 Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our e-rate basic training for the upcoming funding year of 2013. I am Krista Burns. I am the special projects librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. That's my official title, but I am also the state e-rate coordinator for libraries in the state. So any public libraries that are working on submitting their e-rate applications and going through that whole process, that's who I'm here to help. Today we're going to go through and hopefully less than two hours the basics of doing e-rate, what the program is about, the forms you would submit, when you submit them, the whole process. And if you have any questions during the session, please do feel free to ask them. I can stop at any time and answer any questions that you have. So this is going to be very basic for some of you who've maybe never done it before. I do know we have some new people who are new to e-rate in the session with us this afternoon. And I know we have some people that I've worked with before on it. It's always good to get a refresher. There are some things that change throughout from year to year. And it's always good just to be reminded of, no, what do I do now? So on we go. So what is e-rate? E-rate is a federal program that was set up to help schools, libraries, and actually healthcare facilities as well. We mostly here talk about the schools and libraries. But there are other parts of the program as well that are for healthcare providers, low-income people, and people in high-cost areas where it costs a lot more than the usual to do get phone access or internet. And the purpose of it is to lower the cost, make it more affordable for schools, libraries, healthcare institutions to afford their basic telephone and internet access costs and some things that are associated with that. It's funded through what's called the universal service fee. If you look on your phone bill or your library's phone bill, you may see something along with all those, the 10 different taxes that you pay. There's something called the universal service fee. And this is collected by everyone who pays into who gets service, and the service providers themselves pay this fee as well. And all that money is pooled together to create the funds that can then help schools and libraries to afford their internet and telephone access. There we go. It was created by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. So the first year that e-rate existed that you could get a discount was 1997. That was the first year of the program. And in that act, it was put out by the FCC. The providers, your phone company, your ISPs were ordered to somehow figure out how to supply their services to schools and libraries at a discounted rate so that budgets can be able to handle this very important service that the library's used. And the FCC was directed to establish the rules. So how is this all going to happen? What are the rules going to be? What the FCC did, they took this act, and the FCC is the Federal Communications Commission, and they created this company, the Universal Service Administrative Company, called USAC. You'll hear me mention USAC a lot through this training. And this is who you will be communicating with yourself when you're doing your e-rate. It's a company that administers the e-rate program. E-rate is for the schools and libraries, along with the other ones, the one for healthcare providers and for the low-income people. As part of USAC, the specific division that we work with is the schools and libraries division, SLD. So they are the ones that handle what we are doing. So they're the specific people within the big company of USAC that handles our e-rate applications. Now the FCC sets the rules for the program, and they tell USAC, here's what the rule is. Now you figure out how you're going to make it work. How are you going to create a form for it? How are you going to process the applications? How is that all going to come out? The original rules were set up after the 1996 Telecommunications Act was set up. But over the years they have made updates to the program. So things do change, which is good, because we need to update things. There are new products out there, new technologies that they need to be aware of that USAC wants to make sure that you get a discount on. And trying to streamline the program make it easier for everyone to participate in it. Most recently in 2010, they put out a report in order, the sixth one, that made a lot of changes to the program. So you may have heard that there are big changes happened and things are different now. And it's true, they changed some forms. They removed some extraneous questions and duplicate questions and tried to make the process slightly more streamlined. It is still a government program, so there is still a lot you have to do. But this sixth report in order did really make some good, major improvements to the whole program in the process. And this is only the sixth time in the whole life of E-Rate starting in 1987 that they've done one of these major changes. So it doesn't happen that often. But when it does, you do need to figure out what all the new rules are. Now this one was from 2010 and so it was effective with the 2011 year. So we're a couple of years past that now. So things have been pretty much figured out and we know how all the new things work. So these kind of major changes you do not usually have to worry about every single year. Don't have to panic and say, all right, now what is the different this year? Most years it's just minor changes. Some new technology is now available. Some new way of getting your internet access. Some new company has joined up. Minor things usually. This kind of major change is not something to always be worried about. Now the E-Rate funding year runs from every year, July 1st through June 30th. So when you're thinking about applying for E-Rate, what you're doing is thinking now, right now you say, okay, I want to start receiving a discount on my bills starting next summer. So when you start some working on your forms now, you're thinking about July 1st, 2013 through June 30th, 2014. Because of the way the funding years go and the way you're submitting forms to participate in the program, you will notice that right now you're thinking about next year. But if you had worked on E-Rate last year, you're also still working on last year's application and how that works. So funding years do cross each other. So you will be working on forms and discussing things with USAC about different funding years at the same time. And just to make sure you keep those things separate to yourself in some way so that you know this particular letter, this particular form, whatever I'm working on now is from 2013. This one over here is actually from the last year, 2012, and I'm still working on that one. There's various ways you can keep this separate. I have different files for each year, if you want to, each year. And everything that has to do with that year goes into a different file folder. Binders you can use. I use binders here. The library commission, we also apply for E-Rate. And I have a section in each binder for each year. So you just need to figure out how you want to make sure you keep track of these different things. Every time you do use a form and get something back from USAC, it will indicate on it and say what funding year it's in reference to. But you just have to make sure that you do pay attention to that and you reply about the correct year. So there will be overlap in the different years, just something to be aware of. Originally, there was about $2.25 billion allotted to this program. But with that new order they did in 2010, they finally realized inflation is important and is affecting our libraries and schools and libraries. And so now it is increased every year based on inflation. So there's more money available now every year to distribute out to schools and libraries. We don't know how much it is yet for the upcoming year, of course. It's too soon to know that. But you can see here that it has gone up every year since 2010. So that's great. That means more availability, more money. They'll be able to help more schools and libraries to get a discount on their bills. If there is sometimes leftover money from a previous year, it can be rolled over. Some people apply for an e-rate discount and then change their mind. Pricing changes. A service provider decides to give it to them for free. Someone else, maybe the city decides to actually cover it instead of the library having to worry about it. Things change over time. And sometimes there's money that gets given back to the program. And that can be rolled over as well to help out a bit. Now, who is eligible for this? Now, we're specifically just talking about the e-rate part of the Universal Service Program. In Nebraska, all public libraries are eligible to get e-rate. The criteria is based on if you receive LSTA funding in some way, the Library Service and Technology Act funds. These are grants that are given to libraries. But here at the Library Commission, we also receive these same grants. And because we provide services to you using those monies, that makes you also eligible for e-rate. You are benefiting from LSTA funds. So every public library in Nebraska is eligible to it. Schools and school districts can apply, individual schools or school districts as a group. And if we had groups of libraries together, they could apply as a consortia. So if we had county systems, for example, they could all get together and do one application all at once. Here in Nebraska, that doesn't really happen pretty much where each public library is their own thing. And you each apply separately. Excuse me. How much of a discount can you get? You can get anywhere from 20 to 90% off of your bills. And here in Nebraska, most of our libraries fall between the 60 to 80% off. So you can guesstimate you'll probably get that much as well if you haven't ever figured out or done an e-rate before. The discount depends on a couple of different things. The percentage of students that are eligible for the school lunch program in the school district where you're located. What USAC wanted to do is figure out where are the most, the neediest areas of the country and how do we make sure that they get the most of this money, the biggest percentage. And they just decided we'll pick one criteria, and that'll be if there are more students that need the school lunch program that is a possible indicator of higher, more poverty in that area, and we'll give them a higher discount for their schools and libraries through this program. So you will figure out, and I'm going to tell you how to do this in a second, how many students are in your school lunch program in the school district where the library is physically located. One may be next door to a high school, but then there are still like five elementary schools in your district. That entire district is what you look at to see what your discount is. You may have students that come to your library that are from a different school district, not the one that your library is geographically sitting in. That doesn't matter that they come and use your library, all they want you to look at is physically where is your library sitting and what school district is that. And that's what you would look at. One thing you do have to be aware of with this is they do not want you to include any of the pre-K kids in this count. So when you are looking at these numbers, you do need to subtract out those numbers from the count of this number of students that are eligible for the school lunch program in your school district. In combination with that, you look and see if you're considered urban or rural. Most areas of Nebraska are rural, of course. Omaha, Lincoln, they are considered urban anywhere in your large city. But for rural, you get a slightly higher discount. Now, how to calculate your discount? Where can you get this information to figure out how much you're going to get a discount on? And this is one of the things I would say is the first thing to do before you even maybe decide if you're going to do e-rate, if you're new to it, and figure out if it's worth it to you to even get it. Are you going to get 80% or are you going to get 30% and is it worth the time and effort for that much? It all depends. So that's the first thing you want to think about. All the information that you need to calculate your discount is available online. It's just three steps to figure out how much you're going to get. The school lunch numbers are actually posted by the Nebraska Department of Education on their website. They put them up and I've got them right here. There we go. This is the link that's in that PowerPoint there. They put a lot of reports and information up on their website. And if you just scroll down a bit on here, and the second section of this page is the free and reduced lunch counts by school. And it's all just a spreadsheet and you just open up the most recent one. They only have the numbers through 2012 so far, but that's what we use. We use whatever they put up as the most recent ones. So if you start looking at these things late next year sometime, you might notice they finally have the 2012-13 numbers up. And then you would just use those, just whatever one is the most recent one that they have available here. I have heard from libraries in the past before my time that the Department of Education did not always use to do this. And this is one of the hardest things to try and get a hold of sometimes. And to even get started with E-rate was finding these numbers. Libraries had to call the school, call the superintendent, find out who had these numbers, and try and convince them in some cases to even give them the actual numbers. Some of the schools thought it was private information. They were not allowed to give it out. That's not true. It is public information. You're not asking for the names of the individual children who are in this program. You just want to know how many of them there are. And the only reason what's going to be used for is for this E-rate purpose. Someone made a good suggestion in my workshop yesterday that I was teaching