 Okay. Hello, and welcome to the Nebraska Library Commission's workshop, E-Rate. What's new for 2024? I am, for those of you that don't know me, I am Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director at the Nebraska Library Commission. And one of my duties as Library Development Director, well, one of my duties here at the Commission since 2009, I've also served as the State E-Rate Coordinator for Public Libraries in Nebraska. That means I handle all training and resources and hand-holding and making sure that our public libraries get their E-Rate discounts. On to the end of today's webinar, the webinar is going to go for three hours approximately. We will take a break halfway through, so it'll be a small five-minute break for everyone. If you do have any questions or comments or anything throughout the workshop, type into the questions section of the GoToWebinar interface. I've got that open here. There we go. And I will grab all of your questions from there. We will, some of you may have done E-Rate before. Some of you may, it's maybe brand new to you. That's okay. This will be a really in-depth look into E-Rate and how to do it. So if you are new to E-Rate, you'll learn all the basics, everything you need to know about it. See some of the forms live. Go through the entire process from beginning to end. If you have done E-Rate before, this will be a good refresher. It's always good. You all don't do this. You folks do this once a year sometimes. So it is hard to remember how everything goes. And there are some new things this year, some new features in the E-Rate system and improvements, I would even say, that you would want to be aware of. So there'll be a little something here for everybody. So don't hesitate to put your questions and every questions in every think of them. I want to make sure I cover everything that you want to know, everything you need to know. Answer any questions, concerns, anything you're confused about. I want to know. So use that questions section anytime you think of something. And I will keep an eye on it and answer the questions when it works out. Yeah. All right. So let's get into it today. What is E-Rate? I'm going to read the description here to start off with. E-Rate is a federal program quote to ensure that schools and libraries can obtain high speed internet access at affordable rates and keep students and library patrons connected to broadband by providing a discount on eligible services and equipment. So what does that mean? Well, the E-Rate program was first graded, was graded out of the Technology Communications Act of 1996. So it's been around for over 25 years. And it is funding that is given to schools and libraries to get you cheaper internet. So your monthly internet costs, you can get a discount on any construction to bring internet to your library, you can get a discount on and any equipment that's the services and equipment that you might need in your library, routers, switches, modems, all of that, that you might need to make the internet service work in your building. So it's all about getting internet service and bringing it to the building and making it work inside the building. That is the purpose of E-Rate, getting discounts to our school, our public libraries and our schools. The funding for this comes from the universal service fee. This is a fee that we all pay into and all of our telecommunications providers pay into. If you look at your phone bills or internet bills, there may be some, you know, with all those different taxes and things you have. There will be something called the USF fee. It might say universal service, might even sometimes say E-Rate. And we all pay into this huge pot of money that is billions of dollars that is then divided up among schools and libraries that apply for the discounts. The E-Rate program is run by the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC. They oversee the entire program, set the rules, policies, so they tell, they decide what the basics are, how it's going to work every year. And they created a not-for-profit company, the universal service administrative company called USAC, who handles the day-to-day running of the program. USAC is who you'll hear me talk about mostly as we're going through this, that USAC will contact you. We, USAC will do this or that. That's who's in charge of the program. USAC also runs other programs that help get internet access to other areas. There's one for healthcare facilities, one for low-income people, and one for high-cost areas. But E-Rate is the schools and libraries program, SLD, and that is this part of USAC that is for all of our schools and libraries to receive this discount. E-Rate runs on a funding year, so when, which goes from July 1st of every year of a year to June 30th of the next year. So it starts in the middle of the year and goes to the middle of the next year. So when you are applying for E-Rate right now, the process is open right now for next year, you are looking into the future. You're always thinking about what, getting a discount on services that you'll be getting next year. So it's not for something today, getting a discount on this month's bills. You can't do it retroactively for previous months or previous years. You're looking to the future. So funding year 2024 is what you are applying for right now if you apply this fall and that would give you your discounts from July 1st 2024 through June 30th 2025. Currently we are in the 2023 funding year which people applied for last year for 2023 into 2024. So throughout the funding year there are various things that happen at different activities that happen at certain times of the funding year. Before the funding year starts you do what's called competitive bidding where you are reaching out, letting the service providers know you're looking for discounts on your internet service or equipment and you apply for those discounts. At the beginning of the funding year that July 1st services start and your discounts start and then during the funding year and after depending on how you do it is what's called invoicing where you actually receive the funding. You may receive it throughout the year as a discount on your bills or you may pay your bills in full and then after the funding years over request reimbursement and we're going to go through all of this and I'm going to show you how to do all of this throughout the workshop today. So who is eligible to apply for ERH? The FCC rules state that whoever libraries and library systems must be eligible for to receive library service and technology act funds that's LSTA. This is funding that comes from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and here in Nebraska and then they have designated the state library agencies as the one to decide what this means in each state. So it varies from state to state what being eligible for LSTA funds and then being eligible for ERH means. Here in Nebraska, here through the Nebraska Library Commission, we provide many resources and services that are funded with LSTA funding and because you all use those services, we consider all legally established public libraries in Nebraska eligible for ERH because you receive the services and resources from us that is paid with that money. So you don't have to directly receive the LSTA funds. You just receive a service or resource that is funded by it. You do need to be a legally established public library. This also now includes tribal libraries that I'll explain in a minute too. Schools and school districts are also eligible to also and do apply. They are their applications are done through the Nebraska the Nebraska Department of Education handles that as a big group application. So as I said at the beginning, I am the state ERH coordinator for public libraries. So I help our libraries and libraries our public libraries do this. Department of Education helps the schools. However, the process is the same for both pretty much. There's only a few small things that are different. So if you're interested in learning just about the whole ERH process, whether you're a school or a library, this workshop is perfectly fine for you. Tribal libraries were added in 2022. The FCC changed the definition of library in the rules and so tribal libraries are a little different as far as how they meet the criteria to be as with the rate. They have their own rules designated by the set by the FCC. So it has to have been a tribal library that's a designated by a tribal council have regularly scheduled hours that they're open have staff that work there. And they have materials of some sort that library users can use, whether it's things they can check out, things they can use in the library, whatever. So those are what would be the requirements for a tribal library as opposed to a public library, which has to be just legally established and receiving the LSGA funds, resources and services through the library commission. College libraries are not eligible for this. This is only for tribal libraries that are more similar to a public library. Now, the first thing I tell libraries we're interested in ERH to do is to figure out how much of a discount you could get. Find out if it is worth your time and energy to go through the ERH process. As I mentioned earlier, it reruns in a funding year. There are things you do throughout the year. There are multiple forms to submit to submit at certain times through the year. So you're going to be doing something regularly for this as an ongoing process, not every day, three or four times a year, but it is an ongoing thing you have to do and you have to do it every year. So you need to find out, am I going to get big enough discount to make this worthwhile for me? Once you do figure out this discount, you can then share it with anyone who may be wondering why you're doing it, confused thing. What's the point? You're a library board, you're city administrators, anyone in the community who's wondering why you're spending so much time on doing this. The ERH discounts are based on two things and the discounts range from you can get anywhere from 20% to 90% off. Most libraries in Nebraska fall between 60 and 80% off of their ERH discount. I think the average this year was 73%. May be remembering off my head. And this is calculated and is based on the national school lunch program numbers. This is the free and reduced lunches that the children get in the school district in which your library is located. The FCC chose this as the criteria. They needed something that was an indicator of poverty and there's lots of different ways you can do this, but this is what they picked. And also because ERH is about giving discounts to schools where lots of children are and libraries where lots of children are kind of made sense. So this is just what they've decided. Just use this as their benchmark. And this is specifically for the school district in geographically where your library sits. So your school district, whatever your library sits at. Now, you may be having, you may have students that come in, you may have children that come into your library from other school districts and that's fine. You can give them, provide them with services and all, but as far as ERH is concerned for doing this calculation, they only look at the numbers from the school districts where your school district, where your library physically is. And something also to be noticed here, this is the percentage of students that are eligible for the program not that apply. So this is not look at any actual applications. There's no personal private information that is given to ERH or to anyone. It's all that all you know is this many children are enrolled in the school district and this many children are eligible. And what is the, what percentage is that? Pre-K cannot be included in the calculation, just kindergarten through 12th grade. And then you take, once you have that number, you then combine that with whether the location of the library is considered urban or rural based on U.S. census data. So where do you get all these numbers? Where do you get all this information? Well, luckily for us here in Nebraska, the Nebraska Department of Education posts this on their website. They have a page where they have lots of different reports, and this is the URL for that. And I'll mention that while we're here right now. These slides will be given to you after the presentation, after the workshop is over. So you will have access to all these links. They're also on our Nebraska Library Commission e-rate webpage. So don't try and scribble down these long URLs or anything right now. You'll have all of this available to you afterwards. But on that website, there's a bunch of different reports. If you scroll a couple of tables down, there is one that is a national school lunch data for Nebraska, for all Nebraska school districts. It's a spreadsheet that opens up, has multiple pages in it. One page is each individual school and their numbers. But the one that you want to go to look at because it's easier is there's a tab now for districts altogether. Because you need the numbers for the school district you're in for all the schools together. So if there's an elementary, middle, and high school, you need to add up all those numbers. And thankfully, the Department of Education has done that for you. So you look at the districts tab, find your school district, and it will tell you how many kids are enrolled, how many are eligible for the school lunch program and what that percentage is. Then you figure out if you're urban or rural, there is information on the USAC website about that. And this is now has been updated to the most recent U.S. census data. So it is based on 2020 census data, the most recent census we have. Urban areas have populations equal to or greater than 25,000. And rural is everything else. Here in Nebraska, as we know, most of our area is rural then, which is good because it's for some levels that make your discount rate higher being rural. Once you have those two items, then you go to USAC's discount matrix to determine your discount. This is on the USAC website and I have it right here. So you can see there is urban discount, rural discount. And there's category one and category two and we're going to get into explaining that next. There's two different types of services you can get e-rate discount on. So if you look here at the percentage of students eligible, if you even have less, just half of your children are eligible, but only 50%, you get an 80% discount on your e-rate eligible services. That's a lot. If you have less, you can get just 50% off in urban area if you only have 20% of the children eligible for the school lunch program. So this is pretty huge. I think getting half off on your internet bills, that's amazing. Getting half off on the cost of equipment, construction, yeah. So like I said, I say do this first, find out what your discount rate is to decide if it is worth your time, is it worth getting 50, 60, 70, 80% off on your internet services to go through the e-rate process. So the eligible services list tells you what you can get e-rate discounts on. So what is e-rateable? The FCC publishes this eligible services list every year. So you will want to look and make sure when you are looking to apply for e-rate that you are looking at the upcoming years list. It usually comes out in the early fall. It's available now for 2024 on their website. And they've got all the previous lists as well there because sometimes people are still working on older applications and wrapping things up. So make sure you look at the current one. They do update it every year. They pay attention to new technologies, new things they might need to cover. It's not too long. I think it's maybe 15 or 20 pages now. I haven't counted lately. Not too hard to read through. Pretty basic. But do take a look at it every year just to make sure if anything has changed. But it is broken into two categories. Category one and category two. Category one is for everything bringing internet service to the library building. And category two is to make that internet service work inside the building. And so I've done a little graphic here on the right that I put together here. This little brick wall here that indicates the wall of your library. And so category one is your internet service. So the actual monthly service that you pay for and any construction you might need to bring new fiber internet to your building because that's outside the building. Once you have that internet connection, you need equipment to make it work. Switches, servers, racks, modems, routers, wireless access points, et cetera. All of that is category two. So you can receive a discount on purchasing and updating any of this equipment. What is not eligible is the actual devices that you would then use the internet that would use the internet. So your computers in the library, laptops, phones, wireless devices, any devices that people bring into the library to connect to your internet. So e-rate is about the service itself. Getting the service and making the service work. The devices you use are not what you can get an e-rate discount on. So category one brings high speed connectivity to the building. Category two makes it work throughout the building. For category one, there's no limit and how much funding you can request. It's just how much does your internet service cost. You get your percentage discount off on it. For category two, it works a little differently and I'm going to explain in a few slides about category two budgets. They give you a certain amount of money that you can spend on equipment each year. So category one is basically anything that can get high speed internet service, high speed broadband to your library. And this is just some examples. Cable modem DSL, fiber, wireless satellite, T1, etc. Wireless is referring to wireless internet to your building, not the wireless that you do within the building. That's your wireless access points that's in category two. Just to explain that a little bit. So really any sort of digital transmission and internet access service that can bring it to your building is in category one. I want to explain a little more. I'm going to go a little dig a little deeper here into fiber. There is lit and dark fiber out there. Lit fiber is fiber that's already out there. Service provider has it and you can just say, hey, I want to use that and you connect into it. Dark fiber is fiber that has been laid out, laid in areas but has not been turned on yet. When companies were putting in fiber connections, digging trenches, putting them in, they put in more than they needed at the time, knowing, hopefully knowing, that in the future there would be a higher demand and they might need to turn on more fiber strands, but they didn't want to do construction again. So there was some dark fiber that's out there. I've heard that there's not as much anymore because they're all getting turned on and new fires being put out. But just in case when you do an e-ray application and you say, I want to look for fiber, the system does require that you do ask for both dark and lit at the same time just to cover all your bases. You don't want to limit yourself to just saying lit when there might be some dark fiber somewhere that could be turned on. Now, to bring fiber to your library, you may need to have construction done. And there is a special category in category one called special construction, which is the cost for bringing the fiber to your building. There may be fiber that came to the edge of town or to the next town over, but it isn't to your community app or to your library building yet it's elsewhere in town. Under category one, you can apply for an e-ray discount on the cost to bring that connection to your library building. And this would cover the actual construction itself, any planning, project management design, whatever needs to be done to make it happen. Now, the FCC and USAC knows that construction projects like this can't always happen when you want them to happen. And you want construction to be done before the funding year starts in July 1st so that as of July 1st, you have that fiber connection already and you're getting fiber right from the beginning of a funding year and getting your discount on it. So you can actually do this construction before the funding year starts. Usually, everything has to, that you get an e-ray discount has to fall within the funding year that you're applying for. This special case construction can be done as early as January 1st of a year. So the first