have done it, but if you are the new contact person and a new person in charge, you need to submit one form and paper so they have your signature, and then they'll assign you personally a PIN number. Someone else at your library may have a PIN number because they were the one doing it before, but you can't use their number. That's their electronic signature individual to them. PIN number is not to the library. It's to an individual person. So if you use someone else's PIN number, you'd be basically forging their signature and personating them. So, yes. So you have never done it yourself. You just need to do one form. And as you can see here, at any step in the process, you could do it too. When I came in here to the commission, I started when it was in the middle of a year. So I think my first form was a 471 or 486, I forget. Now it's been a few years. So at any point in the process, you can just do that certification and mail it in a paper. They give you the option to do that. You get your PIN number back from them, and then you're good to do electronic from then on. So this is a screenshot. Now we're going to go through some of the parts of the 470. Like I said, I'm not showing every single part because that would just take me too long. So we're just going to go through the basics of it and the things that have been tripping people up. So you type in either your zip code or the build entity number that you may know for your library. So if you don't even know your entity number, you can type in the zip code and you'll find your library in the list. This is one thing also to be aware of when you're doing online forms, and it will probably come up if you don't have this enabled. You need to allow pop-ups for the e-rate website because pop-up messages like this that are tips and guides and warnings about errors or warnings about deadlines will be done as a pop-up. And normally, IE, either on the top or bottom of your window, your browser window will say, pop-ups have been blocked for this website. Click here to adjust that, and you can go ahead and do that and allow the pop-ups just for them. So very important to allow that so you get all the information you need and all the assistance you need as you're going through your form. Now this is the top of the first page of a 470. The very first thing here I have marked is something that drips people up. Applicants form identifier. This is something that you can assign yourself. You make up this code yourself to identify this particular form 470 for your own tracking purposes. So it's not submitted and are signed by them, by USAC. You just say whatever you want. Here, as an example, we've done 470 FY for funding year 2014. I do a similar thing here. I put NLC 470 2014. Whatever you want, you assign that yourself. Then because of the bill density number you picked, all of this applicant information address and phone number is automatically dumped in. You choose what funding year you're applying for with this pull-down menu. Here we've, of course, done 2014. And then you choose what kind of applicants you are. If you're a library, choose library. If you're an individual school, you choose school. If you're applying for a whole district, you choose school district. And then at the bottom here, who's going to receive the services? Now this question doesn't have any effect on you getting your application. They're just gathering statistics on who might benefit from the E-rate program. So you check whatever's applicable. Public libraries would choose public. If you have a Head Start program, you would choose that. If you're a tribal library, you would choose that. So whichever ones apply to you. Now the bottom half of this page, that's where this area is here. You want to tell them how you want to be contacted if they have any questions. And you can choose to have them call you on the phone, contact you by fax, or by email. Whichever works for you best for you. Whatever's the best way to get in touch with you, you want to check that here. If you do choose to have them call you on the phone, we strongly recommend any phone conversations you do have that you document them in writing somehow afterwards. Write them, get an email from someone there and send them an email saying, I just want to confirm exactly what you said. So we have it all in writing. This is why I prefer actually email. I try and do that as much so everything is already caught in email, but sometimes that doesn't work for some people. But you choose how you want to be contacted. And then this last one here does confuse people. Consultant information. And asks for a consultant registration number. There are individuals and companies that you can pay to do your e-mail applications for you. This would not be a service provider. They can't be involved in it. It would just be their organizations and companies that do that. And you may be getting contacted from them. I do. I get emails from them saying, we can help you submit your form. If you aren't paying someone to do this, you just leave this blank and go on. You don't have to enter it at all if you don't have and paid anyone. I am not a paid consultant, so I don't have one of these numbers. I'm just your state e-rate coordinator. And I get paid from the state. So you don't pay me. So if you don't have one, which I don't think I've ever heard of anyone. I know doing it. You would just leave this blank and go on. Now after you do that, you're going to assign an application number to the form. A long form, remember. Write this down or print out this page so you have that number to reference later. If you need to get back into your application, remember those on the buttons, one of the buttons was to continue an incomplete form. You can jump back in if you get pulled away. You're going to need this application number to do that. So make sure you write this down or print it out when you get to this page. Now after that, you'd go through the basics of the form. Like I said, I don't have every