on this that if you do need to call a school to get some numbers, find out who their E-rate person is. Because schools submit for E-rate as well. They'll understand the program and know what you're asking for and why. Sometimes if you talk to a superintendent or a secretary, they don't even know what the E-rate is about and why they could even give out this information. So track down that person. They might help you. The reason you might need to actually call the school, even though the numbers are on here, is if there are pre-K numbers included in your particular schools, you're going to have to make sure you get those out. So here is what the spreadsheet will look like. Now when you first go to it, you're going to have just this first page, which is the caution and warning page. But if you go down on the lower left corner of the spreadsheet, there's a second tab. That's the data. You've got to just move over to the other sheet to actually get all the numbers for the kids that are in the program. So you'll just look here. It's arranged by county. Find your county, find out all the schools that are in your school district. You use all of them in the district. This column here is how many kids are enrolled in the school in total. And this is how many kids are eligible for the free lunch program. So you would then divide the enrolled by the total of all the enrolled numbers, total of all the free lunch, divide the free lunch into the enrolled numbers, and boom, you have your percentage. Here on the grade column, it will tell you what grades are in that school. And here you can see Hawthorne Elementary does say P-K. So the pre-K kids are included in these numbers here. They may be included. What this would need to do is call the school, call the district, and find out, can you give me the numbers for this school subtracting out any of the pre-K kids? They do eat the lunches, and they are part of the program. But for whatever reason, for e-rate purposes, they don't want you to include them. They just want kindergarten and up. So in this case, you would give a call to school, maybe ask, who does your e-rate? I just need to talk to them about it, and they would be able to help you figure out and find those numbers for you. So once you have those numbers, then you check your urban and rural status. This is just based on the census data, U.S. census information, nothing special that they do about this. And this is available on the e-rate website. USAC has a website for you to use, and it lists all, every single state here is listed. I'm not going to scroll all the way down to ours, and then it just goes by county and lists which ones are rural or urban this way. Anything in normal type is rural. If there's a bold type, it means it's a portion. So you can see here, it's based on area codes for Alabama. And Nebraska pretty much just lists all of the... Let's see if I can get down to us here. Oops, I'm too fast. Here's all of the counties in Nebraska listed. And so if you are in any of these counties, then you are considered rural. So you don't have to go somewhere special, figure it out yourself, just go to that link that I have in the PowerPoint, and it will bring you right to there where you can see what counties are rural. Once you have those two bits of information, how many with the percentage of students that are in the school lunch program and the urban rural status, then USAC has this discount matrix where you figure out your discount. Now, something that's really nice about these e-rate forms, all the forms can be done online. And I'll show you how to do that a little later. So if you do it online, the math will be done for you. You'll just plug in where you are and it will look for the... Use those numbers that you put in and do all the math, and it's really nice and quick and easy. There is a page on the USAC website that does give some instructions on how to do these calculations as well if you do it yourself. But once you have those two numbers, you just look at this. This is the discount matrix. Look at what percentage of your students are eligible, and then whether you're urban or rural, and that will let you know how much of a discount you could receive on your bills. And you can see here for anybody that's 49% or less, if they're rural, it does give a slightly higher discount to you. So it is beneficial to be in a rural area, in addition to having more kids eligible for the school lunch program. Like I said, most of our libraries fall between the 60%, 70%, 80%, so that's what we're looking at here in Nebraska. And something to be aware of, too, is we're not talking about how many kids participate in the school lunch program. It's how many are eligible. That is different. Some families do not choose to participate, even if they are eligible for it. And that is the numbers that are given by the Department of Education. This is how many of the kids can get it if they want to. So sometimes when you talk to the schools, they might not understand the difference there. Well, only this many children have applied. That's not what you care about. You want to know how many are eligible, which will be a higher number, which would possibly get you a higher discount. So this is how you figure out how much you could get off on your bills, your phone bill, your internet, basic monthly internet bill. So this is the first thing I'd say to start looking at this to see is it worthwhile for you to do the e-rate process. It is an ongoing process that you do throughout the year, as different forms that you have to submit each step in the process. It is things you have to look up and keep track of and keep track of your bills and work with your service providers to make sure that they are doing their part of it. So it does take some work. It does. It is easier than it used to be. I can tell you that from the improvements they've made over time. You may talk to other librarians who have done this years ago, or you may be one of those librarians who did this 5, 10 years ago and just thought it was the most horrible experience ever, very difficult, too much work, too much hassle. I just don't even have the time to deal with it. It has gotten better. So don't worry about those people telling them, you know what, I'm going to try it anyways and see how it goes. So you figured out how much you're going to get. The next thing to talk about is what can be discounted. What is eligible or irateable for in the e-rate program? Every year, the FCC publishes what they call their eligible services list. And this is a list of all of the services and programs that are possibly eligible for you to get a discount on. And it also includes in there things that you can't get a discount on. So it does lead you in the right direction for that. On the e-rate website, this is that link from the PowerPoint, and they have the current list for 2013 is here, but also the previous years are here as well. Like I said, you will be doing multiple years in a row and still working on previous ones, so you still need the old ones to possibly refer to. But always make sure you're using the correct list, referring to the correct list when you're doing your application because it does change from year to year depending on what new technology is basically something that might be changed on there if they've decided to finally cover something that they didn't before, it'll be updated on the list. So always make sure you're just using the one that has to do with whatever funding year you happen to be working on applying for. Now, what is eligible in this list? How is it arranged? The way all the services are arranged is based on priority. They have a priority one and priority two is how they categorize everything. Dump them into these two broad categories, and then within each one of them, they have subcategories. Priority one is basically your basic phone and your basic internet access. Your local phone number, your long distance fax number, if the library provides a cell phone for you, that would be in there. And then under internet access in there, your monthly internet bill and anything that might be associated with that. So those are priority one services, the basic ones, what most of the libraries here in Nebraska apply for. And you can see here it says they get funded first. Right off the bat you sack when you put in your application, starts looking at those particular requests first. Second thing that they have here is priority two services. This is the extra things that get you the phone access and get you the internet is how you kind of think of it. Internal connections, things like wiring, networking, doing construction in your library. If you have to build a new computer lab that gets the internet in or have to update something, that would be something that would fall under internal connections. Rather than your monthly bills, just your regular monthly charges is what priority one is, priority two would be that kind of extra work. And then connected to that is what they call basic maintenance of those internal connections. Meaning if you have to have any regular servicing done to it, if you pay someone to come in and update your operating system on the computers, that would be something you could cover. If you have to pay, if for example my favorite example is if a squirrel gets in the walls of your computer lab and chews through your network wires and you have to call someone to come in and pay someone to fix that, that is something that could fall under basic maintenance, keeping the actual wires that get the internet and get the phone to you, keeping those working. So that's the two different priorities. Priority two is funded after they've gone through all the priority one requests, then they go back and look at the ones that came in under the priority two. And they do it based on, as it says here, the neediest applicants first, meaning the higher discount you get, the higher percentage of discount is the ones who will be funded first. And then if they have enough money, they'll go down to lower. Normally what happens every year is they make an announcement that priority two services will be funded at the 87% and above or the 90% and above level and that's it. There's not, once priority one is done, that takes up a lot of the money. So priority two services can be a lot more expensive. When you're talking about building a whole computer classroom or running fiber to a library, that can take a large chunk of money. So they do have to be particular about who is going to even be eligible to get the priority two funding. So for example, if your library is, according to that discount matrix, can get a 70% discount on all of your e-rate services and you apply for priority two saying, yes, we're upgrading our network. And then they say, everyone 90% above will be funded and that's it. Then you just won't get anything. It doesn't matter. You may have done a perfectly good application. It's all correct and accurate and has everything they need. But they do have to pick and choose for priority two and give the highest percentage ones. We'll get the money for that. So something to be aware of. It doesn't hurt to apply for it. Might as well do it if that is something that you might want to get a discount on. It just is not as guaranteed that you, if you'll necessarily get it. So what I'm going to go through now is go through some of the specific services that are available under each priority, not every single one. The eligible services list itself is about 50 pages long. So it's got a lot of information in there, a lot of details. But I do want to just highlight some of the more common things that I know our libraries may have applied for. So right off the bat, priority one, telecommunications. This is your basic phone service. If you have long distance, if you use voice over IP and pay for that, if you do have cell phone service that the library is paying for. If you on your cell phone have a smart phone and you're paying for a data plan, that you would actually bump over want to make sure that you put on the internet access category, not on the telephone category. It's different because you are getting the internet for the phone. So if that is a separate cost, you would do that that way. Other things under telecommunications, if you have DSL that you pay for, a T1 line, if you have satellite service, anything like this is what you can get under telecommunications access in the priority one services. And the other part of priority one is your internet access. This is your monthly bill that you pay to your internet service provider to get internet. And it can be anything. If you pay for an email service, that can be included. If you get wireless and that's extra. The fiber that we're running to some libraries, if you have someone host your website and you pay them for that hosting fee, that hosting cost, that is something that you can get discounted as well. If you don't pay for that, then you wouldn't need to put that on there. For example, here at the library commission, we do offer free websites for libraries who need them through our Nebraska libraries on the web project. But if you do pay someone to host your website, you can submit to get a discount on that as well. Now, some things that are not eligible, the actual content itself that might be on your website or that you're accessing through the internet. If you pay for a database, you can't get that discounted. If you pay someone to create your website and create the content on your site, a website designer to actually design it for you, that's not something you can get a discount on. So basically, the difference between what you can and can't internet-wise is what gets you connected to the internet, that is eligible, but what you're actually accessing on the internet is not. That's the basic difference between the two. If you have some sort of curriculum software, if you use Blackboard or Moodle, mainly for schools, that is not something, any software programs that you use on the internet, none of those are eligible as well. Now, like I said, this is not an exhaustive list, this is just a few things that I know some people have mentioned and worked with. So definitely recommend looking through that