 All right, hello, and welcome to E-Rate, What's New for 2021. I am Krista Porter, the Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. One of my duties as Library Development Director is I am also the State E-Rate Coordinator for Public Libraries. That means I provide all of the training, education, consulting, hand-holding, whatever our public libraries need to get through successfully through the E-Rate process. I've been doing this since 2009, so over 10 years. So hopefully I have gathered up enough experience and knowledge to help make sure you get through all of this. In today's webinar, we are going to go through the basics of the E-Rate program and the details of submitting some of the forms, how you do things. So we're going to dive in pretty deep to some of the forms, which will be very helpful to people. I know some of you may have done E-Rate for a long time, for years and years, and that's great. It's always good to have a refresher to remind yourself about how the program works. But some of you may be brand new to the E-Rate program, and that's great too. You will learn everything you need to know, hopefully to get started with the upcoming year. So let's get to it. But what is E-Rate? E-Rate is a federal program that gives discounts to schools and libraries on their internet services. This would be your monthly internet costs and any equipment or construction needed to make that internet work in your library building. This is a wording here from the E-Rate program's own website. It's a federal program to ensure that schools and libraries can obtain high-speed internet access and telecommunications at affordable rates and keep students and library patrons connected to broadband by providing a discount on eligible services. So it gets you a discount on anything related to getting internet to your library. The money for this program comes from the universal service fee. This is a fee that we all pay into, customers like us. If you look on your phone bill, your internet bill, your cell phone bill, you will see along with all those taxes and fees that you pay, something there that may actually say universal service fee. It might be abbreviated to USF. It doesn't usually say E-Rate, but something like that is a federal fee. We pay into it and the telecommunication companies themselves pay into it as well. So we are the ones that provide the funding to help the schools and libraries be able to afford their internet connections. The E-Rate program is run out of the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. They oversee the program. They do the orders and rules and set all the policies. When the program was first set up, it was set up via the Telecommunications Act of 1996. And through that act, they created the Universal Service Administrative Company, the not-for-profit that actually runs the program. They are the ones that we work with daily to do the forms and approve all the applications and provide the funding. They also do, there are also other programs that they give discounts to. They're in addition to E-Rate. E-Rate is the one for schools and libraries, and the Schools and Libraries Division is the subset of USAC that handles that, that runs that for us. But they also do a program to give discounts to healthcare facilities, people in high cost areas, and people with low income. So there's a lot of things that USAC is doing. We are only focused on, you know, talk about the E-Rate one. E, generally being the abbreviation for education. Throughout this workshop, and when we usually talk about E-Rate, and dealing with them, we'll be referring to USAC, because they are the ones who send you the emails, reach out to you, who you talk to about everything. So USAC has emailed you, USAC needs this information. The E-Rate funding runs on a funding year. Whenever you are applying for E-Rate, you are looking to the future. So you are saying right now you are able to apply for receiving funding for funding year 2021, which starts next year. And the funding years always run from July 1st of a year through June 30th of the next year. So this is not a program where you can buy something and then go and after the fact, go and say, okay, I bought this thing, or I have this internet, give me, I would like a refund or a discount on it. You've got to think to the future. So things you've already paid for cannot be done with the E-Rate, it's things you're going to be paying for. And right now it is open for starting your application for the 2021 funding year. So that's what we're going to be talking about. There is almost $4 billion available in this pot of money that we all put into. So there is a lot of money out there for everyone to use unless you make some major mistakes on your applications, almost everybody is approved for what they're asking for. Sometimes there are tweaks depending on if things are eligible or aren't eligible and things need to be done. But there is a lot of funding out there for our schools and libraries. So who is eligible? Who can apply for this? The FCC rules for E-Rate state that anyone, any library that is going to apply, must be eligible for LSTA funds. That's Library Service and Technology Act funds. And who is eligible is determined by the state library in each state in the country. So here in Nebraska, it's us, the Nebraska Library Commission is your state library. Here we have determined that we provide a lot of services to you, programs, databases and things that use LSTA funding. And since you guys use those services, you are then eligible to receive LSTA funded service. So our determination is that all public libraries are eligible for E-Rate because of that. Also our schools and school districts, same deal, they are eligible as well. And if we have consortia as groups that get together to save money on services, you can have a consortia application. As I said at the beginning, I am the state E-Rate Coordinator for Public Libraries. Our schools and school districts, they have staff on hand at the Nebraska Department of Education that help them with their E-Rate applications. There's some things, sometimes things are a little differently the way schools do it than libraries. So I handle just libraries and we'll be talking about that today. So the first thing I tell libraries when they are going to are considering doing E-Rate is, let's find out how much of a discount you can get. The E-Rate program is an ongoing program. You have to apply for it every year. It's not just a one-shot thing and then you always have it. You have to reapply every funding year. And there are multiple forms throughout the year that you do have to submit. I am here to help you make sure you do that. But it's good to know how much money could we potentially be saving before we get into this. It can help you to talk to your board or your municipality or anyone in the community or on your staff who might be concerned about why are we spending so much time doing this and dealing with this program. You can tell them right here why, before you even start submitting forms, why this could be a good thing for your library. So you can receive anywhere from 20% to 90% off on your eligible services. This would be on your monthly internet and any equipment needed to run that internet. The discount percentage is based on these national school lunch program. This is the free and reduced lunches that the children get in the school district where your library is. Now you, this was picked by the FCC as a, it's one of the many ways to determine levels of poverty. They needed to figure out how much of a discount should we give place, give schools and libraries. We'd like to give more of a discount to the needier areas. And there are many different things that can be indicated to poverty. They just decided to go with this one, the school lunch numbers. If there are the more kids that are eligible, the more needy the families in that area that would be and the more needy that particular community is and would need a higher, like a higher discount. This is, now you may serve children or people from other school districts because of where you're physically, you're geographically located. You might be on the border of a school district of multiple ones or just people travel because of where you are. And that's fine if you serve other school districts, but for e-rate purposes for calculating this discount, you just look for wherever your library is physically located, what school district are you sitting in? And those are the numbers that you look at. In addition, it is only K through 12 pre-K numbers have to be removed from the calculation. Generally, that doesn't make a huge difference in the numbers, but officially. In addition to that, then you look to see whether you're considered urban or rural. And this is based on U.S. census data. In Nebraska, most of us are rural, so that's good because we get a slightly higher discount. Urban would be, I mean, they are larger cities. So how do you find out these numbers? Luckily for us, the Nebraska Department of Education posts on their website every year the school lunch numbers. So you can go to their website and don't worry about trying to jot down any of these URLs I have in the presentation. They're in the slides. You have the presentation, it's on the website, it's been sent to you, and it's on our e-rate website that I have as well at the Library Commission page. So it links to everything. But on the Department of Education website, they have a lot of different spreadsheets, but they have one that's for the National School Lunch Data. And when you go into there, there's one page is every single school in the state and showing what their numbers is. It shows how many children are enrolled in the school district, how many are eligible for the school lunch program, and then what percentage that is. And something I should mention, too, the key to this, too, is this is the number of students that are eligible for the program, not necessarily not the ones who actually apply. That number can be different in many areas. Sometimes some families just don't need it. They're actually, yes, we are officially technically eligible, but we really don't need it. We're doing fine. Some some families choose not to apply due to the stigma of it. So that's a very important differentiation there, you know, it's not just the number that have actually applied, it's the ones that are eligible. This also goes into in some schools, they in some areas they were concerned about privacy, that if you know who you're going to know who the children are that actually are in this program. No, we don't know who they are. We don't know who they apply because that's even not what we're looking at. It's just a number out of this many students who enrolled in the school district. This many are eligible. We don't know anything more than that. So you can find that on the school department education website. In that spreadsheet, like I said, there is a one sheet that is every single school, but they've also added a sheet that is the school districts as a whole. So you don't have to go and look up each individual school and then do the math to add them up. If you have an elementary, middle school, high school and your district, you just go to the district, want to find your school district and it gives you the percentage. Then USAC has on their website a lookup tool for finding out what your urban or rural status is. As I said, this is based on census data, the most recent census, well, it's based on the 2010 census right now. We just did the 2020 census, so at some point it will be updated to those numbers, but that all needs to be tabulated and so we got ways to let changes. The cutoff between urban and rural is 25,000. So if your 25,000 or more is your population, you're urban and less than 25,000, you are rural. And then you look at USAC's discount matrix to figure out your discount. And that's this here. So you can see here the percentage of students that are eligible for the school lunch program and then what the discounts would be. Now there is category one and category two you'll see on here and I'll get into details of that. That's just different types of services you can receive an e-rate discount on, excuse me. And you can see even if half the children in your school district or less have are eligible, you can still receive 60 or 70% discount on your internet services. So on your monthly internet bills or on if you need to buy any new equipment, you're on the internet within your building. So this is a very good deal for many libraries. There's a lot of things that we're gonna take into consideration here to decide to do it of course, but definitely in benefit. Most of our libraries in Nebraska do fall between the 60 to 80% discount rate. I think our average is 72 or 73%, something like that. So this is what you can take then to your community or your board or your municipality and say if I do this, if I devote time and energy to doing this, we can save 70%, 80% off on our internet bills. So what can you get a discount on? We're gonna talk about the eligible services list. What is irateable? Irateable, I don't know if that's a word, but I use it for this. Every year the FCC publishes a new eligible services list, the ESL. It is posted on their website and we have links to that on our page as well. Because there's a new funding year every year, there is a new eligible services list every year. So when you are doing irate, if you're looking at a applying for next year or if you're checking out what you did this year or previous year, just make sure you look at the appropriate eligible services list for that year because things do change. They do update it, they do add new technologies, tweak things on there as things change over time. And it is broken up into two different categories. Category one, services providing the high speed connectivity to your building, getting the internet to your library building. And then category two is making that internet service work throughout your building inside. And I put together this graphic here to help illustrate that, that brick there, that's the walls of the wall of your library building. So category one is just bringing your internet connection, whatever it is, to the building's wall. So getting it from your service provider to your building. Once you get it to your building, you then need to have to make it work and you need all this equipment, modem, routers, racks, switches, cables, et cetera, et cetera. And that's category two, all of that equipment that can make it work. What's not eligible is the actual devices you go on to use the internet service. So a laptop, your smartphone tablet, PCs, any wireless devices or anything that connects to the internet service. So purchasing those devices themselves is not part of e-rate. E-rate is all about the service, the internet service and getting that to your building and making it work with the inside your building. So onto some specifics about each of the categories. Category one is basically anything that gets high-speed broadband to your building. So it could be DSL, cable modem, broadband, ethernet, wireless. This is not an exhaustive list, this is just some of the most common ones. The eligible services list has all the potential ways it can get it. But basically anything that can get an internet connection to your building. A little bit more information about fiber. Fiber is something that does see a little more explanation and we have some extra options for that as well. A lit fiber, cause there's lit and dark fiber. Lit fiber is fiber that's out there, fiber optic connections that you can contact the service provider and connect to and then you just sign up and you're using it. Dark fiber is fiber optic connections that are out there that have not actually been turned on yet and aren't available to use. When fiber was installed in many communities and they were digging the trenches and laying in the cables and everything, fiber optics, they put in more connections than was needed at the time. Knowing that there's gonna be future demand for this is gonna be an increase in demand and let's be ready. So we don't have to do all this construction and digging all these trenches again. So they put an extra and it's in there just waiting to be used. Somebody owns it, aren't always sure who and somebody has the ability to then turn that on and use it. So you can do an e-rate application request. I'd like to get fiber. I'm looking for whatever's out there available lit but I'm also interested in if there's any dark that might just need to be turned on that I can connect into. And when you are doing your e-rate application there's a note here about that you will apply for both dark and lit together at the same time so that you can cover all your bases for that. And I'll show you exactly how that works when we get into looking at the forms themselves. Related to fiber is special construction. Special construction is an e-rate category. This is under category one. This is getting the new fiber connection to your library building. So if you don't have fiber at all right now you're using something else, broadband cable, modem, wireless, whatever and you want to get fiber, you can get a discount on the construction of bringing that fiber to your library building. So there may be fiber lines somewhere in your community but it's like across the street is where they stopped installing it or a few blocks away or just outside town or wherever and that last bit of connection sometimes called last mile that is called special construction in the e-rate world and you can receive your e-rate discount on any of that work that's done. The planning of it, the management, the design, having the guys come in and connect and extend the connection to your building. All of that is eligible for e-rate discount as well. Now, USAC knows that not every, these companies can not necessarily do all of this construction just within an e-rate funding year that July through June timeframe they might need to do it at other times and you also want to make sure you have this construction done so when the funding year does start you've got the service ready to go on July 1st. So this construction can actually happen any time six months before a funding year begins. So going back to January of a year. So for example, you would like to get fiber for next year. You want to make sure it's ready to be used and to receive your discount on July 1st as the start of the funding year. So you have the construction done any time between January and June. Yeah. So at any of those times and then that construction even though it's outside of the funding year before it because it's related to receiving that fiber you receive a discount all of that work and construction as well. Now also related to special construction when e-rate did a little streamline and modernization of their program back in 2014, 2016 they added this new state matching fund as an extra feature of special construction. If a state puts up money to help libraries complete this work e-rate will match the money that the state is putting up. So a library gets a special construction done they want to have this done they want to have the fiber run to their schools and libraries and the state says, great we'll put aside some money as well to add a little bit to your funding. So their discount will be this much but we'll pay for some of the extra that you're responsible for. If the state tells e-rate that that e-rate will match the state funding as well. So you can get even more of a discount of e-rate and the state helping to pay for that extra bit of the costs that you would need to cover. And this actually is better explained with actually math. So and these numbers I just made up these numbers for ease of math I don't know if these are accurate for what these would cost but it explains the special construction and state matching fund concept. So you've received a bid from a company who will do this construction we'll put new fiber and that's key to this is a new fiber line run to your library. This is not about upgrading current fiber to a faster speed or anything like that. This is just brand new for the first time. You have a bid from a provider to do this and it will cost $100,000 and your e-rate discount is 80%. So e-rate covers $80,000 of that 100,000 because that's how much is discounted off your cost and the library is responsible for that extra 20,000. However, this state has a matching fund that they have set up and they say in our matching fund we will contribute 10% of whatever your project is. And in this case, because it's nice simple math that's $10,000 and because the state has that matching fund e-rate says great good for you will match what the state is giving you too and we'll give another 10% $10,000. And in this perfect math example, the library and the municipalities cost is zero. Everything is covered by e-rate or by the state themselves which is pretty awesome. So very simplified $100,000 project your e-rate discount is 80%, e-rate covers 80,000. The state says we'll cover up to 10,000 take off another 10,000, e-rate says good on you, we'll match that library has to pay nothing. So this is a great deal. Now, of course, if your e-rate discount is less than 80%, this is like the perfect math that you will have to pay a little bit of something at the library from the library of the municipality. And it also depends on the cost of your project and everything and what's 10%. So depending on your discount, you'll have to use something but you'll still get another 20% off on whatever your discount is because of having a state match and then e-rate matching the state's funding. Now, why do I explain all of this in such detail? Because we have this now in Nebraska. About 20, 25 other states across the country have gradually been doing this since they made it a part of the e-rate program, the state matching fund over the last five years. And finally now this year, the Nebraska has done it. This came out of the World Broadband Task Force. This was a group of people that was over