six months of the year all the construction can happen and then as of July 1st, you've got your fiber and you've got your discount. Another program that e-ray put together related to special construction is state matching funds. This is something that about 23, 24 other states have already done and this is additional funding that e-ray will provide an additional discount to libraries if a state helps cover some of the costs that normally the library would be responsible for. So for example, you have a construction project that is being done, you get your e-ray discount of 50, 60, whatever percent, but you or your community is still responsible for the rest of the cost, e-ray will help cover some of that. They will do an additional 10% above what your basic e-ray calculation is if a state is providing also funds to cover to help cover some of those costs. And we have that now in Nebraska starting. This came out of the Broadband Task Force that was put together in 2017 to 2019. We have a special construction state matching fund program. It's NUSF 117 is the order for it. The money actually comes through the Nebraska Public Service Commission. The Public Service Commission in Nebraska handles Nebraska's universal service. We have our own universal service program locally to get discounts to similar healthcare facilities and whatnot in Nebraska. So they budgeted out of this task force. It was put to the legislature and they were given $1 million to use over a four-year period to start with from 2021 through to the 2024 funding year to do new fibrous construction to libraries and schools that didn't have it. So this is only for new fiber if you don't have it already. So it started in 2020, which as we all know is when the COVID-19 pandemic started. So our timing was a little off there, not the best. As soon as the pandemic started, as you all know, lots of service providers started doing, we all needed, we all started working from home, going to school from home for quite a while, and internet was increased everywhere. And they've been since then more and more money, billions and billions of dollars being thrown at doing new internet connections in fiber from the federal government and state governments. So this program did not get as much activity as we had hoped. Before the pandemic, it was going to be, yeah, we're going to go through this, it's going to be great, we're going to so many libraries and schools connected. Most schools are already fiber connected, there's only a few that aren't, but we're going to get our libraries. We only used maybe 20,000-ish of that money. So this year, the commission put a new order in to modify the program. And it was approved. So as October, they officially approved it and has been extended until further notice. So there's no longer going to end in 2024. It's going to go until either we run out of money or everyone, all libraries have fiber. And it removed the 10% cap on state support. In the original program, you'd get your discount, the state would do 10% and then you would do 10%. And some, depending on what your original discount is, the library would still be responsible for some part of it. And the reason we are expanding this, extending the program and still doing it, is that we know here from the library commission, we do a public library survey and we've done actual, some reaching out personally to libraries. You know, there's about 100 libraries in the state who still do not have fiber internet. And we want to get them connected. There are many ways you can do this, as we know. But this is one way that we would definitely encourage you to look out, look and do. There's the URL there to go to the website on the public service commission page to learn more about it. Let's get into the more details of it. So as far as the funding goes in the math, for example, if you received a bid, and I don't know if these numbers are correct, I know they're out there, but it's good just for demonstration purposes. You said you want to do construction and bring fiber to your library. It's a $100,000 project and you have a 50% rate discount. So rate will cover 50,000 of that and 50,000 still needs to be paid. E-rate will match up to 10% of whatever the project is, so 10,000 towards it. And now the state matching fund and public service commission will cover the remaining 40%. So there will be zero cost to the library. So starting with 2024, if a library wants to do special construction, the actual construction of bringing the internet to your library building will be at no cost to you or your community. That's huge. We know some libraries could even afford that extra bit and now you will not have to. So this is definitely something to look into. So just in the math here, $100,000 project, 50,000 from E-rate, 10,000 from an additional 10,000 from E-rate because the state is going, they know the states can be providing some sort of a funding, 40,000 from state. So how do you apply for this? You do have to go through the basic E-rate process, which I'm going to get into. You do the first form of the process, which is the 470, where you say we want to do special construction. You have bids come in, you pick who you want to go with, which company and what they're going to do. Then you submit an application, a separate application, to the public service commission asking for their funding to cover that extra cost. You will include a copy of your 470 and whatever the bid or the quote that you receive from the company. The deadline to do this is December 31st of this year. So this is something you need to get on right away. There is a rule in E-rate that once you do your first step form in the process and have a competitive bidding process, you have to wait 28 days to make your choice. You have to allow vendors, that meant much amount of time, 28 days is what was designated by the FCC. So this is something you need to jump on very quickly if you do want to do it. However, I will say, every year we've done this, we have had libraries who didn't make it by the December 31st deadline and that's okay. The public service commission is very flexible with this and we just reach out to them and let them know, hey, we know some libraries are working on it still. Can you give them an extension or, you know, let you know they're going to be the applications coming in some time in January, if that's okay. And they've always said yes, yes, no problem, just we'll keep it open. So we'll not hard close on December 31st, but we definitely recommend getting it involved, looking at it right away. After you submit your application form to the public service commission, then you wait to hear back from them. They will reply to you with an email that will have a letter attached, letting you know if you've been approved or not for the funding. And it'll come sometime in January usually. And then when you do the second form of the process, which is the 471, which is where you let E-rate know which service provider you have selected and who you are going with, what you're going to get from them, then you include that letter with your application. And then USAC knows that when they do your E-rate discount, that they will have to do their additional 10%. And then that because the state, this is how you notify them that the state is also doing the state matching fund program. So this is something that'd be very good for your community. This is something that your community can be the one that brings fiber to, that you, the library is the one that brings fiber to the community. We have heard from libraries across the state oftentimes saying, you know, we've explained this program to them that's been available since 2020. And they say, oh yeah, well, our provider says it's coming. We're getting fiber, we're getting fiber. And here we are two or three years later and they still don't have it. If they had gone into special construction, that would have initiated the construction project bringing the fiber to the community. So you can be the one that helps bring fiber to your community if it's not there yet. It is a major construction project, however, so you do need, this isn't something you just do on your own as a library. You do need to work with your municipality, talk them of that. They have rules about doing request for proposals or accepting quotes and accepting bids, anything like that. You need to talk to someone for approval before you're allowed to do an RFP for a major construction project like this is going to happen in your town. You might need to talk to the city administrator, attorney, your mayor, definitely make sure your library board knows what's going on. Anyone who might need to be talking to about this. So reach out to people, start talking to them. This is, as I said, this is a program that's been going on for a few years. We do workshops specifically on special construction. We did them earlier this year before this, before this general e-rate workshop. So the recordings are out there. We have slides, so if you want to know a lot more about special construction, let me know. We can get you that information. As far as I know, we did email to all the libraries who don't have fiber a link to the recording of the special construction webinars and the slides for that. So everyone should have received it. But if we miss someone, let us know. If you are interested as well, reach out to us here at the commission. You may have heard of or been working with Holly Wolt. She's retiring as of December 1st, so she is going to no longer be at the commission. And now we will be working with Sam Shaw is handling it now and Andrew Sherman, who is almost a year, been here, our new IT person. So Andrew Sherman would be your point person to talk about this. Myself helping you with the e-rate part, Sherm helping you with special construction, RFPs, what equipment you might need to update all of that information. So if you're interested, reach out to us and we will help guide you. We're working with some libraries already this year on getting special construction done. So that is all of your category one. The re-eligible, your monthly internet cost and this special construction. Category two is your internal connections. This would be anything that you need, anything, all that physical equipment inside your building that you need to make the internet service work. Wireless access points, cables, firewalls, networks, switches, routers, racks, pyro supplies. So you may have a network closet somewhere in your library. It may look nice and neat like this picture here that I found and all the wires all kibbled up or it may be a mess. Who knows. But all of this equipment, the racks that the actual racks that they come and sit on is what you can receive an e-rate discount on. In addition, any upgrades you need to do, software licenses you need to pay, any of that is also eligible as well. So not just the pieces of equipment, but making sure they are up to date. Category two is very important because you could get your internet speed increased. You can upgrade to fiber if you want to, but if you don't have the equipment, the physical equipment that can handle that speed, you're not actually getting that speed to your computers. So it will slow it down at that equipment. We have had, do a speed test on your computers. We recommend to make sure that whatever internet speed you're paying for is actually making it to the computer. And if it's not, there's something physical in between there, this stuff, that it can only handle a certain speed and you will need to update it. Category two, internet can help you do that. In addition to the actual equipment itself, you do need to do maintenance of it, actually updating the, you know, keeping the equipment up to date. You're going to have to do system updates, updating the pieces themselves, repairs. If a squirrel gets in the wall and chooses your cabling, you're going to have to run new cave, have new running, cabling run. So all of this ongoing maintenance is also something it's called basic maintenance of your internal connections, BMIC, that you can get an e-rate discount on. This is something that is maintenance services. You can have a contract for them. If you have a subscription that you pay for over multiple years, like you contracted with your service provider or someone in town, you would need to split that up into each funding year. You don't apply for the whole three years all at once. You do one, you divide it by three and do part each year. And it's also for only actual work performed under the contract. When they have to come and do something, that's what you can then apply for and receive a discount on. But this is something you definitely want to add if you're getting any sort of equipment. So miscellaneous things that could, that you would also want to receive an e-rate discount as all those taxes and fees and surcharges that you pay on your bills. So when you tell e-rate your receipt, you want to get a discount on something, you tell them how much it costs. So don't just tell them the main, the actual just the cost of the service, add in all those taxes and fees too because you can get a discount on all of that. And you, even the discount on the universal service fee that you pay in, you can get a discount on that kind of weird cyclical thing. But it is, it's how it works. So any of those extra fees, any shipping charges from an equipment ship to you, training, training related to having to train any staff to make the network work, installation of all of this equipment as well, installation of anything category one or category two, all of that can be included as well. Now, for many libraries, many small libraries, this is a lot to figure out. What do I even have? What equipment do I have? Do I need to update it? How do I even know what I have? Well, we have some resources that can help you with this. Well, we didn't create it, but the Torda Gigabit Libraries Toolkit, Hollywood was involved with the development of this. It is, it was funded, it's a free online resource funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And it's, it's for anyone can use it, but it's specifically designed for your small rural tribal libraries who do not have their own IT person. You don't have a, a shirm at your library or in your town. This is something you can do. And it's really great. It guides you through these questions that are really nice, really simple, and they're specifically written for people who don't have an IT background and don't know anything. It will guide you through doing an inventory of everything you have and give you some, a plan for how, what might need improving and updating. So we have a link to this on our use, on our e-rate website through the library commission. So you can get to that and use it there. Also reach out to shirm. He is doing technology inventories for libraries now too, related to the special construction projects program if you're going to do that. But just in general, he can, he will, this is what he does for libraries now here. So if you want to contact shirm, there is his email there, and he will either come to your library into a site visit, or he will have you take pictures of your equipment, you know, the model number, whatever, serial numbers and whatnot, and send them to him so he can tell you figure out what you have and what you might need to update. So I mentioned earlier that category two and category, category one and category two handle their discount and you're receiving your funding slightly differently. Category one, it's just how much does it cost? Take that percentage off. Category two works a little differently and it's done with what's called the category two budget. I find that I, when I first learned, when they first started doing this, I was a little confused by this whole budget because it sounds, when you get down to it, it's kind of a budget, but then it's part of the budget. And I'll explain what that means then as I go through this. So what category two is, USAC has calculated a budget of five-year budget for all categories products, category two products and services. So over a five-year period, you have this amount of money to spend on all those equipment purchases and an installation and whatever for them. Right now, we're in the 2021 through 2025 five-year budget. So we have funding to use over those five years. In 2026, it will start with a new budget cycle, with a new budget. This would be every five years. Of course, they look at inflation and what things cost and assumingly, they would increase the budget in 2026. But right now we're in the current one. You can receive discounts on the cost of any category two services, up to whatever your library's budget amount is. And I'm going to tell you in just a second here how that's calculated. You are not limited to only buying that much though. You can purchase whatever you want, but you only get a discount on up to whatever your budget is. So for example, if you have to buy, you know, $20,000 worth of equipment and your budget is $10,000, you just get a discount on half of it, on half the cost. This budget is also tracked in your e-rate account. All e-rate program forms and everything is done in an online account that you have. And they track you to the calculator for you. So they say, here's your starting budget. And they just subtract what it is each year. If you've used it and then you can know, right, so you don't have to keep track and do the math yourself. Your budget is determined when you do the first time you do a category two application and that second form in the process, the 471. So if you haven't ever done a category two yet, you don't have a budget yet. You got to wait until the first time you ask for something. So what is your budget? For the current five-year cycle going through the 2025 funding year, it is for libraries, it is based on the size of your library building, the total area and square feet of your building. All floors, everything enclosed by the walls and occupied by the library. So you may know this. Some people, you may have submitted it on your public library survey. If not, you can look at blueprints or contact the city or somebody and say, hey, what's our total area and square feet of the library building? All floors and everything. And then you take that number and you multiply it by $4.50. That's the multiplier for this five-year cycle. When the next five-year cycle comes up, that'll probably be changed to something else. However, there is a minimum budget of 25,000 for everyone. That's a minimum everybody just gets 25,000 as their budget. So if your library is smaller than 5,556 square feet, you just get 25,000. If it's larger than that, you do the actual math and then you figure out what your budget is. Now, if the size of your library building changes during the five-year cycle, that's okay. You can just request a replacement budget. If you've built a new library building, and so the building's a different size, you put on an addition to the library, expanded it or something, moved to a different building that's a different size, you just reach out to USAC and you request a change and then they will change the square feet of your library and redo the calculation if necessary. So here is an example in math. Your library is 3,500 square feet, 3,500 times $4.50 is $15,750, but there is that 25,000 minimum. So since the calculation is less than 25,000, your pre-discount budget is 25,000. And this is where things got a little confusing for me. Pre-discount. So your pre-discount budget, you still have to use your e-rate discount in category two and apply it to this. So it says your budget is 25,000, but you have a 50% discount rate. The library, you will actually have 12,500 from e-rate to spend. So similar to category one, where e-rate will cover 50% of the cost of something, e-rate will cover 50% of your budget. So your budget is 25, your e-rate will cover 50%. So they now have in your e-rate account $12,500 showing of money you can spend. And as you buy things through and apply for them through category two through e-rate, they deduct it from that $12,500 until either it's gone or the five years is up. Now during that five-year period, you can use it however you want each year. You can do it all at once, like if you're maybe building a new building or adding a new updating your computer lab or adding a computer lab, you could use it all up in one year. And that's fine. You just don't have a category two funds to receive e-rate discounts on for the rest of the five-year cycle. Or you can split it