single screenshot here because that would just, we'd be here way too long. But the basics were asked you what services you're looking for. You tell it you're looking for the local long distance internet service. You're not talking about your service provider yet here, even if like I said, you know who you're going with because there's only one guy in town. You just hear saying, here's the service we're looking for. And you just fill in that information. And at the end of the form, this is where you get the submit button here, the big bright green button that says submit. And it does tell you after you submitted your form, follow the instructions to certify it. This is where, like I said, some people get caught up. They get tripped up. They think, I submitted it, boom, I'm done. I'm off to the next thing I'm doing at work today. You still have to go to the certification part because after you hit submit, it will prompt you to do that. And people miss that and just think, green, submit, I'm done. But you have to go on and do the certification, either electronic or paper, depending on your situation. The certification that then comes up has got all these check boxes, and this is just the top part of it, where you're basically just checking off the legalities of it. Yes, I am the person authorized to do this. Yes, all the information is true and verifiable as far as I know, all that kind of legal stuff. The first question here is choosing if you're a school or a library. And then the second one that I bring your attention is about the technology plan. If you are only applying for priority one, the basic phone and basic internet access, you would check no technology plan is required by commission rules. You'd check the second box. Now, even if you have a plan, you'd still check the second box because for e-rate purposes, it's not required. You may still have a plan because you want to have one and you know it's a good thing and you've got one. But what they're asking for here is as far as e-rates concerned, do you need a plan or not? The first box would only be if you jumped down and doing any priority two, internal connections, basic maintenance. But your standard telephone and internet, you would choose the second box that no plan is required. And then check all the other ones, and then it will prompt you to the page for whether you're going to do electronic or paper certification. If you've been doing e-rate and you have a pin number, you choose electronic one. This is the top of this page. The next screen here is the bottom of it. If you've never done e-rate at your particular library before, you're going to need to do paper for your first time, for the first form you do, and it will prompt you to do that that you can print out. Now, just to confuse you, there is a section here to request a pin number online. At the moment, and I've tried to do it myself, I've tested it, this doesn't actually work. I hit the button and it just throws out an error message. Like I said, they are updating the Form 470. It's going to be a new one. Hopefully this will be either fixed or removed in an update. But right now, even if you try and do this, it's just not going to work. The way you get a pin is by sending them a paper certification. They receive it in the mail. They now have your service signature on file. They send you out your pin number. So your choice is either electronic if you have a pin, paper if you don't. Now, this is what comes up when you submit for your, as an electronic certification, you'll have a box where you can type in your pin number. Everything else will fill it. You fill in. And then this is another thing that people miss because I think it's, I honestly, it's badly designed form. There's this little checkbox at the bottom that half the time people just miss that it's there. Check to confirm your compliance with the certification you're doing. So you just have to remember to look down and find that little checkbox and check it before you actually hit done for the electronic certification. A little hidden thing there. Now, this is what it would look like if you did a paper certification. All this information is filled in, but this is blank and you don't enter anything, the signature and date. You print this out, sign it, and then they have here where you send the actual, the address that you mail it to is right there on the form itself. You don't have to go look up an address. It'll tell you right there where to send that certification to. Now, after you send that in, they send you a letter. This is when these colored letters start coming to you. And it tells you, it summarizes all the information that you put in the 470 and tells you what your 28-day deadline is. So you have now 28 days from this date is when you can do your 471, in the form and the contract. After you have passed that 28 days, that's when you can start, do your actual bidding process. You can evaluate bids you received, pick your provider is, sign a contract, and then do the 471, of course, waiting until that window opens in January. But that's when you can do all this. I'm just going to give some basics about competitive bidding here in case some libraries do get multiple bids. Something else new I have discovered as I've been doing this training the last few years, lots of libraries have said to me in training, I never ever heard from any providers before. I have a local person in town and then maybe the big time warner or whoever, Quest is the big one in the state. But now I'm suddenly receiving bids and requests for providing service from companies I've never heard of or new companies and I've never had it before. What is all this about? I don't know exactly, but I have guessed over the years that some of these companies are getting really desperate. There is more competition out there. There are more companies out there providing services, phone services, internet in various ways, whether it's DSL or through cable company or through Fiber and it's a lot more