the last two, three years or so have been investigating the internet situation, the internet broadband situation in the state of Nebraska and has just last fall put a proposal, submitted their report to the governor's office for what they think could be done. Now, this is all about all sorts of internet in the state, not just for schools and libraries. So it was about ag and business and residential and healthcare, et cetera. So there's lots and lots of parts of this report. But the one small part that has to do with schools and libraries is related to this Universal Service Fund and this extra funding. I mentioned at the very beginning of this that there's the Federal Universal Service Fund in Nebraska, we also have our own, which is run by the Nebraska Public Service Commission. So here in Nebraska, people also pay a little fee to create this fund that is used to help our local, just in Nebraska, get even extra discounts on their services. But from this funding and out of the report, the recommendations from the report, the Public Service Commission has set aside $1 million to use over the next four years to help libraries and schools do this new fiber construction using the special construction feature in the E-Rate program and then matching that funding with their $1 million. This is starting this year, which is great. We are very, very close to do the deadline of being able to get under the wire for this for this year. So this might not be something you're ready to do right now because you would have to jump on it like today, tomorrow, get your application in, get everything print out, but that's okay. I'm gonna explain it to you now. And this is something, like I said, it's available for the next 40 years. So if you're not ready to jump on it this year, that's fine, you can do it for next year or the year after or the year after that. So you do have to go through the E-Rate process. You do the first form in the process, which is your 470, where you're saying, hey, I would like to have a company do this special construction for me and run the fiber to my library. And then you go through your competitive bidding process, and then you pick who you're gonna go with for the company. The competitive bidding process for E-Rate, once you submit your first form, and we're gonna get into a lot more detail about this later, but just as a general overview, once you submit your first form, you have to wait 28 days to allow everyone who might contact you to reach out to you, and then you can make your choice. So if you submitted to the form today, you wouldn't be able to make a decision until 28 days from today, which is later in December. And the reason this is getting, cutting it close is once you apply for E-Rate, then you have to apply for the Public Service Commission's matching funds through the state. And their deadline, their deadline is a little wishy-washy. It doesn't, there's not a specific date on the order about this. It is, they've just said mid-December, and we've asked for specifics and they've decided they'd rather make it a little, let it float a little, I guess. The specific order is NUSF 117, if you have wanted to look this up through the Public Service Commission, Nebraska Universal Service Fund 117 is the order, and the application. You'd have to get that in by mid-December. Elsewhere in the application, they suggested that they would do it, they would have the deadline be the last day in December, but nothing was really made official, so we're kind of floating around here in the last half of December being needing this form in. So you'd need to do your 470, pick who you're gonna go, wait for your 28 days for competitive bidding to happen if there is any competition, pick who you're going to go with, and then submit the Public Service Commission's application. To do your 470 and to submit all this, you also have to have a RFP, a request for a proposal, which is a much larger document that you fill in about the details of how this construction would need to be done for your building. Here at the Library Commission, we do have a template for that that we are providing to libraries where you just fill in your libraries in your community's personal info. Holly Wolt, who is on the computer team here, the commission is the person who's working with, who I'm working with on this whole program, we're doing it together. And she's the one who you would reach out to if you do wanna get a copy of that template to see what you would need to put in there. But that needs to be submitted also with your 470s. There's quite a bit of work to do with this. With the deadline to submit to apply for the Public Service Commission funding being mid to late December, we're really cutting it close right now. If you're ready to jump on it, if you try, all that could happen is maybe you missed the deadline and just have to wait till next year. We'll see. Whenever, whoever has applied, and we do have some libraries who have applied for this already. So we do have four or five libraries, I think, that are gonna be our tests. They're the first ones to go through this process. So we do have some we're working with right now to make sure how this all works for the first time through. Sometime in mid January, the Public Service Commission would, would be evaluating your applications to them and then would let you know if it has been approved for the matching funding. And then you would do the second form in the process, the 471, where you then tell USAC, we've applied for e-rate and we've picked we want to be a service provider and we have this state matching funds. There'll be a letter that you'll attach to that 471 saying letting us e-rate and USAC know that so that they know to match that state funding so that that all works out in the end. So definitely something to look into if you are needing new fiber run to your library, look into special construction and in general, and then also look into the state matching funds that we have available. But like I said, right now, really kind of close the deadline. You could try and get in if you're able to. If not, don't worry. This money is a million dollars available for the next four years so we can try next year. But do reach out to me or Holly Woltz here at the Library Commission if you wanna know a lot more about that. So that is our category one. Any questions about category one? You can type into your questions section of your go-to webinar interface. Under category two. So category two, as you remember, is everything inside your library building. So any equipment or service that's needed to make the internet connection that you've brought to your building to make it work. In addition, so you see here, you've got a network closet maybe somewhere or somewhere in a corner where you've got all of your wires coming in and the racks of switches and routers and things. All of that equipment. So your cable, your firewalls, routers, rats, wireless access points, power supplies. Any software needed to run the network and upgrades and things like that. So all of that has to do with making your internet network work within your library building is eligible. In addition to the basic maintenance of these connections, so we don't just give you money to get the equipment, but you've got to do the upkeep on it as well. So if it needs to be repaired, if anything needs to be replaced, basic service system updates that it needs to be regularly done, security, et cetera, et cetera, so anything to keep those connections working. Now, a basic maintenance is only, you only receive a discount on actual work that has been done. So for example, you may have a contract with someone, it could be your service provider may do this for you and that's great, but it may be a tech person in town that you know, a local company that does this kind of work. And if you have a contract with them to be on call, so to speak for that, and you pay them, for example, $20 a month to be on call, but they don't need to do anything until like the fourth month of the year because that's when an upgrade is needed or that's when a squirrel got in the firewalls and chewed up the cabling and needs to be replaced, then that actual job, that work that they need to do to replace that cabling into the update, that work is what's eligible for a discount, but not the $20 you spent per month, just to keep them on call. So if you have to pay something to have the contract, that money's not, it's just what they actually have to come and do something. In addition, there are some things that will be either on category one or two, all of your taxes, your surcharges and fees. Make sure you include that in your cost calculation when you were telling us how much something's gonna cost. Don't just say, my monthly internet bill is $30, but say it's $30 and it's these taxes and fees onto that $30, all of those taxes are also eligible. Any training your staff might need to do to make sure they know how to work the internet, work your network, and installation, configuration, any of that that needs to be done. So pay attention to everything that's related to your internet, that those things you mentioned when you were asking for a discount. Now, it can be confusing to understand what all this is. What are all those wires and cables in that closet there or underneath that desk? I don't know what connects to what and we're not all IT people. I only know even myself a little bit of the basics of it, but there is this great resource that's available out there that actually Holly Wolt here and other Nebraska staff were partially involved with getting out there, the toward gigabit libraries toolkit. This is designed as it says for our small rural and tribal libraries who don't have their own IT department. Many of our libraries, there is not an IT person on staff. You depend on the person in town who happens to know a lot about the internet or who helps you connect things. But it's good for you as a library director or the person in charge of your library to know and understand what is actually going on. Don't just say, oh, they'll know it and they'll take care of it. I don't know. You should learn about this and understand at least the basics. And this toolkit can help you do that. It is free. It is available online. We have a link to it from our e-rate website. It was funded by a grant from the IMLS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And they just recently got an update to that grant actually to a new grant to update it. So it is constantly being refreshed. But it has questions that it asks you about what is in your closet? What is the model numbers? What are the things that you have here? So you can learn about how it all works and how it all connects. And then it also will provide you with a plan to improve it if you need to increase that speed, if you need to. So it could say, you have this kind of router, you could get this one and do better and have it increase your speed. Or you need to update this, this is too old. So it's a really good resource. We highly recommend taking a look at it, look online, download the document, go to your network closet. And if you do have someone who helps you with your IT, ask them to come in and look over it with you. And then they help them explain and fill in all the blanks on this document for you. So that is our category one and category two services that are available for e-rate discounts. Do you have any other questions right now? Now that I've gone through the category two services. Let's go on, let's go on to our category two budgets. Category one and category two funding they're both calculated and provided to the libraries a little differently. Category one is pretty cut and dry and basic. You pay this much a month for your internet disconnection, you receive this percentage off as a discount. And so it's very simple, it is what it is. Category two is a little different. What USAC has done with category two is they create what they call budgets for this, category two budgets. It's a calculation for an amount of money that they are willing to give you to pay for any of your category two services. All those are the equipment and the installation of all of that. The wording I find is a little misleading, I might say. It's not like a traditional budget that you have where they say, here's money, we're just gonna give it to you, now go and spend it. It's more of just a calculation of how much money you could use and it's over the next five years. It's got a lifespan of five years. And we'll show an example of this and so you can see the math of it. So they have five year budgets where they say, we think you could spend this much money over five years to upgrade any of your category two equipment. The five year budgets go from starting next year is the beginning of a new five year cycle, 2021 to 2025, then you'll get a new budget for 2026 to 2030, et cetera. This was done as a pilot project over the last six years actually. They started this out as a test to see what this budgeting work for libraries. And then they did it as a five year one and then added an extra year, made it kind of six years to just work out, iron out all the details. So we've been testing it out for a while and they decided this is a way to do it. It is working for libraries. At the beginning of your five year cycle, your budget is set and it is not adjusted for inflation anytime throughout that five years. So you get an amount at the beginning in 2021 that you can use over the next five years. And you can use it however you want over those years. You can use it if you've got, if you know you've got a new big computer lab upgrade coming or new library building being built, you can spend it all in that first year to get everything done and then just do nothing category two for the next four years and then wait till the next five years cycle to begin or you can spread it out and use it gradually throughout those five years. The first year you could buy some new cabling for the computer lab. The next year you can buy some routers and then the next year some switches and wireless access points. It's up to you how you wanna use it and how you wanna spread it out. Now, if you have a project that costs more than what your budget is, so for example, that's okay too. You're just only going to get an e-rate discount on how much the e-rate has calculated that you're eligible for. So for example, you have a project to upgrade your computer lab and it costs $50,000, but your e-rate budget is only $25,000. That's okay, you can still do that big project. You're not now limited in saying, well, we can't do the project because e-rate only says we have 25. All they're saying is we will just give you up to $25,000. You can have a project that's way above that for all you want, but we're only gonna give you a discount up to half of that project because it costs 50,000 and your budget is 25. Just think about that. You're not cut off because your project's bigger. E-rate's just gonna only look at part of it to give you a discount on. So how much is this budget? How is this calculated? For libraries, this is based on the size of your library building, the total area and square feet of your library. So all the floors, everything inside, wherever the library space that is occupied. So you may know this number, which would be great. You might have to look at blueprints or ask somebody in the city or someone about your building, but you just need to find out what is the total area and square feet of the entire building, all floors, everything. And then that for this 2021 through 2025 funding year is multiplied by $4.50. That's the, they call them multiplier that they've determined for this funding, this five-year cycle. The next five-year cycle, it could be different. Previous cycles, when we were doing the pilot project, it was all different ones each year as well. The minimum budget with a minimum budget of $25,000. So if your library is pretty small and your calculation comes out less than 25, you still, everybody gets 25,000 as a minimum budget to start with, no matter what. Now, if you'd heard about category two and had been working with this in the last few years, when they're doing the pilot, the minimum budget was different. The first five years, it was 9,000 something was a minimum. And then last year for 2020, they upped it to 11,000, 12,000. They realized after going through this process that libraries really did need more of a minimum budget. And now they've said, bumped it way up to 25,000. Everybody has that as a minimum. So by going through this process, they learned what it really should be. This can be changed. Your calculation could change every year if the size of your library changes. So you have to change your square feet. Hopefully it may be going up if you're expanding or building a new building that's larger, but even if it goes down because you had to cut back on space or move to a different location that's smaller, your calculation would go down too. So using real math to show this and explain it, your library is 3,500 square feet. 3,500 times 450 is 15,750 for your budget. However, there's the $25,000 minimum. So since your calculation came out less, your actual budget is 25,000. Now, this is your pre-discount budget, meaning just like when you purchase something on category one where it costs this much, but you only get the discount percentage off, you've got to take that pre-discount budget and take off the discount that your library has. So in this example, just for nice math purposes, the discount rate is 50%. So the library will actually receive half of that 25,000 in money to spend. So $12,500 in funds to spend on category two services over the next five years. So you now have that much money to spend. Now, within the e-rate system, everything e-rate is done in an online system to apply for all the funding, to do all your forms and track all of that. And they will keep track of this for you in that your e-rate account online. So they will do the math and figure out, you'll tell them what is the square feet, then the system will do the math and say, okay, here's your budget amount. And then if you do apply for category two funding, it will deduct from that each year and let you know how much you have left for the future year. So it'll keep track of that for you. So category one and two are both a little different as far as the math is done and how you get the funding. But you still use the same forms to apply for both of them. They just work different behind the scenes to figure it out. Category two can be a little confusing, but I found for myself doing this math really helped me figure out, oh, okay, once I get all of it done, I just have this much money to spend. Great, I'm good to go. And then it is no to keep track of that. So any questions about category one, category two, how the funding is done, category two budgets, type into your questions section. And if you do have any questions as I'm going, you don't have to wait for me to ask. If you think of something you're confused about or something pops into your mind that you wanted to know more about, go ahead and type it in and I will answer it whenever you ask. So one other thing that you do have to think about when you are applying for E-Rate is SIPA and filtering. SIPA being the Children's Internet Protection Act. This is the act that requires that anyone who receives federal funding for internet services must be filtering the internet that comes into that location. So this is for your internet access. You receive the actual internet service, that category one, or the actual that you are getting funding for the internal connections, purchasing all those equipment pieces in category two, or having any of that construction done to make it work. All of that, if you want to receive an E-Rate discount, you do need to be in compliance with SIPA. SIPA is about having a filter on your computers to block access for, to block minors access to unsavory things on the internet, your pornography, violence, whatever it is that your community thinks they should not be looking at. This is something that can be a controversial in some areas and it varies in different bi-community and each community can decide how they want to be in compliance with SIPA and how they want to, what they want to be filtering. There are some people that think blocking access is absolutely necessary. We have to protect the children at all costs. So put a filter on all these kids' computers and make sure that it can't get to anything bad. All the way up to the other extreme end of the spectrum where some people consider filtering to be censorship and that is blocking intellectual freedom and blocking people's ability to get to anything that they should be able to freely have access to on the internet. And all the sorts of opinions all the way in between. What's great about SIPA though, is for our e-rate purposes, it is very vaguely written. There's not a lot of detail to it. So we can work with SIPA and get these filters in our computer so that we can receive these e-rate discounts and not really impose on people's use of the internet and what they can actually access and get to. SIPA, the document itself is only 12, 14 pages long depending on how you print it out. So you're welcome to read through it if you want to. We have links to it on our website too. It does not state a huge list of here's all the websites you must block. It does not say you have to block YouTube or you have to block Facebook or whatever. It talks about what the content is and what's out there. It also does not say here's a list of the filters you must use. It does not dictate these are the only acceptable services or internet filters or software that you must use and install. You can use whatever you want that's out there. Just me it says you have to have one. So there's a lot of leeway there for you to work around that. There's also one section of it that is very important I think it does also state that for any adults which is 17 and over according to SIPA that are wanting to access something on the internet for bona fide