eligible services list when you're doing this to see is there's something I do that is actually on this list that I can include when I'm asking for my discount. So that's our priority one services. Priority two services, this is the internal connections, the networks, the cables, the building of a new classroom or of a new library for this. So any of that, you can get a discount on under priority two services. One thing to be aware of here is they have this two and five rule, meaning for internal connections only, you can only receive funding two out of every five years. So for example, if next year you're doing some construction, you can apply that year for it, and then if it continues to the next year, you can apply again, but that's it, only two of those years. Then you've got to wait three years just to apply again if there's something else you're still doing. Or you can split it up if, you know, it's whenever this might fall into your budget, you're doing something this year, great. And then three years from now, something else needs to be done, then you can do it then because then you just have to wait another couple of years because you have to keep just two applications within a five-year timeframe, and it's just a rotating timeframe. So just be aware of that that you can't ask for internal connections every single year. Your basic phone bill, your basic Internet bill of course, that's an annual thing you'll always ask for. This one has limits on what you can do with that. Now, the other part of priority two is what they call the basic maintenance. And this is the support. If you pay someone, like I said, a company or an individual to come in and upgrade your computers to repair anything that goes wrong, any basic tech support, you have someone on call for that, these kind of things, you can get a discount on. Now, you do have to, before you do this, you can't just call somebody and say, great, I'm going to have you do this, and then we're going to get a discount on it. Before you apply for e-rate, you have to have an agreement or a contract with someone to do this. So it has to be something already set up that you will contact this company. You're there the one that covers this for you. It may be something that your ISP itself provides for you, this kind of support or your phone company. Whatever it is, you do have to have an agreement ahead of time. And then when that work needs to be done, you can get a discount on it. If you pay them a monthly fee, for example, like we pay you $20 a month to be our on-call tech support, but you don't need to call them during a month, you can't get that refunded. It has to be actual work done. So, for example, hopefully, squirrels aren't going to chew up your cables in your walls every month. You might go for three months and everything's fine, and then the fourth month, you have to get this repair done because of the nasty squirrels. That month, you can get an apply for a refund for your discount for that one, but not for the months leading up to that. They didn't actually need any work done. That two-in-five rule doesn't apply in here. It only applies to that internal connections category. So, that's the only one out of anything that you have to worry about. Am I allowed to apply for it this year? Everything else you can do every year. Now, related to all of these priority one and priority two services, there are miscellaneous charges that may be connected to either one of them, and they're in a separate category, but then what you would do when you apply for your particular request is say, this is a miscellaneous charge for my phone bill and this is a miscellaneous charge, same miscellaneous charge, but it happens to be for my internet. If you have to train someone, train your staff on how to use, if you get a new phone system and you have to, in the phone company, provide you with training that you have to pay for, that's something you can get a discount on. If you have to train your staff on how to use your new servers or your new network connection. And this is only for the actual staff, not for your patrons or your users, so this would only be for your own people to get this training. And the other main thing, major thing that's a miscellaneous charge is all the taxes and surcharges and all those extra things that are always on your bills. Many of those are also eligible, so don't just ask for a discount on the charge for the month, but look at all those taxes as well. You may be able to get a discount on those, including the Universal Service Fund fee itself that you pay into the program with. You can get a discount on the fact that you paid that in. So a little circular thing going on there. This is not every single thing that is available as a tax or surcharge. This is just a few of them that I know people have encountered. Look at the Eligible Services list online and look and see, and then compare that to the bills that you get and make sure you're getting a discount on everything that's possibly eligible. So that's the basics of what you can get a discount on. Does anybody have any questions yet at this point about what e-rate is, about getting what the discount is, and what can, can't be requested, the services? If you have a question, type it into the questions section and I can answer there. If you have a microphone, just let me know and I can unmute you. No, doesn't look like anything urgent is coming through. That's fine. We will continue. Next, I'm going to talk a bit about the actual forms that you submit. Some basic background information about them, what they all are about, how they work, some things you need to plan for ahead of time, and then talk about each of these specific forms in the process as well. So there are four basic forms in the e-rate process that you would be submitting. The first three here on this list, and we're going to go into the details of each one, the specifics, but the first three on this list, you always submit every year. The fourth one, it will depend on how you're going to get your money, and we'll talk about that in a second. So that one, you may or may not be doing that fourth one. 470, you are putting out that you want to receive a service from some companies that you want to be, and you want to eventually get e-rate discount on it so that they all know. We'll get into more specifics about these. This is just a quickie run through. After you put that out, you'll get libraries, or not libraries, service providers will contact you saying, I'm the one that can provide this to you. Hopefully your own service provider would. And you pick one. You tell USAC with the 471 form. I've picked who I want and what service I want. Then the third form is where you let them know that service has actually started happening. The funding year doesn't start until July. So this actual process with that 470, you're starting now. So he's making these choices and letting them know that who you want and what service you're getting is going to happen before that funding year starts. So then you eventually have to tell them that, yes, we did decide to go with that company. And the 486 tells them we've started receiving it. It started. It's all good. And then the last forms, the 472 or the 474, those are what they call their invoicing forms where you actually tell USAC, my bills are. I am paying my bills. Now give me my discount. So four different forms. You have to make sure you go through the whole process and do all of them to actually eventually get your money. And you don't get any money until that fourth form is done. Everything else is prep work before that. One great thing about this, all of these forms can be filed online on the USAC website. It's much faster. It gets them there immediately. This is the website, which I was actually showing you a little earlier too. This is a particular section of the USAC website that is for schools and libraries. Each of the other programs has their own. And there's a lot of good, useful information on this website that I'll be showing you throughout today as well. But the Applying Online section is right here. The big red arrow is pointing where you click on that and you get to this page where they have links to all the forms that you can apply. The 470, the 471, the 486. And over here, the one that says bare, that's the fourth form that they don't put the number on here for that one. Interesting. I'm not sure why, but the 472 is what that one is. Now, a few things to be aware of here before you start doing your forms online. It says here in the very first bullet, use Internet Explorer 6.0 and above, other browsers may cause errors. For just surfing the USAC website itself, this part and looking at the different reference areas and their news items and whatnot, you can use any browser you want to. But once you get here onto their online forms, you have to use Internet Explorer. It is the only browser that they have programmed to actually work with their online forms. You may start using a different browser, Firefox, Chrome or something, and think your cruising along just fine. And eventually something will break and it won't do the correct thing. Or you think you've submitted it, but really it hasn't gone through. So just definitely be aware of that. I know people do have their preferences of browsers to use on a regular basis, and that's fine. But for this particular purpose, you have to be using IE or something along the lines will not work. We have asked them about can you get other browsers to work, and they just do not have the programmer time to get all of these forms programmed also for the other browsers. This is the answer they've given us. So we just stick with this and just make sure that you use IE whenever you're doing your online applications. Something else that is very useful here is, there's a link here that I highlight, the required forms page. And this is where you can get the PDF versions of the forms. All the forms can both be submitted either in paper or online. So there's where you can get those and instructions to submit all these forms. On each of these links where it has where you can create the forms, there is of course help guides and help to go through to prompt you to what the next thing is and how to answer this question. But I find that the instruction guides that are in PDF on that required forms page have much more detailed instructions. I use them all the time. Half the time when you guys are calling me and asking questions, that's what I'm pulling up and looking at is the instruction guides where it explains, this question means this. And we are looking for this kind of information and here's where you can go to find that information. It gives a lot more detail, I think. So it's a really good reference to have even if you're submitting online using those PDFs of the instructions is very helpful. And also the PDFs of the forms themselves. Use them as a cheat sheet. When you're going through the online form, you can't see ahead to section 4 of a form. It just goes a section at a time. But you can look at the PDF ahead of time and know exactly what you might be needing to fill out later on. Here is the page on the website. And here's what I'm talking about, the required forms page. Oh, it has a redirect, okay. Okay. Here's one of them for 470 where you can get the form itself and the descriptions and everything on their website. So we'll pop back to the PowerPoint. So on here on the online forms, you can create a form online. And you'll also see here is something also nice to be aware of before you're jumping in to do these online forms. You'll notice that all of them have here this continue in complete option on all three of them. If you're in the middle of doing a form and you realize that, oh wait, I forgot to find this information and you get interrupted by something at work, you can always go back and finish the form later and it will save your work as far as you've gotten along. You don't have to start over. So that's a really nice feature that you can do that there. So just be aware of that that you don't have to say, nobody talked to me for the next three hours. It's okay. You'll be able to jump back in and continue along where you left off. And we'll get into some of the more details about all of these different ways of filling out these forms a bit later. Now every time you do submit a form, what's also nice about the program is every time you submit something, USAC will send you a letter saying they got that form. You send the 470, they send you a letter saying, yes, we received it. You send the 471, you said, yes, we received it. And what they do with these letters, they color code them for you, which is great. Every year for each funding year they make them, the letters you will receive from USAC will come on a different colored piece of paper. These letters, yes, do come in the mail. They are not emailed. They are not faxed. They're not anything fancy like that. They are still doing the old fashioned to traditional email. So from the USAC, they'll come in a white envelope. USAC, your logo, but inside will be a certain colored piece of paper depending on what year they're saying, they're responding to for you. You can see it just rotates to pink, blue, and yellow. So the upcoming year, if you're starting your process now, you'll start getting letters on pink paper. If you are doing 2012, you have older letters that are on the yellow paper. They call it canary. This is a thing that they started, I think in 2006 or so. When they first started the program, they did not do this. Everything came on white paper. You had to read and figure out what funding year does it say this is. Someone eventually came up with the idea that this would be great to give someone a quickie. As soon as they see the piece of paper, they know what it's about. So now everything is color coded. This is nice. My binders that I have for e-rate, I can just browse and see, well, here's the year for 2010, because it's all pink, and here's my 2011 papers, because it's all blue. So it definitely does help when you get these letters from them. Now, all these letters that you receive and the forms that you submit to e-rate, you do need to keep copies of them, save them for five