competition. So there is going to be companies that will contact you that you've never heard of or never heard about before and you may have never had to deal with this before. What also has come up from many of these people is they hear from these companies and they say, well, this sounds like a good deal. Let me call them and see what kind of deal they can give me. Their pricing seems good. Let's talk to them and work out maybe switching to them. Many times some of these companies, the libraries call and we've got lots of libraries here in Nebraska in the teeniest little towns and they call the company and say, hi, I'm in so-and-so town and you contacted me so what can you give me? And the company says you're in what town? We don't serve that town. I don't know what's going on with that bad evaluation of who they're bidding on. Some companies maybe say, oh, yeah, we serve Nebraska, but they don't know anything on the western part of the state they've never heard of, or we serve the Midwest, not understanding what that really means when you get into Nebraska. So that may happen too. And if these companies contact you and then you say, so give me your deal and they say, well, we don't serve your town, we just can just ignore them and just write them off and say, thanks for wasting both of our times. I'm not sure what's going on with that. Like I said, I think it's just a lot of competition and desperation from some of these vendors. So you may have never heard from anyone before, but you do now and once you do start hearing from multiple vendors, you do have to do a comparison. You must do some sort of evaluation to decide who you're going to go with. You may have your local company that you like and it's great, but you do have to, if any companies contact you and they are actually a company that can provide you with a service, meaning they provide what you asked for as a service, not try and sell you something different, and they serve your town, you do have to then evaluate them compared to maybe your local company that you've been working with. You have to take into consideration, you can take into consideration lots of factors, but costs must be the primary factor. And I've got a little example here of how you can do this kind of thing in a matrix. This does maybe look a little confusing here, but let me explain it to you and you can see what I mean by cost being the primary factor. What it means is you need to take into consideration the cost of the service more than any other part of anything else that might be important to you. So in this case, you figure out what's important to you when picking a vendor. Obviously, the price is important. Do you have prior experience with them? How are their prices for other things non-erated? Are they good environmentally? Do you prefer them because they're local or in state rather than being from Texas or California, whatever? And you can assign all of these points. And this is just one example of a way you can do it, but it gives you the idea of what we mean by making price the primary factor. You say this is how many points you can earn as a vendor in each of these areas. Price gets 30 points, and that's more than what can be earned in all the other areas. So you hear from possibly three vendors and then you look at their application, their bids, see what they do and all these things that are important to you, and then assign them points in each area. Now, this list of things that are important is just a few examples. You can put here whatever matters to you. Vendor two is the cheapest, apparently, from here. They got a full 30 points for price. However, vendor three isn't as cheap, but they have gotten higher points in other areas, and when it comes down to the total, vendor two earned 92 out of 100 points, oh, sorry, vendor three, and vendor two only 68, and vendor one was totally out of the running. So in this case, you've done your comparison, you've figured things out, and you've decided that actually vendor three is who you're going with. So the price, the primary factor, by having it be worth 30 points, but look right here, prior experience got a full 20, and this new company who came out of nowhere got a zero, took them completely out of it. So don't, as we all know, you never just go with the cheapest guy in town for anything. That's always a bad decision because it could go bad in the end, but if you do this kind of evaluation, that could be how the importance of my prior experience, that's how you would then go with your local vendor. This kind of thing, you do need to document somehow. If you do get multiple companies contacting you, USAC may come in that five-year time, like I said, and ask you, why did you pick vendor number three over vendor number two, and you're going to need to have somewhere an explanation of why you did that. Now it could be this kind of little matrix you put together, or you could just write a memo to yourself, write up a memo or an email that says, I made the decision. We looked and just write a narrative up that says, vendor number two, these things were the pros and cons, vendor number three, here are their pros and cons, and so this is how we ended up with vendor number three. Whatever works for you, but have something documented, if you do get multiple bids that are valid ones that you can even respond to, something that shows why you picked whoever you did pick. Now, once you have picked who you want to go with, you then do your second form in the process, the 471. You wait those 28 days, and you wait until the window opens in this year, in this case, in this year in January. And this is when you tell you sec who you picked, tell them what specific services you ended up with, tell them how much it's going to cost. This is where you then tell them what the discount, what your discount calculation came out to be, and if there's anything you need to certify with the compliance with the technology plan or the SIPA. As I said, you wait the 28 days, sign