research that is something as legal you do have to turn off the filter for them you have to have that ability. So there's the ability to make the internet completely free and open to anyone who needs to but you've installed the filter so you are in compliance with SIPA. Turning off the filter for people is also part of filter SIPA being compliance and by doing that you are totally following the rules and you are eligible for any federal funding including E-Rate. So that's something I think it's very important to remember is that you have to have that ability. Something else about it is it does require however that you must have the filters on all of the library's computers. All the computers the library owns. So this would be not just your children's computers which that is what the act is all about is protecting minors but you do have to install these filters on every computer in your building that connects to the internet. So both the children's computers, adult computers and staff computers. Also any devices that you hand out that are owned by the library if you lend out laptops. Those as well would have to have them on there. Now for these adult computers or your staff computers as I just explained, you have to install them on there but then you can turn it off. So if you decide for adult computers we just don't filter anything, I'll get it installed and turn it off, good. For staff computers you might have staff that need to access things and they need to get out there and not have anything blocking them. In the back room if you have a computer or your circulation desk just do the installation and then turn it off and you are good to go. Our technology protection measures right now are not very bright as I'd say. So there will be things that they will block that they shouldn't. For example breast cancer research sites it might be blocked cause it uses the word breast if that's what something in your filter thinks is a bad word. So there's gonna be situations where you will have to turn it off. If someone does ask you to turn it off they don't have to explain why. They just have to say I'm an adult this is blocking something I need to get to. As long as it's a legal site, something legal you can just go ahead and do it, no questions asked. Now the other things specifically that SIPR requires is just three things. The internet safety policy and this is something you may already have. This is a policy that states how people can use your internet and your computers at your library. Please don't go into any illegal sites. Don't hack our computers please. Don't do anything bad to them, that kind of thing. You might already have that in one of your library policies like how to usage policies for the library. Then the technology protection measure itself that's the filter itself. Now the filter itself can be software you install on each individual workstation. It can be something that's on your at the server side. So your internet server or router that then sends internet out to all your computers it can be there. Your service provider might provide it at their hand outside the library and then you've got it covered from that way. So there's all sorts of options for that. We don't recommend any particular service here at the commission. There's just too many variables at each library to us to be able to decide. But we have links on our website to information about filters and options that are out there so you can make your own decision. And then the third thing you need to be in compliance is to have had a public notice or meeting and hearing about it. Now this doesn't have to be a huge meeting and announcement of we are going to be filtering and everyone come and talk about it in the community unless you need to, I don't want to. It could just be an agenda item on a library board meeting saying hey we've decided to do this and we're gonna have an open discussion about this in a board meeting. Anyone in the community who wants to can come and talk about it to us. You may have done this before if when you did the first install filter years ago and decided to do it it was discussed at a board meeting so that they could approve that you're gonna be purchasing this and installing it, that counts. You don't have to redo this meeting or hit something as you're now suddenly deciding to do e-rate. There is information on the USAC website about SIPA information on our website so you can read more about it. But basically you are required to be in compliance to get e-rate but there are ways to do it that will not impose on your users too much and they would not even notice necessarily that you even have a filter on there. The filtering level that you decide is whether it's high level maybe for the children's computers less for the adults turned off completely for your staff. That's all local community decision. You just have to have it there to begin with. So any questions about SIPA? That's my quick little explanation about that. So let's talk about the e-rate forms themselves. As I said this e-rate is a process you have to go through every year and there are multiple forms to submit throughout the year as you go through it. There are basically four steps in the e-rate process and four forms that would need to be submitted for every application. The first three forms here and we're gonna get into a lot more detail about all of these. So this is just a general overview here. We're gonna get into a lot more specifics in the second half of the workshop today. But the first three forms here everybody has to do with a few slight exceptions. But 470, 471, 46, everybody does. The last form called the invoicing 474 or 472 that depends on how you're gonna be receiving your e-rate discount. If you're gonna submit the form to get the money back or is your service provider gonna submit a form to get the money reimbursed to them. So your first form is the 470 where you were just announcing I would like someone to provide a service to me, whether it's my monthly internet, I wanna buy some equipment. The 471 is I've picked who I want my provider to be and what I'm gonna buy. The third form is letting you sac know the service has actually started. I'm receiving the equipment and I would like my reimbursement. And then the fourth step is I'm paying my bills, give me my money, I'm ready to get my money. If you are receiving a discount on your monthly bills via your service provider, they're just sending you a reduced bill to start with, they submit what's called the 474 to USAC to be reimbursed for what they've discounted you. Service provider always gets paid in full, part comes from you, part comes from USAC. So if you're getting discounts, you're done with your e-rate process at the 486. However, if they don't discount your bills or if it's something you have to just pay in full ahead of time, then you have to submit a form, the 472, which is called the bear, the reimbursement form to get that money back after you've paid your bills in full. And then in that case, you would have to do a fourth form in your e-rate process. After the year is over generally at the end, you then see you've paid everything in full and now you want it to be reimbursed from USAC. If you are doing that reimbursement afterwards, you have another form you have to submit but only once, not every year. These other forms, the other ones you do every year, 498 is to provide USAC with your banking information for the bank account you want this funding deposited into, the library's bank account. They do direct deposits of this as your reimbursements now. They don't send it mail a check or anything to anyone. It's just an electronic payment. So you have to let them know what is the bank account information. So you'd have to do the 498 first and then you can submit your bear forms to get your reimbursements. So 498 is only done once, not every year, as long as your banking information doesn't change. You do that once and then it just lasts for the whole years and years as you're doing your regular forms for the e-rate process. And like I said, we get into a lot more detail about all these forms. This is just a little overview right now. There is also a document retention policy related to e-rate. You must keep copies of any of your e-rate paperwork for 10 years after the last date of service. Last date of service is the end of a funding year, which is June 30th of whatever funding year it is. So for example, for the funding, for the e-rate year we're applying for right now, which is 2021, 10 years from the end of that is June 30th, 2032. Sounds way, way long time from now, but so for anything having to do with 2021, you need to keep all of that for 10 years. If there are any things that you used previously, but relate to the current year, you have to keep them as well. So for example, you may just pay month to month, your monthly internet bills. You don't sign a new contract every year, every three years. And that was originally set up back in 2010. That contract you still have to keep a copy of with your 2021 paperwork, because it relates to that money, that account that you have. So you're gonna have to make copies of that and keep it like in the same file for 2021 that you hold on to for 10 years. SIPA, you would keep that forever as well, because from whenever you first started filtering, that's gonna apply for every year going forward. So all that documentation, but when you first did it or any invoice or proof that we have it set up, copies should go into the same file that has to do with that every funding year. Now, what's great about this is you do not have to keep paper copies, unlike the scary picture of piles and piles of papers that I have here. You can keep it paper if you want, you don't have to keep big file cabinets full of this or binders on your shelf full of this. You can keep this all electronically. And especially now that we have to keep 10 years worth, highly recommend scanning everything and saving it to somewhere on your hard drive, a special flash drive that's just E-rate in a folder for, you know, each give each year a folder on your computer for E-rate 2021, E-rate 2020, E-rate 2022, whatever, so that you can keep everything in there. The key is that if USAC does come and ask you about any of these things in any particular year, you can just jump to that particular file and find the document that they need to give to them. And the reason they have the second rotation retention policy of 10 years is because they can go back now 10 years if they want to and do what they call an audit and check up and see how your application process went. Now, this is not an audit like the IRS does. So I don't panic about that. Some people do. It's not because you've done something wrong necessarily. It's more of a checks and balances type thing that they do. They like to make sure the program is working. Is the process successful? Are people doing things in the right order? Did they understand what to do at each step? All of that. And is everybody keeping the right documentation? Do they know what they're supposed to do? So don't panic if they do, reach out to you to do one of these things. It's just generally a check thing. But they can go back 10 years to do this. Now this just became a rule with the updates in 2016. So right now we don't actually have, we're not 10 years past when it became a rule. So gradually we will have 10 years if you didn't keep things back 10 years from now because the previous rule is only five years. That's okay. You don't have to suddenly find things that are 10 years old from now. But gradually we will have to have everything. And the things you do need to have is basically anything related to your e-rate service. So of course, all the forms you submitted, all of the responses back from USAC, any other correspondence from them with questions or anything. Now, as I mentioned, e-rate does have an online portal and online location where you do all of this work which we're gonna see in just a second here. And they have said they will for you keep everything for 10 years within that online account. And that's great. But it doesn't hurt, I think, to play it safe and have your own copies locally as well. For all the forms you do, you can download and print out PDFs and keep your own versions of everything if you need, if you want. Because when they come to ask you for a piece of documentation, you might not be able to get into your e-rate account, your internet might be down, it might be issues, you never know, technology doesn't always work. It's always good to have a backup of all of these things. Also, anything else related to what you did? Did you sign any contracts? Were there any invoices for equipment that you purchased? Any discussions you had with service providers about what they would be providing? If you had to make a decision if there was a competitive bidding process and you didn't have to have competition and make a choice, how did you make that choice? All of this stuff you do have to keep. Now, a lot of these things might not normally be with you. Contracts or invoices, your city clerk or whoever does your accounting may have those, but get copies for yourself as well for e-rate purposes. Rather than having to track down your clerk and ask for this invoice from five years ago and who knows if they can find it, have your own duplicates of all of this. You don't have to have the original, but at least make copies of everything that relates to your e-rate and keep it in your own files somewhere so that if you set, because they're gonna come to you and ask for this information and you're gonna be responsible as the one who submitted the application to get them the piece of the document that they need. All right, so that's our document retention policy. Checking my time here, perfect. So the e-rate program, all of your forms and everything are submitted through the e-rate portal, Epic. Epic is the e-rate productivity center, e-rate productivity center. EPC is the acronym, but it's pronounced Epic. So whenever you're submitting anything, that's what you are going into. It is one-stop shopping for anything you need to do e-rate. You complete all your forms in there. You can check your status. You can communicate with USAC. PIA is their program integrity assurance people. They're the ones that might ask you questions. Anything you need to do is all in that one account. And there is the URL, you go to the main USAC website, usac.org slash e-rate to get to it. One important tip right now, this past summer, USAC did institute multi-factor authentication. This is something where it's now a two-step process to log into the e-rate, your e-rate Epic account. You have to log in, you have to put in your username and password, which is standard, excuse me, but then you also have to follow up with they will send you a verification code, a little six-digit number that you then also have to enter. It's an extra level of security to make things safer for everyone. If you use other kind of online services or things you may have done this before, sometimes it's something that is sent to your phone, a code that is sent there that you then get and use in your online account. This one, it will email you the code, so you have to check your email account to do this. So it takes two steps now to log in. At the moment, we have discovered that this new multi-factor authentication is only working successfully on Chrome or Firefox browsers. Previously, Epic worked everywhere. You could be using IE or Safari or whatever anything you liked, but now that they did this authentication right now, we're only sure that it works for Chrome and Firefox. I've helped quite a few libraries in the last month or so who had previously used specifically actually Safari and it worked just fine and it just gets you caught in a loop and it doesn't actually get you logged in. It just keeps asking over and over again for this verification. Some things just not programmed correctly there. So for now, just use Chrome or Firefox if that changes in the future. Try and let you know. So to log in to your Epic account, every library has been set up with an organizational account in there and USAC has picked someone to be the account administrator, the person in charge of the whole account. When they first did this back in 2016 is based on whoever was the contact person that submitted the second form in the e-rate process, the 471. That's one where you've picked here's who I'm gonna go with for my provider. If you did not get one set up but you weren't doing e-rate before, that's okay. You can just call USAC. Their customer service is called their client service bureau and later on in our slides and on their website we have an 800 number for them. You can reach out to them and request a account be set up for your library or if they do have one for your library, for you as the director or the person in charge to then be the account administrator to run that account. So you just have to reach out to them if you don't already have one. Account administrators can also add other people to the e-rate account if you have other staff that you want to help you with doing e-rate or someone else in your staff that you want to hand off e-rate to you and put them in charge of. You can add other users to the account and then give them certain abilities, certain permissions. They can be a full user where they can do everything, submit, fill out the forms, submit them, certify them, do all the official things. They can do be a partial user where they can enter the information in the form but then you or someone else who's authorized can actually do the submitting of the form and there's also a view only access where they can just look at everything but can't submit anything. And then everybody can also update and fix if necessary the organizational info. That's the basic info about the library. So now we're gonna get into some screenshots to show you how this all works on the USEC website. So like I said, you go to usec.org slash e-rate, e-rate, and this is the login, the main screen, the main page for the USEC website and there's two blue buttons both that say sign in. Either one of them works to log you into your Epic account. They're just in two different places there. When you click on them, you'll first get this long explanation of how to log into one portal. This is their new, the new way of logging in using that multi-factor authentication with that extra verification security. Now, the first time you log in and only the first time you log in to this new version, so you have to do these eight steps here which controls resetting your password, changing your password, logging in, doing the verification to get yourself set up the first time. So if you have not logged into your e-rate account since summer, they instituted this in June, July of 2020. If you have not logged in since then, you're gonna have to do this setup the first time. After you do this once with forgetting your password, saying you forgot your password, and changing your password and logging in, that's the only thing you have to do the first time. Every other time that you just skip all that part with your password and just click continue and then log in using the username and password that you created. It is a little misleading, because if you don't read every single word here, and I don't think they highlight it as much as they should, that's why I circled it here. The first time you sign in is the only time you have to do this. I've been quit a few people get caught up in doing this every single time they log in, changing their password every day when they log in. No, you only do that the first time, then you just ignore all that one through eight there and just go ahead and log in with what you've set up. But so the first time though, you will come here, you will click the continue button down here at the bottom, and then it will give you the screen to enter our username and password, but since this is your first time using this new version, you've got to pretend you forgot what your password is, even if you haven't know what it is, just pretend you don't. So you click the forgot password link there, and then it will ask you to enter your username to send a reset email. In Epic, your username is your email address. It's not anything else that you set up, it's just whatever your email address is. This is similar if you've forgotten your password or need to reset a password in any online system. It sends you an email with a link in it, it sends you an email with a link in it that you use to reset your password. So you'll enter your email there, click the reset via email button, they'll send you an email, and then you will follow that email link, change your password, your password, they do have some requirements for security purposes for the password, has to be at least eight characters long, have one lowercase, one uppercase, one number, and one special character, so you do have to be creative with it. So you'll give yourself a new password, use that password to log in, then you will have it send you an email to with a verification code, this is that second level of the new second level of security, you'll enter that verification code, and then you'll be able to log into the system. The second part here of sending the verification code, that's something that you'll do every time you log in now. The first part of changing your password, that's only the first time you go into the system, not every single time. So after you've done that password, reset password, like I said, just don't read all that, you're all good, just continue, and then enter your username and the password you created, check the box to accept the terms and conditions, and sign in, it will then say, we now require multi-factor authentication, this is that second step, and it already has prefilled in your email address, so you just click the send email button for them to send it to you, the screen will reset and give you a box to enter the passcode, so this is something that's gonna have been emailed to you, so you will then have to go and check your email, whatever