years. USEC and FCC will do audits of libraries to see how the program is working. This doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong, or there's anything that you need to fix, or they're calling you because you broke the rules or whatever. It's a huge program, billions of dollars, so they're always doing basically checks and balances type of thing. Checking to see is the program working as it's supposed to. Is the process working correctly? And they are allowed to go back five years if they want to, to check up on the library, and they'll randomly pick to be the one of the ones that gets checked each year. The five years is five years from the last date of service, that you receive the service, not necessarily from when you started the application process or when you submitted the forms. So for example, for Funding Year 2013, the funding year ends in June of 2014, so you have to go save everything through June of 2019. And this is anything that relates to that funding year 2013. If you had originally made a contract with a company, for example, back in 2009 in this example, that's when you first contracted with your internet service provider and the same company you always use. That old contract from back then you still have to keep because it still has something to do with the funding year 2013. So anything related to that funding year you have to keep as well. So just think about that. If anything that has to do with what's going on this year, keep that for five years. You might have to make copies of it like if this contract has held somewhere else in the director's office, but now you want to put it with your E-rate files, make another copy of it, stick it in there, just so you know nobody accidentally throws away something that you're supposed to be keeping. They might not realize that E-rate has rules for things that are different maybe than what the library's rules or the city's rules are or the county's rules. So just be aware of that. Also, you do not have to keep the paper copies of all this. You can keep them electronically. If you want to be, if you are a paperless office or working towards being one, scan them in, save them in a folder somewhere on your computer, and just make sure that you are able to access them whenever USAC might come and ask you about it. That's all they need to do is to get a copy of these forms. They don't care how you're keeping them on your side. You just need to be able to, if they ask for this contract from 2011, you'll be able to send it off to them even if it's an email attachment. That's perfectly fine. The only thing that doesn't apply to this five-year rule is when we're talking about SIPA, which is a Children's Internet Protection Act, which is related to filtering, and we'll talk about that a bit later. That is something you'd keep forever. So the kind of things you would have to keep, any forms that you submit, any letters they send back to you, anything else they use to contact you, if they contact you wanting to know more information, those letters, any contracts or agreements you've signed with anybody, those are things that you would need to keep a hold of. If you have any equipment delivered when you're having construction done and all those delivery notices and letters, keep all of that. Basically, anything related to that funding year, hold on to. So there's a couple other things I want to talk about that you also need to think about before you decide, before you're doing your E-Rate, that you need to take in consideration before you actually even start filling out your forms. The first thing you want to, one of the things you want to look into is technology planning. Do you have a technology plan? I'll ask you guys here, raise your hand using the GoToWebular interface. Do you at your library have a technology plan already? Whether it's an individual one, just this is technology plan, or you can also say yes if you have it, if you want to in the chat, or if it's part of your strategic plan, some other plan of the library. Does your library already have one of these, a technology plan of some sort? It looks like we have a couple of people that do, okay? Some places do, some places don't. Technology plans are really good. We've done some training and we have information about that here. They're also required in Nebraska for certain levels of accreditation. That would be something. Oh, Lola, you're working on one now? That's great. I can help you with that, as you know. So for e-rate purposes, technology planning is needed. A technology plan is needed if you are applying only for those priority two services, meaning internal connections, stuff for wiring, construction, basic maintenance, all that kind of things. Your basic, your priority one services, your basic phone, internet bills, you do not need a technology plan for those anymore. This is new from that order that came out in 2010. So a lot of libraries had a sigh of relief from that. It used to be required for internet access, but it is no longer. So if you're just applying for your basic phone and your basic internet, you don't have to worry about doing a technology plan. But if you are, there are a few criteria that they do require. I'm just going to go through this quickly here. Goals and strategies for how you're going to use this technology. Think about that in your plan. Fresh on development strategy. How are you going to train all of your staff to use any of these new technologies that you might be implementing? And a current assessment of what you currently have and what you might need at your library. How old are your computers? Do we need new ones? How often should we replace them? And then an evaluation process of the plan itself. Is this plan working for us? Is it not? How can we make it work better? On, there we go. On the USEC website, they do a page all about doing technology plans. We also have a page on our commission web page website about technology planning. And what we have also is information about how to do it. But also there's this worksheet that was created years and years ago by Pam Scott, who's my predecessor a long time ago, where it is just a worksheet that you can use. And here it is here. Fill in the blanks of this and it guides you through creating a technology plan. Who's going to be on your committee to figure all this out? Here's the goals and strategies section. It explains what they are, why you would do them, sometimes gives some examples. And then here blank space, type in what your goals and strategies are. And it goes through the whole plan this way. This is available as a Word document so you can download it and just type in your answers and then send that off to me and I can look at it for you. And as long as you answer all the parts on this worksheet, you'll have an approved and useful technology plan to use in your library and to use for e-rate purposes. Now, just as with everything else, you need to keep these for that same five years. I would be the one doing the approving of the plan. I'm a USAC certified technology plan approver. That's me. Whoops. I jumped ahead too quick. So when you're working on your plan, you can send it to me and I can help you work through it. And if you need any help or assistance or ideas about am I doing this correctly? And then when you're done with it, I would approve it. If you are doing it for e-rate purposes, you have to start writing it before you start the e-rate process. So before you do that very first form, the 470, and then I have to approve it before you do your third form in the process. So just be aware of that when you're doing it. You do not have to do a new plan every year. Some libraries do, but you don't have to. You can write it for a three-year time period. So you only have to do it and update it once every three years. So that's a very quick overview of technology plans. Like I said, we do have information on our website about it. Definitely look at that and talk to me and I can help you work through it if you do want to be working on one, either for e-rate purposes or just because you want to have one for your library. So the second thing that you need to look at and think about before you're going to apply for e-rate is SIPA. SIPA, this is where we get into filtering and whether libraries want to filter or do filter. How many of you do know that you already have filters on your computers that you're already using, some form of filtering the Internet access? Can you raise your hand or type in yes, either way? Okay, so that's a few. Oh, great, a few more. Great. Okay, so some of you are. SIPA is the Children's Internet Protection Act. Now, you may be doing filtering at your library just because you want to do it there and you may not be doing it in response to this particular act and that's fine. Many libraries do it just because they want to have somebody in the staff of the library wants to do it or someone in the town wants you to do it, for whatever reason, for e-rate purposes. If you want to apply to get a discount for your Internet access, that's the priority one service or your internal connections under priority two, you do need to be in compliance with SIPA. So if you want to get a discount on your basic monthly Internet bill, you do need to be somehow complying with SIPA. SIPA is a very simple document, actually. Some of you may have heard me talk about it before. It's about 12, 13 pages long, maybe. Not very much to it. It requires three basic things and I'm going to get into details here. An Internet Safety Policy, how people use the Internet at your library. A Technology Protection Measure, how people filter itself, and some sort of public notification letting your community know that you are doing this. There is more detailed information about this on the USAC website, but I'll give you some of the basics now. But the first thing I want to tell you about is that there was an update to SIPA just done in 2011 from the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. So this updated some of the information from the Older Children's Internet Protection Act. So a new FCC report came out. So there's some new procedures and new requirements that need to be looked at in order to be complying with SIPA. However, for all, most of us, for us here, I'm working with libraries. For libraries, there are no new requirements. So nothing changed for libraries. This is great for us. We don't have to worry about this. I do know we have someone here on the line from school. I don't do rate consulting and help for school, so I don't know a lot of the details about what you guys need to be aware of. But I do bring this one thing up to attention to of our libraries, because I think it may be important and might have to deal with it. Libraries don't have to make any changes to how they're dealing with SIPA, but schools do. One specific thing that I know has been mentioned is that schools now do have to educate the students about using chat rooms, meeting people online, cyberbullying, all that kind of thing. They have to actually have courses for these students now. That is a requirement now for the schools. It's not a requirement for the libraries. If you read the new act, this FCC 11-125, if you read through it, it says schools must do this and schools and in schools, that's what's mentioned. So for my libraries, I want you to be aware of this. Just in case someone from your community has heard about this change and has heard that the students now need to be taught about this, that if they come into your library and say, why aren't you offering these courses? You're breaking the law. You have to be. You can tell them, not me, it's the school's responsibility. It's the schools that have that new rule, not the libraries. Now, so if you as a library want to provide that kind of training, that's great. You know, it's good. If you want to provide that as a service to the minors that come into your library, that's perfectly fine. However, for SIPA requirements, it is not you that are required to do that is the school. So if anyone does try and complain to you about that, you can just tell them, nope, it's actually the schools. If you're concerned that they're not being taught this, that's who you need to talk to about that. So, just one thing to be aware of about the new update. Now, the basics of SIPA, having an Internet Safety Policy, that's the first thing. You may already have this. You may already have an Internet Use Policy or Safety Policy in your library that you're already using. And if it covers all of these things, just all of these things right here, then you've already got this one done. You have to somehow describe how you will restrict access of minors to inappropriate material. They make sure that they are safe when they're using their e-mail and chat rooms. How are you going to address that? Make sure that they don't hack into your computers. Probably should be making sure that not just minors aren't hacking into your computers, but SIPA itself talks about making sure that they are not doing that. That you're not giving out minors personal and private information, privacy rules for that. And that you are restricting their access to anything harmful to them. That's your filtering. So, in your policy, these are the things you need to address. The FCC doesn't tell you how to address them. It's a local issue up to you, how you want to, but just have somewhere in your policy that these five things here are mentioned and discussed about how you're going to handle them. How you do is up to you. If you already have, like I said, an acceptable use policy or a safety policy, you don't have to write a separate one for e-rate. The one you already have, as long as it covers those things, works perfectly. The second thing you need is the technology protection measure itself. This is the filter. A specific technology that blocks internet access to certain things. This can be anything. It can be something you pay for. It can be something free. It can be on each individual workstation, something installed. It can be something at your network level, at your server level. However you want to do it, this can be. Just like the policy itself, the FCC and SIPA does not tell you what to use. It just