the contracts, wait for the window to open for the 471, and then submit it. 471, January 9th through March 26th this year is when you can do it. This form, this is a form you would always do every year, no matter what. This is not one of the forms you could maybe do or not. Remember, the 470, dependent on if you had a multi-year contract or not. 471, you will do it every single year. You do have the, also if you forget to do that certification that I was telling you about before for your 470, you have until the filing window for the 471, the second form of the process, closes to get that certification in. So if you forget to do it, you still have till March 26th. So you may have submitted your 474, forgot the certification, done the 471, then the 471 certification. You can still run back and do that 470 as long as you get it in this year before March 26th and have everything will be done correctly for you. Okay, excuse me. So this is the start of the 471, looks very similar to the 470, same as what it has. You can do a sign of applicant form identifier to it. So just like as you could do for the 470, you just make up whatever you want this to be. Everything else here is pretty much common. Excuse me. I'm going to pop a little cough drop here. Same thing, choose your funding year. Something that's new with the 471. Sorry. Got a little frog in my throat here. Something new with the 471 that has never been on them before, this was added with that new update in 2010, is this FCC registration number. Many libraries, mine included the library commission, may have no clue what this is. When I first got this, I actually asked our business manager and said, what is this, do you know what this is? What is our FCC registration number? She had no idea what I was talking about. What this is is a form that has been assigned, whether you know it or not, any entity who's ever done business with the FCC has been assigned this number by the FCC. You might not have had to use it for anything before, but they've been using it on their side for you. And in 2010, that new update, they decided that they wanted this number added onto the form. So it is now question 3B, FCC registration number. And if you don't know what your numbers, your libraries is, which I didn't know, you can go and look it up. They've got a website, the FCC does. Excuse me. Where you can go and either look up what your libraries is or request one. I've had a library who did it and it's very quick. Within a day at the least, they had a number assigned to them and then were able to go on and continue with their 471. So if you don't know what it is, just go look it up there and then you can put that in the form. It is a requirement now. So if you don't have that number in there, it won't, on the online form, it won't let you continue on with the rest of the form. And then the bottom half of this page is similar to the 470 application with the type of application it is, how you want to be contacted, all that same information. Now, once you get done with that first page in the 471, just like with the 470, it assigns an application number to it. This is a shorter number. But it also assigns a security code. From this point on, you have a security code that you need to have in addition to the application number to get back into your form if you need to continue in incomplete form. So if you get interrupted or something pulls you away or you realize you didn't have all the information you needed, you need both this application number and the security code number to get back in again. They even say in bright red, make sure you do this. Write this down or print it out. They actually give you a print now button so you can print out this screen and have it available to you. Application numbers, we can look up for you. Security code numbers, nobody can look up. Not even you sacks on customer service people. That's just automatically generated at this point in your process. And this is the only way you can know what that number is. If you don't catch the screen and don't print it out or write it down, you'll just have to start all over again and submit a new form 471 from the beginning. Now, as you're submitting the, as you're filling out the 471, each request, each service that you're requesting a discount on is assigned a funding request number. So, and this is in this section as it says here, it's called Block 5. When you look at the form, you'll see it there. So, if you have phone that you're looking for, your local long distance, and you have internet or service that you're looking for, you're going to have two funding requests that you're asking for a discount on this one form 471. So, your phone and your internet will each, as you're going through this process, be assigned a funding request number. From here on out, every time, every future form you do and every future, any future interactions you have with USAC, you're going to be, they're going to be referring to these funding request numbers, whatever one they assign to your phone, whatever one they assign to your internet, if you have both of those. So, you'll be thinking of, I've got two services I'm getting internet for, an E-rate for, so to make sure I keep track of each of those service requests. In addition, here is also where you submit whatever your service provider's ID number is, just like your library has a billed entity number, you have a PIN number, service providers are assigned an ID number as well. You can get them from the service provider themselves, ask them what SPIN number they want to use. They can also be looked up on the USAC website as well. Some providers have more than one, depending on, they may have different ones for different areas in the country they deal with. Just make sure you have the right one if you're not sure, confirm with your provider what SPIN number you should be using for them. Now, in addition to the form itself, there's an extra attachment you submit when you do a 471, the second form in the