email account you use for e-rate, and you receive this kind of an email, it's called, it says one time verification code in the subject line, whoops, back up, and then here is your six digit code that you can enter. This code is only valid for a limited amount of time, this is not your code for every time you log in, it's only valid for 10, only will work for 10 minutes, and then it will expire and no longer be good, so what I've been doing is, as soon as I use this particular code and this particular email to log in, I go right back to my email account and delete this email, because I don't wanna get confused, the next time I log in and they send me a new one time verification code and accidentally click on the wrong one, because then if I try to enter this code here, and it's longer than 10 minutes, from when I received it, it won't work anymore, and I'll get an error message. So this is a very limited time thing, every time you log in to e-rate into the Epic system, you're gonna have a new verification code that you'll be sent and that you enter. So I'm gonna take this code that I did get, and I type it into the passcode here, if you didn't get the email, check your very often people, it's going in for people, it's going into your junk mail, or your spam folder, your spam folders or junk folders in your email account, so check there, if you still can't find it, you can have them resend it, but once you do have it, enter the code, hit verify, and then you're logged in. When you first get to log in, you may have this kind of screen where you can get into the Epic system itself, or you can submit your bear form, that reimbursement form that I mentioned earlier, and we'll get into doing that in a bit here. The bear form is done in kind of a separate special system, a special place. But we're gonna go just right into Epic and look at some of the basics of your account here in Epic. Now yes, now I know you can't read this whole screen, that's okay, I just wanna show you when you first log in, you've got this long screen that has all the information, all the different things you can do in your Epic account. This is your applicant landing page, it says welcome in your library's name here, and then it has different things you can search for, and a whole bunch of menu items up here in the upper right, so I'm gonna go through some of these now, I'm gonna zoom into some of these parts. The first thing to know is you're right in the middle, and zoom in is under the My Entities section, this is information about your library, and you have an entity number that has been assigned to you. This is also called the Build Entity Number, or BNBN number. This is a number that is associated to the library for the whole time that the library works with E-Rage. Multiple staff may come and go working at your library and doing E-Rate, but this number will always be associated to the library. It's kind of like a social security number for a person that follows you for your whole life, this is the Build Entity Number for the library that follows it for its whole life in E-Rage. This is something that you do need to know for your library, very often E-Rate, USAC will contact you, will ask you questions, and they will wanna know your Build Entity Number, or when you are submitting a question to them, or sending something to them, you're gonna need to enter this number, so you're gonna make sure you know this. That's right there on your main login screen, applicant landing page for you to look it up. At the very bottom of the page here is this also a very important thing to use, your FCC forms and post-commitment requests search. This is where you can look up any form that you have submitted in the E-Rate program as long as we've had Epic, which goes back to 2016. So I very often get questions from libraries saying, I can't remember if I did this form, can you tell, I don't know if they received this form, if it's successfully gone through, can you find out for me? You can look this up yourself. You just go into your account and you go down there, you choose the form you're looking for, and you choose the funding year that you're looking, want to look at. So an example here, there you can choose, you can look at your 470, 471s, 486s. Form 500 is a different form, we won't talk about that one today. And then you choose a funding year. So here I've said for 470s, what have I done for 2021, I'm trying to remember. And once you enter those two, your results pop up down here and you can see on the right is the status of these forms. If it says certified, that means your form has been submitted, USEC has received it and you're good to go, you've done that form. If it does anything else, like incomplete or any other statuses, then you have not finished it and you still need to go in and complete that form and work on it. So in this case, I did do a 470 and set it in and I started another one. Maybe I'd gotten confused or backed out of it and started a fresh one, that happens. So this is where you can check all of your forms and make sure what we've received and you can see if you need to do a particular form. Up here on the top of your screen, there is a blue bar with some other sections of your Epic account you can go to. I'm gonna talk about a couple of them here. There's a news section, which sounds very good. It actually is news, notifications, letters, contact with different libraries for the entire e-rate program. E-rate is a public program. All of this is something that you can see what everybody else is doing and they can see what you've applied for. So if you go there and click on that, you're gonna get news for every single library but you most likely wanna know yours. You only really wanna know your library's news. So instead of using that, what you wanna do is at the top of your landing page, underneath the USAC logo, it says welcome and your library's name. You click on your library's name and then you get into your library's account. We've got lots of different things you can do, customer service, you can submit a question to USAC. I mentioned the category two budget, that's here in the middle. This is where it does track what you have in your budget, what you're based on your square footage and how much money you have left. So that's where you can check that. But you can also click here to get news and this is just the news items related to your library, not everybody's. So if you go in here, you'll see this is my library's, the 470 was submitted from my library and it's right there for you. So that's where you should go to look up at news because it'll only be about your own library. The second option up here is tasks. This is, and if there's a number here, you have got something in there. Tasks are forms that you are in, are things you're in the middle of doing. You started form and haven't completed it yet. You're waiting to certify something. So this is all stuff that you have instigated, instigated is bad word, you have started and are still working on. For some of these that may be fine, what's great about the Epic system is it does save as you go. So if you start a form and then get called away as could happen or you realize, oh wait, I need to look up for more information about this service. I don't remember. So I have to step away and come back to it later. It saves up to where you filled everything out and then you can jump back in right where you left off. And these forms are kept in your tasks section. So if you do start a form and it immediately goes in here, when you go back to it, go to your tasks to find the one you wanna do. You do not click on the top of your menu here and click the form again. That will start a whole new one. And you don't wanna do that. Sometimes though, you may have started a form here and then actually restarted a brand new because you had done something wrong or you weren't sure about what you're doing and you just started all over and that's okay. However, anything you have floating around in here, the Epic system will proactively send you emails to remind you and nudge you. Don't forget, you've gotta work on this form. Don't forget that you need to do this. Now the wording in here can be confusing when you do get those emails because as you can see it says create FCC form 471 create which sounds like it's telling you you need to create one. What it's saying really is you're in the middle of creating one, you already started it. The system will send you emails to your personal email account however that say things that says something like this. New tasks create FCC form 471. This task was assigned to you on whatever date which gives people many people the impression it's been assigned to me. So I guess USAC is telling me I need to do this form. I haven't done it. Uh-oh, I better go do it. That's not what it really means and I wish they could change the wording where it says, hey, you started this form. Do you still wanna continue? Go here if you wanna do that because that's what this really means. It's hey, we're just letting you know this is still out there. Put book, make sure you do this. You're welcome to just ignore that email if you know, yeah, yeah, I know I've gotta get back to it later or if you know that you've done it but you can clear up these so you stop getting these emails. If you go into your tasks and we'll see when we look at an actual form here you can discard all of these in-process ones. If you're sure you're not gonna be working on it anymore if you're sure it was just a mistake or you actually had already submitted the form and this one, this duplicate doesn't need to be done you can go in and there's a button to discard form and then you can clean this up and stop getting those email reminders that keep coming to you over and over again. So keep an eye on that. If you get these emails, you're gonna have to decide, oh yes, you have to remember, oh, I am in the middle of something or no, that was when I didn't need, let me go and delete that so they stop nagging me. Now back to your landing page, you have user information up here and the upper right, there is a silhouette, a little head silhouette. If you click on that, it will bring up a link to go to your own profile, click on profile. And this has, right here comes right up in the front that says, here's a button where you can edit your profile. However, there is a big error message down here in red, error, a instruction that says, please don't use that, please use the manage epic user profile button and the upper right, use that instead. This e-rate system is a work in progress sometimes and they don't always aren't able to program out certain things. You can still click on edit profile here but it just won't do anything. There's nothing that actually, it doesn't work. They've got this new button which has more robust information there. So you click on here to get to your own user information and this is where you can change anything about you as a particular user logged in right now using the library account. So your name, phone number, address, all of that basic information. Now, your username you'll see and your email are not fields that you can edit. You can, once you've set up an account in Epic, your email address becomes your username and it is locked down. You cannot change that. So if your email address does change, I'm gonna show you a way how you can make that change in here. If, in many library situations, if you are an old director is leaving and a new director is coming in, if you're gonna be using the same email address. So for some libraries, their email address for their director is so-and-so publiclibraryatgmail.com and it's just a generic library account. That's fine. You can just go in here as the user and change the name of the person to the new director's name. If they have a new phone number, we change that too. Since your email address is saying the same, that's okay. You just change this particular user account to the new library director's name. However, if you have a different email address, if your emails are done, for example, by your name, like mine is crista.porter at Nebraska.gov, I would have to create a new account for the new person and then hand over the administrator control to them and I'll show you how to do that in a bit here. Now, sometimes there is not a good transition time where the old director and the new director are working together and there's a handover of this and that's okay. If the old director at least leaves you the login information for the e-rate account and you have access to an email account, you go in as them and then change the name to yourself if you use the same email address. If you need something set up because the old director left and kind of took that email account with them and you no longer have access to it, you can call e-rate's customer service, explain the situation, it happens all the time. Say I'm the new director at this library, I do not have the previous login information to the e-rate epic account, can you please set me up and they'll set you up with an account to be a user account to get in there. Now, up here in the upper right, you can also manage all the users in this account, this is where you can create new ones. You would check your library's name and then create a new user. This may seem a little confusing here that it says existing organizations and you have to select yourself and you're the only one. The epic system, you e-rate, there are many large library systems with multiple branches or school districts with multiple locations and they would on here have a list of every branch or a list of each school location and you would have to pick free location who the people are associated with it. Here in Nebraska, most of our libraries just single independent so you're the only entity and that's okay, you just got to pick yourself. So you can create a new user if you're putting in a new person or you can add or remove previous ones and work on their user permissions. So for example, if you need to add the new director in because they have a different email address, this is what you would do, you create a new user for them. And now this case, you put in for the first time their name, title, phone number, enter whatever their email address is, library's name. Down at the bottom is the user permissions, you can zoom in on that. This is what I talked about earlier, you can give someone the full partial view only rights for everything. Something to be aware of is the 498, that's that form for giving the banking information. There's a choice here, you need to be made the school or library official to have the full access to be able to provide that information. So you may have to make this change by default that is not given to everyone. So you would have to go in here and make that change. Luckily, you can change your own user permissions too as the account administrator and fix that. So you can give the banking information if you need to. Now to change the account administrator, and this would be in a case of, like I was saying, if a previous director or new director have different email addresses, this is how you'd have to do it. You would go in and create a new user account for the new person with a new email address. Then you go into your library's account section. This is where from the main landing page, you click where it says welcome in your library's name. You know, we looked at the news item and everything, but also across the top, there's all these other options. If you click this three dots button here, and the palm down menu opens up and there's a modify account administrator option. So you can transfer account administrator from the old director to the new. What you will have here is a list of all your users you might have and who the old one is and the new one is. Now, this is another thing that I'll point out to you here that I encountered. As I said, your email address is locked in and it cannot be changed. So your username cannot be changed. This means if you get married and change your name and your email address changes because of that, like happened to me a couple of years ago, you can keep using your old account if you want to or you might need to create a new account under your new email address and then transfer it over. This is what I had to do. At some point, my old email address will possibly stop working because that's no longer my valid name or one. My one now is Krista.Porter. So you may need to do this, but this gives you an example too of when I had to do it for this purpose of just transferring it from anyone to someone new. So when you get into here, you'll see it be whoever the current account administrator is and you just check the box to change it to the new one is gonna be. So I'm changing it from me as Krista Burns to me as Krista Porter. You may be changing it from the old director to the new director. You continue and it's gonna confirm this is the current account administrator. The new one will be this and you submit and now that's all switched over and now the new person has got all full account administrator powers. Something else you also wanna change is the general contact. It's a whole second section of here that has the same kind of contact info where this is the previous person and you wanna change it to the new person. This is just who you sack will be reaching out to with any questions they have. You wanna make sure this has got the right name as well. Name and email address. So it's just like the account administrator, you just check the other box, it continue, it says here's the current one, here it's gonna be changed to and you submit. So that is some things you can do with a user account and what you can, might need to change around in there depending on your situation. If you have any questions or it's any weird, you're not sure, let me know and I can also help you go through all that. Now there is also a certain time of year when USAC opens up what they call the administrative window where you can change things in your profile. At certain times of your organization profile is locked down and the numbers cannot be changed. Once you're getting into doing your forums, the 471, we can't have things being changed in the middle of the process because that can mess everything up so they make it so you can't change things like the school lunch numbers or your square footage of your library that has to be locked down at some point so that all the math can be done in the forums in process. Luckily for us right now, they just opened up this administrative window in October. So you can go in and make any fixes and updates to your account. So I recommend you go in right now, double check your library info, double check your personal info and make sure everything's up to date and correct. It will close sometime before the time to submit your 471. The second form in the process, the 471 is only open during a limited time amount of time every year, about three months, usually in the spring, January through March. And right before that happens, that's when everything needs to be locked down by. So by then sometime in January, they're gonna announce the window is being closed for making these fixes. So get in right now and get that done. So let's look at your organization information here. We're a little after 11 o'clock, as I said, it was gonna take a break. We did start a little late from our start of time. So I'm gonna get through everything here about your organization and then we will take a break. Just wanna let you know. So from your landing page, there's a manage organizations option at the top, just like the manage users. You choose your library and click the manage organization button. And now yes, this is a long page you can't read right on the screen right now and that's okay, I'm gonna zoom into each part. But I just wanna show you, this is a long page as all the information about your library. So if we zoom into the top, this is the library name, address, basic info. You can change any of this. We do have some libraries who've names have changed if your library has become so-and-so memorial library, something like that. This is where you can update all that if your library moves, change the email or change the address. A latitude and longitude, you'd not need anything in there. They considered using that for urban rural status, but decided to go with the census data, so that was wrong blank. Your urban rural status is here. You can, if your mailing address is the same as the physical address, you could put that here. If it's different, you can change that. If you want to add a phone number is needed, if you wanna add another email address, website for the library, all this other information you can update. And then the next section down, you wanna make sure all of this is correct for your library. This is very important. Your library type, are you a public or private library? You can see some of these do have flu astrixes, means they're required. And then what all of these subparts are for your library? Are you a research library, a tribal? Do you have a bookmobile or a separate location kiosk? Whatever applies to you, you can check here. Always want to make sure also that you have main branch selected. For library systems that do have a main branch and then branches, that would make sense, picking one as the main and the other all not. For most of our independent individual libraries between Nebraska, you're only one library, but you are also the main branch. As far as being the only library, you are the main branch. As far as your rates concerned, I'm gonna make sure you have yourself selected there. Over on the right here, this is where you put in the library square footage as well. You can see the software acquired field. Right now, you definitely wanna make sure you put that in so that if you do decide to do category two, they can do your calculation for you. USEC is asking that every library, everyone go in and get this correct right now so that when this new funding year, 2021, the new five-year budget for 2021 is calculated, we have all the numbers correctly. That's