up a little bit each year. I know some libraries are doing where one year we're going to update our switches and just that. And then next year we're going to update our routers. And the next year we're going to update the cabling. So a little bit at a time. You can use it however it works best for you. All right. Okay, so does anybody have any questions just yet? What are your questions? I want to pause here before I go any further and see. Does anybody have questions about e-rate what it is, discounts, what's eligible, what's not eligible, special construction, budgets, anything like that. Type into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface. I'm monitoring that here. And I want to make sure I get all of your, like I said, I want to make sure everything gets answered and as well as I can today before we wrap things up. I can't see if you're typing. So hold on just a second here. Nothing coming in? All right. We will move on. Oh, another thing that you need to be aware of related to e-rate is SIPA and filtering. Many of you libraries may be doing this already and it's a thing, not a problem. But for anyone who is not, this is something that is required. Being in compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act is required to receive actually any federal funding now. So it's not just for e-rate. So if you receive Library of Service and Technology Act funds, library improvement grants from us that deal with getting internet service to anyone, you have to be in compliance with SIPA. And this is where it gets to having filters on the computers that you are, you have in your library. So for e-rate purposes, internet access, your Kegri one and all those internal connections, all that equipment that you buy to make your internet work, you have to be in compliance with SIPA. SIPA is something that can be controversial to some people. We have people who think that is very important. And the only thing is that it's so important to protect the children. And the purpose of SIPA is protect minors from harmful things on the internet, harmful depictions on the internet. So the people that say, yes, filter everything, block it, protect the children all the way to the other extreme where, other end of the spectrum where people say it is imposing on freedom of information and its censorship and I just won't do it and everything in between. And that's fine. Here, what we are talking about for e-rate purposes is complying with SIPA to receive your e-rate funding. So I'm not going to get into whether it's a good thing or a bad thing or whatnot. I'm just going to explain what it is and how you can be in compliance with it and to receive then receive your e-rate funding. What I think is a good thing about SIPA is it is very short written act. There's not much to it. If you print it out and read it, it's maybe 12 to 14 pages long and it's very vaguely, very vague, which is a good tune. There is not a lot of detail. It does not say this is the list of websites you might block. It does not say here are the internet filters you must use. It just says you have to block certain things and you have to have a filter. So it actually requires three specific things. You must have an internet safety policy. Excuse me. You may already have something like this. It says this is what you can and can't do on the internet. Don't do anything illegal. Don't hack our computers. That type of thing. You must have a technology protection measure. That's the filter itself. This can be either a software product that you purchase and install on each workstation in your library, something that's at your network level, something that comes down from your internet service provider. And this filter has to be on all computers in the library, not just the children's computers. The SIPA states the filter must be on its computers in the library. So this includes adult use computers and staff computers. However, there is also a clause in SIPA that states it needs to be able to be turned off for adults who need to do bona fide research. This would be adults working at the library or adults using their computers for adult purposes, their own purposes. So you do need to install filter on every computer in some way, but you can then turn it off on any computers that you want to, that you are in compliance. You also have to have had a public notice and some sort of a meeting or hearing about it. This would be a one-time thing. You have it as an agenda item on your library board meeting at some point, letting people know, hey, we're doing filtering now. We're going to open it up for discussion. If anyone wants to talk to us about it, here's the service or product we're using. You just do that once and keep track of that that you had that meeting. You don't have to do that regularly. So to explain a little bit about how the filter needs to work, specifically SIPA states that you must filter, you must protect minors from visual depictions of anything that be harmful to minors is the exact wording. Now, as far as I know, unless something has changed very recently, we do not have technology that can really do that yet, visual depictions. We do not have technology that can accurately and consistently tell the difference between this is a woman in a flesh-colored dress and this is a woman who's actually naked. So we use other things. We have these service, the companies who provide filtering have blacklists and whitelists, websites they know and it's their job to keep track of which ones are good and bad. They, so certain URLs, certain words are blocked and this is things that you can always adjust as well. If you discover that something is being blocked incorrectly, like this filter blocks the word breast, but it's also now blocking breast cancer websites, that's something you'd have to adjust and you can do that. You also have different levels of filtering available, sometimes strong, medium, low strength, all these different varying criteria. SIPA does not specify at what level you need to be filtering at or what words or things you need to filter. It just says, you must, as I said, the wording is visual depictions and we just have to work with that as best we can. So if you are worried about blocking too many things and you don't like that, you can install a filter and put it at the lowest level possible where it hardly blocks anything and you're in compliance with SIPA or you can make it as high as you want to and you can make it different on each computer in your library and don't forget you can turn it off on certain computers too for adults. So I think any library could get a filter and use it and correctly and appropriately for both protecting the children and allowing adults to do what they need to. There is information about SIPA on the USEC website as well, I've given the URL there. Now a question I get a lot is, I need, can you give me some examples or I need to know what filters I could use. We have information on our URI website, but just this summer, SHRM, we love SHRM, has started a new program here through the library commission where we are now providing offering a DNS filter to Nebraska public libraries for free at no cost. We have budget approved for this and so any legal established, any library, any public library in the state can reach out to SHRM and he will set up for you a DNS filter and he will monitor it and assist, help you with the implementation of it and keep track of it for you. So if you do not have a filter or if you are not sure if you like the one you have or you want to try something new, we are covering the expense entirely for all libraries in the state who need one. There is a URL there for our, his website about it, so look there about how to apply or just contact SHRM and let him know, hey, we want to know about this. Something we also recommend, check your current filter, make sure it is actually working. SHRM has discovered that many libraries who have a filter and assumed it was doing what it is supposed to and they do a little test search on some bad terms or looking at bad websites, it is not actually blocking what it should be and it is not configured correctly or it is not installed, even though you think you have not installed, you want to make sure you double check this. So check your current filter if you have one and make sure it is working and figure that out. If you do not have one or if you want to try something different, reach out to SHRM and he will help you get up set up with our free DNS filter. Right, so don't forget, type in any questions you may have with anything about anything whenever you think of it. I want to make sure I answer if anything is a little too confusing to you, am I going too fast? We got a lot to get through so I have to go at a certain speed, but I want to make sure that everyone understands what I am talking about here today. So next we are going to talk about all of the e-rate forms that you have to use to apply for e-rate. As I said, this is an ongoing process throughout the year, excuse me, and there are different forms that you submit at certain times of the year. So these are the basic forms in the e-rate process and we are going to go into a lot more detail about all of them. This is just my general overview of them. The first three forms everybody has to submit. The last form in blue there, it depends on how you receive your discount. And then the form underneath there, the 498, that's a one-time form. So the four across the top are the ones that you do cyclically every year to go through the e-rate process annually. The first form, your 470, this is opening up your competing bidding process, letting service providers know you want to receive an e-rate on something. Then you wait and hear from them, wait that 28 days, then you submit your 471, when you pick your service provider, let USAC know here's who we've chosen and what they're going to give us. Then that's when USAC reviews your applications. Once they, if they approve your application, then you give, send me the 46 saying, great, thanks, we want to receive it and we're starting to receive our services. We want the e-rate funding. And then the final option there is invoicing USAC where you say, I want to receive, tell how you want to receive your discount. You can receive either a discount on your bills as you receive them from the service provider automatically. In that case, the service provider submits the 474 form, where they receive the money from USAC and they give you a discount. Or if you want to pay your bills in full, then get reimbursed afterwards. You, as the applicant in the library, submit the 472 form. And then the money goes to you instead of the service provider. So your service provider always gets paid, no matter which way it's done, either with the, they're giving you a discount on your bills, they get reimbursed from USAC, or they get paid in full from you and then you get reimbursed from USAC. That's your two choices for, they call invoicing. In order to do that second form there, the 472, and for your library to receive the funding, you have to do a one-time form, the 498, where you give them your banking information. It's done as a direct deposit, a direct payment. So like a direct deposit that you get for your paychecks and you do that 472, 498 one-time to give them your banking information. And then every time you submit a 472 after that, they have that info. And we are going to get into the details of how to do all of these forms in the second half of the workshop today. So USAC does have a document retention policy, where you must retain copies of any e-rate paperwork for 10 years. After the last date of service. Last date of service is the end of your funding year. So for the upcoming year, what you're applying for right now, 2024 funding year, you would need to keep everything through June 30th, 2035, 10 years from now. Now this would include not just paperwork and document forms you submit this year, but anything from previous years that relates to this year. So if you signed a contract back in 2020 and it's just for ongoing services, that contract applies to the 2024 internet service you're receiving. You've got to keep that contract for the 10 years of the 2024 year. So that 2020 contract, you may be keeping for a lot longer than 10 years from its initiation date, because it's based on the funding year that it relates to. You do not have to keep piles and piles of paper though, like this scary picture I have here. It can be paper if you want to, if you want files or binders or whatever, but you can keep it electronically. Everything is done online, as I said an online system, but you can download your forms and PDFs, you can scan things, all the communication from USAC comes in email, so you're going to have that as email attachments and PDFs and spreadsheets. You can keep it in whatever an electronic format. So create a folder in your computer that's for each e-rate year, put it on a flash drive, whatever works for you. You just may need to be able to access a particular document from a particular year if USAC asks. They do do what they call audits, and it doesn't mean an audit like an IRS audit where Omenol you did something wrong. It's a checks and balances thing. They do random audits just to see is the program working, does everybody understand it, did they get all their forms submitted correctly, you know we got to make sure, you know, we have people who have to answer too about this. So if they do reach out to you, you have to be able to find that contract from 2020 that relates to my 2024 e-rate application and show it to them if they want to see it at some point. So the kind of things you need to keep is all the forms you've submitted, all the letters you've received back from USAC, any other correspondence you've had with USAC or PIA is their program integrity assurance area who handles evaluating your applications, copies of bids, contracts, receipts, correspondence with service providers, the decision making process you went through when you picked a service provider, all of your SIPA documentation you must keep. And there's a URL there for more information about that on the USAC website. Now as far as your FCC forms and everything between you and USAC, they do keep all that in your online account as well. So they say we will always have that here for you to access. But if you want your own local copy, I do recommend downloading on anything that you can from there. If you need to look at something and their system is down or your internet is down and you can't get to it, it's good to have a local copy. So as I said, all e-rate work is done online through their e-rate portal Epic. EPC is the acronym for the e-rate productivity center, which they call Epic. I don't know how epic it is, but it's working pretty well. So that is how it's pronounced. Epic. It is the one-stop shopping for all of your e-rate program activities. This is where you submit all of your forms, where e-rate USAC reaches out to you with questions or notifications are sent in their reminders. You can ask USAC questions, everything back and forth between you and USAC is all done entirely online in your e-rate productivity center in your Epic account. They do recommend that you use only Chrome or Firefox browsers, this is important. If you use Internet Explorer or Safari or something else that's out there, they can't guarantee that your forms are actually being submitted and certified and processing through the system correctly. We have had that happen before where someone had used Internet Explorer, thought they submitted a form, turns out they didn't, so they missed deadlines and whatnot. So Chrome or Firefox is what you need to use. That is the URL for the main USAC website and specifically the e-rate page on it, so usac.org. Now, how do you log into your Epic account? If you are new to e-rate, you've never done it before, USAC will create an account for your organization, for your library, and then they need to identify some particular person who will be the account administrator. This is the person who is in charge of making sure the account is up to date and correct, they are responsible for that, and they may be also responsible for submitting all of the e-rate applications and doing all the communication with USAC. You can have more than one person in your account too, you just need one person to be in charge of being the main contact, but you can have additional users if you want to. There are different levels of permissions that you can give to different users as well, so a full user can complete all the forms, certify them, certify as USAC e-rate terminology for submitting the form, updating information about the library, dealing with all the USAC communications. Partial users can complete forms, but can't actually certify and submit them. This is if maybe you have one person that will fill out all the info, but then the director has to double-check and is authorized to hit the submit button, and then view only can just look at everything in there if they want to. Here in Nebraska, most of our libraries is just a single person in charge, generally it's a library director, might be an assistant director, or a staff person they've designated as, hey, you, you're in charge of e-rate, it's all on you. So most of our libraries, I think, I think 90, I went 9%, there's just a single person and they are in charge of it all and they are the account administrator. If your library already has an EPIC account, most of our, many of our libraries have them, don't realize it and that's okay, you can just, we can find out if you have one already, if you're not sure, if you're going to be new to e-rate and then we can get whoever is the staff person is going to be in charge, set up, USAC, you can contact them and to get a person set up to be the account administrator. So this is, so I'm going to go through now actually going into your, an EPIC account to show you how this all works. So we're all doing this all on screenshots. I did not want to do any, you know, worry about actually being connected live to something and if something go wrong. So I've got all these screenshots here in the presentation for you. So as I said, you go to usac.org slash e-rate and you have, this is the main screen for e-rate and there's actually two sign in buttons, the blue buttons, one at the top and over on the left, they both go to the same thing. They both go into your EPIC account. This is just when you get on the main page, but when you get any of the other pages or links off of e-rate, that blue button at the top floats along the top. So you can always sign in from anywhere you are on the e-rate website. So when you click on that, the first screen you get is this screen, which looks like it's something with like terms and conditions and whatnot, but it's actually instructions about how to log in and authentication and using the dashboard and it's, it can be confusing to people who are using e-rate regularly. I wish they were to be more clear about part of this and then explain what I mean here now. Right in the middle, there are these eight steps that say, click continue button and click the forgot password button, reset your password, sign in, verify, which gives the impression that this is how you have to log in every time you use the EPIC system. That is not true. This is you only have to do the forgot password if it's your very first time logging in. That's why I added that red box at the top there. If it's your first time, you have to pretend that you've forgotten your password. When you are a new user to EPIC, USAC creates a library account, sets you up as the administrator using your email address, but then it's up to you to create your own password. They don't have a create my account feature. They have you use the forgot password feature, which many of us have done over the years. I know I've done it many, many times, but I've forgotten a password to some site to then create so that you pretend you forgot your password to create your password for the first time. That's what these instructions are, the very first time you use it. After you've done that, you get to ignore that and you just say, yep, I'm already done. I just ignore that. I just click continue and log in using user name I have and the password I created. Too many times I have had libraries who I say, okay, let's get you logged in. They say, okay, hang on. I got to change my password because I got to do the forgot password thing every time I log in. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You do not have to do that. Please don't do that. You're wasting a lot of your own time and it's painfully for me when people say that, but this is very confusing, I think, and that is why. So, forgot password on the very first time. Now, your passwords do expire. That is something about every 90 days, but the system will prompt you when it's time to create a new one and just give you a little box to do here. Just create your new password. Not go and do forget password again. No, you should only have to do forgot password the very, very, very first time you've ever used Epic or if you've actually forgotten your password, then you would do that. But as far as just regular daily logging in, ignore that, click continue. Whenever the system prompts you to create a new password, do that. But, so, what we are going to do now is I am going to go to the process to show you how to do this for the first time. So, if you have never, don't have an Epic account. So, if you click continue, you get where you type in your username and password. Now, username is your email address, whatever email address you've given to USAC for yourself. So, you click that forgot password link and then it's asked you to enter your username and reset by email. So, put in your email address and reset. Then it will send you an email that says USAC password reset. You've received these emails before with a link to go and change your, to create your password. It is, does expire in one hour, so you got to do it pretty quickly. Once you do that, then when you come back to this screen, you don't have to do forgot password anymore. That's why I put that big red X there. You just click continue and enter the username and password that you created. You do have to click this box now to accept these terms and conditions and then sign in. But, there's a second step. USAC or the Epic system does now do multi-factor authentication. This is where they will send you a code, a second code as its extra level of security. You've probably done this before where you get code sent to your cell phone to get into your email or something. I know I have to do that or to get into different systems. Same kind of thing. So, your email address is already prefilled in there. You just say, send me the email and then it opens up and says, okay, enter the password, pass code you've been sent. So, you pop over to your email, find this new email that says one-time verification code is the subject of the email and there's a six-digit code that you use. This is only good for 10 minutes. So, one-time thing to use this. I recommend, and this is what I do myself, once you've used this code, immediately I go back to my email and delete this email. Can never use this one again. I've also had some libraries say, oh, well, this one's not working. Let me try an old email that I got. No, no, no. These expire after 10 minutes. So, I recommend just delete these as soon as you use the code. So, we took this code, type it in to our pass code and verify. And now, our second step, we are in our epic account. We're on our dashboard here. Okay. And there are two gray boxes in the center of the page here. The bottom one is for the Emergency Connectivity Fund. This was a temporary program that was enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic where schools and libraries could apply to receive hotspots and devices to get interned for students and users who needed to use the internet off site, outside of the library and away from the school. That program is wrapped up. You can no longer apply for it, but they are still processing through invoices and things. So, it's still there. So, what you want is to do is just the e-rate productivity center at the top box. They're epic. So, you click anywhere on the gray box, you will go into your applicant landing page. Now, I know this is really hard to see. That's okay. I'm going to zoom into different parts of the page here, but I want to show you what your whole landing page looks like. So, this is your main page for doing everything in Epic. There are some menu items across the top. A few of those we'll talk about. Some other menu items in a group up here on the upper right. You can look up inquiries from USAC, notifications, information about your entity if you submitted any customer service cases, cases asking questions, and we can look up all of your e-rate forms at the bottom here. I want to zoom in here to my entity information to talk about your entity number. This is also called your build entity number, or BEND, B-E-N, for build entity number. This is like a social security number for a person, but it's a number associated with your library. As soon as your library is set up as an organization, as an entity in Epic and the e-rate system, they are assigned a number. That lives with the library for as long as it's in the system. If new staff come and go, that's always the same. This is something that USAC will reference oftentimes when they're talking to you, so that's something to be aware of, and that's where you can find it right there on your landing page. At the bottom of the page is where you can look up any of your FCC forms that you have submitted since the system has been used. Epic has started using Epic in 2016, so going back to 2016, everything is in here. I get this question asked a lot too. Did I submit the form this year? Did I do my 470? Did I do my 471? I want to look at last year's 470, so I can just duplicate it for this year. Well, you can all do that right here yourself. You can search for all the different forms, excuse me, sorry, 471, 46, and then you can choose what funding year you want to look for. Here I've done, looked up what 470s did I submit in 2021. I've got two forms, and over here on the right, there's a status incomplete or certified. Certified means it has been submitted and USEC has received it, so if you see that, then you know, yes, I did do my 470. Incomplete is a form that you may have started, but you haven't finished, and that's something to keep an eye on too, to make sure that anything that's incomplete, you either finish submitting it if you were still working on it, or you go in and discard the form and get it out of your system so it's not there, and I'll show you about that in a minute here. On the top of your screen, at the top of your page here, I told you there's this blue bar, there is on the upper left there a news item, news item, which you'll see lots of times in e-rate instructions, new second instructions that says this will appear in your news, in your entity's news. However, this news link at the top here brings you to a page that has the news, which is all the notifications and emails from USEC for every library, every entity, every applicant, all the schools and libraries, everybody. This is all public infos, I mean this is your account that you log into, but it is out there publicly when these forms are posted for service providers to see, so it's got everyone's. You can search it, but it's really clunky. The way to get to your library's news items is from your landing page, I zoomed in here to the top. Click on your library's name here, right underneath the universal service administrative company logo with those blue boxes it says welcome and your library name. Click on your library name and now you're in your organization account where you can do a whole bunch of different things here, change things, look at your discount rate, there's your category two budget where you can look it up, et cetera, et cetera, but click on news here and then you just get your library's news items. Only the notifications about forms you submitted, notifications about things USAC has sent to you. The second item up at the top here is your tasks. This is things that you are working on in the middle of working on and this is where in that search where we did, when it said the 470 was incomplete, that's because it's still sitting here and you haven't finished it. Now the screenshot, this first one it says I submitted something that's ready for certification, that's different, but in this here I have create FCC form 471, this means I've started an application but I haven't finished it yet, it's still here under tasks and other things they need you to do will appear in here as well. This is important and it's also, I say this too often and I hate it, but it's another confusing feature of the Epic system. If you have something in here that you've created and you haven't finished it, it's incomplete, the system is prompted to send you an email every now and then reminding you, hey you still have this open there, you didn't finish this form, might want to go and look at it. However, the wording on it is confusing, as you can see here it says create FCC form 471, which to many people means, oh it's telling me it's time to create my 471. Unfortunately that's not what it means, the system doesn't tell you when it's time, it means you've created it and you need to go back and see if you want to finish it. This is the email that you'll get as well that says new tasks, create FCC form 471. And it says it was assigned to you and others on whatever date. It wasn't assigned by USAC, it was kind of assigned by yourself because you started the form. So if you start getting these emails and you know, no I did my 471 and you do a search and you find out, yep there's the certified one done, go in, discard this form and I'll show you that button when we get right to our 471 just in a minute here. Discard the form, get rid of it so you can stop yourself from receiving these emails. I get this question a lot as well. What are these emails about? Why do I keep getting them? How do I stop them? No problem just go in, delete the form that you started and didn't finish yet. So also from anywhere on the site you can get to your information specifically about you as the user. Up in the upper right here there's this head select. You click on that you can get to your profile information. So there's the organization's information that you got to by clicking on the library name. This is where you get to your personal information for you as the user. It's also where you can sign out of the system when you're done at any time. So this goes to this page here, my Epic user profile. We're right here in the middle there's this nice edit profile button. However at the bottom there's this red notice that says please use the manage epic user profile action located in the top right. Don't use the edit profile button under the user picture. This edit profile button actually just opens up a small screen that says here's what's in your profile. It doesn't actually work. They have this other button instead. I don't know why. I don't know. It's just always been this way. So click on manage your epic user profile and then as you can see here you have fields that you can change. Now you cannot change your username, your email address. That is the only thing you cannot make a change here. You can see that it lets you change the name, phone number, address, director or title, all of that. So if your username is your email address that's locked in. If you end up with a different user email address that you need to change to, you change to in the urate system, you need to create a second user profile and switch over to that one. Or if you have a new staff person comes in, if you have a new director coming in, old director is retiring and leaving a new director coming in. Depending on how your email addresses are handled this may be perfectly fine for you. If it is you have like a generic email of you know so-and-so public library at city.gov and it's always so-and-so public library and just the name of the person using it changes this will be fine. You just pop in here, change the name from the current library director to the new library director, submit it, save it, it's all the same email address. Perfect. However, if you do emails that are based on your name so it's Jane Smith at library.gov and then that's going to be you know Sally Jones at library.gov then you're going to have to create a new account for the new person and then hand over that administrator control because someone has to be in charge of it all. And I'll show you here how you can do that. Go back to your landing page, always start everything on the landing page, manage users you choose from up here and then you have to select your library which seems weird because you're the only organ-ling listed there. This is of course in this system is built to handle both independent libraries like this or but also library systems with multiple branches, schools, school districts with multiple locations. They would all be listed here and you have to choose the appropriate location. We're just doing this as a single independent library which all of our, almost all of our public libraries are. You see here you can create a new user or add and remove existing users and manage user permissions if you need to. So we're going to create a new user for this situation where we're saying I have a new person who has a different email address and they need to be made the administrator of this account now. So now you see here you can enter the person's information, job title, email address, and the address of the library. When you, and you see it says here so-and-so's email address will be used as a username for the new account. When you create this that email will be sent, that person will be sent an email saying hey an account has been set, a user account has been set up for you in the library's epic system. Please go choose your password, get yourself set up. Excuse me a minute here, sorry. All right and below this you can see there's the user permissions. So for this new person you can also decide what kind of rights they will have. Now if you are setting this person up to be the new account administrator you would give them full rights for everything most likely because you want them to be able to do everything. But you can pick and choose different forms, different things that they can or can't do depending on the situation. You can do an apply all or you can do they get everything all at once or you can do it one at a time. Now once you have this account set up and they've created their password then you have to go and hand over the account administrator control. Now I know in some situations this will work that there is either transition period between an old director and a new director or a new person doing it and you can go ahead and do this and that's great. You can plan ahead you know who the new person is and you can create an account for them and he never control and it's all good. But I also know this isn't going to work for everyone. There are times when the director leaves and there's a lag and a break before a new person comes in. There also may be the director leaves and didn't leave passwords behind. You don't even know how to get into the library's account. That's all okay. You just reach out to USAC directly and say hey I'm the new person. I don't have access to the previous account. They'll get some documentation, some proof from you and then whoever the new person is can be set up to be the account administrator and run the e-rate account. So if you have to do that, that's your situation do that. But if you're able to do a handover like this, this is how you would do it. In this case we went to, we clicked on the library's name on the landing page and we got into that and I zoomed in here. Over here on the upper right there's the, you know, click this button here with the three dots and it opens up a whole bunch of other things you can do. And we want to modify account administrator and we're going to do general contact. You want to change both of those from the old person to the new person. So you can see here it says this allows you to transfer the account administrator function to another individual. So we do account administrator and this is something I had to do. So this is the example I put in here. I had to do this for myself when I got married and I changed my name and my email address changed. So my old email address, Christa Burns at Nebraska.gov, was going to be turned off by the state of Nebraska because it was no longer my email address, no longer my name. So I needed to create a second account for myself in the commission, library commission's e-rate account and change handover account administrator from myself to myself, but one email address to another one because email address is your username and that's logged in, locked in. So I unchecked it from my Burns, which is my maiden name and checked it to Porter, Porter, which is my married name. Continue. It says current account administrators. This email is going to be this one and then you submit and it makes a change and then just do the same thing, the general contact. Uncheck the old one, check the new one. That's going to be changed as well. So depending on your situation and what's going on, either call USAC or you do this yourself. Now there is a particular period of time when you can make changes to the library's profile information and your profile information. It's called the Epic Administrative Window. It's only a certain period of time and eventually it will close. It's open right now. It opened October 24th and it will close right before you can submit your 471 application, which it will be sometime in January. So if you're not sure what's in your going on in your account, you want to double check everything, now is the time to do it. This is the reason that it closes. There's certain when you have to eventually stop making changes, is there certain data, the student counts, doing calculating discounts. This all has to be locked in and not be able to be changed after you've submitted your 471 form. So they have to stop people from making changes. Up to a point you have to get your information in there and then it's just what's got to, what has to be used. So you want to look at your library's info, who the administrator is, verify everything is correct. Also you want to make sure that square footage is correct if you ever are thinking about doing category two. So just you might not even know if you're going to or not, but just to play it safe, make sure that that is correct. To do this on the main landing page, you click on manage organizations right next to manage users. Same thing, you select your library and manage organization. And now you can see here all the different things feels that you can change about your library. So if library name changes or the address changes because it moves, you can update all of that. Latitude and longitude is just some old holy hell over in this system that we don't use. Your urban or rural status is here. If you think it's wrong, you can change that. Now this is a really long page, so I'm going to be jumping down to each section in it and these screenshots. So below this in the middle of the page is where you can decide if the mailing address is the same as a physical, give other contact info if you want to. Library information, choosing your library subtype and main branch is important that you do this. Make sure that you are correctly set up as a public or private library. As I said, I handle public, so most of you are going to be public. And anything else that applies to you, are you tribal library? Do you have a bookmobile, a kiosk? Is that you're building something new? In addition to just being public, make sure even if you're just a single individual library, which most of our libraries except for a couple are, designate yourself as the main branch. That is something you need to do. You are the only branch, but you're also the main branch. Make sure that's checked off. Are you part of a library system? Here in Nebraska, that will answer will always be no. We do not have library systems the way that E-Ray is thinking of it. Library systems in this case are where there's like a central office that runs all the libraries in a system. So it's not like, you know, Lincoln City libraries has branches. It's different individual libraries in different towns, but there's a main system that runs them all. We don't do that here in Nebraska, so you're not ever going to be part of a library system. Yes, we do have regional library systems as they are called, but they are not this kind of system. They are just out there, you know, extension of the library commission to help you with trading and resources and whatnot. Below this is the bottom part of the page, and this is where you put in your square footage. So if you're ever thinking about doing category two, go in