process. So for a 470, the first form, you had the form and you had the certification. For a Form 71, you have the form, you have your certification, still got to do that signature, and you have a third piece called the Item 21 attachment. It's just a separate bit, a separate form that you have to submit that was just more detailed information about the services that you're requesting. When you're doing it online, it just prompts you right into going into your Item 21 attachment so you can just pop right over onto it. If you're doing it in paper, you have to remember to do it. There's information on the Item 20, on the USAC website about it. You have until the close of the filing window that March 26th date to get these attachments in as well. They must all be in there. You can do it in mail and paper, but it's also available online as well, which I think is much easier than anything else, as all the forms do online. Now, if you look at when you're doing your Form 71, the form itself, when you go through, as you submit it, you'll notice all you tell them on the Form 71 form is who the provider is you picked and how much it's going to cost. On the form itself, you don't actually tell what the service is. That's what the Item 21 attachment is for. It gives you a free text box where you can type in and describe exactly what you ended up with a service for. They've just made it a little separate part, not built into the Form 71 itself. So this is the first page when you get into the Item 21 attachment page online. You'll see here it asks for the build entity number and that security code for your Form 71. So you need to have that to get into this part of your application as well. When you get in there, it's going to pull from the Form 71 that you just submitted the specific request that you made. Now here, this is ours for the Library Commission. I have four that I do. You most likely will just do two, one for your phone and one for your Internet. Because you submitted the Form 71 and they were assigned funding request numbers, as I mentioned, they're all listed here. Over here on the right, it will tell you what their status is and what you need to do. In this case, I've done our first two already and it's telling me they've been submitted online. The attachment. And I need to create the attachment for the other two. So when you first get here, if you just have two funding requests, phone and Internet, you'll have two of them listed and they both say create attachment. So you just click on the hot link to create it. And then it brings us up where it dumps in all this information by default, your build entity number, your funding request number, who your provider is. And then this is just a free text box that you can just type in whatever the services you're getting. Local and long distance phone for so-and-so library, monthly Internet via Fiber for so-and-so library, whatever it is that that particular funding request is. Now when you get to the next screen is where they ask from the details of the cost. Now you did already enter this in the Form 471. And what's great is, and you can maybe not see it if it's tiny on your screen, over here on the tips and hints, they've got a link that says click here to import the cost information from your Form 471. So you already entered it over there. You don't have to look it up and type it in again. Just click that little hot link and boom, based on the funding request number, it will just pop in the cost automatically for you. Easy peasy. And then you go ahead and submit that. When you're done with one of them, if you've got two funding requests, remember for phone or for Internet, you are going to have to go back to your list and do the second one. This is the screen you get when you're done. Your Item 21 attachment for funding request number, blah, blah, blah, has been received. But they don't make it very obvious how to get back to the list. This little link up here says FRN Listing, Funding Request Number Listing. That's how you get back to this list. Here. So you click that. It comes back here. Do your second one. Now the one you've done, you did will say Submitted. The other one left will say Create. Create the attachment for the second one, and then you're done. So make sure you've got two funding requests, phone and Internet. You do two Item 21 attachments. When you are done with the 471, it's all submitted, and the Item 21 attachment is submitted. Once again, you'll get a letter in the mail for 2014 to BM Blue saying, here's everything that you've submitted on your 471. Now what's also great about USAC is if you do the 471 and forget to do the Item 21, they'll let you know. They will keep track and they'll contact you and you'll get a letter, a separate letter from this. It might be an email. If you said contact with the email that says, we've received your forms for 71, but we have not received your Item 21 attachments. Please go back and do that. On that online page with all the blue buttons at the bottom, there's a button there to just do your Item 21 attachments so you can go back and do it. Now, after you've done your 471, you can make corrections. So after you've done the 471 and the 471 and the Item 21 attachment, you can go back and make corrections. On these letters that you get, it says, here's what we've received from you and it has a page that says, if you need to make any corrections or changes, fill in this information. I know you can't read this, send this to us and let us know what's wrong. Both of the forms, you can do that. And they both just have right on there on that letter exactly what you need to do and what the instructions are to submit the forms. Now, the kind of corrections you can make is the basic kind of things that are human error type things. Spelling, math errors. If you've got a new contact person, a new person doing e-rate, changes about doing the certifications, correcting costs if anything, changes, that kind of thing. Basic changes, not huge changes, like I want