tells you you have to have something installed. What's interesting about SIPA is it specifically says that you must protect adults and minors to visual depictions. It talks about pictures. In this day and age, there is no reliable software or product out there that can do that. They can look at a picture and say, that's a bad one, but that's a good one. We'll let this one through and not that one. There are some things that are being developed where they look at maybe the colors that are coming up on the screen. If they see a lot of flesh tones, something bad that might be a naked person, so we should block that. It could also be somebody wearing a khaki military outfit, because that's flesh tones as well. It's not a perfect technology yet. We have to play a game and figure out what can we do that might possibly catch these and the filters that we have look at words. Words that might be in a website or look at domains. Certain URLs that they know are putting out information, and that's what these companies do. They track these kind of things. They create blacklists for you and whitelists for you and track that for you, and then update your software to block those particular things. One thing that's also important about SIPA that some people forget is you must be able to actually turn off the filter or unblock a certain site that is a legitimate site if someone who's an adult asks you to. That is a requirement in the SIPA law. Some people don't realize that. They think that it just means blocking everything. It just means censorship, and that's wrong. But you have to be allowed to unblock things. You have to be aware that it is something that you have to ongoing track and keep track of that. Is it blocking the right things? Is there certain sites I have to unblock because it did it by accident? That kind of things you do have to be aware of for it. For SIPA requirements, keep all the documentation for that forever. You know, five years ago or six years ago, but it's always going to be related to the current funding year that you're applying for at the E-rate. For SIPA stuff, you'll just keep everything forever, not those five years. The last thing you need to do is somehow let your community know that you're going to be doing this filtering. If it's an agenda item on your board minutes, that's fine. Putting an ad in the paper, putting a flyer up, actually having it calling a meeting to hope that they can discuss about it. That would be something to do as well. So you just have to let them know. SIPA and filtering can be a very controversial issue. Libraries are on all sorts of ranges of yes, we filter, we block as much as we can because we have to protect the children to the other extreme of filtering equals censorship. Censorship is bad. You don't have to filter forever filter and everything in between. And that's fine to have that whatever your opinion is. However, if you want to get an E-rate discount on your internet bill and maybe you can get 60, 70, 80% off on it, the people on the extreme end of filtering is censorship may be convinced to say, well, can we possibly meet these criteria and get our 80% discount and really impose much on our public. And you can. You can put your filter to a very low setting and some, I've had many libraries tell me it doesn't even, nobody even knows that we have one, but it's on there and it's blocking just the worst of the worst. And that's great. SIPA doesn't come and say, you know, you have to block YouTube and you have to block Facebook and it's not about that at all. So you can still get those in your computers and never even know that something is up. Now, if you're interested in doing this and not sure about what to use, on my E-rate page, this is at the Library Commission's website, I have a section about SIPA here where I've linked to some websites out there that talk about filtering in libraries so you can see what the issues are. List of certain software that you might use and I have a PowerPoint presentation that I did last year about this regarding SIPA so you can, you know, educate yourself and maybe you're some people in your community about what it is or isn't about. So hopefully some of that information there can help you decide if you do want to get that Internet access discount how you can comply with SIPA and do that. So any questions at this point about technology planning or filtering? Next, we're going to jump into the actual forms themselves for the second half of this. Okay, this is a timeline, a basic timeline of the different forms that you would submit and the specific dates when things might be due for this upcoming funding year, 2013. This is a good reference for you, a resource for when things are due and the order that things happen so you can use this as you want to put this off, off of your PowerPoint. It's also available on our website in a general form but this one specifically gives the dates for the upcoming year. So this is just the basic process and now we're going to go through each one of them one at a time so you can know more about them. Something that some people do ask me right off the bat is when are these forms due? When do I have to do these by? And the way the deadlines and the forms each year, the dates vary that will change each year. So every year it's not going to be the same day that something's going to be due. Every year the second form in the process which is your form 471 and I'm going to explain more about what's on these different forms in a second. It is only available for a certain period of time called the filing window. That is the only time when you can actually submit this form. It's the only time it's available and usable on the website and it's the only time you should be post-marketing anything if you're mailing it into them. For this upcoming year it actually, the window opens next week next Wednesday on December 12th and it will close on March 14th. So since USAC has announced that we know now based on that window when other stuff may come due. The form 470 the first form in the process has to be out and there's a 28-day period there has to be between the two forms. You submit the 470 you wait 28 days at least 28 days minimum then you can do your 471. So what we know now that the 470 is the last day you can possibly submit one of those is February 14th. Valentine's Day. Don't wait till the deadline though. There's no reason to wait. You can do the 470 now. You could have submitted it actually a month ago, two months ago it became available for the new year and it was June or July of this past summer. So jump right on as soon as you can to do that if you want to. Scott, do you have a question? Hi, Scott. Do you have a microphone? Hi. I've unmuted you. Is there a timer on that 28-day period or is that on us that we need to market in our calendars? No, they will tell you what the date is. After you submit your 470 like I was saying earlier that every time you submit something they send you a letter saying they got it on the letter they send you saying we have received your 470 it will tell you what that 28-day is the date that you're allowed to do the 470. Oh, okay. Thanks. You can track it yourself too, use a calendar, but they will actually also let you know that. Okay. Cool. Okay. So let's get into each one of the forms one at a time so we can know what we're talking about here. So the first form in the process is form 470. This is the form where you are what you're officially doing is requesting services and you're opening up a competitive bidding process. Now I do know that here in Nebraska that this whole competitive bidding process is a moot point in many of our communities because there isn't any competition. Many of our towns there's the one there's the one provider and that's it. There isn't anybody else who's going to be competing with them for your business and that's fine. However, for e-rate purposes you still have to go through the steps of opening the bidding process and letting companies know that you want to be receiving a service and getting e-rate for it. That is what the purpose of the form 470 is. You put on here what you want to be receiving, the services that you want to get, which would be your local phone service, your long distance phone service, your internet access, whatever it is that what library it's for and then it's posted out there. Once you've submitted this form it's made public so that any service providers who want to can go and look at your form and see what you're asking for and then the idea is they would all contact you and give you their quotes and their bids and say I'd like to provide the service to you. Like I said here in Nebraska don't get a lot of competition in many areas. However, what has been happening in the last couple of years I've heard from many libraries and I've actually experienced it here at the library commission as well. Companies are suddenly contacting you that you've never heard of before. My guess is that the competition has gotten very hot out there for your services and to provide to make money and even though you've never heard of them before they work in Nebraska so to speak and so they see a Nebraska application and they send you a quote. What I've heard from many librarians from that is I then contacted them and said oh cool you seem to have some good services and great pricing. I'm in so-and-so town what can you do for me? And the service provider replies oh we actually don't serve that town. Okay. Why did you contact me? I don't know. I think they're just getting desperate for business and so they're kind of doing a little fishing expedition to see who might, they might be able to give provide service to. If they don't serve your area that's fine. You just set it aside and say never mind and go with your regular provider and that is perfectly fine. This competitive bidding process the FCC rules say must happen for 28 days before you pick who you're going to go with. Even if you know you're just going to go with your regular company who you've always been with you still have to wait the 28 days to choose your vendor which is submitting that second form the 471 that I was just talking about. So when February 14th being the last day because the deadline for the 471 is March 14th February 14th and the last day you can possibly submit a 470 and still be able to wait those 28 days before you do your second form. Now strongly I can't emphasize this enough don't wait till February 14th because if you do then you only have one day to get your 471 in your second form in the process you only have March 14th to get it in on time. If you have problems with the website if you're doing it online if you realize oh I forgot to get this information together I have to rush around I don't know if I have all the information you might miss the deadline. If you're trying to do it online and you have all your information and because many many other people have waited till the last minute their web page may crash their servers may crash it has and that what will happen then is you will have to then find a PDF of the form do it in paper get yourself to the post office and get it postmarked before the end of the day in March 14th that is not fun we have had some libraries have to do that before so don't wait till the last day if you haven't already done your 470 do it after we get done with this class do it tomorrow do it next week just get it done and then you know at least you're not now I'll get more into this tracking the bids in just a second here this is online what it looks like on the first page of the form 470 I'm not going to show you the entire form here just certain things here that I want to make sure that are a little iffy and that some people question about some of the basic things that are on this form like your contact information is pretty obvious when you first go to login to submit a form you can do it by your zip code or you can enter a build entity number every library who does business with who has done e-rate before has been assigned an entity number they also call it a build entity number I had many libraries tell me oh nobody ever did e-rate at our library I'm the first one I'm trying to figure it out and they come to find they do have a number if someone way back when decided to try it out and submitted just the 470 and then gave up and didn't finish the process that would have made USAC generate them a build entity number you may have one and don't even realize it if you're not sure what it is just type in your zip code and all the libraries will be listed there and you'll be able to find your library that way if you absolutely can't find yourself on there then you would contact USAC and they can assign you with a build entity number to actually continue the process and this is the first form of it all these same fields are going to be needed on the paper form as well so if you're doing it that way it's the same thing very basic contact information here of course who your library is what funding year you're applying for this is a screenshot that's older of course so it talks about the funding year 2011 right now you'd have a poll done it would say 2013 up here at the top this is something I get a lot of questions about the applicants form identifier this is something that you can make up yourself it's not something that's assigned by them or that you have to put something particular specific in here it's not like your build entity number that's assigned to you it's just make up anything that will identify this form to you and then whenever USAC is contacting about it they will refer to that so in this example you can see it says 470 FY 2011 so they're talking about the 470 from funding year 2011 when I do mine for the library commission I sometimes do NLC 470 2011 so 470 so Nebraska Library Commission but whatever you want to put in there it's up to you to have that designation there the other two things down here that I've got arrows at are a type of applicant that you are and who is receiving the services these are two things that they ask for just for statistical brief presses really it doesn't really have anything to do with whether you'll get funding and how much so for us we'd say we're a library and who will be