here into your organization's info and make sure that square footage number is correct and update it whenever it changes. Also where you can see what you, they have associated as your school district, make sure that's correct. You can do a search here of school districts if you want to. FCC registration number is a number that you need to have as well. This is something you can look up. We have links in our website. It's just a number for doing business with the FCC. And then submit and that will update all of that. All right, let's take a pause here. What questions do you have so far? I think this is where we're going to take a break in just a minute here, and because the next half of the workshop is going to be talking again into the details of all the forms. So I want to know what questions do you have right now related to anything I've covered so far? Anything about E-Rate? Anything I haven't mentioned yet that you're wondering about? I want to know. Type into the question section, let me know. Is there anything I haven't mentioned? Anything that is confusing to you that you'd like some more explanation on? Anything you'd like me to go back and show you again? Mark Selene, more about anything? What questions do you have now? Let's get some of those answered before we get into the second half of the workshop and the forms themselves. So please type into the question section. All right, I think, yeah, we are exactly about halfway through the workshop today. So we're going to take a five-seven-minute break here so you can get up, stretch, hit the restroom, refresh your drink, whatever you need to do, and we will come back at, it's a little after 11, it's 11.02, 3 by my clock here. Come back at 10 after, 11, 10 after 11 central time. And then we will go on to the second half of the workshop where we will be getting into, there it goes, all of the forms, more details about all of the forms. So we'll come back at 10 after. If you think of any questions while we're on break, please go ahead and type into the questions section there. I will answer them when we come back. So I'll see you all in about five, seven minutes. Okay, so we are back. So the first form in the e-rate process is the 470. This form is available now. It actually goes live on July 1st every year, so it has been available since July. But most, well, libraries can submit at any time. Most wait, most Nebraska wait till sometime in the fall to get into doing it, because you're still wrapping up the previous year. And generally, there's not a huge rush to do it, but in the fall. And the form 470 is where you describe and request services. This is where you are officially opening up a competitive bidding process. And I'm going to explain what all that means. And the form is to notify potential bidders, which is your service providers, of what kind of, what's e-rate eligible things you want to receive a discount on. It's going to be your monthly internet costs, your equipment, construction, whatever. So you're just saying, hey, we're looking for somebody to provide us with this service. It is, it can serve as an RFP or a request for a proposal on its own. You do not have to do an additional full document. However, if you have something major, a major construction project, building project, something more complex, you would definitely be doing an extra document. But it can stand as its own. You can submit more than one 470 if you want to do one for category one and category two at different times. It's perfectly fine. You can also do them combined all in one big form 470. I mentioned at the very beginning when we showed our first screen of all the different forms that everyone has to do the first three forms in the process. But there are a couple of exemptions for the 470 to very specific situations. First, if you are in the middle of a multi-year contract, so you have a contract as a specific beginning and end date, like a three-year, five-year contract, then you do not want to do a 470 when you're on the, like, for a three-year contract, the second or third year of that contract because it does open up a new bidding process where companies could reach out to you and say, hey, we want to provide you with a service. You're already in a contract with someone. You don't want to open up a new competitive bidding process while you're in that. You did that the first year of the contract. So for the subsequent years, you do not do a 470. You skip that process. You skip the opening it up. You jump to the second form in the process, the 471, where you let E-rate know that you still have the same contract with the same company. You still have to do that 471, the second form every year and pick it up at that point annually. You do not want to do a 470 during the years of your contract. In addition, there's this one situation that E-rate is encouraging for libraries and mainly for service providers. If you can find this situation, this speed at this price, then you don't have to go through a competitive bidding process. As far as the FCC and E-ra is concerned, you found a good deal. It's a great speed at a great price and there's no competition required. You can just say, yep, this is who we're going with. In this case, on your 471, there would be an option that says we did not do a 470 and here's why. So this would be if you find a business class internet access where the cost monthly is $300 or less and you get at least 100 megabits per second speed downstream. This also has to be publicly commercially available, something that anyone could get, not some sort of special thing for you because you're doing internet with the service provider. So this is something when I first heard talking about it a few years ago, we didn't have 100 megabits per second common. Many people were saying, oh, well, we've got 75, but I don't know. Well, mention this to your service provider and this is the way I think the FCC wanted to encourage the service providers to offer the faster speeds at the good price. That's the whole purpose of E-rate, right? Good speed at a good price. And so this is very cost effective as far as the USAC is concerned. So if you just look for a service provider and if they offer this, you're good. You don't need to do any sort of competitive bidding and you get to skip the 470. This also can include installation charges if you get this new and any equipment that you need to update potentially to get this kind of service. So if you can find this deal, you get you and your service provider. It's a benefit for them as well. They don't have to compete against anyone else if they're already offering this 100 megabits per second at less than $300 a month. They don't have to worry about competition with any other service providers. You can just say, we're going with you and we're skipping to the 470 one. So there's the only two situations when you don't have to do the 470. Otherwise, this is how everyone starts off the E-rate process each year. So to do your 470, you start here from your landing page in the upper right section here. You see there's all your main forms are here that you can go to. So you click on form 470 and you start with your first page. Now, right here, as soon as you've done this, you immediately have a task assigned. So remember that email that you were getting, letting you know you started a form but hadn't finished it. Even if you haven't filled anything in here, you haven't entered a nickname, you haven't clicked save or anything. The system has already started creating the form. And even if you back out and say, oh wait, never mind. I'm just going to close my browser. I didn't really, I wasn't ready to do this yet or I got interrupted, whatever. It will start sending you notifications. There'll be a task in here. What do you do about that? You come here if you really didn't want to use this form and that's where you use your discard form button. Click discard form. It'll say, are you sure you want to discard this? You get rid of it. That will stop those email reminders from coming to you. But in this case, we are going to actually go through the process of submitting this form. Across the top, you will see this blue bar that will move along into each section of the form. So you can see as we're going where you are in the form. Right here, we've got our basic entity information, basic information about the library that fills right in automatically. And we can give it a nickname. Now, this is a free text field. You can type in whatever you want, just something to identify it for yourself. The form is going to be assigned an application number, but you could also give it a nickname to help you better rather than remembering this long code number to label it whatever you want. Here, I'm just doing FY 2024 470. It's my 470 for funding year 2024. And then I will save and continue. Save and share is not something you normally use. It's if you have a different, you are the person who can complete this form, but you can't submit it, so you need to send it to someone else to do that part. You would then share it to that person. Like I said, our library is Nebraska. Generally, don't do that. You're the person completing it. You're the one submitting it. So click save and continue to go on to the next page. And you can see now, up at the top here, the form has been assigned a number. This is the application number for the 470. That is something that USAC will refer to whenever they reach out to you. Here's the basic information about your library. It's a library, your single entity, your public, main branch, your build entity number. You can go back every step of the form you want to. Now you have a back button. You can discard the form at any point. As you can see, that discard form will always be there if you even decide halfway through. Wait, wait, this is totally wrong. Just delete it totally. We are going to save and continue. So our next section here is your consultant and contact information. Consultants, there are companies out there that you can pay to submit your application for you. This is generally used by large organizations like big library district, library systems or school districts that just don't have the staff to do it themselves or they have just such a really complex application with so many locations and things. You can hire a consulting firm to do this for you. I can help you do e-rate forms. I've got a consultant like this. You don't pay me to do this for you. I get my job to do this here for the state. So most likely you would not have one of those. And that is fine. But you do need to do contact person. You're the main contact person and you're going to say yes and it will automatically fill in your information here and then we'll save and continue. And this is where you can choose which category of service e-rate category you're going to apply for. You can do a form just category one by clicking on the category one button or you can do a 470 just for all your category two or you can do both by clicking both buttons. This example I'm going to do both so you can see how both of them work and then save and continue. If you have an RFP you can this is where you would upload that. So if you're going to do special construction you're going to have an RFP. We have a template that we can help you fill out and create for that or if you have one for yourself because you're doing construction or something this is where you would attach your RFP to this right off the bat. In this case I've said yes you can click here to upload and find it on your computer or just click and drag and drop the file there and there is an example one that I added and now it is available to be used for whichever services I look for and we save and continue. And then since we did upload an RFP we can decide right automatically is it going to apply to all category one services or all category two services. In this case I'm saying oh this is just an RFP about category two stuff it's just about the equipment that I want to purchase so I'm only going to have it automatically attached to any category two request that I make and save and continue. And now here's where we start telling them what we want to get an e-read discount on. So it says it's a service request is what we are creating and they're currently none because we haven't done it yet. So we click this blue button in the middle of the page add new service request and the forms have been updated a few years ago and I really like this with this kind of a hierarchy of menu of what you know we click one second one option and it will open up the next one and the next one so it guides you through it much easier than previous ones where you had to kind of you had to know what it was you were talking about this is as much more guided and it makes it so much easier. So you can seek bids for internet access or data transmission service at your basic monthly internet or network equipment or maintenance operations we're going to do our basic monthly internet first year so we check that box that circle and then you've got your options here of what kind of internet bids for internet access and data transmission service provide over any combination so fiber non fiber hybrid cable dsl cover satellite basically all any of the possible ways you can get internet then there is internet access without data transmission data transmission only and then building your own network I not going to do that. These two other situations items here one that we're going to look at to do dark fiber are mainly for like school districts that we have here in Nebraska they get their internet service and the actual sending the services to separate things it's a whole technical thing but for a month for you public libraries doing this that's not really going to apply to you you're just getting your basic fiber or internet from whoever cable dsl whatever satellite so we're going to choose the first choice and then you can do this where it says you want to do your basic service or do a data plan or air cards this is you would only doing air cards or data plan wireless adapters if you don't have good broadband in your location and this is a very special case if you don't have you know it's basically a cable modem fiber satellite whatever so if you know about air cards and know you're using one or using your data plan you'll know that that's the thing to use if you've never heard about that and it's just not familiar to you that's not what you have you're just doing basic internet so it's only very special cases that would you would do that and if you do choose that use that's going to ask you uh you need to explain that a little bit more about why you don't there's really there's just no internet provider just your your typical internet provider and down yeah so we're going to do the first one then internet access and data transmission service whether offered by a one provider as a bundled or more um that one and now this is where we give the details of who we are and what we're looking for quantity is number of internet connections number of entities serve is how many locations we have uh speed minimum maximum capacity is the speed we're looking for how many megabits or gigabits per second and then do you want to install and do you want to attach the rfp even though we didn't say it previously to automatically attach it we can still attach the rfp we've uploaded if you want to so i've entered here one quantity we only want one internet connection we're only one library and then i've done 25 megabits per second as minimum and one gig as maximum now um and where we want someone to install this activate it configure it if we do get something new potentially so as far as the speeds um your 470 is i think i'd always tell you dream big this is where you're thinking of trying to say here's all the things we possibly want it's like your wish list um when it comes to speed you want to make sure that whatever speed you ask for here the minimum maximum what you end up with is going to fall between them if it doesn't then you will get denied your e-rate application will be denied because you didn't allow for that speed so here i said 25 megabits is as a slow and one gig as high now we might end up with just 50 megabits per second or 100 megabits per second and that's fine but it falls between that if i said i wanted between like 10 and 25 megabits and where service provider comes along that says well we offer 100 you're not going to get your e-rate discount because you said we only wanted 50 you can get that 100 you can buy that pay for it but you don't get a rate because it wasn't within the the minimum maximum so think big when you're doing your 470 think you can even go higher than one gig actually on that but it's a pull down menu you can go up you know how high it goes 25 50 it's kind of crazy but um think big just to make sure whatever you get will fall in there also thinking big gives the providers to know hey you've got people that might want really faster internet so and we're not going to do that rfp because it's for our category two we are going to save the request all right and then now you see it starts a little table now of our what we're asking for for category one now to do we're going to now and it shows what we entered in there the speed entities quantity etc we also want to do one in this case i want to do one where i show you how to do that lit and dark fiber which you want to make sure you do that i'm just to cover all your bases like i said the 470 is putting out feelers kind of a fishing exhibition to see you know what's available so i want to add lit and dark fiber as well just to see so we're going to add another service request in this case i did the seeking bids for internet access the first choice but now i'm going to seek bids for date to purchase data transmission service only and my i can do service without internet but i want to lease dark fiber or lit and then this opens up it's very similar to only did the basic internet one quantity and i've already filled this one one internet one one connection we're one library in this case i opted to 25 gigs is the high so you never know what kind of fiber you can find out there the rfp got automatically attached that was automatically clicked there because of what we did earlier and then the number of entities at least dark is on the left lit as the right and then number of entities is the bottom here and then yes we would like somebody to install the fiber if we get it of course and then we'll save this request and now you see it's added to the table our least dark and lit fiber as well so we've covered all of our bases for any type of internet connection we could possibly get and this would also cover doing that construction the special construction this rfp here that gets attached to this would be the rfp for special construction that we put together now there is a little narrative box here you can use as well this is if you want to add any other details or if you want to just put something in here it is small it's a free text field that you can if you want to but it's not required and then there's an installment payment plan question if this is something you're going to be paying over time generally though these kind of things you just pay in full as you go so we're going to say no and we're going to save and continue because we've done all of our category one options that we want to so now it's going to pop us over to category two which looks exactly like category one at this point but once we get into it it's going to look different so now we're going to do our category two which is our equipment i'm going to add a new service request and it also has its own menu you can look uh get bids for equipment needed basic maintenance on the equipment or operation management and monitoring of your internal connections we're going to start with equipment so the actual pieces of equipment that we want and that's just going to have only a single option and then it gives us this big pull down menu where you can choose what pieces of equipment you want to get so you can see there's your cabling firewall racks router switches power access points etc etc so as i said earlier you can do category two you do everything in one year or you can do a little bit at a time so i could do this as we're just going to get some new routers this year so i can choose just routers and do a router request or i could say i want to do multiple things if you're going to do multiple things you're going to go through this adding a new service request over and out repeatedly for each of