gonna be calculated when the window closes based on what you put in here. So even if you're not thinking about doing it right in the upcoming year, you've got five years to use that budget. Get this updated right now so that for whatever future time in the next five years, your calculation is all done. These other fields here are blank because you don't need to use them. Next is your school district. They may have your school district are selected. What this member, this is based, this is for determining your discount rate. The school district that your library is physically located in, make sure it's correct. If it's not, you can search for school districts down here. There's multiple ways to search. I recommend zip code. Most likely you and your school district have the same zip code. It's the simplest thing to look up and you know it. If you look it up by zip code and do hit search, it will tell you who the school district is and you can select it if you need to. And the last thing here you need is an FCC registration number. This is something new that USAC is requiring. It is gonna be needed when you do your forms. Anyone who does works with the FCC has one of these numbers. Your library might have one and you don't know it. We had one for the commission when I applied for RE rate. I didn't know it was what it was. But we do have on our MIE rate website for you, I do have a link to look up what your registration number is and then to apply for one as well. All done online, only takes a couple of minutes and you'll have a number that you can enter in there. So check your organization account, make sure all of this information is in there. And if anything is not, look it up. Look up your square footage, look up your FCC registration number, go in and confirm that everything is correct here. And if you made any changes, there's a blue submit button at the bottom here. All right, so that is all the basics of the program. Does anybody have any questions right now that you wanna ask about anything we've done so far? Type into your question section. We are going to take a break now, about a 10 minute break, as I said. And then when we come back, we're gonna work on the actual forms and cells. We're gonna take a step-by-step screenshots of doing a 470 and looking at all the other forms in the process. So do you have any questions right now that you wanna ask of me before we do take our break? I'll give you a few minutes to type in. I can't see if you're typing, so I need to wait until the question pops up. So let me know if you have any questions. Ah, Jerry asks, how do you discard a task? Actually, I'm gonna show you how to do that when we look at a form. There is a discard form button when you go and look at a particular task. And when we actually look at our 470, I will show you exactly where that button is so you know how you can do that. To actually do it, you just go into a task, click on that task and it will open it up as if you're gonna work on the form and there's a button in the lower left that says discard form and you click there on that form to do that. But I'll show you exactly how that looks in the 470 that we do, okay? So the first form in the E-rate process is the form 470. And this is the form where you are telling potential service providers. This is all the services that you're looking to receive an E-rate discount on. Do you want monthly internet? Do you wanna buy some equipment? All those different things. So you are going to describe and request the services you're looking for. This does officially open a competitive bidding process and we'll get into the details of what that means. You are like I said, announcing to any potential service providers publicly that you want to receive E-rate particular services. Your 470, I always describe it as is like a wish list. What are the things you would like to get? And it's okay if you put things in here that are things that you might not ever end up going for or being able to purchase, but that's okay. This is just your, we're thinking about these things. The second form is where you say we've decided on these particular things. Also you can just put out a 470 to feel the waters, see what the kind of responses you might get back for costs. When you get bid responses or quotes from particular companies to see how much something will cost, maybe just investigating to see, is this something I can afford at all? What would they be offering us via this E-rate process? So you can feel things out. If you decide after you receive bids about or quotes from companies on your 470 that it was none of it was anything you wanna go for and you just can't even do the E-rate process, that's fine. You can just stop and not do the second form, not do the 471, not continue through for the rest of the E-rate process for the year. That's okay. So this can just be your feeling the waters, feeling out there to see what's going on, see what you're gonna get bids on and a dream of what you could possibly get a discount on. Everybody does a 470 to start off the year. It is available right now. It actually goes live on the summer before the funding year starts. So this has been available since this summer to apply for the 2021 funding year, which starts next summer. There are a couple of situations where you do not have to do the 470. If you are in the middle of a multi-year contract, you do not want to do a new 470. This would be a specific contract where you start, you have like a beginning and end date of the amount of time that you have the service. So you signed a specifically a three-year contract of the company for your internet. And it started in 2019 and it goes to 2022, whatever your period is. The first year of that contract, you would have put out a 470 looking for potential bidders. You decided on this particular company and signed off on a contract with them that has locked you in for three, four, five years, however long it is. But the second year of that contract and the third and any future ones, you do not wanna open up a new bidding process because you've already contracted with somebody. So you don't do the 470 for those following years. You sit back and wait and you just do the 471, the second form where you're just pretty much telling you, SAC, yes, we're still with them. We're still with that company and we're still getting the same service. So you do still have to do E-rate every year. You just start with a second form, not the first. You don't wanna open up yourself up to new bids. Now, once that contract does expire and ends, that year, you would then do a new 470 to start up again and reset and potentially get a new contract with that company or with someone else. Another time that you do not need to do a 470 is if you can find this deal, basically something at a really good speed at a really good price. This is a particular setup that the FCC has determined it would be really good for libraries in schools to have at least 100 megabits per second download and it costs $300 or less a month. And if this is something you can get, you don't actually have to do any competition. The FCC was doing this to try and encourage service providers to offer this as a basic service. When I first started talking about this, I had libraries that said, that's not out there. I know my company, they don't have 100, they have 50 maybe, they have 90 maybe, megabits per second of a speed, but not 100. When the FCC put this out, the idea was if we give this as an option and say you don't have to compete with anybody, you automatically get this library's business that will hopefully encourage the companies to offer this as a standard and then everybody is much easier, jumped right into e-rate. All you gotta do is start with a 471 as well, saying we got this deal. So here is what we are going with. I know some librarians had mentioned to me, oh, my provider actually in the training a few years ago, my provider does 90 megabits per second. I wonder if I could talk to them and convince them to bump it up and then we get to skip this whole competition thing, this whole open bidding. And I said, that's great, do that. And I don't know what the aim of that. Hopefully by now, libraries, companies may be offering this more as a standard. We've gotta have the cost being $300 a month or less and the speed being 100 megabits down and 10 up. And it has to be also commercially available. Anybody can also get this as well, just out publicly. And if you need to have something new installed, that can be included in this as well. These are just the two very specific times when you don't have to do a 470. But if you're just doing your basic monthly internet, you're doing, you wanna buy some new equipment, the usual, everybody would do a 470 to start off the process. Now, to get to your forms from your landing page, up top here on the right, you'll see there is a FCC form 470 link, 471, 486. All your basic forms are right there is where you start a new form. So you click on that and it starts you into the form. It pre-fills information from your library's info. So double check all this, make sure it's correct. If anything is not correct, you would go out and fix that in your organization profile and then you have to start a new form. Across the top, it has a bar that will move along as you're going through each step in the form, each section, so you can see how far along you are. At the bottom here, you do, the first thing you do have to enter is an application nickname. This is anything you want, it is required. This is not anything that is determined by USAC, it's something you make up yourself. I put in here FY 2021, 470, the funding year 2021, my 470. But you can name it anything you want. If it's, whatever makes it easy for you to remember which form this is and what it was for. If you're doing a special construction project, you could put in special construction. You could say it's for internet or routers, switches, whatever it is that you were doing, it's all for you. It is something that will be on the, if you rate has any questions, or anything they send to you, they will indicate it's this form and here's the nickname for it so you can match it up. At the bottom here is, this is where that discard form button is that I was talking about before. And we had a question right before the break about how do you discard a task? And this is how you would do it. So if you have these tasks floating around in here, they're for create a form 470 or create a form 471. On your task screen, click on one of those tasks to go into that form. And on the below or left, there'll be a discard form button. Click that form, there'll be a confirmation that'll pop up. You say, yes, I wanna discard this and it will delete the form and then you'll stop getting those emails sent to you. So make sure that you, like I said, keep your tasks cleaned up that way. Now something that is frustrating, I guess, the system, as soon as you click this create a CC form 470 or 471, as soon as you click this button and as soon as you're on this screen, Epic has automatically already created a task for this form. You haven't even entered anything even if this nickname is blank still. They, as soon as clicking that button, that link is set up a task. So you may do this and say, oh wait, I actually meant the 470, hang on and you just go back to your main screens, do a force, or I meant 471. Go back to your screen and do a 471 instead. But then this one is still floating around out there. You haven't even entered any info, haven't saved anything, but it's already started saving it. It's just how quickly the system works. So just pay attention, keep an eye on your tasks and go in and clean up and discard anything that you know you're not gonna be working on. But we're gonna actually go through doing this form. Once you enter your nickname, you've got two buttons over here, save and share and save and continue. Save and share would only be if you're going to need to send this form to someone else in your Epic account. So if, for example, you have a staff person that can complete the form, enter the information into the form, but then they have to send it to you to verify or double check as the administrator or the Z1 authorized to actually submit the form, they can then share it to you. Generally, we don't have that in here. I know it's, you can do that. Most of the time there's just a single person who's in charge of e-ray and they just do everything themselves, but it is there. What you usually wanna do is just save and continue, which goes on to the next page of the form. So on the next screen of your 470, there's nothing to enter here. This is just filling in information based on your profile. It doesn't let you know if you need to fix anything, go into manage your organization. At this point, it does assign a form number to this form. Every form, your 470, 471, 46, they also are assigned a little number. This is a way you can track this particular form for this particular year as well. And this is what USAC will refer to when they email you or contact you. They will say 470 form number 2 1 0 0 0 1 2 6. So that's how you can know that that's the right form. And as you can see here on the lower left now, there's also now a back button. As I said, this does save as you go, but you can always, if you realize you need to go back to a previous screen at any point and fix something, you can always click the back button and go back, back, back, back until you get to where you need to change something and then continue on again. You can always discard the form at any point, not just on that first screen. So no matter how deep you get into this, as long as you haven't submitted the form, certified and submitted it, you can always discard. And then we do our save and continue. The next screen is has consultant and contact info, consultant information, most likely will be blank for you. There are companies out there, firms that you can pay to do your e-rate forms for you. This is generally for larger organizations like large library systems or large school districts who need someone who's a real e-rate expert and they don't have that person on their own staff and they play the company do this for you. That's what that would be for. I do help you with consulting. I'm your state e-rate coordinator, but I'm not that kind of a consultant where you pay me anything. So I don't appear on your forms at all. At the bottom, then I ask for contact. Are you the main contact person? You would click yes and it will automatically fill in your information here will appear. If you're not, you'd say no and put someone else in but generally it's you. Save and continue. And then this is where you can decide what you want to apply for, category one and category two. You can do just a category one 470 if you want to with just your monthly internet costs if you want. You can do a form that's just all category two, purchasing equipment and doing all that or you can do a 470 that has both of them on the form itself. Up to you what works best for you to keep track of everything you're doing. I know many people do like to do them separately so they can say, this is everything that has to do with my purchasing of equipment and this is everything that has to do with just our regular monthly internet that we always do every year. If you do them separate, you're gonna have two form 470s that you'll be submitting and that you'll have to make sure get done and certified with everything done. You'll do one, all your category one and then a second one with everything doing category two. Up to you what works best for your organizational purposes. For this example in this demo, I'm doing both so you can just see how both of them do work. So we've clicked on both of those buttons and save and continue. Then I will ask if you have an RFP for this. If you are doing, there we go, a in-depth project, something a lot more like update in your computer lab or building a whole new library. You probably have a lot of detail about how the construction is gonna be done and what will need to be done for the internet to be set up and all the equipment to be put in. And you'll have some sort of document about that that your municipality or your library is put together. If you need to provide that information because it relates to the service you're looking for, you would, this is where you can attach that RFP and you would put that in here so all the bidders have access to that info. You can click and drag it to here or you can click on up the load and it will go out onto your computer for you to find wherever that document is. Also, if you're doing special construction that we talked about earlier, you're gonna have to have an RFP for that. As I said, we have templates here that we're working with to help our libraries who've wanna do that special construction and that matching and then apply for that state match. So you can work with Holly Wolt here at the commission and she'll work with you on that and then you would attach that here. But if you're just doing a very simple application, it's just a regular monthly internet like we always do or just buying some new wireless access points, nothing complex, you would say no. So it would depend on your situation. Save and continue. And now here's where we can add what they call their service requests, what we're looking for. You'll see there's, for category one and category two are in two separate sections and it says there currently no category one service requests because we haven't done anything yet. So you click on the blue button, we're gonna do a category one for add new service request. And then this opens up where there'll be a pull down menu with all your options, but then right at the bottom which is very important, there is descriptions and explanations about each of the things you can get here. I'm gonna go over some of these here now. There's your least lit fiber. This is just regular old fiber that we're looking for the usual fiber that we have. And if we were going to look for that, then the next three options are kind of related to each other, internet access and transport bundled non-fiber. So this would be for any other kind of internet connection that's not your fiber connection. So either you have fiber or you don't. That's kind of the two choices. If you have fiber or you're looking for fiber, you do the lit, if you have anything else, you do this second one, internet access and transport bundle. Now, some people do get a little confused in our small individual libraries because following that there is a transport only, no SISB service included, and then internet access, ISB service only, which catches a lot of people's attention because yes, I want internet access. I'll pick that one. These two are separated out here because internet transport separate, internet transport bundled. These are separated out because in some larger school districts or larger library systems, they do pay for these each separately to maybe to different companies even or totally separate out on their bills. So they have to ask for them separately. 