receiving the services is it the public do you have any tribal or your tribal library you have a head start program that comes in whatever applies you would choose there further down on this part of the form your basic contact information how you want us to be able to contact you if they need to ask you for more information this is very important to make sure it's a way that you'll have quick access to sometime many times when they contact you and say we need to know more about this particular part of your form they will give you 15 days to respond and if you don't respond in 15 days they just go with the information they had which may possibly end up causing them to deny your application because they didn't get the updated information or corrected information that they wanted so make sure whichever way you pick telephone fax or email that something you will always be able to access or if you have someone who's your backup someone else who knows about e-rate if you're not around they'll be able to as well we've had some problems with people who put in their own email address and then they go on vacation for like two or three weeks more than 15 days and USAC tries to contact them and nobody knew that this email had come in so be aware of that if you are someone who's lucky enough unlike me to take like a three four week vacation make sure someone else can get to your email or make sure you pick something else as the contact so that someone else will be able to respond to any requests that they might make of you last thing here about consultant information there are companies out there that you can pay to submit your forms for you to help you do this if you do decide to do that they're all assigned a registration number by USAC you'd enter that here I am not that kind of consultant I'm just your state e-rate coordinator I work for the library commission so I don't have one of those it's not how I don't do it for you and you don't pay me for that but if you did want to contract with those companies that would be there you may get contacts from companies wanting to help you with that I've gotten some here and I just ignore them I know how to do my e-rate and you can you know if you want to you can or if you want to get free help just contact me or USAC themselves and they'll help you get through the forms but that is what you put there if you don't have one you just leave it blank and skip it when you're done with entering your basic information you'll get a screen that assigns you an application number print this screen out or write it down whatever works for you make sure you keep this application number this long number here number one I mentioned earlier how you can continue an incomplete form you'll need that number to get back in to continue this form that you had started working on if you get interrupted if you have to step away if you realize you forgot to find some information you'll need that so very important write down or print out that number the base then after this the basic parts of the form is just putting in the information about what service you're looking for look at your eligible services list put it in the form it's pretty straightforward on there but at the end of the form is your certification and signature this is a separate section where you actually basically agree to all the legalities this is a place where some people have some difficulty with have to make sure you submit the form and submit the certification both of those things need to be going out when you're doing this here I just indicate here about technology plans this is a new question that's different than what it used to be in previous years that they do have where no technology plan is required you can check this little box here if you're doing anything priority one basically you're just your basic phone and internet you would check that no technology plan is required because you're not bumping down to those priority two services now you might have a plan but if it's not required for e-rate you can just check there for what you're applying for you just check there so just some basic information here your build entity number like I said most you may have one if you don't you can submitting forms online you know the way you will sign your form is using a pin a personal ID number that usac can issue to you if it is your very first time doing anything with e-rate like if you've never submitted a form before you have to do it for the first time in paper in order to get them to generate you a pin number they need your actual signature your wet signature so to speak on file at least once and then after that they every single other time you can use the pin number that they assign to you to do all the rest of the forms online so the first time you do a form no matter where it is the process doesn't have to be at the beginning of the process like the 470 here at the commission I came in in the middle of a year my first form was a 46 so I submitted that one they sent me a little postcard in the mail here's your pin number and then I was able to use that every time in the future what you can do is you can submit as I was saying here submitting the form and submitting the certification are two separate steps you can do the form part submit it online and then print out the certification and that's the part that has your signature and mail that in to them and that will then get them to generate you a pin number when you get to on the online form doing a certification it will ask you do you want to do this online or you want to do it in paper it gives you that choice and that's for this particular purpose so you can go and do the online form part then when it bumps to here if this is your very first time say I want to do the paper one it will prompt you through printing it out where you'll sign it the address to mail it in is right there on the certification you stick it in the mail you get a card back with your pin number and then from then on every part of the forms you can just do online and you no longer need to mail things in I highly recommend using online forms they prompt you through to do things they have a lot of help in there and they get your forms submitted immediately which is great as I was just mentioning to Scott and we asked after you submit your 470 you get a letter back from USAC that summarizes what's on the form what you submitted double check it make sure it's correct and they tell you what your allowable contract date is your ACD that's that 28 days that of when you can when you can finally do your form 471 the second form in the process so yes you can do your math yourself but when you get this letter it will actually tell you your allowable contract date is so-and-so and that's the date that you have to wait before doing the second form in the process now what the I'm going to go through this besides the next slides I have coming up here is about doing a competitive bidding process which as I said doesn't generally come up a lot in Nebraska but I've got the information in here for you just in case because that's what you're actually doing in submitting a 470 whoops opening a up to any company companies to contact you and say I would like to provide the service for you and what you have to do is evaluate the bids that come in if you get any that come in and if they're even from a company that you can do business with as I said we keep getting these contacts from people who don't even work in our towns there are other reasons too that you might not even be able to do a comparison for example here at the commission I don't have a choice about what service provider we use is decided by the state of Nebraska so even if I do get these other bids and I can't entertain them at all I just put them in a file and set them aside and don't do anything and I had some people in my class say the same thing well the city decides who we go with even if other companies contact me I can't change it I said that's fine then when you get these bids you stick them in a file you hold on to them for that five years so that if you stack ever does ask you and explain well yes I received these three bids but the city decides so but here they are in case you want to look at them so you'll notice also on the form it asks if you're going to be submitting an RF you intended to submit an RFP a request for proposal or a request for quote if it's not required by your local town municipality to do that then you just say no it's it's optional and you do not have to do that for e-rate purposes the 470 serves that same purpose so you just say no to that if you do need to evaluate the bids maybe you do get a new company that comes to town and is actually providing services to you you need to compare them to who you've been using and to decide how am I going to make this decision one way to do that is with a bid evaluation comparison here this matrix this is just an example of how you could do it if you wanted to as you may have seen earlier it said that price must be the primary factor they want you to get the most cost effective bid however price is never the only thing you want to look at when you're deciding is you all know you don't just pick the cheapest guy in town necessarily doesn't mean he's the best company in town so in this example here you do assign points to each thing that might be important to you this is just some examples there could be other things that you care about are they good of the environment are they local do you have prior experience with them are they your regular company are they brand new and you don't know how they how they are with customer service assign points to everything make sure prices that has the most points and then look at each of the bids you get and subjectively decide how many points they win they earn for each thing that each of your important criteria and then whoever has the most points that's the best one that you go with and you can see here in this example vendor two got a full 30 points meaning they're probably the cheapest out of all these three bids however vendor three was much better in other areas it was their prior experience they're the guy we've been with the company we've been working with their prices for other things are much better their local their you know all these other things ended up with their total coming out to a lot more than vendor two so even though this one is cheaper you pick vendor three so prices important but not the only thing make sure you take other things to consideration usack wants you to do that not just go with the cheapest person in town because if you go the cheapest one and they end up having really terrible service it doesn't help you at all so once you've done this if you do have to do this that's when after that allowable contract date after that 28 days has gone that's when you can start looking at these bids doing your evaluation picking who you want to go with and going on the second form in the process which is the 471 second form 471 you've waited the 28 days you've looked at everybody if you have to sign a contract you've got that in hand and you're ready to sign it important even though if you have a contract from someone do not sign or data until those 28 days has passed both the form 471 and that contract have to be done after the 28 days we've had a couple of libraries just recently get not receive their e-rate funding because they signed the contract too soon so make sure you wait those 28 days wait longer if you want if you can most of these companies who you're working with they know what e-rates all about and they will understand because they are participant in the program on their side they have to submit all these forms on their side just like you do on yours they know there's rules they will be willing to wait until you get to that point to sign a contract if you need to sign a new contract with them so the purpose of 471 is to let you sec know who you picked and let them know which services you're going to be receiving and how much they're going to cost this is also the point where you report what your school lunch numbers are and what your discount level is so there's a section for that on the form it also has a certification like the 470 did of working with all the program rules you see I'm really forcing this 28 days thing aren't I I hate it that we've had libraries that have you know done it too soon wait for the 28 days and then provide all this information the earliest you can do a 471 is December 12th so next week if you've done your 470 a long time ago that might be when you can do it if you haven't done your 470 at all yet you'll be after December 12th of course it'll be whatever that 28 days is and then you have until March 14th to do it something that someone has also asked me you don't have to do it on the 20th day you just have to wait that long so anytime 28 days or later is when you can do the second form this 471 471 a very similar looking to it was a lot of similar information to the 470 your basic contact information it has a form identifier as well that you can put in if you want to type of application down here who's receiving the services it has something new on here that I want to bring to your attention an FCC registration number this is new on these forms this has not been needed before many libraries didn't know they had one of these didn't know what it was I didn't know anyone who's ever quote-unquote done business with the FCC in some way whether it's through e-rate or something else has been assigned a registration number by the FCC I didn't know that the commission had one I went and had to look it up but that was fine they have a website here where you can go whoops and if you don't know what your number is you can look it up on their FCC website search for your library and find out what the registration number is if your library doesn't come up this is where you can register and get one I only takes on a few days to get one of these numbers registered sent to you so it doesn't take very long but do be prepared to have one before you submit your 471 it will not let it go through it will not be complete without that number maybe today go ahead and look it up so that you have it ready for when you have it