these items you can't you can't choose multiple here you know if you do control and click on something it'll select multiple things in a menu that's not how it works here but we would have to go through and do a service request for cabling then go through and do a second one for racks another one for routers another one for switches and just doing it over and over again if you're wanting to get multiple pieces of equipment this next year remember you're just thinking about the upcoming single year so my first example here i'm going to choose cabling i need some new cable to run in my new computer lab and this has a quantity and it says the units are feet i did a thousand feet i don't know if that's a good amount it's just a round number i guess i don't know how much you need uh then you can choose a manufacturer if you want to but you can say no i don't care whatever um you'll know here always if you open up this pulldown menu it will say a manufacturer's name is a huge list of all these different manufacturers but all say or equivalent um this is to give the service provider the option to use a different brand if necessary you know so you're submitting this form now the work's going to be done next um july they might find a different brand and you want to make sure that you have that as um you leave that option open if you limit it to only with the brand and they don't use it then you don't get your e-rape but you can't not do it or equivalent it's all my default so it's nice number of entities served i'm a single library yes i would like someone to install our cabling and our rfp was um automatically attached now i mentioned earlier that in addition to buying getting the equipment you can have basic maintenance that could work in upgrades and maintaining the equipment and they give you this great new feature where you can check this box to automatically create an accompanying category two basic maintenance of internal connections the m i c request to this internal connections request so just check that and automatically just duplicates everything for that you selected at the top at the bottom and that's all about the basic maintenance of it and when we save this one you'll see we it also started a table for our category twos with two options internal connections and the basic maintenance of the internal connections for our cables um and now if we want to do more pieces of equipment we just do that same process over and over again for each thing we want to do i'm not going to do that and show you how to do that over and over again here i just showed you it once showed you it once but i am going to show you what it looks like after you've done multiple ones so after we've added all of them now we have a longer table of all the different things we're thinking of purchasing this year in this case i do racks with its basic maintenance router that's basic maintenance um switches there it's basic maintenance and you see some of the information you ask for is a little differently the quantity i want a single rack a single router and three switches and so you also have a little narrative here if you wanted to use it but we attach our fp so that has all the information that anyone's going to need so that's all the equipment i'm thinking of purchasing in this next year because that's under category two so once i'm done adding all of those using that blue button over and over again to add new service requests then i save and continue to go on to the next page in the form and this is where you add technical contact person if you have one um if you don't have one you would just say no and just go on in the form but if you do it and if you say no then you as the main contact would be the one any service providers will contact with questions um if you'd help answering the questions you can always contact me or shirm and we can help you with technical issues and questions but if you do have someone on staff or someone in town who can help you with this and you want to designate them as don't call me call hit the call them you can do that um you can put them in as a user but unless you think a tech person has a reason to do anything with your e-rate forms i don't think that's necessary luckily they give you this feature to enter their details manually so you don't have to create them but they don't need a whole e-rate um epic account um you can just type in the information so i said yes we have a person we're going to enter it manually and i just typed in their name phone number and email address here and then we save and continue uh then it will ask are there any state or local procurement requirements or any rules that your um statewide we don't have any rules but if you're a local municipality has any you're going to want to um include that here you'd say yes you know like you're doing bids how they do that how they want you to accept bids or what kind of bids you can accept or any rules about procuring new services or uh construction or equipment or anything um but we're just going to say for our example so if you do have that you'd say yes and then link to it otherwise we're going to say we're just going to say no for this example and so that's the end of the information we're entering so now we go to review our form and when you click review what it does on the usax side and their servers they are creating a pdf of the form for you to look at and this can take a few minutes to do like a few minutes as in 30 seconds 90 seconds um end um so you do have to wait you can refresh this page if you want to and see if it's done when it is done a number will appear up here next to your tasks or if there's already a number here the number will increase so that's you keep an eye on once you do see that happen then you click on tasks as it says here when the form is ready a task will become available click on tasks and then you'll have a link that says for you to certify your 470 so we've entered all the information we still have to certify and actually submit it so we click on that and it will give us a link to download the pdf if you want to look at it um this is fine if you want to do that and double check all your work uh this is um not the for i said you can save these um after you submitted them you would not need want to save this one because this is just the draft after we've completed and submitted the form we'll have a new pdf that will be the first certified one and that will be the one that you'd want to save um you can see here there is a box to check saying that i certify the info and the pdf is correct and over on the right there's two certification buttons the send for certification that's that situation you have to send it to someone else to do the certification not you so you don't want to use that you would do continue to certification but you notice here it's kind of a light blue not the bright bright blue that we've been clicking on that's because we haven't checked the box yet certifying that the info is correct so just take a look at the pdf here so you can see what it looks like um it's just got the basic information that you everything that you entered in the form build entity info category one request category two request the technical contact all that um so if everything is correct you'd certify if you need to make any changes you've got this back button here you can always go back to any page in the application and fix something if you realize you made a mistake but we're going to say it is correct we check in the box to certify and then continue to certification notice now that we check the box that button goes bright blue and we can click on it it will confirm are you sure you want to certify yes and then this is all the legalese that you have to agree to feel free to read it if you want to um i'm just going to also and you'll see here all the boxes need to be checked and in the lower right the certify button is grayed out because we can't click on it yet because we haven't checked all the boxes it is zoomed in here we check every single box this is just all the legal rules and things you have to agree to as far as doing erate once you've checked all those boxes then the button will go bright blue and you can click on it and certify then it will pop with are you sure you want to certify and this is a scary fault statements may require may result in civil liability or criminal prosecution i'm going to assume you're all not trying to do anything illegal with erate and you just say so you'll say yes and then your task is gone and you're done you've submitted the form now uh we want to um so there you go first step done uh but you want to get a copy of that for your own records we go back to our landing page um anywhere you see this blue this logo for usac you can click on that i'll always bring you back to your landing page so we're going to go down to the bottom of the page where that says the fcc forms and post-commitment requests so we can look up our forms remember and i did 470 and 2024 and i've got a few options here one incomplete one i haven't done and two certified ones we'll get into that in a second here and remember the the application number for the one i just finished was the one that ended in 242 so i am going to click on the nickname for this one that's blue so it's a hotlink and then it shows me on the screen the html version of the whole form but if i want to get a nice pdf to download a pretty pdf there's a generated documents link up here at the top and the top of the form and then it pops over to the original version click on that and then there's a pdf of the final form looks similar to the draft one but it's got the information that we entered but at the very bottom it has the authorized person name and certified timestamp with the date and time when we actually submitted this form so this is the one that you'd want to then save or print out or do whatever you do to keep for your in your files like i said it will always be saved in the system you know we just looked it up in there but if you want a backup or something of your own i know many people like that and prefer that this is what you would download and save and once you've submitted your 470 you will receive a receipt notification this goes in your news feed your own library's news feed and it's a summary of what you did and this is where you can make some changes even after you've submitted your form there's any sort of clerical errors you've made or minor things you can make changes it has a feature to do that it's also tells you what is your allowable contract date this is an important date very important date it's the date that that's that 28 days you have to wait before you can do make your choice of who you're going to go with officially and submit your 471 this is very important you cannot jump or head and through your 471 early or make your choice or sign any contracts before that if you're doing any new contracts before that 28 days is up if you break that rule if you do it too soon you've broken the usac erate rules and you won't you'll be denied your erate discount this number this date is given to you right when you get your notification so this is in your news feed remember you click on your library's name on the main page click on news and then here is it says the bar 70 was successfully posted and then the allowable contract date is gives you the date so you know here the date when you can do the second go down to the second step in the erate process what's great to the system does is on that date they send you an email letting you know you've reached the date too so even even if you forget or don't remember what was the date I don't know is it too soon can I do it yet just wait till you get that email and actually email it go to your email address says you have reached the allowable count allowable contract date you can now go on to step two now I want to go back to when we did that search and we had three forms that we had seen that were in our results only a second one is certified as well so we've submitted two four seventies here however I've decided that that first one that I did was actually wrong that's why I did a second one there's a new feature just this year where you can cancel a certified 470 previously you just had to leave it out there and just kind of float it around doing nothing now you can cancel it officially yourself so if you go and click on the nickname for that one that we know is the old bad one and then go to related actions this is also where you can see I told you to make some minor changes to a form nickname contact person you can change those there but there's now I cancel this form 470 so as long as you haven't gone to the 471 and submitted that you can always cancel a 470 once you've done a 471 that links back and mentions this 470 you can't cancel it but we can still do that now they do want a reason they want to know why you canceling this one I said it's a duplicate and you could say whatever I made a mistake or change my mind whatever and then we say we are canceling on the blue button on the right are you sure you want to cancel yes and if we do a new search for 470s done in 2024 you now see we have three different ones one incomplete one certified and submitted and one canceled so um if you do do 470s and you need to do that um you have now that ability yourself like I said new this year once you have submitted your 470 that opens up they call the competitive bidding process which sounds very intimidating and scary but it's it's not in in practice no it's not so competitive bidding is the formal process to choose who what vendor you're going to go to and what services you are going to receive for e-rate as I said it must last at least 28 days from the date you do your 470 that's your level contract date so you have to have competitive bidding open 28 days before you make any choices during this 28 days service service providers will send you bids um you can look at the bids they may ask you questions you can answer their questions um for when you do the 470 service providers cannot be involved in writing that 470 and entering into that information so you can't like talk to them and say okay what do you have as a service let me put it here let's work together to make sure that I get your stuff in here and then I'll pick you that that's illegal working with them like that if you're not sure about what to pick that's why you've got us here at the commission myself shirm we can help you decide what you might need to be choosing but during this time period you can compare offers and then you would select the most cost-effective bid using price as the primary factor and I'll explain what that means next first you do you must have a fair and open bidding process where you treat all the vendors the same um if they ask you a question and it changes some something major about the application you need to make sure all the other vendors know um if you realize you need to do a new 470 because someone asked you a question you didn't realize oh I should have covered that that will restart your 28 days if you start do a second 470 you gotta remember things like that um and then you must choose what they call the cost most cost-effective bid with price as the primary factor not the only factor um now as we know in life choosing just the cheapest thing isn't always the best choice it doesn't always last as long you never know um but that's okay um there's other things other criteria you're going to use to make your decision as well um and if you do have a competent multiple bids that come in you will need to do some sort of comparison and review of all these bids now there's a chance that this won't happen at all there will be no competitive bidding because there's no competition because you only got one response or you know I only have one u8 provider or internet provider in town and they're the one who's going to give me the service and that's perfectly fine you might not have to go through competitive bidding at all you do have to go through the steps and the process of doing the 470 waiting the 28 days and then choosing the one vendor that you um have in town but if you do get multiple ones because we do have new companies popping up all the time new new companies spreading throughout the state to new new communities you may end up get with multiple um uh quotes and you will have to compare them to each other um and this here is a bid evaluation matrix that is an example of how you can compare them and it also explains how this whole um price as the um primary factor works so what I've done here is I've listed things that are important to me in making this choice deciding who who which service provider I will pick the cost of course do I do I know the vendor um what about other things they call they um give me or they will they discount my bills how are they are they environmentally conscious are they local or not and then you assign points to each each criteria the total up to 100 price being the primary factor meaning worth the most points but not like half the points it doesn't have to be like primary meaning 50% of it is based on that so in this case they can earn 30 points for price and then all the other points they can earn are less than that here I got three different uh quotes um and I total up what I thought about them and what I knew and this is all subjective um for you to decide well how many points you want to assign uh and you can see here vendor three has the most points however vendor two apparently was the cheapest earned a whole 30 points the the big place where they lost out here was on that prior experience this is obviously a new well this is potentially a new company you've never heard of she's like I don't know them do I want to pick them or you do know them and you know they're really bad bad customer service bad internet connections you've heard bad news about them and so you say no zero they don't earn anything and that's okay in this case even though vendor three was not cheapest other criteria matters as well and in the end they won um they earned the most points and it's okay to pick them as you are winning bid and that's who you go with um if you do have to do this you want to save this and keep record of what you did here and why you made all these choices and these decisions decisions because um someone can come back and ask well why did you pick vendor three or vendor two potentially vendor two may reach out to you or to usack and say hey we know we're cheapest how come they could shouldn't have picked vendor three this has got to be something something's got to be wrong here well you can show them here well I don't know this company or I know they're really bad company that's why they earn zero points on prior experience um and you just need to be able to show this if in case um other vendor you sack whoever um asks how did you make that choice so as I said if you have multiple quotes this is a way that you could do this and make a comparison if you only have one it doesn't matter so now there are some special cases the special situations you may encounter that may be uh you have questions about what if you have a current contract for um your service current internet contract and you want to start doing e-rate for the first time so you're in the middle of like a multi-year contract um or you have a current ongoing contract um that's okay you can do a form for 70 say we're looking for someone to provide the service you wait the same 20 days and then you use whatever is your current contract as one of your bids responses if you have other bids you compare it and if the one if that existing one is a winning bid then now that contract can be used to um get your e-rate so you don't have to always be starting a new contract um if you're brand new you don't have to like say okay I've got to wait till this contract's out and done before I can do it or I'm already on a like recurring contract we don't have to sign a new one every year but I want to do e-rate can I just jump in in the middle absolutely just like this um this is where that whole prior experience with a vendor in a comparison may come into play um and would help you to stick with that same you know to um stick with this current contract that you're in um but you do have to do a comparison if there are multiple um responses that you get what if the city pays for the library's internet and the library actually doesn't do it um you know there's a main internet connection to the city and it goes out to the town hall on the fire department and the library and whatever well