to get a new service that I never asked for, not that kind of thing, but these kind of errors that are common that you might make. And the 471, if you missed, wrote in the 470 form number on it, if you mistyped it or mis-entered it, if you were wrong with your calculation of your discount, if your, well that's what the box 4 worksheet is too, is the discount percent. If you had the wrong contract number written in, or anything like that that you need to fix, you can make changes to the form. So I think it's a really good thing that it's not just a in-stone thing where you submitted the form and it's done and you can't fix it. USAC always wants you to make sure that you get these things done correctly. Their whole point is to get you the information, the money. So they will, do all they can to help you do that. Now, once you put your, submit your 471, that's when you wait. That's when your form goes into application review. USAC checks the eligibility, checks to see that everything is correct. They may contact you to ask questions. The, or part of USAC that will contact you is program integrity assurance, is the area that's called that handles all this review. PIA reviewers is what they're called. They may contact you. Once they, to get more information, if they need clarification, if they need some form, certification, you forgot that's who you'd hear from. This process will go on for months and months and months. As I said, for 2013, we still have some libraries who haven't done it yet, haven't received their answers yet. This is an ongoing process. Once you, they have decided, then they send you a funding commitment decision letter. It comes on colored paper and this tells you what you've been, what has been approved for your request, whether it's been approved, whether it's been not approved, funded or not, if they maybe changed the amount, whatever. There has been, they might be sending you more than one, so look at it, and if you have two funding requests, one for phone, one for internet, make sure they're both in that letter. It might be on a different letter that might come. You might get a second one for some reason. Maybe they need more information for your internet one, and so they had to wait to answer to that one. The information on this form is what can be used to do your third form in the process, your 46 that I'll get to in just a second here. This is the point where you can make an appeal if you want to. If you feel that they shouldn't have denied you, they shouldn't have reduced an amount or something, you can make an appeal. There's information on the USAC website about how to do that. You can go through USAC themselves first, or then you can go to the FCC to bump up to them if necessary. But this is the point where you can do that if you feel the need. Now, the third form in the process is the 46. This is a form that a lot of people do seem to lose track of the process here. They receive their funding commitment decision letter that says, yes, you've been approved for this money, and that's great. However, and then they think, great, I've got my money, I'm done, I got it. No, you still have to go through the rest of the process and finish it up. And it says on your funding commitment letter, now you can go into your form 46. This is where you just tell USAC that, yes, I have started receiving the services, or I will be receiving the services, and you confirm if you have a technology plan or your SIPA. You have 120 days after service starts to do this, so you have a long time. When the funding year starts in July, that's October, so sometimes in October you might be hearing from me or USAC saying you need to do your 46. Telling them service actually started, they're not going to issue you, actually disperse you any of your money. This is when you are doing your 46, just once you get into the form, just like the 471, it assigns a form number and a security code. Make sure you note that number just like the other ones. You'll need that to get back into the form if you need to continue later. This is something also in the 46 that has been tripping people up. The certification regarding being covered by a technology plan or not. The technology plans are only required, as we said, for Charity 2 services. However, the Form 46 wording has not been updated yet, so the terminology is still old from before that 2010 rule change. It says if all of the funding request numbers are for basic phone service only, then you choose other and say you don't need a technology plan. What this should say is are for Priority 1 services phone and internet, then you do that. I just give this so that you know I get a lot of calls about this saying well it says only basic phone, that means I need a tech plan. Nope, the rules change, just the wording on the form has not been changed yet. Pretend it says this, maybe print this out and say this is what the form really should say. USAC knows the rules have changed. Not the wording on the form. They know that. There's actually instructions on their site and they are always trying to remind people yes, we know the words are wrong, the rules are what matter. It is for phone and internet. For all Priority 1, just say none, we do not require a tech plan. When you are in the 46, something else that confuses people here is these different fields that you need to enter for each of your funding requests. Like I said, if you have a phone and internet funding request you are going to have both of them here on the 46 and you need to do two. But the first column here, I'm not sure if you can see that very well, it doesn't actually have a box to enter anything. You actually start entering this on the second box in the form with the funding request number. Not the first column. You would think logically you start with the first column and fill them all in, but not here. Put in the second column, put in the service provider spin number, it will pop in the service provider name and then it will automatically, based on