handy when you're ready to actually submit the form itself same thing as the 470 at the bottom of the form your contact information make sure it's something they can get in touch with you with once again that consultant information you don't need to enter there unless you're using one after that information is done on this one you get this screen with big red letters it says important this red circle I added for a 471 it also signs an application number but it also gives you a security code number this is a number you need to have to get back into this form to continue with it to continue an incomplete copy of this form the security code number is automatically generated by the system if you don't print out this page or write this down I can't look it up you can't look it up nobody will be able to find that for you we can look up application numbers for the 470 and the 471 but not that security code so if you mistakenly don't get it take it down you'll have to start your 471 form all over again isn't too horrible you've only gone through that first page with your contact info but it is it can be a hassle if you don't have it that previous one just dies off and then you start with a new one so very important print out write down this page so you can get back into it again later you may have to continue the form again later or you may just have to go back to do something with it you never know why you might need to get into that but definitely do that now in conjunction with the form 471 there is a separate attachment you have to include with it so the 470 is just the form itself and its certification the 471 is the form itself its certification and then this what they call the item 21 attachment it's for question 21 on the form this is where you describe the services that you're actually going to be getting on the form itself you just tell them who the provider is how much it costs on the attachment that's where they want you to describe the service this is for my local and long distance phone service this is my internet access it's fiber and it's at this speed that kind of thing on the item 21 attachment it just has a nice box just a free text field box where you just type in describing what your service is for so it's pretty simple to do but it's an extra step that some people forget when you're doing the online form it prompts you right into doing it which is great it says now would you like to do your item 21s and you say yes and then you go and do them when you're doing the paper forms you have to remember okay now I got to go find my item 21 and do that there is information on the use that website about it so you can use that if you want to the item 21 gets these to be submitted at the same time as the form the same deadline that March 14th deadline both your form your certification and your item 21 attachment have to all be submitted at the same time if you talk to other people other librarians who've done this in the past they may say that oh no you do the item 21 later don't worry about it that was the old rules new rules with that report in order from 2010 this must be done and submitted by the close of that 471 filing window as well so you can't wait to submit it later used to be able to so be aware of that after you get these you send them the 471 they send you back a receipt letter just like I said with the 471 every time you send them something they send you a letter saying yeah you got it so you'll get a pink for a receipt acknowledgement letter that chose you everything that's on the form what's great about these forms the 470 and the 471 is if you discover you've made a mistake or they have maybe transcribed something incorrectly from when you submitted a paper form you can make changes and fix this to them and that's a great thing that you don't you aren't stuck with it you don't have to start over with the process you're not knocked out of the process because you made a mistake you can make a change in that in just a second show you the different things that you can make changes to I actually had to do that for the commission one time because I made a typo when you get this funding or this acknowledgement letter back from doing your 471 each of your requests will be signed a funding request number which you may hear described as a fern that's a pronounced that acronym each time when you do a 471 each request that you have will be a request you may have a request for your local phone number your long distance and your internet that's three different requests if your local and long distance are bundled they might be one and then your internet access is a second one just depends on how your billing works out and how it works into the categories for e-rate each one of those requests will then be assigned a number that then USAC will talk refer to you when they're asking you questions about it they may say fern number one two three four five we need to see the contract for and you have to know well which one is that they won't say your internet access application they will say fern number blah blah blah tell us this about it so on the letter it will show you which one it is and you'll know then which requests if they ask you for more information you'll need to use that to refer to them to answer back to them just like a you are assigned a billed entity number all of your service providers are assigned their own ID numbers called service provider identification numbers or spin numbers it will ask you for that on the form you can look up on the USAC website to see what a spin number is for your provider or you can ask them yourselves just go to your service provider and ask what's your spin number for doing this if you some before you has done it you can look at the previous forms and just it should still be the same spin number these are just like a billed entity number they're assigned to a service provider for the life of that company billed entity numbers supply assigned to your library for the life of your library so that is something that you will need to put on the form as well and this is just more about the receipt letter that you can make changes to so that's the first two forms in the process for those two first forms 470 and 471 you can make corrections and this is something I've added to this presentation because I found it very useful because sometimes you're wondering you're worried about did I do this correctly what if I did it wrong what if I made a mistake do I have to start all over depending on what you need to change you don't always have to start over you can make corrections there is a specific FCC rule about these corrections they call them ministerial and clerical errors that is there a fancy legal term for it and you can make these changes onto your 470 and your 471 up until USAC tells you you've been funded you've been money has been allotted to you and that's okay there's usually months and months that it takes before they get back to you to let you know after the 471 has been submitted that yes you've been accepted so you got plenty of time to do this and you can do it by just faxing the information to them as well that's what I did so it's a very quick getting them the changes that need to be done and these are basic things like typos spelling errors math errors if you forgot to enter something correctly your school lunch numbers punctuation marks are in the wrong place whatever you know these kind of basic things what happened to me was I actually somehow typed in our area code wrong for the library commission I think I put down like 202 instead of 402 something like that so I had to go and make a change I can't remember if it was the 470 or the 471 but some of them I had to do it for the way it works is when you get those receipt letters telling you yes you received your form and here's what you put onto it there's instructions on those letters about how to submit corrections the first page tells you yes here's what we've got in your form second page says if you need to make corrections write in here your contact information and then look at the rest of the form you'll see for each part of the form on the left side of the page it says here's what you told us if you want to make a change just write it in here next to it and fax this back to us or scan and email it back to us and it gives you the contact information to do that and then boom you've made your correction for it so whenever you get these receipt letters look at them and read them and make sure it's correct make sure you didn't make a mistake like I did or like I said if you submit it in paper make sure they didn't make a mistake with transcribing your information or if something has possibly changed for example on the 470 if the contact person who's in charge of doing e-rate at your library has changed since you submitted the form you can make that change on the letter itself so if staff turn over staff changes you can change that if you forgot to sign it you need to add someone's signature someone else's signature to it if you didn't get the certification in time you can do that for the 470 on the 471 the second form the things on there that you can submit because this is the kind of things that form itself what is your percent discount you're getting your urban or rural status did you do that wrong billing account number that was mine did you have some wrong account numbers on there the block for a worksheet that's where you're doing your calculation for your discount maybe you made some errors on there same thing you can once again change contact person if during between the time you submitted the 471 and you got the letter staff has changed changing amounts that you want to get you can lower amounts on there but you can't raise them of course any friending request that you forgot to put in the 471 you can add them on here so look at the letter itself it will tell you it'll the different things that you can change this is just some of the common ones that I know have been done so always be aware of that you can always make changes if there's a problem with something so after you submitted the 471 after you submitted it the next step is they review it they look at your application and check and see if it's all accurate verify that all the information you put is correct this is a point where they may contact you to ask for more information this process of reviewing your form can take months and months and months you submit your form as soon as you submit your 470 they start looking at them but they have so many of these forms millions of forms coming in for billions of dollars it can take some time so don't expect something this to be done as quickly as just getting your notification letters for the first two forms this is where now they're actually looking at and deciding is this a good form are we going to actually give them the the funding for it so once they do decide what they're going to do they will send you the funding commitment decision letter FCDL this will also come on that colored paper so you'll know and this tells you if you've been funded or not or if they've decided to change the amount you're getting they may look at some of the information you sent and decide you know you asked for $50 or you asked for $100 a month for this but we're only going to give you $75 whatever they may want to do you'll when you get this funding commitment decision letter look at it to see which funding requests are on it you might end up getting more than one they may do some funding decisions first and then other ones later so look and see is this actually this particular letter I got cover all of the funding requests I made or is there one missing still and I've got to keep my eyes open for the next another one to come through at this point if you disagree with you sex decision you can appeal it if you think you should get more money you think they made a mistake in some decision something in the letter you can appeal that there's information on the website about this I won't go much into this just so you know it's available that you're not just stuck with they said no and that's the end of the story I have helped some libraries do this we're still in process but it is something that they will do for you they in spite of all this work and forms and things you have to fill out they do want to give you this money that is the point of the program is to get you guys the discounts and get the money to you it is a complex process they do have to go through a lot on their side to make it work and so do you so don't be afraid to go for an appeal if you don't agree with what they said to you because once they look over things someone else may decide oh you're right this should have been done let's redo it we'll get back and we'll give you your money back that you didn't get so the area in USAC that does this evaluations of your forms is called program integrity assert assurance PIA so you will receive contacts from them they will be the ones that will be if they want more information you'll get an e-mail or a phone call from a PIA reviewer and then that funding commitment decision letter is what they will send you now after you have your funding commitment letter that's when you do the third form in the process the form 46 this is the form where you just tell them that yes the service I asked for and the money you gave me I'm actually getting the service you also say if you had to do technology plan that you certify you're compliant with that if you're doing SIPA for filtering you certify that you're doing that you just notify them that you've actually decided to go through with it some places don't do this they change their mind after even getting the money whatever reason things change but this is where you say yes we've started receiving the invoices we're starting receiving the service it's all happening correctly there is some deadlines for this you have 120 days after service starts which is July 1st the funding year is what they consider service starting or when you get that funding commitment letter whichever is later often the funding commitment letter will come like I said it can take months and months to do hopefully it comes before the funding year starts so you know you're getting the money but