that's fine you can use cost allocation and just receive an e-rate discount on the library's portion of the internet whatever part the library actually uses you may have actual statistics from the service provider showing which percentage is used by each building whoop perfect just then you when you submit your e-rate application um and you're 471 you say how much it costs you just put that amount in um or you can do an estimate if you know well we've got five things to connect divided by five this is our part um but you only apply for e-rate on what the library actually uses but you can do that what if you only get one bid or no bids that's okay as well like i said you don't actually have to have a competition um if you only have one bid just go with it and just write yourself a note we didn't get any other bids this is it um if you didn't get any bids you can and it is past your 28 days then you can reach out to vendors and say hey i did e-rate and i haven't heard from you can you please send me a quote um reach out to your current provider at a minimum anyways to confirm with them that they're still going to provide you with the same service at the same price then nothing's going to change um and uh have them send you just like some sort of an email confirmation thing saying oh yes i see they're doing e-rate and yes we will continue so after you have reached that allowable contract date you officially close the competitive bidding process now there's nowhere that you go where you like click a box on the e-rate website or in your account to turn off bidding or to stop receiving contracts or anything then that is not what you know i've had people ask that too there's no way to like close it that way um you just pick a date internally and say okay it's been 28 days and now as of this day we're going to sit down and make our choices and so you do um you pick you want to do if you need to use sign up a document or a contract and then you do a form 471 the second form of the process but only during a certain period of time there is what is called the 471 application filing window um there's only a few months during the beginning of a year when you can um where the 471 is actually open and available to be um um accessed and um filled completed and submitted so you do have to wait for that application filing window to open so you could have done your 470 a month ago made your choice but the window is not open yet so you just have to wait sit back and wait until the window opens to go ahead and do it if you try to do a 471 early it just will say no not ready yet uh any questions about the 471 or competitive bidding what questions do you have about that that i haven't covered is anything confusing any situations that you are in at your library that you're wondering about that i haven't covered type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface i'm monitoring that here all right the second form in the e-rate process is the 471 and this is where you tell usac um who you've chosen as your service provider and what services you're going to be receiving from them you have to do a 471 every year there is no way to get out of this one like there is those couple of uh exceptions in the for the 470 um this is also where you your discount calculation appears on this um and a tip your as i mentioned earlier about how your 470 is um your wish list your 470 and your 471 must match so whatever you put on your 471 you must have asked for on your 470 you can't come back now and say oh wait now my service provider says i need a new router let me add that on the 471 if you didn't already do a category two request for a for a router you have to think about that ahead of time if you're still before the deadline you can do a new 470 for a router wait the 28 days and then do that as a separate application yes but a 470 and a 471 that are related to each other have to match whatever you say you're getting on the 471 had to be asked for on the 470 at this point you can communicate with your service provider and you want to you want to make sure that whatever you're putting on your 471 is correct and accurate the prices are correct uh whatever uh equipment they're going to be providing you is correct um and you'll talk to them about how you want to do that last step the invoicing whether you want to receive discounts on your bills automatically or if you want to pay the bills in full and then you receive the apply for and get the discount so when do you submit this as we had already mentioned after the 28 days it's so important don't don't don't don't jump ahead after if necessary you sign a contract of some flirt and during the application filing window if you wait for that window to open up it usually is between mid january and mid march they have not announced the dates yet it will be announced in the usax december news brief um this is a monthly email that they send out that i highly recommend you subscribe to you sign up for and we've got a link on our website and um that you where you can do that uh and this just gives you reminders about things deadlines coming up tips and tricks um all sorts of things but it's only once a month so i definitely recommend that i will also announce it onto our e-rape mailing lists and on our website uh when they do announce what those dates are so you do have to wait for that filing window dates to be announced um this also answers the question that many people have as far as what is the deadline to submit a 470 each year how what is the last date that i can do a 470 well until we know the dates the filing window we don't know the specific dates of um deadline for the 470 because remember we got 28 days we have to wait before we can do a 471 so to figure out the deadline for our 470 the first form we take the end date of the filing window the last date you can possibly submit a 471 and back up 28 days that date is the deadline to submit the 471 the very last day you can possibly do it and still submit a 471 within the filing window uh so until we um these dates are announced we don't know the specifics um we can give a guesstimate though for years and years now they have um done it at the same time of year it bounced around a lot years ago but now it's usually mid january to mid march so most likely um if mid march mid end of march is going to be the the close of the filing window mid middle of february will be the deadline for doing a 470 so you can put that in your head right now if you want to it's like sometime in february is going to be the and most likely second half of february is most likely going to be the deadline the latest i can possibly do a 470 for e-rate for the 2024 funding year so for starting to get e-rate discounts starting in july of 2024 but keep your eyes open for the specific dates um when they do get announced later next month as i said earlier i mentioned earlier you do get an email to let you know when you've reached an allowable contract date when those 28 days has passed sounds like i mentioned these 20 days a lot and that's because it's very important uh do not jump the gun on that if you go if you do that there's a breaking a major e-rate rule you want to make sure you wait until those dates that date has passed but it will this is an email that go directly to your email address you don't have to like log in your epic account to find it it just says epic notification allowable contract date reach yay and it will say you now close you you may now close your competitive bidding process and go on to the second step which is the 471 um this notice also goes into your news section of your um your epic account as well but they do correctly send you that nice email now the 471 um access to it is right up there next to the 470 like i said right now it's not available so i can't do screenshots of i didn't i can't show how to go into that one or do it um but it is um pretty a pretty easy form you all your information is your 470 you repeated the 471 um but i will talk about the structure of it and how it works could it is um it can be a little confusing to some people so a 471 it is a it's different in multiple ways from the 470 it's a two-step process first of all um oh first of all you have to submit a separate 471 for each category of service category one and category two so your monthly internet and your construction and your category two for your equipment and everything related to the physical equipment um this is because the discount calculations are done differently for each one you know category one it's just a discount on whatever you're buying category two uses that budget you have to do a separate 471 for each category so if you have done a 470 that covers both category one and category two or you've done two 470s you've got to do two 471 so you're going to go through a 41 form 471 for all your category one things and then you're going to do a second one where you do just category two um and then once you are doing the 471 it's a two-step process to get all the information in there um you first create the funding request we created the service requests when we did a 470 now we have a funding request because we're saying here's the funding we want um and you choose whether it's for your internet access for your internal connections each piece of equipment and then you after you've created that you then have to go into that funding request and add what they call line items where you tell how much it's going to cost um and this is where people kind of lose it they get confused they get error messages it says we haven't done a line I don't think well I don't know why didn't I didn't have to do that in the first form right you don't if you and the the tip to knowing if you've done everything you need to is if you haven't entered a monetary amount tell them how much something costs you haven't finished doing your funding request and that's why you're getting errors so you'll create this funding request you'll get that little table like we saw on the 470 then you've got to click on that request and go into it and do more work to that funding request by adding in the actual cost that's what they call line item in the details um for all these forms I'll tell you right now too because you know this one does sound confusing lots of steps um I am here to help you do these forms if you need um and what I do with many libraries I can help you over the phone um step by step guide you through it or what I do more often is we'll do a session like this with go to webinar where I can you know I'm sharing my screen with you I'll have you share your screen with me and I can see exactly where you are in the form and tell you where to click and guide you through it it's much easier than trying to figure out you know over the phone where you are so I will set up a session with you and I will say click there click there upload this click there and I can take you step by step through every step of all the different e-rate forms so if you need assistance with doing your 470 right now reach out to me and we will set up a time that works and I can do that for you that's part of my job here to guide you through those forms so reach out to me if you need help and then when you get to your 471 and all your other forms the same thing after you submit the 471 you get a receipt acknowledgement um every time you submit an e-rate form you're going to see here they send you back a notice saying we got your form so there's always something that was back and forth you can also make minor changes if you need you to this if you realize you did something you know minor wrong major things you would do a new 471 you can request changes in the funding if you realize afterwards oh wait the cost is actually different but you can only reduce amounts not increase them if the price has changed as far as the service provider comes back to you and says oh actually it's this much and it's gone up you'd have to just do a whole new 471 and so this is just the notice in your news item news section the receipt acknowledgement letter acknowledging USAC has received form 471 after USAC has received your 471 then it goes into application review this is where they look over your application the PIA program integrity assurance section of USAC looks over your application and just um and sees if everything is correct this process can go on for months and months so you could submit you could submit your 471 in like January February March and not hear back from them until April May June July August September October a long time so this is where you just sit back and wait they will make sure everything's correct in the form nothing's done anything's eligible you did all you should they may reach out to you with questions if they do you will get an email saying you have an inquiry from USAC and you will then go into your epic account to answer that question if you need help answering those questions that's a good time to call me as well or contact me I can help translate your questions sometimes they get very very wordy I think I feel and again you can bog down and what they're explaining when the question was just like a small part of it so if you do receive a notification I am sometimes unfortunately I don't know why sometimes I'm copied on them and sometimes I'm not when they send you these requests if I do get copied and I notice it I will reach out to you proactively to say hey I saw this I looked at it here's what you're looking for but I don't always so if you don't hear from me and you want some help just reach out to me and I will help you answer any questions they have you have to make sure you do answer them they usually give you 14 days to respond so you have some time but you have to respond and get them their answers so they can have the full information they need to review your application after they are done doing this then you will receive your funding commitment decision letter this is what can take possibly months and months to receive and that's okay even no matter when you receive your funding commitment decision letter if it's an approval you will still get your funding back to the beginning of the funding year back to July 1st so even if you don't get this letter until September October September whatever that's just when they got to it there are so many applications they have it just take some time to get through all of them but you'll get your funding you'll get just going back to the beginning of the year so don't worry about that if you don't have the letter by July 1st just to be aware you might have to pay bills in full until this letter gets done and everything gets processed but you'll always get your credit back eventually but this letter will tell you if you've been funded or not or if they've given you reduced funding you might get more than one especially if you did multiple applications multiple like 470s or 471s you can file an appeal if you want to if you get denied I've helped libraries do that every now and then over the years so please let me know if you do get denied and feel like you want to do something like that and this is what that will look like it's an email that's sent to you so this is an email it says the funding commitment letter is available and it's actually attached so this isn't something where you go into your epic account to look at it it's actually attachment there's a spreadsheet and there's a pdf that you can then we'll open up and look at and this tells you what your next steps are working with your service provider reviewing your zipper requirements submitting your and filing your 486 the next form in the process and then your invoicing form so it tells you exactly what you need to do next steps here in the email and in the letter itself so this is the pdf this is one for a big school district obviously they got $51,000 here and there's the next steps on this letter here telling you what to do information about appeal if you want to and then the details of everything that was that you are going to be receiving so after you do your for after you receive your funding commitments that letter after you receive your funding commitment decision letter the next form you do is your 46 and you should do this immediately there is no waiting period there's no time you have to there's no like you have to wait a certain number of days there's nobody you have to wait for to tell you something to do you can immediately as soon as you get that letter that notification should sit down that same day or the next day and do your 486 and this is where a lot of people lose it in the process as in they forget to do the next step because you got a letter that says hey you've received your funding you've been approved and you say yay great I did it however you haven't they haven't actually given you the money yet what that actually means is we've approved your application the money set aside now you have to let us know if you that you still they want the money and that the services will be coming because and why would you not want it well situations can change you know you submitted this application back in you know January or February and now it's November there may be you know things have changed service provider may have changed prices drastically you can't afford it anymore they may have decided under the goodness of their heart to just give internet to free for everybody you never know what may have happened fiber may have been run to your city while you were going through all this process and you no longer need to do special construction all sorts of things to happen but you do have to so if you do want it then you do the 46 and it's also the form that most many people forget to do but it's also one of the easiest forms because all the information is already in there you don't have to enter anything new it's all the 471 is all you've you've given you sec all the info they've just approved what you said to them and now you're just doing here and you're just confirming yep yep this is what we're getting um and it's also where you do your SIPA compliance you check the box saying yes we are in compliance with SIPA so to get your 46 it's up here in the upper right as well and I'm going to show parts of this form here same thing as the 470 and the 471 of phrase six they all start the same with giving it a nickname you're going to choose the funding year that you're applying for choose your con you as a contact person and then it's going to ask you to it's going to be these searches that you can do but if you just scroll down a little bit on your screen you'll see because we said it was for that particular funding year here the funding request we had put on our 471 and you can see their status over here they've both been funded meaning they've been approved because we got that letter so we want to move these from here's the our funding request floating around up here to be we want to select them there's a selected section at the bottom so you check in the box in front of one click the add button and it pops it down and selected we could also do the second one too if you wanted to um so once they're under selected then you can continue on the form and you have your certifications here in the 46 also legal things you have to agree to there are two the two boxes you just have to check off because that's the legal stuff then there's a SIPA certifications and this is something where for some reason sometimes people check the wrong one here i don't know if it's just mistakes um technical errors it happens more often than i feel like it should but there's three choices for SIPA certification the first one is i certify that we have complied with the requirements the second one is i certify that we are in undertaking actions you have up to three years to become SIPA compliant from the first time you get e-rate and say we're doing something internet related um but you just continue with it i mean you do have to um go through with it otherwise you have to return your e-rate funding and then the third one is i certify that SIPA act does not apply because it's only for telecommunication services there are some minor types of connections because of what the service does um and that doesn't um require SIPA certification however for 99 percent of the services you're doing internet service you're doing equipment that relates to internet you have to be in compliance so make sure you select that first one unless you're in the middle of doing it in the second one the second one you'd only do if your filters aren't installed and working and you're still kind of get them working um