95% of you guys just doing this as an individual library, you don't do that. It's not a thing. So you need to do the bundled one. If you just do internet access service, you're getting the service, but you're not getting the transport of getting that service to your building. That's the difference. Don't panic if you've done that by accident. USAC knows that this is something that commonly is done as a mistake and they will reach out to you when they get to their work questioning. We have some questions about your application. We want to help you work on it and give you an opportunity to fix that. But just try not to do that. You're either lit, either have fiber or you have everything and you want it bundled. You want the service itself and you want to get it to your building. That's the, so you'd want to choose the bundled one. Beneath that is the dark and lit together. So if you are interested in investigating, is there any dark fiber out there that I'd like to find out about and have turned on so I can use? That would be you do the least dark and lit together. The other options here are generally things you probably wouldn't use if you're going to be running your own internet service. I doubt any of us are doing that. Some network equipment, maintenance, air, cellular data, some cellular data plans would be what you would use the internet to a bookmobile potentially. That'll only be used for that situation. So we'll open up this pull down menu here and now we have all our choices and I'm going to do my basic internet service of internet access and transport bundled. So if I choose that, it then refreshes the screen and asks me some specific questions about that service. Depending on which item I pick and may ask differently, different kind of questions. But quantity, how many connections, how many circuits, how many connections do I want? How many internet connections do I want coming into the building? Just one is fine. Number of entities served, I'm just one library, so I'm just one. And then you want to do your speed. What is your minimum you're requesting and your maximum speed you'd like to have? In this case, you want to make sure if you're just continuing with whatever your current internet connection is, make sure you know what your speed is and make sure it falls between the minimum and maximum here. If you're trying to expand your connection potentially, make sure whatever you might be looking for falls between your minimum and maximum. So if you open up these menus, you'll see this actually goes up into the gigabit speeds, which is even faster than megabits per second and is like one gigabit, five, 10, get my bra off the top of my head. So if you're looking for something for fiber, that's where we're getting into the gigabit speeds. You would definitely want to make sure you include that. What's here on your 470s, you want to, as I said, you're dreaming, what could we possibly get? You may investigate, look on a company's website and see, oh, they actually offer five megabits or five gigabits per second. Let's put that on here and see if we can get it. And now work, see what it's gonna cost us for e-rate, via e-rate. If you put down here like 25 is a minimum and maybe 50 is the maximum and your provider comes back and says, actually we can offer you 100 megabits per second, then you're gonna, you've just lost out in getting e-rate discount on it because you only made your maximum 50 megabits. You've got to make it sure that your, whatever speed you end up getting falls in that range that you asked for in the first place. You can't, on your second form, when you tell the USAC on the 471, we went with this company and they offer 100 megabits per second. If you only ask for a maximum of 50 on your 470, it doesn't match up, you're not gonna get, you're gonna be denied. So think big on the 470, think over big. Even think oversized effect. Don't even know if anybody offers five gigabits. Do it anyway, it doesn't matter. On your 471, that's when you'll say what you actually ended up with, but you want to make sure it falls in here into the range. Now the last question here is that do you need it installed or not? If it's something new, a new service, you would want to say yes, but in this case I'm gonna say this is just my regular monthly internet, I've always been getting for years and years, it's already installed, so I don't need it installed now. And then you click the add button on the bottom. And now it prompts you back to your main page of your service request. You'll see it lists what you requested here. Internet access, bundled, 25 to 100 megabits, et cetera. Now if I did also want to explore getting fiber as an option, I would click add new service request button again and add a second request where I choose lit fiber or the darkened lit fiber, whichever I'm thinking about doing. And just keep adding until you've got them all listed there. There's also a narrative box down here where you can explain a little bit if you want to do a little more detail than just I want an internet connection at this speed. I write things like this monthly internet service for a public library, whatever you might need to add. Sometimes there's more detail you want to give, but it doesn't require a whole RFP, a whole giant document. That's where you can put some of this and we had a smaller details in here. Now we've scrolled down a bit on this page and we have an installment payment plan question. As you can see here, this is only related to doing special construction and about the non-discounted fees charges. So there's anything that is not eligible for e-rate other costs related and you want to work with your company on having an installment plan so you can pay a little bit as you go, paid off gradually, you would say yes there. We're not doing that on this application so I'm saying no. But now we're going to go down and do a category two request. Just like category one, you add a new service request. But in this case, it looks different because it talks about what are your category two services. There's the internal connections, that's all your different pieces of equipment. The basic maintenance of them, as I mentioned, and then it managed internal broadband services. This is something called also called managed wifi where you can have a company that runs your internet for you and you just don't have anything to do with it. You just totally hand it over to them. Depends on if that's a situation that's available in your area. For internal connections and the maintenance of them, you would have to do a service request twice for each piece of equipment. First, you would say I want to purchase the equipment and then I also want maintenance on that equipment. You go to the second time and do the maintenance one. For future years, if you already purchased equipment, you can continue doing basic maintenance on them as a service request, as a category two, just for the following years. So I'm gonna, and you can see here is all your different pieces of equipment, cables, racks, routers, wireless access points, antennas, et cetera, et cetera. I'm gonna pick here, oh, cabling. So my internet connection cable. And then in this case is gonna ask, as I'm gonna start asking specific questions depending on what piece of equipment you're asking for, what it needs to know about that piece of equipment. In this case, it wants to know feet. How many feet of cable do I need? I'm not really sure how much it takes. So I just kind of went, I put in, I just guess. A thousand feet of cabling to wire up my computer lab. I don't know if that's enough, but that's just for demo. Then you can pick a manufacturer if you have a preference. I don't know a lot about manufacturers. I just usually put nothing, no preference because whatever the company comes back to me with is fine. Number of entries served, I'm still one library. And in this case, yes, I would like someone to come in and install the cable. I don't know anything about that. And I hit add. And now there is your category two. Just like in the category one one, you're, it's an internal, your cable, how many feet it is, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if I want to order, I want to get the rate on other pieces of equipment. I just go and do add a new service request and pick one of those, pick the router, pick the power supply, whatever it is that I'm looking for racks. And just keep doing over and over again, add a new service request, do another piece of equipment, add a new service request, do another piece of equipment. On and on until I've requested all of the pieces of equipment I might want to be purchasing in the next year. So this isn't just, I want everything, you know, everything I'd ever want. It's, I'm thinking about in 2021 funding year, what might I be buying? Now you may be thinking of things for future years and that's fine, you'll do those on future applications. But this is just, what do I think I'll buy in 2021? So I'm not going to go through that for each one because I just showed you the basics of how it works here but I'm going to show you now after I've done this two more times, I added a router, I picked router and I just need one new router that I would like to have installed. And you can see here, the unit is, rather than how many feet, it's just how many each. And then WAP is wireless access points. I'm also getting three wireless access points to extend my internet connection out. There's also a narrative here if I feel the need to explain anything about any of these category two requests. And then I'm going to zoom out here and show you. Now here is my finalized service requests application, category one for the internet access from basic monthly and category two of the different pieces of equipment that I'm planning on purchasing this next year. Once I have, and I just keep adding new as I get everything on here that I'm going to be doing in the next year. Once I'm happy with everything, I got everything on there I need to do, I save and continue. It will then ask me if I have a technical contact person, do I have some other person I would like these companies to contact to ask about this equipment or the service rather than me. In many libraries, I'm director, I'm the only one, it's me, but you may have some tech person either on your staff or in the community who you would like them to talk to rather than contacting you about it. If you don't, you would just say no. If you do, you can say yes. You can search the system if you wanted to for some reason, some library, some organizations do give their tech person access to e-rate because they help them a lot with the e-rate forms. But if it's just, they don't have anything to do with e-rate itself, but they do are the person you just want them to talk to. You'd rather have a service provider talk to them about what kind of router or what kind of connection. I wouldn't give them a whole user account in the Epic system that's not necessary because you can enter their details just manually here and just give it on the fly. So I enter the name, phone number and email address so that the service providers can contact my technical person instead of me. And then save and continue. Their next question is about state or local procurement requirements. Are there any rules about how you have to do competitive bidding? At the state level, we don't have anything that specifically talks about that, but you would have to know if there's anything at your local level, does your municipality or your county or whoever you work with have any rules about competitive bidding it has to be done. You say yes here. This is the kind of thing you could add in just like you do an RFP where you could, if there's a specific separate document, you could upload it or you can enter a link if there's something out on the city website that says here's all the information about any companies that want to bid with us. You could just put that link in there for their information. So you're gonna have to know that locally. And now that's all the information we need to enter for our form. What we now can go instead of save and continue, we review our 470. Once we hit review, it says when it's ready, a task will become available. So what the system is doing right now is on their side, it's generating the form itself, putting all the final information is and creating a PDF for you to review. This could take a couple of minutes to have to work and to be done. I have had to wait 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes sometimes before it's all ready. But what you would do is go to your tasks, click on tasks and see if there's something that says like this certify FCC form 470 rather than create. You need the certify one and that's the one that goes on to the next step. Most likely when you first come to the screen it won't be there. I don't think I've ever seen it there immediately as long as I've been doing this. Just wait for it to appear, refresh the screen, you refresh your browser screen every now and then. And like I said, 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes you should eventually see it appear. Once it is there, the certify one, you click on that task and now this is where you're doing your final step of certifying and signing off on the form. There is a link to view the PDF and you notice over here now our continue to certification button. It's kind of grayed out. It's a light blue, not a bright blue. It's not alive yet. You can't click on it until you check this box saying that everything's correct. There's also a send for certification button. This is what I was talking about before. If there's another staff person that this needs to be sent to for them to certify this is not sending it to USAC. It's once again another confusing wording. This is sending it to someone else. Like if you have one person that completes all the information in the form but you as the director is the only one of authorized to submit it. So they would fill it out here and then send it to you to your user account with an Epic to actually certify. You just wanna use the continue to certification to actually do it. If you're sure everything is fine you can just click the box and continue. But if you wanna look at the PDF you click on the link here and it will open up a PDF in whatever you use for viewing those. And you can just see here's the basic info. Here's what I entered. There's the category one, there's the category two and just make sure everything is correct. If everything is good then you just go back and you check the box and continue the certification. If you notice something needs changing there's a back button here. You can always go back to any particular previous step and change something. Now this PDF here since you are opening it up you can save it or download it if you want to to have for your records. But at the end of the form I'm gonna show you how you can get the final version of this form with the certification, with the date and time so when you actually submitted it for your paper files or your electronic paper files and that's the one that you should download and save for your records after you've completed everything. So we've checked the box because everything looks good, continue. And it says are you sure you wanna go on and certify? Yes we do. And now this is all of the, this is the certification page, all the legal stuff, everything you have to agree to to complete the form. So it's all the legal notifications and all these boxes that you have to check. And I'm gonna zoom in on these so you can see them but I'll just point out also on the lower right again this certified, this is the final certified button is also grayed out, not bright blue. It's not live yet and it's not clickable until you check all of these certification buttons. So I'll zoom in there and you do have to check every single one. There's not a choice to make here of what I agree to, you have to agree to all the terms of the E-rate program. I certify the applicant includes libraries or library consortia eligible for assistance. I certify that all information will be available to review by bidders, I'll retain the required documents, et cetera, et cetera. You're welcome to read through all of it. I'm not gonna read all these certifications off to you but it's just basically you saying yes, I agree to all the rules and regulations in the E-rate program. Once you've checked all those boxes then you'll notice the certify button does become bright blue and now you can click on it and submit your form. So once you hit that certify button this last one you have submitted your form. It will give you a little pop up and this is the scary question of false statements from this form may result in civil liability and or criminal prosecution. That is true, there are things you shouldn't be doing don't try and scam the system or work with a service provider to give them a leg up on doing getting your business but ideally I hope none of you guys are doing anything illegal I don't think anyone here has done anything like that so you do just have to say yes, I do agree that I am not gonna do anything illegal related to my E-rate. You say yes and now it's submitted. It pops you back to the tasks where it had left off when you're doing that certify and you'll notice that certify task is now gone because you did it and your form is submitted. Now how do you really know? You wanna double check and make sure you have it done. You go back to your landing page and I'll give you a tip right now too anywhere in the system where you see a USAC logo you can click on that and we'll bring it back to your landing page. If you don't see a logo if you click on reports at the top here the BA returned me to my landing page link as well. So we're gonna go back to our landing page and we're gonna go down to the bottom where I showed you earlier how to search for all your forms and we're gonna look at our 470 for the upcoming year 2021 and now you'll see I've got a third one because I just did another form and it's that one with the 126 at the end and it says certified. So I know, yes, I did it. It's done and USAC has received it. Awesome. Now I would like a copy for myself and so if you do wanna look at the whole form and get your own PDF of the final version over here on the left the nickname this blue is a hot link. So you would click on the nickname for whichever one you wanna open up and it'll give you a version showing you the whole form on the screen here but get a nice pretty PDF version of it up here at the top menu and we're gonna zoom into that there's this generated documents option. If you click on that, it will open up and you can click on original version of the form and here the upload date that's the date you submitted the actual form click on where it says original version and you get a PDF that looks just like the draft one that we had but this is the final version it has application following number all your information up here and the first page, second page but now you'll see it also has the certifications all the certifications you agreed to are now in the PDF. So this makes it about three, four pages long and then at the very end your signature, your authorized and the date and time that you actually submitted it. This is the final version of it in a PDF form this is the one that you wanna download, save, print out, whatever you do to keep your records and paper documents of this. In response to your 470 they will send you a receipt notification and every time you submit a form to USAC they always come back to you with a letter an email, something within your email account saying yes we got it, yes we got it. This comes up in your newsfeed that one newsfeed of your own and something you can look at to see everything you submitted you can also make changes at this point. If you realize after setting certification so many of they did make some sort of a typo change you can make corrections using this notification. This also gives you what your allowable contract date is allowable contract date this is the 28 days after you've submitted the 471, 470 and when you can meaning when you can do your 471. So they will do the math for you explained earlier that when you do the 470 open bidding that you got to wait 28 days to make your decision they will tell you what that 28 days is in your letter. Now from the form itself when you're looking at that or you know that to generate the documents for to get that PDF next to it you can click news and there is your receipt notification letter you could also go to news from your main landing page click on your library's name go to news it'll be there as well and this is where it gives you your allowable contract date and it tells you 12, 14, 2020. So you know, okay, I've got about 20 days now before I can do the second step in the process, the 471. All right, so that is our 470 has been submitted. Any questions about the 470 itself? Anything you enter on there. But as I said, the 470 opens up a competitive bidding process. Competitive bidding is a the formal process where you open up your library for bids and companies may reach out to you and submit their quotes for any of the work you wanna have done. You may receive none, you may receive one. It depends on what you're asking for and your situation in your community. Many of our small communities they only have one service provider so it is who it is, that's who you get. Sometimes depending if you're doing something more complex like a construction project or buying equipment you might have some new companies reach out to you but you do have to evaluate all of these they will send you bids, you will then compare all the offers received and select one of them. You do have to wait those 28 days after you submit your 470, wait for that allowable contract date before you can make your final decision. You get the good bid in a week after you submit your 470, that's fine. You've gotta hold on to it and wait 28 days before you sit back and make your official decision and then go on to the next steps in the e-rate process. To do competitive bidding you must have a fair and open bidding process. This means you can't give anybody any extra information, you can't treat anyone differently even if it is your own local company you can't go to them and say hey I did a 470 hey let's do this, you've gotta make sure make treat everybody with the same work responses. Your companies, your service providers cannot be involved in creating your 470, you cannot go and work with your company even if it's the one you currently work with or when you want to work with and say hey I'm gonna do e-rate, let's work together to submit this application. The 470 is just to be just you as the library looking for someone to provide you with this service or this equipment or do this construction. What you can do is go to their websites and investigate, you know I was talking about speeds earlier, find out what speeds do they offer so I know what broad range to ask for in the 470. You can find that out from many company's websites. You could also contact them and ask for information about what they do provide. Do not mention e-rate however, do not mention I am doing this for the purpose of doing an e-rate application just say I'm looking for information about what you can do, what you provide. You don't want them to send you a quote before you do your 470. You can ask them what they provide before you submit your 470 but they can't send you a quote until after the 470 has been submitted. It has to be done, everything has to be done in the right order for e-rate purposes or you will knock yourself out of receiving the discounts. So you've got to submit your 470 first and then a quote or a bid needs to be dated and sent to you after the date you submitted the 470. You can't take a previous quote if you hadn't been tapped and to be chatting with someone and use that, they'll have to send you a new one after. Once you do have all these bids and you've decided it's time to make a decision, you, in order to make a choice you do have to do according to your e-rate rules choose the most cost effective bid with cost being your primary factor but not your only factor. Also, cost effective does not mean cheapest. Sure, we've all experienced in our life that the cheapest is not always the best in the end in the long run. And you don't always want to go with that. It may be more expensive but still cost effective because of other factors that you take into consideration when you are making a choice. So we have a chart here, a bid evaluation matrix, an example of one that you could use if you need to make this kind of decision. So this would only be if you've received multiple quotes, multiple bids from multiple companies and you need to make a comparison between them to decide who you're gonna go with or you need to document why you chose a particular company over another one. You're gonna need this in case the company or USAC asks you about it later. This is not anything you submit with your application. It's just for your records in case anyone asks. So we talked about that. You do have to