this funding request number, then fill in for you the first column. It's confusing. It is, I don't know why it's in that order and confusing, but this is the way they've made the form automatically fill it in to you. Start with the second column there. Just make sure you have two of these new funding requests you're doing. After this is done, you'll get another letter saying that they've received the 46 from you. And you'll notice here that both you and the service provider receive these notifications. So they know too that you've been approved for this money and that it's going to be coming. So you're not just doing this on your own and you don't have to let them know. USAC is making sure that they let the service providers know that all of this is been approved and is coming. Now, the final form in the process, we're almost to the end here, is your, what they call your invoicing form. And there's two forms at this point and it will depend on how you're going to get your discount, which form you would submit and who would submit it. This is another form that is, you may or may not be submitting. The two forms in the middle, 471 and the 46, you always submit every single year. No questions asked. 470 depends on if you're doing monthly billing or a multi-year contract. This final form depends on how you're going to be billed. You have a choice of how you're going to receive your money. You can either pay your bills in full and receive a reimbursement after the fact or you can receive a discount on your bill every month from your service provider. If you want to receive a reimbursement afterwards, you as the applicant would just submit the billed entity applicant reimbursement form called a BEAR. You'll hear a lot of people talking about BEAR forms. If you want to discount on your bill, your service provider, they submit their own form, a service provider invoice form, that's the 474. They submit that to USAC. They give you a discount on your bill, your service provider and then they get the money back from USAC. If you're doing a reimbursement after the fact, you get a full bill that you get for the provider, then you get the money, you submit this form, the BEAR form and you get the money back from USAC. It depends on how you want to do your invoicing. Something you need to think about is how your accounting people work, how your money works with your city or your county or your municipality. If a check comes in, this is what this will be, the BEAR form will mean a check will be sent. Does it go to the library? Does the city grab it? Does it go to some big general fund? You've got to make sure that that money goes to the library. E-Ray is not a program to give discounts to a city or town, it's to give discounts to a school or a library specifically, so you have to make sure it can get to you. Which is why we try to recommend, if you can, to do the discount on your bill. Then the bill that comes right to you already has the money off, taken off of it, easy nothing to be confused about where this money will go. So in this case, this is where it would depend on if you do the form or not. So you may if you're doing a discount on your bill is what you requested, you do not do this form, your service provider does. If you're doing the bear form afterwards and trying to get your money back after you've paid in full, then you do the bear form. Now you might end up doing a mixture of this. For example, like I said, there are some libraries for 2013 that have not received their funding commitment letters yet, or they got them after the funding year started. Remember the year starts in July. So you had to pay bills in full until you get that letter. To get the money back for those previous months you paid in full, you have a choice you've got to work out with your provider. Will they give you a credit on future bills? If they're willing to do that, then that's cool. They just provide, send their spy form in, their service provider form in. You get your credit on your bills and then your future bills are discounted and it's all handled by them. If they won't give you a discount or a credit on your bill for those previous months you paid, then you can submit a bear form just for those months worth that you're missing to get that sent to you in a check. So you have to be doing a little of both. You do have 120 days after the last service day, June 30th to get this form, the bear form in and get your money back. And there's always deadlines that are being announced and I do keep track of what libraries are doing and contact you if I've noticed you haven't got this form in. You need to have one of these forms done to get your money. This doesn't happen even though you've gone through everything else, all the first three, you still got to do this tip to make sure that the money is dispersed and sent out to your library. And this is a picture of what it looks like for the bear form on the way, when you do it online, basic library info. And down here at the bottom, you start with that make sure when you're doing your bear, if you had two funding requests, one for phone, one for internet, you've got two items down here at the bottom on your bear form. Make sure you're asking for your reimbursement for both of those funding requests, the phone and the internet. It may sound like I keep pushing this fact that you've got two funding requests, two funding requests on one form, but this is something that very often libraries miss. They do one 46 form and just do one of the funding requests just for phone and forget that you actually got to do the second one for internet. Same thing with bears, I've seen them submitted with just one of these and not doing the other one. So it is a common thing that people keep missing that it's a single form, a single 471, a single 46, a single form bear, but you got to make sure you do two items on every single one of those forms, get your phone and get your internet. But I do keep track of this, like I said, and if you've missed