the first one is we have filters they're installed i'm in compliance um and then we will you can preview the form so when you look at the preview you'll get a PDF just like what we were looking at for the other the 470 double check that certification the preview make sure it's the right one that is being selected if you choose the wrong one USAC will reach out to you and say with an inquiry and say so you're getting a discount on internet you said you're not doing SIPA that's not going to work are you sure that's correct and they do give you a chance to fix it but save yourself and then a little hassle and worry and just double check and make sure you get this certification correctly it gets done to wrong missed too many times i want to help people stop after you submitted your 46 you do get a letter is issued to you and your service provider notification letter letting you know an email and in your epic account that has been submitted until this has been done your service writer cannot start giving you your discounts so that's another key thing too um unless and i get people contact me and said so i got my funding commitment letter but i'm not getting my discounts you didn't do your 46 to say you wanted the money you're your service writer can't do anything until you do this there is a deadline for when you need to submit the 46 buy it is um now like i said just do it right away just don't wait to the deadline there's no reason to you want to do it as soon as you possible as you get that funding commitment letter so as soon as possible your service writer can start working on getting your discounts and your bills are getting discounts or you start receiving your service but you do have at least 120 days after the service start date so July 1st or 120 days after whenever you get that letter if you get that letter after July 1st whichever is later Friday letters that come before that July 1st date end of October is a deadline October 29th i do pay attention to this for you i will look up and see who has been approved for e-rate and if i don't see a 46 done i will reach out to you proactively and send you an email and say hey you need to do this so you can start getting your e-rate discount the final forms in the e-rate process we're almost done are your invoicing forms the 474 and the 472 this is where you tell e-rate tell us how you want to receive your e-rate funding you have two choices as i mentioned you receive discounts on your bills and then your service provider directly from your service provider if this is and we do recommend you do this if you can it makes it much easier for you as the applicant because if they are discounting you on your bills the service provider is required to submit their responsible for submitting this service provider invoice form the spy form 474 they are responsible for submitting this to usack to get reimbursed for whatever this is counting you and you're done with e-rate application forms with the 486 the last form you did you don't have to do anything more they do but if they can't do that or it doesn't work then you would do a bear form the build entity applicant reimbursement form 472 that you have to do as the applicant to get reimbursed after you pay your bills in full and there's a lot more that you do need to do related to doing it this way as well there is also a deadline to for when you can submit this it's also at the end of October it's 120 days also but after the last date of service or the date whenever you did your 46 so if it is the last date of service being the June 30th do October 28th so I also pay attention to this I check and see if you've done your 486 and at that I've gone up to that stage for a funding year and then but if I see there have been no invoicing form submitted there's no bear in the e-rate system and there's no spy from the service provider I will reach out to you and say hey I don't see any no one's requested funding as far as I can tell um as far as I those requested any funding from e-rate yet usack yet so someone needs to do something now you might be getting discounts on your bills and the service provider has just not done their 474 yet this has happened many times for some reason sometimes they they go throughout the year giving you discounts and then ask for all their money at the end of the year that's okay so check your bills if you're getting discounts you're fine but if you have not been getting discounts then you will need to do your bear form so that you can get the money back directly from usack and this is direct reimbursements only as I said they just do bank transfers they don't mail checks or anything anymore so if you are going to do bear you do also need to have done a form 498 first and this is a one-time form not an every year form uh you just as long as you're unless you're banking information changes you wouldn't have to redo it um so you will um and this is just like uh doing a direct deposit your basic banking info contact person routing numbers bank account numbers etc you also need to know your library or your city's federal id number your tax id number that's used for payroll it's going to ask for that and then there is another code number that it asks for for doing business with the federal government because this is federal funding um and this change it's a new thing this change earlier this year in may of this year they change usack change from using what was the Dunn and Bradstreet number Dunn's number to a unique identity unique entity identifier a UEI number um this is done through the sam.gov website um if you have applied for grants lately in the last year or so with us the library commission um library improvement grants uh you have had to have um had one of these numbers as well or anything else the federal government it's a new thing that the federal government actually changed from Dunn's to um UEI numbers their own numbers so everyone has to have those numbers if you want to receive any sort of monies from the federal government so this is if you're going to be doing a brand new 498 or have to modify an existing one so if you have to change banking information or something if you currently have one you should be okay for um for now and there's information instructions on the 498 website there on how to get a unique a new UEI number if you don't already have one um so i'm not going to go into that today because that's a whole another thing um but if you've have one you've already used for applying for grants like I said with us it's the same number so use that you will use that same number um for e-rate otherwise go to their website and follow the instructions on how to get yourself one of those numbers it's free doesn't cost anything you just got to go on to the sam.gov and set up um set your library up there within the so so get that number first then go and do a 498 within the 498 form you will also have to upload your banking documentation there is a page called the remittance information page so you will need to have somewhere before you do the 498 scanned an image of avoided check or a statement from your banking um from your bank that shows the bank name and the account number that you want this to go into so just like you know getting direct deposit it's going to ask for that in the 498 so where do you do this form this isn't a different place than your other forms this is not a form that you do regularly every year so it's not up here to get to your 498 you click on your library name again and you go to related actions there's a huge list of things you can do here and somewhere down there it will say create fcc form 498 if you have never done one before if you've already and if you're not sure if this has been done previously um if there isn't a choice to create one you've already done one once you've created it it removes it from this list of related actions because you you don't have to create a new one but um for the first time here we're going to say we're going to create one um you can see here just like other forums it has uh blue bar go across the top for each page in the application um give it a nickname give your basic library info here I just gave it a nickname of 498 uh the library name um this is a made up tax ID number obviously um and then you choose your business type if you're a city township county that's the choices you have you're on this pull down menu um and so this is the first page of the form and then you save and continue as soon as you go onto your second screen of the form it gives it a number this is your 498 id number that you are looking for you need this id number in order to be approved and set up before you can do your bare form this is what you're looking for now this is giving you what the number is but it still needs to be approved by USAC they have to receive this form receive your documentation and then um um you'll get noticed that it's been approved and you can do your bare form so if you're even thinking about possibly doing a bare at any point I recommend just going on and getting this set up because it'll take some time to get your you know your UI if you don't have one scan your checks or bank statement um this takes a couple of days for them to get back to you with to get this all set up and ready so it's just in there for any possible potential need um in the future if you ever need to get um reimbursement yourself directly from e-rape um the um I don't have a screenshot of it here because you know this was like me playing around and doing a demo but further along is that remittance information page that's where it will say okay click um upload into here your avoided bank check or your avoided check or your um bank statement that's a section that I was talking about after you file this form yeah within two days your should be usax says within two days you'll be notified if it's been approved rejected they have to verify your bank account info um so they say two days let's see um if you don't hear back in two days you can go in and check the status of it yourself if you go into your epic account and there's a blue bar at the top of the screen you can click on records actually I can show you here yeah records up here in the blue bar and under there you would choose there's an FCC form 498 choice once you've submitted one of these and you can look up your ID number and see if it says if it has been approved or not is ready to go once it is you have been notified that it's been approved and ready to be used then you can do your um bear form so where is the bear uh the bear has moved and this is great we um it is there's was a systems consolidation was done earlier this month and where finally all of our invoicing has been moved into epic uh previously there was a way you that was in the they called the legacy system the old version of um the previous incarnation of online um e-rate applications um but now it is finally just a link right within the system um if you want to learn more about the system consolidation you can look there on the um usac website it's up here also in the section uh up on the right um it's got its own it's over here epic it kind of wraps around e-rate invoicing is where you would click to go to do your bear so this is only if you're remember if only if you're not getting discounts automatically on your bills would you have to do this now this is two different screenshots so I don't want to be confused here I want to show you what it would look like um so this is when you get into your invoicing dashboard for doing your bear if you have and it would depend on if you have a bear that you can submit yet like is your 498 ready have you done your 46 and everything if you go to invoicing and there's a blank here at after the you know at the end of the library info you don't have a bear available yet there's nothing for you to request or um um uh reimbursement for either a service provider is done their form or your 498 is not done or your 46 isn't done whatever but if there is something to do there is there would there would be a link that says file your 494 72 bear form and we click on that very similar to other forms you can give it a nickname you can discard the form um so we're going to give this one a nickname bear funding year 2022 because it's always bears reimbursing for previous um bills you've already paid so it's going to be for a previous year um our 498 ID I hope I've just pulled on a number it automatically fills that in said yes I am the main contact person they can continue and then this gets into line items you have to choose the different um funding requests that you want to receive reimbursement for so we so it looks very similar to that 470 right and um add a line item and then uh we choose the funding year again up here and then it shows all the different ones we have now this is the example of a school district this is the training system with lots and lots of choices but we're just going to pick one and so you click on the first section here the first choice because like there's the one that's ours um and then you have to say how often were you billed if you build monthly when did it start being billed typically July 1st of the year and what was the pre-discount was the full cost of of your bills you put that there and then this is the discount amount that USAC will reimburse to you save it save it again if we wanted to add other ones we could keep going in and adding them but we're just going to do this one for this example and then you can review it to see make sure you did anything correctly it doesn't do a pdf for this because it doesn't have that much info that's necessary it just opens up a little page where it shows okay here's what you've entered is this correct is the amounts correct sure sure um then we'll go and certify it this is very similar to our other forms and this one has what I really like here I hope they do this on the other form and in big red it says check all boxes to certify gives you that prompt so here you got to check every single box this is just green to all the legalities no choices like your SIPA certification that's the only one we make a choice um square boxes means check them all and then you certify and submit are you sure you want to do this yes and then it says you have successfully filed your bear form yay and you should at some point receive the funding into your bank account you will automatically immediately receive a notification bear notification just like when you had your 470 and 471 and 486 notification like I said every time you submit a form they send you a thing saying back saying yep we got it um and you will also um receive a bear remittance statements that show um what payments have been made to you so once you receive that report it's emailed to you double check the bank account whoever wherever it went into whether it was a city's bank account or a library's bank account to make sure that's in there um and then you'll also risk so that's every time a payment's been made is made um but then you'll also get quarterly reports that will show all bear and spy activity so if you um maybe end up with a mixture for some reason but this will show you what they've sent to the service provider on those service provider invoices so compare this you know this will tell you we paid the service provider this much make sure they were discounting your bills that same amount um and that's done quarterly uh the remittance the remittance statement is done whenever they do a payment to you uh typically bear forms you pay the whole year and at the end of your request one big reimbursement you can do one every month to do it as a monthly thing if you want to go through that work every month i don't recommend it but you can i know we've had a few some libraries done that but ideally you just wait till the end of the year pay everything in full and then have a one-time thing and that is the end of the e-rate process and the forms go back to this uh slide here showing all those forms so we did our 470 we were asked for service we waited 28 days for to give you some receive some quotes and bids we did our 471 where he said yes here's who we picked then we waited for be reviewed we were approved for e-rate funding and we did our 486 immediately telling them yes we want it and then we immediately jumped into either making sure our service provider is going to give discounts and did their form the 474 or if we waited and paid for the whole year and then did our 472 to reimburse ourselves and that is the e-rate process okay we're almost at the end of our time here but that's okay we only have a couple of slides what questions does everybody have nobody's asked anything yet throughout the whole workshop that's okay but what questions do you still have i want to make sure you know i know we have just a couple minutes left here but we will not get cut off if you have questions and things you want to ask i want to make sure anything you're wondering about now i answer is there anything that was confusing that you want to go and look at again on any situation in your library that you want to ask me about right now while you have me here type into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface okay uh we have uh thank you i'll leave a comment thank you for all your information i'm sure i will have questions as starting the process yes as you are starting the process yes that's that's pretty common yeah i know if you're not already in the process right now it's hard to know what to ask and that's totally understandable i get that a lot yeah this was a lot of information yes i hope it was helpful to you though and at least showing you showing you the whole beginnings to end like i said right now you're just worrying about doing the 470 all the other forms will be done next year but you have here all of that information and i said you will have these slides and this recording available to you after um we are wrapped up here but please do reach out to me with any whenever you have any questions and whenever they come up i'm just going to do the last couple of slides we have here just some info um it said uh i do this training every year uh but usack also has their own training that they do as well and i highly recommend that you go look at it look on their website we have links to it from our e-rate website here at the library commission they do um they did a series of online workshops hour long workshops in october and november um on each step in the e-rate process as well and they also have videos a little shorter like five ten minute videos on different forms and different steps in the process so um guiding you through um screenshot you know going through live uh demos of them there are some user guides in pdf if that's a better way for you to uh learn then online things like this that you can i highly recommend looking at all of their resources um and definitely sign up for that news brief i mentioned that earlier it's monthly um so it's not too often but it will let you know deadlines coming up tips and tricks when those um for 71 filing window dates are so um sign up for that you are welcome to reach out to e-rate directly for help too you know of course i'm here for you locally but if i'm not available or it's um you just you're need to talk to them you call them on their 800 number um if you do have an epic account there is a contact us contact us link in the upper right where you can submit and um a customer service case within the epic system and reach out to them there um and this is the url for our for my e-rate website that i hope um maintain here in the library commission site page uh website so that will have resources to everything you might need to use uh the link to the department of education in nabrasca nabrasca department education page for the school lunch numbers all the forums every resource you would need um is on there so please do look there and then when this recording is available um everyone who attended all of our workshops i'll let you know but it'll be linked it'll be posted on there as well and there is my contact information call or email me with any questions or issues you have um i didn't see any other questions come in right now while i was wrapping things up that's fine um i hope this was helpful uh it's a lot of information i know um but my job my goal here is just to make sure you get your e-rate funding so please do call or email me with any questions issues you have and i will help you and make sure um you get your money your funding so go out there apply for e-rate and good luck thank you for being here today bye