have cost be the primary factor. So in this example, what we've done is we've taken here and listed all the things we think are important in our decision-making process to pick a service provider to give us our internet. Price isn't the only thing you always wanna think about. Do you have a prior experience with this vendor? Do you know them? Are they your current company? Are they another company you know about? What about other things you need to buy from them? Are they good on those prices? How do they invoice you? Are they willing to do a discount on your bills or not? Are they good for the environment? Are they local? Are they not? All these things, and these are just some things you can decide what's important to you. You can pick some of these, you can pick other things. Customer service, you know how their customer service goes, you can put that in, whatever is important to you. And then just assign points to each item with price, earning them the most points. Not even half, there's gonna be like 50% of the points, but just it's worth more points than anything else. That makes price the primary factor in your decision-making process. Then you look at the bids you've received and give them their points. And we can see here, vendor two got a full 30 of the price. They're obviously the cheapest. However, vendor three ended up with a total more than either of the other ones. That would mean you can pick vendor three as your company who won the bids in this competition, even though they got a 25 for price, even though their costs were not as cheap as vendor three, with everything else that is important to you and that you took into consideration, they came out on top. And that is perfectly fine. This is how you do this. This is how you make this decision and this is how you would tell USAC or the company or anyone else who asks you about it. So if you have to do this, obviously you can see here where they really went out was the whole prior experience. Umbedding vendor two is probably some new game in town, new company that came along. And so nobody knows anything about them. So they got a full zero on that one. They also weren't so as good for ineligible services. And not as good as ineligible services, that's the other one. So there's lots of things here, that concentration. Now, once you make this decision and you do your second form and the words out who you picked, vendor two could come back to you or go to E-rate and say, hey, we know we're cheaper than vendor three. Why didn't they pick us? I wanna dispute this. And that's fine. Just make sure you have this documentation. You can show, well, this is why. This is all that's important to us. And that's how it works. It's not just who's the cheapest. You decide as the librarian and the applicant what matters to you beyond price being primary, being worth more points, everything else is up to you to decide what's important to you. And once you show them this, they have no legs stand on to argue. So you would choose vendor three. Now, there's a few situations that are a little, questions I've had about what, what about special situations that might come up? What if you are brand new to doing E-rate you have a current contract with a company. So you are in a contract right now, you can't really open up for a new, you can't start a new one, but you want to start doing E-rate and make that contract work in the E-rate program. Can we do this? Or do I have to wait till the contract ends? You do not have to wait. You just do a 470 as you normally do. You wait your 28 days, but then you use that current contract you have as one of your bids. It becomes a bid. If you receive other bids or quotes, you'll have to do your comparison and decide hopefully your current company will come out ahead using your discount matrix and things like this prior experience difference here of getting zero from a new company into the most for the current one that can be very helpful to you in that situation. And so as long as your existing contract's willing bid then now you can continue on and they win and you can go on ahead even though you have that previous contract already in place. So this would be if you're brand new to E-rate for the first time and you want to jump in in the middle of a contract. What about if the city pays for the library's internet? The library doesn't actually have its own just internet bill, that's okay. You can cost allocate out the city's costs from the library's costs. So you have to be able to separate out how much of the internet service is being used by the library as opposed to anything else the city is paying for. They may be paying one big bill that is city hall, fire department, library, all their internet service. And that's fine. You just need to be able to see on the bill which part is for each location or you can have an estimate if you think, well, we know the library uses this much and city hall uses this much, you can try to estimate. You might be able to get actual statistics from your service provider. Ask them, can you tell me we've got these three different connections one or three buildings? How much of that connection is going to the library and what cost-wise would that be as compared to all the other ones? You can only receive E-rate on the internet service that's going to the library building, not to the other buildings. The city can pay for it all as one big bill but you've got to be able to differentiate. This is the library's part of the internet. So we're going to ask for an E-rate discount on that cost, not the amount that goes to this fire department or city hall. What if you have one bid or no bids? That's okay. There does not have to be an actual competition even though it is officially opening a competitive bidding process. If there's only one bid, you just go with it. That's fine. Write yourself a little email or memo saying we only received one bid from so-and-so company and that's fine. If you didn't have any bids, you can now, after the 28 days, reach out to your vendors. Reach out to your current service provider. Maybe they didn't realize and notice you had put something out there. You want to just nudge them and say, hey, we did our E-rate. Are you still on board for that? So you have a confirmation with that. If you were trying something brand new and you know there was companies in the area that could do this, that could give you fiber or due construction, after that 28 day period, you can now contact them, reach out and say, hey, we did this. Are you guys due E-rate? Can you give us a response back? So there is, at that point, it's okay to talk to them. So on or after the allowable contract date, that 28 days, at any point you decide you close the competitive bidding process and you can choose when you want to do that. You can dictate that actually in your 470. If you had a whole RFP, you would probably mention it there. In that narrative part, you can say, competitive bidding process will close on and you can pick a date. It has to be at least the 28 days, but then you can give yourself like 28 days plus a week. So you have that extra week to make any decisions to reach out to companies, get something back. Depends on how quickly you think things can work. But you can say, this is when it's gonna be. Or you can just, you don't have to dictate it, but you can just pick a day and say, okay, we've gotten everything we need. We know what we're gonna do, let's do it. There isn't any real process to close the bidding process. The competitive bidding as in check a box or make an announcement or something. There's nothing within the Epic system to do that. You just say, today we're done and you do it. That's when you can do that evaluation, choose who you're gonna go with. If you need to sign a contract or an agreement or a memo, whatever needs to be done. And then you do your 471 telling USAC who you picked. However, and I mentioned this earlier, you can only do your 471 during their application filing window. It's only available for a short period of time during the year, as I said, generally in the spring. So that would be the wrapping up of your competitive bidding process. Any questions about the competitive bidding before we go on to the next forum? As I said, you may or may not even have any competition and that's fine for many of our libraries. It's not a thing just because there's only one company in town and it's much easier than all of this that I've explained to you may sound. But if you do receive multiple bids, you will have to do some evaluation. Something I should mention though to when you do receive these bids, you do have to make sure they're actually responding to what you asked for in the 470. We've had this happen as well. I put out a 470 asking for monthly internet charges and they send me a quote because they do other services as well, send me a quote for cell phone service. Thanks, but that has nothing to do with my e-rate application. There's nothing in my e-rate about cell phone service because it's not a thing that's available, eligible. And you didn't mention anything in your quote or your contact with me about what I did ask for my monthly internet cost. In that case, you can just ignore that bid or quote completely. If they don't respond to what you actually asked for, doesn't matter. Hold on to it just for, you know, for paperwork purposes in case somebody questions, we sent you something that you can say, yeah, you sent me a thing for a cell phone, I asked for internet, not the same thing. So that will come up. So pay attention, read the quotes and the responses you receive and make sure it's actually what you, matches up with what you asked for. If it doesn't, you don't have to do it. Also, if after the 20 days, you may start a conversation with a company and saying, hey, you know, your pricing is really good. I'd love to talk more about this. And you could say, you know, when we had this happen before too, where a company is just doing kind of a phishing expedition, seeing what they could, you know, they've noticed libraries asking for what they do. And so they send a response and then you reply and say, oh yes, I'm at so-and-so town in, you know, way in Western Nebraska. And they say, where? We don't serve that area. We don't have any business there. We don't do business there. All right then, you wasted everybody's time by sending this quote. It happens. That's another one you can just ignore. You do not have to compare them if they then reply to you and say, oh, we actually don't do business in, you know, so-and-so town in Nebraska. Sorry. Hold on to it, but just set it aside. Doesn't need to be taken into consideration. So just because you receive a quote doesn't mean you have to evaluate it. Take a look at it, make sure it's responding here at 470. Make sure the company actually does business in your town. Only those valid ones are the ones you have to do any sort of a comparison of. All right, no more questions here. All right. Let me get another trick here. The second form in the E-rate process is your 471. This is the form everybody has to submit this one as opposed to there's a couple of exceptions for the 470. You do this one every year to let you SAC know who you have chosen to your service provider and what services are gonna be getting. If you have a multi-year contract, this would be your second, third year of the contract. You'd do this to let them know you're still with that company. For something new, you'd be letting them know who you went with, the certifying compliance with this and your discount calculation comes in on the in this form. At this point, this is when you can communicate with the firm provider. I said with the 470, when you're first reaching out, you cannot have them help you work on your form. On the 471, yes, you can because you might need information from them about how this is gonna work, what they're gonna do, what it's gonna cost. You're gonna need to have the back and forth with them at this point. And so now they can help you to make sure you get the right information into the 471. You'd also wanna talk to them about how you're gonna do the invoicing part. How are you going to receive your discount? Is it gonna be a discount automatically on your bills or is it gonna be a reimbursement after the back? So the 471 can be done after the 470 has been out there at least 28 days. As I said, you've reached that little contract date, you've made your choice, you've signed your contract, made your agreement, and then it has to be during that application filing window. The filing window, usually as I said, is between January and March. It's when it's been falling most recently. Right now, as of now, USEC has not announced the dates. The dates do vary. There's not a set beginning or end of March, so it's specific dates. And they announce those dates usually sometime in December. So sometime next month, we'll know what that actual window is. Right now, you can't even do a 471 if you try to. It'll say, sorry, the window's not open, come back later. So that's one good thing. You cannot accidentally go in and do it earlier then the window opens. It just won't be available to you. You do have to wait until that 28 days has passed though. That is very important. Do not jump the gun on that. If you do your 470 now, that's great. You'll definitely have more than 28 days before the window opens in January. But you can still keep doing your 470 in January and February. If that's when you finally get around to it and that's fine, but you've gotta make sure you don't jump the gun and do the 471 too early. If you do, you've also knocked yourself out of getting your E-rate discount because you've broken the E-rate rules and done it in the wrong timeframe. We recommend don't wait to do your 470, your first form. There's no reason to wait. It's available now. Do you know what you're gonna be looking for? Go and do it right now. Do it today, do it tomorrow. Do it next month. As soon as possible, there's no reason to wait. You could even start it back in the summer when it was first available. Because the earlier you get it out there, then you know you're definitely gonna have those 28 days before you even get close to the filing window and do the 471. Lots of people do ask me, well, what is the deadline for submitting a 470? There's gotta be a final date. And there is, we don't know the deadline until we know the actual dates of the filing window. Because what it will be is, whatever is the close of the filing window, the last date you can submit the 471 back up 28 days, that will be the deadline for the 470. So there will be a deadline as soon as the filing window dates are announced, then we'll be able to do that math and figure it out. But if you wait until the deadline, as many of us tend to do, you may have issues. If they're in, you might not be able to get your form in on time. If on that date, there is a problem that your internet's down for some reason. If there's a storm, if there's a blizzard, we're in Nebraska in the spring, there's gonna be. And you can't get to your library or get to a connection. If USAC system is having technical issues, when it gets down to that deadline date, things are delayed because of people rushing in the last minute. So please just don't wait to the deadline to do that because you might end up having so many other issues or if you're ill that day and you can't do it, you just don't get your e-rate. Also, if you wait to the last date on the 470, then you have to do your 471 on its last date as well and you could encounter the same issues. What if there's weather? What if the internet's down? What if I'm ill on that one date? You wanna give yourself more wiggle room than just those single individual dates. So get your 470 done now. Get it done before the end of the year and then you know you've got plenty of time in the spring to get the 471 done. What is actually one nice thing that USAC does do is they do send you a notification and email to your personal email account, letting you know that the allowable contract date has been reached for the 470. So if you're not sure, maybe you didn't know that in your calendar, you weren't sure, wait until you receive this poke, this nudge and then you know I'm good. I'm past that 20 days. Now let's start evaluating. Let's see what bids we've got. Let's get that 471 in. This will be emailed to you. It'll also be in your news section in your e-rate account. Now to do the 471, it is also in the top menu here. Like I said, it's not available right now so I don't have screenshots to show you but I will talk to you about the format of the form that you see you know. The 471 can be a little confusing. It is a two-step process. You first have to put in the request itself saying what the service is that you're looking for and then you have to go into that request you've created and enter the cost information and the specific details. A lot of people kind of get confused and lost in this process. Don't realize that I have to go create it first and then go in and do something more. It's a little extra work than when you did the 470 which was just create the funding request and it's all in there. One key to remember if you've done this right or not and so you don't get the error message this if you haven't entered money information you know the amount it's going to cost you you haven't finished the request. That's what goes in the line item information is how much is it gonna cost me. If you haven't done that and you're trying to go further on in the form and it's throwing errors out at you, that would be why. So use create the request then go into that request you've created and provide the cost information. Something else to be aware of is you have to submit separate 471s for each category. Category one and category two of E-rate. For the 470 as I told you you can submit one 470 that has both of those in them but once you get to the 471 you have to do them separately because they do the funding differently. As I mentioned category one it's a straight you get a discount on whatever you purchase but category two uses that budget the category two budget. So within the system they need two separate 471s to process two different ways. So if you are requesting both category one and category two services in the same year you're gonna be doing two form 471s. You're gonna create one and do everything that talks about your category one basic internet and the cost of that submit and certify that one then you're gonna start a whole second 471 that talks about your category two services and all those purchase equipment and purchase that you're doing and submit that one. You also receive in response to the 471 a receipt knowledge management letter just like the 470 summarizing it you can make changes to this one as well. Same thing. You can also request changes in the funding if you just realize oops actually the cost of change now from the provider. You can reduce funding but not increase it. So make sure you have it correct before you do your 471. And this comes to you within your E-rate news account news section as well. Now, once you've submitted your 471 it goes into application review and this is where the waiting game starts. This is where you wait for them to review it. Application review could take months. You have a deadline to submit it sometime in March. They might not respond to you and make a final decision until April, May, June, July, August. Yes, even into the funding year that you're applying for. And that's okay. They have so many applications that they receive it sometimes takes time to get through all of them but even if you don't have your answer until it's during the funding year like after that July 1st get in August, September, October, that's okay. You will receive the funding going all the way back to the July 1st, the beginning of the full funding year. You don't lose any of that. You'll just get a credit from your service provider for those preview, those months. So application review is done by the PIA Program Integrity Assurance Department and USAC and they will check and make sure everything's correct in your form, everything's legal, you checked all the right boxes, verify everything you did. They may reach out to you with questions and allow you to make changes or fixes to things on the form. If they do, you'll receive an email sent to you to your email account and it will say, click here now to go into your Epic account and review the inquiries that we have for you. If you have any confusion or questions about this this is the time to call me or email me and I will help you interpret what they're saying. They can sometimes use what I call e-read ease. It can be a little convoluted how they explain it. They use like three paragraphs for something that could have been two sentences. They have July, here's what that was going on. Here's how the program works, but this is what we need from you. If you can't interpret and figure out what they're asking for, just let me know. I can get into there and look at it and you can send me what they're asking you and I can help you translate what they want to and get them the right information. It might be just changing a checkbox. It might be providing a bill or a quote or a contract, whatever they may need. And like I said, this can go on for months and months until you get an answer. When they have made the decision, they will send you the funding commitment decision letter, your FCDL. This is acting an email, a letter email that is something that's emailed to you to your personal email account and it is attached to that email. This will let you know if you've been funded, if you've been denied, if maybe they reduced the funding, they may have in conversation with you, just decided that certain things you asked for were ineligible or we had to change the costs on things and all those changes will be there. You might get more than one of these emails, especially if you've separated out your category one and category two requests. So you've got two 471s that they're evaluating. They may send a different letter for each one. So keep an eye on