one, you set tracks that can always let you know and make sure, but just everything makes sure you follow it all the way through. Once you've, if you do decide to do the bear to get a refund check, you'll get a letter that's sent to you and to the service provider to let them know. In addition, you get quarterly reports. Now, these don't come on the colored paper. This is the one thing that doesn't come on a colored piece of paper for whatever reason, it must come from a different printer or something, but you will get quarterly reports that tell you how much money USAC has actually dispersed out. If they've sent the service provider money, because they did that service provider invoice form for them to get reimbursed because they are discounting you, make sure you're getting that discount on your bills. Look at your bills, you're getting from your provider to make sure they're discounting you the right amount and they're just not taking the money from USAC and not passing the discount on to you. You'll get these quarterly reports so you can keep track of all of that. And that is the last step in the process, the last form. Any questions? I know we went through a lot of that, jumping around a bit. Sorry about my coughing there, but I'll be okay. Those are the four forms in the process, the basics of doing them, some of the things that trip people up trying to make sure that you keep up on them. Does anybody have any questions about any of the forms or their application? You've been asking questions throughout which is great and you ask them during when, you know, I'm talking about it, that's awesome. Alright. Well, just to wrap up then Client Service Bureau is USAC's customer service and they have an 800 number you can call if you have any questions or need any help with anything. They may also tell you to call that number for any help when they ask you for more information. They don't have an email address to send to individual people who may contact you of emails. They don't have a generic one just to send an email to them. What they do have is a web form so if you do want to submit something online, something in writing to them, you can use the web form to ask them a question or if you are here in Nebraska, of course, you can contact me for any help that you need. I can help you negotiate with them and work on things in other states. Like I said, every state has a state e-rate coordinator just like me. Your people in your own states can help you negotiate and work with USAC if necessary for your applications as well. A few other things that can help you keep up with e-rate and what you're doing. I mentioned earlier they do have a news brief. This is a link you can go to if you want to sign up for their weekly emails. What applications have been and what funding requests waves have been put out, how much they've been sending out and they give you tips and articles about here's the next thing you need to do. Here's tips on writing a technology plan. Here's what you need to know to do your item 21 attachment. Lots of guides and information there. There's a nice little flow chart of the application process if that might help you keep track of things. And then a glossary. I mentioned this earlier too. It was on the USAC website. This great PDF is about 20 something pages long of all the terms and terminology and things that are used in the letters or in the forms and they contact you. I definitely recommend taking a look at that if you're confused about what some reviewer or some USAC person is saying to you. And there is my contact information as well. Our Nebraska Library Commission e-rate page and the 800 number here in my email address. So if you're in the Nebraska Library please do call me. Email me. Let me know if you have any questions. Go to our website as I showed it to you before. We have lots of information on there. I'll just pop over to that for a second here with there we go. Guides information about the basic program. My previous training session links to lots of things having to do with your forms. Now USAC does have its own website and it's good but I've noticed that some of the things you might need to do certain forms and applications may be a little buried. So I've pulled out a lot of those links here. And for specific things you might need, looking up your FCC registration number in Nebraska, looking up your reduced lunch counts, the eligible services list, how to get to an attachment, all that is here. I've got some basic information about SIPAA about it itself. Like I said, we don't recommend specific filtering programs. Each library situation is way too specific to that. But I do give you lots of resources here that you can use to figure out what would work best for your library. Information about technology planning that we have here if you do want to do that. And then here for Nebraska I also list our E-rate funding recipients. This is all public information so I just keep track of how many libraries and who here in Nebraska has gotten E-rate in the current year. Right now we're doing pretty good $285,000 in discounts to public libraries in the state. There we are back. Any last minute questions, comments, anything that anybody has before we wrap it up for this training? Anything you want to show me a little more about or tell you a little more in depth? Alright, well, I hope this was very useful to you that we'll wrap it up for a very quick E-rate basic training here. Yes, I am. Someone just commented, thanks. You're only a phone call away. Yes, calm me, email me, that's what I'm here for. I'm here to help you get through this process. It can be a complicated process. It is an ongoing process throughout the year, each step in the process of each of the forms you need to do. But that's what I'm here for is to make sure you guys can get through it with as little painlessly as possible and get your money because that's what it's all about. Alright, so that will wrap it up then for our training. Thank you very much.