sometimes it won't for 2012 the year we're in right now they actually didn't even start sending it out until about August which was after the funding year has started so everyone's deadline for the 46 was 2828 days after that letter date they had so many applications just took them that long to get through all of them hopefully it won't be that if you do get the letter after the funding year has started after July you still get that previous money back you get it reimbursed retroactively to the start of the funding year so don't worry if you haven't gotten a letter that you're going to be out the money for those months you will get it you just have to be prepared to pay the full price just in case you don't have the letter and time to start getting the discounts right away just like the first two forms you'll get a notification letter back from USAC letting you know that they received your form 46 and it's been processed so the final form in the process the fourth form is either a 472 or 474 there's two options that libraries have to receive their funding and this is called being your invoicing method how are you choosing to get the money you can either receive a reimbursement check after you've paid your bills so maybe at the end of the whole funding year you send a what they call their build entity applicant reimbursement form their bear and get a check or you can have a discount on your bill monthly that your service provider just gives to you so you have a choice getting a check or getting a discount on your bill you're going to want to think about deciding how you're going to do this in relation to how your city your town your clerk may handle money that comes in if for example we've had some situations in some libraries if a check comes floating into the city and your clerk says oh great check for the city and just takes it maybe you don't want to do the reimbursement check later because then the library doesn't actually receive the money only if you are sure that your clerk will you know accurately pass that money on to the library like it's supposed to this is not a discount program for the town it's a discount program for the library so the library has to benefit from it in their budget somehow so unless you know your clerk will definitely make sure your budget gets credited you maybe you don't want to go to the reimbursement check you want to go with a discount on your bill instead so that the bills you receive your service provider already have a cheaper amount on it and in that case the money from you set from the rate program goes directly to your service provider not to you so something to think about if you have those kind of concerns or issues with actually getting the proper money passed down to to the library when this money is coming in now if you want to do the check that you submit the bear form to get the reimbursement check this form you you file that's the 472 so you would file it as the applicant send it to usack they will send you a letter saying they received it just like they always have for everything else and then they will pass the money for you the discount money on it all goes through the service providers because they are the ones that was ordered by that telecommunications act these service providers must provide these discounts so they send the money to the provider and the provider will cut you a check for that reimbursement amount this is something you would do either at the end of the whole funding year so you pay the full year full price of all your bills and then get a check back at the end or some libraries do it monthly every month they submit a bear form for that particular month and get the check back the next month either way you can do it if you want to the last the latest you can do any of these is 120 days after the last day of service the June 30th so you will see in October I send out reminders to libraries I can track and see what you guys are doing whether you have submitted forms or not and I will remind you if you haven't done this and requested your money this step the last step the 472 or the 474 is the way you actually get your money if you haven't done this step you're not getting your money yet so make sure you go all the way through the whole process some libraries forget this or forget the previous step because they think I got my funding commitment letter I'm getting my money I'm done nope there's still more to do instead of a check you want to get a discount on your bill then the service provider submits the 474 form service provider invoice form the spy and they then are given the money from usack and then pass on to you a discounted bill not the money so depending on which way you're going to go you may for an entire year of E-rate be doing three forms if you're going with the service provider doing a discount you'll only be doing the 470 471 and 46 however if you want to get a check sent to you you'll do four forms the 470 471 46 and the 472 bear form so everyone will always do three forms every year no matter what the invoicing will determine whether you do the fourth form or your service provider does the fourth form they will send you a bear notification letter that is sent to you and the service provider so if you choose that I want to check the service provider is sent a letter as well letting them know that you have asked for that so that they should know when usack sends them this money that it's supposed to just be fed through and given to you not kept for them or anything you will also be given a quarterly disbursement report that will tell you what money usack has sent out whether they send it to you or whether they send it as a bear with it being a check that should come to you or a spy which would be the discount on the bill you'll be you'll know how much has been sent out so if you're getting discounts on your bill check this report compare what usack says they sent your service provider to what you're actually getting discounted on your bill just to make sure that they're properly giving giving you the right amount of discount so and they should know that you're getting these reports and know that you know that this money has been sent to them if you're getting a check make sure that your service provider sends it on to you that you get it we've had it every now and then there are some providers that don't know how the process works some smaller ones necessarily don't have a full staff of people that do this they are trying to figure out themselves it doesn't hurt to call them and say don't forget I sent you this form and you have the notification and you should be sending me my check you know that maybe something you have to do so that's the last form in the process is the invoicing and telling them how you want to get your money any questions about the forms in the process questions comments thoughts about what you're doing at your libraries no looks very quiet out there this is a lot of information yes to put into just a couple of hours I realize that but I tried to give you the basics of how the program works and highlights of certain things that I know have been stumbling blocks for some of our libraries so hopefully using this information you have in the PowerPoint will help you get through doing your forms as well also I would definitely recommend checking out our website here this is the page I put together on the commission's website that has information has a timeline over you the process the training that I'm doing right now for you is being recorded and when next week some time it will be posted up here in the training section so you can go back and watch it again if you want to there's also some great links here to other trainings that have been done Web Junction has done a few great trainings about doing the basic beginning form in the 471 USAC itself has a video on YouTube how to submit how to enter the information in your 470 a lot of my links here go to things on the USAC website their website is fine, it's a good site some things I found are slightly buried and some things that I know people need to have quick access to I've tried to just pull out into my page so hopefully that will help you also I've included things like this extra links to information that you need to help submitting your forms that FCC registration number look up I've linked to because you're going to need that for the 471 the Nebraska Department of Education page to look up your school lunch numbers I've linked to that here so you can get to that easily so I've got all those in there to just help you get into them the information about the SIPA and technology planning is all on here also here in Nebraska we do have an e-rate mailing list if you'd like to keep up on what's going on specifically in Nebraska our Department of Education posts a lot of good information on here about reminders about things and updates about who's gotten built funding this month or this week so definitely recommend going on that it is not a very busy listserv let me tell you maybe once a week if that maybe even less often than that a couple of times a month maybe something will come up on there on the USAC website itself I showed you there was that news section they do weekly news brief that if you want to also keep up on e-rate I would recommend signing up for their weekly schools and libraries news brief it will give your minors about deadlines coming up and sometimes little articles about here's how to write a good technology planner here's what you need to know tips to submitting your 471 just comes out once a week all the archives are here if you want to look at previous ones and see what they're about I get them every week so I use them to help me keep you in touch with things as well something else that's a really good research here also is they've got this acronyms and terms PDF this is something new they did I printed this out and handed it out in all of my in person classes this is a PDF document of all those different acronyms that they use and all the terms they might use and the communications they have with you like the ACD the allowable vendor selection contract data I was talking about what would an appeal be what's an audit so this is a great document that I definitely would refer to if you're wondering what did they say in that letter and what does that acronym mean you'll find that here in their acronyms and terms document their glossary basically of all the wonderful acronyms they've come up with so any other questions okay we do have one question very specific question that just came up your hang on it's like Lola says on form 470 block 2 question 8 can you explain how to answer oh that has to do with issuing your RFP the request for proposal I mentioned that earlier if your local community does not require that you have an RFP or a specific separate document for putting out bids to receive a service you just say that no I have not released and do not intend to release one for these services and you just enter that for each one of the request that you're doing is that the part of it that you're talking about okay yeah that is something that is confusing because it does look I've had this problem before myself it looks very official like are you doing an RFP you really should and it makes you give the impression that you should be doing one of these are you and here in Nebraska there's nothing statewide that just says you have to do it it would just be if your local municipality your city your county requires you to have something separate if they don't require you to put out some particular document requesting bids for something like this then the 470 itself serves that same purpose for e-rate as far as e-rates concerned they don't require it at all it's just only if locally it's required any other questions okay if you do have need help with doing your forms USAC's client service bureau that's their customer service they are very helpful I've had many people contact them and ask them for advice and tips on what they need to do whenever you contact them they will assign you with a case number that you can always refer to when you call them back again for more information make sure you track that number that you can submit a question online as well they have an email form that you can use online if you want to there's more information about those news briefs I was talking about there is an overview of the application process on the USAC website so it talks about the different seven steps to go through to submit an application that might help you keep track of what you're doing when you're doing your application and that wonderful glossary of terms that I found very useful for knowing what they're talking about and then of course you can contact me that is the e-rate website that I was showing you on our commission page and the 100 number my email address I am the state coordinator for e-rate for libraries so that's my job here is to make sure that you guys know what you're supposed to answer in each question get these forms submitted successfully and get your money that's my job here is to make sure you guys can get through all of this as painlessly as possible I'll say that maybe so any last questions comments thoughts anything you want to know that I maybe went through too quickly questions about any of the forms submitting anything right now okay you're all being very quiet thank you very much for attending and then sitting through the two hours of this I hope it was useful as I said the whole thing has been recorded so I will be posting it up so you can listen to different parts of it again if you want to to get some more information you know refresh yourself about certain parts I'll be posting a PowerPoint presentation and links to all the things on the pages there definitely yes you're welcome they say thank you very much I'll be in touch if I need some help yes that's what I'm here for please do call me email me we no deadlines are coming up anytime soon so you all have plenty of time to get started with this process if you haven't even started yet for the upcoming year so give me a call give me an email and that will wrap it up for our e-rate basic training for this year thanks very much for attending and happy holidays to everyone