your emails to make sure everything you asked for, you get responses too. If you disagree, like if you've been denied, you can do an appeal and I can help you do that. I've helped many libraries go through the appeal process and there's information in our website and the USAC website about that if we need to ever get into that. So this is the email you receive and it says USAC funding commitment decision letter available for FCC Form 471. In the email itself, it doesn't tell you what their answer is. It just says, here's your letter, but attached you've got a spreadsheet showing it and then a PDF of the actual letter itself. And so here's the PDF. It says how much has been, what's been committed. It tells you what your next steps are, what you're supposed to do now in the process. If you do need to make an appeal and then specific details about the request, what it was for, what the monthly cost will be, what everything will be, that's all there in your, everything you need to know is in that funding commitment decision letter. Now, as soon as you receive your funding commitment decision letter and you've been approved, immediately you need to go into your 46. This is the next form of the process. There is no reason to wait. There is no delay you need to do. There is no like 20 day waiting period or anything. It's immediately as soon as they've said, yes, you go and do this form. However, this is where many libraries kind of lose it in the e-rate process. They've received their funding commitment letter and it says, yes, you've been approved and you go, yay, you did it, we're done. Well, no, what it really means is they've set aside that money for you but you need to let them know that you want to accept it and you would like it. Why would you not want to? There are possible reasons why things, the situation may have changed. Like I said, it does take months to get it. The funding commitment letter sometimes. Your city or your library may have decided that we can't even afford the extra part of this. It just kind of doesn't help. The search provider has changed what they're offering. They've gone out of business. They've jacked up their prices. They've reduced their prices. All sorts of reasons why you might not want to receive, accept the funding. So that's why USEC says, let us know you actually want it. So you've got to do the 46. So you let them know that service has started. You're going to be getting it in as of July. And this is where you certify that you are in compliance with SIPA. This is where that one comes into effect. Now it's also great about the 46. It's one of the forms that a lot of libraries lose, you know, forget to do because they think they're done when they get that letter. But it's also one of the easiest forms to do because you don't have to actually fill in anything. All the information you need is already in your Epic account because you entered it in the 470. You entered it in the 471. USEC entered it, their response to, in the funding commitment letter, all of that is in your account. You just have to create a 46 and say, yes, we want all this stuff and submit it. So it's one of the quickest, one of the easiest forms to do. So the 46 is also available in the upper here on the top. And so a few screenshots of this one, not the full process all the way through because a lot of these forms are similar with the certifications and how to do all of that. But you would go in and you'd choose, put in your nickname, you're the contact person, choose the correct funding year and we choose whatever the funding year you're doing. It will then bring up all of the funding requests you have submitted for that funding year that you have been approved for. You can see here, your status is they're funded. They're up here as the ones you've requested and down at the bottom underneath there is the selected ones. You have to select them and say, yes, we want these. This is a little red triangle, exclamation mark means this information is missing and you need to select something. So automatically default bringing up that funding year's requests. So what you would do is you would check in the box for the one that you want and then add it. You can do them one at a time. For some reason you might want to just one and not the other or there is an add all button noise that you can click on it and we'll check every single one of them. It's like across the board, yes, we want all of these. In this example, I just checked one and then you click add and now you'll see it bumps down and has also put that one in the selected section as well. So now it's saying, yes, these are the ones I want. Now the buttons in front of these are just to remove them. There's nothing going into there to make changes. All the information is just built in there. So you're just selecting the one you want, moving it down, continue. When you get to the certifications on the 486, some things I want to notice, as you know here, there's the square box ones that's just that's legally is you have to agree to the SIPA certifications. This is where you do have to make a choice about where you are in the being in compliance with SIPA. The first choice is we are in compliance. So you would check that one if you've got your filters going and you're good. The last choice I'm going to bump down to that is SIPA does not apply. This is for previous applications where there are some situations where you didn't need to be in compliance with SIPA. But the middle one here is we're in the process. What's great about USAC and ERA and SIPA is that they do give you up to three years to become in compliance, to get set up with it. They know that it could take time to make a decision, figure out who you're going to go with, get everything installed and working and have it all up to speed. And as long as you're working towards that, they'll give you your e-read discount on those services. But you have to make sure you do finally get it all up and going and do become compliant within those three years. Because if you don't and you decide, eh, the filtering didn't work and you back off on it, those previous years that you received discounts from, you have to return that money. So if you're going to do e-rate, make sure you're going to follow through and being compliant with SIPA. You don't want to have to give back any of your money. The deadline to submit the 46 is 120 days after your service start date, which is July 1st or the date whenever you've received your funding commitment, the decision letter, which I said can sometimes come after July 1st. To start with, if it is July 1st, October 29th would be the deadline for it, for anything that you received July 1st and after. If it's anything later than that, your deadline would bump ahead, whatever 120 days is after your letter. USAC will notice and pay attention to libraries who have been approved and received kind of funding commitment. And you just say, hey, your 46 is due, it's coming up. I also do that myself as well. I proactively keep it on everything you guys are doing. And in the beginning of October, I will send emails to anybody who I know has been approved for funding but has not done a 46 yet. And so you will get an email from me saying, hey, you have not done this form, you need to do it. Otherwise you're going to lose some of your e-rate funding. With the 46, any days you submit it late, you'll lose that day's worth of, so if you don't do it on October 29th and you do it on October 30th, you lose one day's worth of funding, whatever the math comes out to that. So I will nudge you and let you know that you do need to get these in as well. You will also receive a letter sent to you and the service provider letting you know that the 46 has been processed. This is the form that the service provider looks for to make sure that you're good and you are accepting the information, accepting the funding so that they can go ahead with the invoicing if they're gonna discount you on the bill or if they're going to, how are they gonna provide the service? You'll also receive this notification letter in your e-rate news. So now onto the last form of the process. Now I know we are a little late here, we started a little late, I apologize for that. It is a little after 1230 but I'm gonna keep going until I finish through everything. Please stick with me if you're able to. We're recording all of this, there will be recording late available later. If you do have any questions about any of the forms get it into the question section and I can answer them for you right now as well. So please go ahead and type in there, I'll keep an eye on it, I've got the window open here for any questions you have. So the last form in the e-rate process is your invoicing form. This is your 474 or a 472. Now you have two choices of how you can receive your discounts if you're going to receive a discount on the bills that you receive from your service provider, then they are responsible for submitting the spy form, the service provider invoice form, the number 474. So they will submit this to USAC to be reimbursed for whatever they're discounting you. So if this is how your e-rate is being done, then you are done when you've done your 486. Your responsibility is done at the end of that third form of the process and you are done. You'll now just be getting your service, it will be discounted on your bills automatically and it's up to the service provider for their responsibility to get their money back from USAC, not up to you at all. Now, if you are not getting a discount on your bills, you're having to pay things in full and you want to receive a reimbursement after you've paid them, then you would submit the 472, which is called the BEHR form, the billed entity applicant reimbursement form. This is filed by you. It is, and you generally would do this after the funding year is over. You've paid all your bills in full and then after the year's over, you would submit this. This one is also conveniently do also 120 days, but 120 days after the last date of service, which is June 30th, or the date when you just did your 486. That depends on when you got your funding commitment letter. So sometimes it might be bumped a little. This also ends up falling at the end of October, October 28th, if it's before the, this is on the regular schedule. So I also just like with the 46, I do pay attention to anyone who has gone through a full year of E-Rate, and I can look up and see if USAC has distributed any of the funding. And if they say they have not sent anyone any funding, then I will also nudge you and say, hey, if you haven't received your funding, you're gonna need to do your BEHR form. Now, if your service provider has been giving you discounts on your bills, that may be on them. They may have just not submitted their 474, their spy form to USAC asking them to reimburse them. So, and it's still on them. Just because you haven't, according to USAC, they haven't sent any money, it's not necessarily your issue. So if I do reach out to you about a BEHR invoicing, check your bills. If you've been getting discounts, it's not your problem. It's up to the provider to take care of their issue. If you haven't been, and you know you've been filling out, paying everything in full, then yes, you do need to go and do the BEHR and get your reimbursement. As I said, this is a direct reimbursement with electronic bank transfers. So if you are doing the BEHR option, you do have to do that 498 to give them the banking information. You have to do the 498 before you can do the BEHR form. It won't let you do a BEHR form until you've given them the banking info. So if you're ever thinking about potentially needing to do a BEHR form, maybe get this done just for the heck of it. So the info's in there already. And then in any future years, when you need to get a reimbursement, the info's already there. So you will give them the usual banking information. It's just like getting a direct deposit for your paycheck, bank number, routing number, bank account, all of that. You also need to know whatever the federal ID number, a tax ID number that your city or your library uses, same for payroll. And then the new number that they're asking for on this, used to identify businesses, a DUNS number. This is free. If you're doing anything federal, E-Rate, it's a federal program, you have to have one of these. You might already have one, just like that FCC number I mentioned way earlier. You can look up on their website to see if you have one, and if not, you can reply and request one. Now, to do your 498, it is in a different place than everywhere else, because it's not one of the three forms that you do as a regular, as a regular process. And you only do it once. Like I said, you only got to submit the banking information one time. It's in your library's info. So underneath the logo where it says welcome, click on your library's name. And then from this menu, choose related actions. And it's a whole bunch of things you can do here. But about halfway down, there is a create FCC form 498. If you don't see this here, I'd mentioned earlier about permissions, you may need to give yourself the permission to do this. As I said, the account administrator is not automatically set up with full permission to do the 498. It's a special one. So you may have to go into your user account, look at your permissions, and give yourself the school or official officer option. Turn that on for yourself. Then come back here, and then the create 498 form option will pop up. That also may take a few minutes. I had to do it for a few people, 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes. Do the same thing as generating your PDFs. Refresh the page a few times and eventually it will pop up for you. But once it's there, you create it. And I'm not gonna go through this whole form either. I don't have banking info to fill in here. But as you can see here, it asks for your company, your library and then general financial contact numbers, remittance information, all your usual banking account info that you would submit. Once you submit the 498 form, then they're gonna email you and ask for documentation. Just like when you've done a direct deposit type thing, you have to provide avoided check or something. They ask for that as well. Avoided check or a copy of bank statement will work. They also send you to a different website to provide this info and upload this info. They do keep your banking information completely separate from the Epic system. So there's no security issues there. So there's nowhere in Epic to submit this. You go to the email that they send you, click on that link, go to that webpage and follow their instructions to upload the documentation and the proof of your bank account there. Eventually then they will receive that and look at it all out and they will then issue a proof and turn on your 498 ID. Until you have that 498 ID turned on, you cannot do a bear form. It won't let you, there's nothing, it won't let you do it because the process can't go through. This can take some time, a few days a week. So this is not a kind of instantaneous thing. So if you need to do a bear form and get your reimbursement, you want to, like I said, get this 498 work done ahead of time. But once you do receive that email saying, yes, your 498 ID has been approved and you have it, then you can go and log into your Epic account. And remember at the beginning, I said there's the Epic for everything else and then a separate login for the bear form. You would use that instead and that will bring you to a new screen to log into. This is the bear form is in what they call the legacy system. This is the previous incarnation of doing eRate online. And it's just still in the old system. Hopefully someday it'll move into Epic as well, but for now you kind of log into it via Epic to start with and then pop over there. And to log into this system, you do need to have a pin number. This is a number you may have had if you did do any eRate before. It was assigned to you to do your previous eRate before Epic became a thing and you had your username and password. You still have that old pin number. That's what you use here. If you don't have one, you can reach out to client service bureau, eRate's customer service and they will issue one for you. Not a problem. And then just log into there and fill in all your bear information to receive your reimbursement. They will send you a notification letter letting you know that it's been processed, same as everything else. And then you'll also start, no matter which way you're receiving your discount, you're gonna start getting quarterly reports, disbursement reports, letting you know, you set letting you know we've given this, sent this money to wherever. If you're getting discounts on your bills, look at this report and compare it to the discounts your service provider is giving you, make sure they're giving you the same amount discount of money as eRate is sending them. If you're doing bears where you're getting a reimbursement after you've paid your bills in full, double check your bank account or contact your city clerk or someone to double check it and make sure the amount that USAC says they're sending to you is what's appearing as a direct deposit into your bank account. And so once you've done the 472 or 474, whichever one it needs to be done for you, you are done with your eRate process for the year. Yay! And that is it. So, any questions? We have just a couple more wrap-up slides here, but do you have any questions about the eRate process you wanna ask me now? Type in the question section and we can go over it. Anything that we've talked about today. We've gone through the, keep an eye on the question section here if you type anything in. We've gone through the basics of the program, how it works, what you can apply for, gone through the forms, all the different steps that you need to do to have a successful eRate application. While I'm seeing if anybody has any questions, I should point out, we do have our eRate website that I had mentioned nlc.nebraska.gov slash eRate where I have a lot of information for you to do your applications. There's also some other training that I highly recommend that you take a look at to keep up with or learn more about the program. Every year in the fall, USAC does do applicant training workshops. They're usually held throughout the country in multiple locations. This year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they were all done online only over a three day period earlier this month in November, but now recordings of all of those sessions are available. They're each one hour sessions. So I think there's nine or 10 of them out there on different aspects of eRate. So we link to those from our website. You can look at those. They also have always had a training series for applicants where just showing the basic process as well and then step-by-step videos on each form. The tutorials are not too long, five, seven minute videos showing each form or parts of each form and live demos of all of them. So for example, here today, I didn't show you full from beginning to end of the 471 and the 46 or anything. They do have their own videos out there that you can watch. So I definitely recommend using those. And they also have PDF user guides for men and instructions for many of the forms. So if you're the kind of person that likes to have in paper here in front of me, what I need to do with screenshots while I'm doing the thing on the screen and matching those up, those would definitely be for you. So definitely look at those. The client service peer I've been talking to you about throughout this session, USAC's customer service, that's their 800 number, 888-203-8100. Also within Epic, the contact us link, there's where you can send an email type request to them. And then lots of information and all those pranks and everything on the main USAC website. It's not just for logging in, it's for getting information about the E-Rate program. And of course, my contact information. As I said, I am your state E-Rate coordinator for public libraries. I am here to help you get through this process. I've spent over 10 years helping libraries, holding their hands, whatever needs to be done. Call, email me, reach out to me for anything, any questions you may have about doing your application. And I just wanna show you here also quickly, this is the E-Rate website that I have for on the library commission page, Nebraska.gov slash E-Rate. Basic information about the program, links to other information, links to the training, the USAC's training they did this fall, there are other videos and training information. Information about all the tools, the link to the Department of Education page for school lunch program information. So I try to give links out to anything that may be of use to you about each step in the form. Also the SIPA information I have here, types of filters you can do, information about it. And then if you're interested in what has been done in here in Nebraska, we started having libraries apply and receive E-Rate as far back in 1998, the first year that could be received. And we have lists here of every library and how much and what they've received it for. So you're wondering where you are on here or where some of your colleagues may have applied, what they may have received, you'll find it on our lists here. All right, so that wraps it up for our workshop today. Does anybody have any last minute desperate questions you'd like to ask me about before we do end things? Step into your questions section. I know there's a lot of information to give, but hopefully it was useful to you to at least go through the whole process. They said the recording will be available in a bit. It's gonna take some time to go through any editing that needs to be done, but you'll be able to re-watch it and look at anything else you might want to on the E-Rate website for more help. Oh, it doesn't look anybody has any questions you want now. That's fine. Call email me if you do and get out there and apply for your E-Rate and get your funding. Good luck.