All right, hello and welcome to the 2020 E-Rate. What's new for 2020 webinar? This is our annual training and update for E-Rate. I am Krista Porter. I am the Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. One of my duties as Library Development Director is I am also the State E-Rate Coordinator for Public Libraries in Nebraska. So that means I do the consulting and training and hand-holding and anything else you may need as you are going through your E-Rate applications and anything that goes along with that. I have been doing E-Rate since 2009, originally did start out with training in 2009 and submitting the application for the Nebraska Library Commission. So I have been through the same thing that you guys are all going through with E-Rate. We are going to go through some of the basics of the program today and then get in some details of some of the forms so that you can see how some of this will work and hopefully answer any questions that you may have. Today, information we have today will be useful to anyone who is brand new to E-Rate. If you've never done it before, you're just wondering what it's all about. We'll have all the basics about for that as well as people who have done E-Rate in the past. This is something that you can potentially benefit from having a refresher on. It does take some learning to do some practice, but we will get everyone through the process here today. Checking one more thing here. All right, so we are going to start with the very basics. What is E-Rate? E-Rate is a federal program that gives discounts on bills and costs for schools and for K-12 schools and public libraries to get discounts on telecommunications and internet costs. So this would be your monthly internet bill, any upgrades, wiring, equipment, anything else that you might have to do that has to do with your internet connection. This is something that started out as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was where this was set up, this was something that the FCC and the government realized they needed to do is help schools and libraries to afford the increasing costs of internet and telecommunications. The first year you could apply was in 1998. So that's how long this has been going. And we have many libraries I know here in Nebraska that have been doing it from the very beginning and that's great. The money that is in the program is funded through what they call the universal service fee. This is something that the companies that provide your services to, your telecommunication companies, your internet service provider, and you pay in due. If you look on any of the bills that you have for your phone or your internet, you will see something called sometimes a USF charge, universal service fee, it might be abbreviated some other way. But this is one of the many fees and taxes that we all pay. And it goes into a pot of money that is then available to be divided up amongst the schools and libraries who apply for the discount. So it is run by the FCC, Federal Communications Commission. They oversee the entire program. They set all the rules and policies and how it is all going to work. And then they created this company, the Universal Service Administrative Company, which is a nonprofit company that is responsible for running the actual program. They're who you will hear from when you are submitting your application. We have questions, all of those things. There are also a couple of other programs they run for hospitals and healthcare facilities, for low income people and for people in high cost areas. So there are multiple places that this money is divided up amongst. E-rate is an abbreviation, unofficial abbreviation for education rate being for the specific part of the program that's for schools and the libraries providing educational type resources. And within USAC, there's a schools and libraries division that is the people that we directly deal with as far as being a school and public library. Now, who can apply for E-rate? Libraries and library system, the only requirement that E-rate that USAC has for it is that you must be eligible for LSTA funding. This is Library Service and Technology Act funding. This is determined differently, state by state. Each state is given the authority, their state library agency, which here in Nebraska is us at the Nebraska Library Commission. They are given the authority to decide what that means. What is the definition being eligible? So it varies from state to state. Here in Nebraska, we have decided that we do provide many services to all libraries in the state that you are eligible to receive. So you are then receiving LSTA funding in kind of a trickle down theory. So in Nebraska, all public libraries are eligible to apply. In other states, it will be different. So if you are watching this either today, I know we have some today or on a recording somewhere and you're not from Nebraska, you need to check with your own state to see what the requirements are there. This is done as a state by state thing. Also schools and school districts are eligible and if we had consortious groups of schools and libraries getting together. Here in Nebraska, we have divided up the support for E-rate public libraries. Come to me at the Nebraska Library Commission for their training and education and our schools go to someone who is at our department of education. So we have split up the E-rate duties, the E-rate support and training duties and consultation. In other states, it's different. So in other states, you may have the same person that does both of these things. So once again, check with your own state if you're not in Nebraska for who you need to contact for more help and support with doing your E-rate application. So E-rate works on a funding year. Commitments are made, as they say, from July 1st through June 30th of a year. So when you are working on your E-rate application right now, which you can start right now with the first step of the process that we'll get into, you are looking for something in the future. You're looking to say, I want to receive my E-rate funding starting in July of next year. So we are now working on applying for what they call the funding year 2020, 2020 funding year, which runs from July 1st, 2020 through June 30th of 2021. Right now we are in the 2019 funding year, which libraries applied for last year in 2018, for 2019 through 2020. You'll get used to the process that works for the funding years. So you're always, whenever you're thinking about E-rate, you're always thinking into the future. It is not something where you can say, oh, I had these bills and I want to get my discount money back. I want to get a reimbursement on something I already paid for or something I already bought. It doesn't work like that. You're always thinking to the future that we are going to be needing to spend this money next year and we want to get a discount on it when it comes up. So that's what we are working towards. There is almost $4 billion available as a minimum each year. And they do adjust that annually. This year I know they did up the amount that was going to be available due to inflation. Here on my head, it's now 4. something billion if you look for the official amount that's out there. But there's plenty of money to go around to everybody. We just need to, you just need to apply for it. Now, the first thing I tell libraries to look at when they are thinking about doing E-rate is what is your discount? How much of a discount can you receive at your library? To see if it is worth it. Is it worth your time and effort and energy to go through applying for all of this? So discounts are calculated based on a couple of different things. You can receive anywhere from 20 to 90% off on your bills and it will depend on the number of children who are eligible for the school lunch program in your school district. So this is the free and reduced lunches that the kids get in school. It is specifically the school district that your library physically sits in. It resides in where your building is. Now you may provide services to children from other school districts that are not the one that your library actually is geographically in, and that's okay. As far as E-rate is concerned, they just look at where you're located to figure out this calculation. There are lots of different ways that poverty level can be determined and E-rate wanted to make sure the most discounts get to the poor areas in the country. This is just one criteria that they decided to pick for their purposes. So you'd have to look and see what is your school district that your library building sits in and find out the numbers for that. Note here, you can include pre-K, only kindergarten K through 12. And then they combine that whether you're considered urban or rural. Here in Nebraska, we are mostly rural, which is actually a good thing because they do get a slightly higher discount in some things by being in a rural area. So we can very easily actually look up all of this information here in Nebraska. On the Nebraska's Department of Education website, they post their school lunch numbers every year. So you can go to this link here and you will find spreadsheets going back multiple years. You just look at the current year, you find your school district. There's multiple tabs in this spreadsheet. They've got every single individual school listed, but there's a tab that's just the school district as a whole. And that's the one you wanna go to because you want all of the schools that might be in your district, whether they are the elementary, middle, high school, however your district is broken up. And you find the number in there and it's very useful for us. It tells you how many kids, children are enrolled in the school and how many of them are eligible for the school lunch program and then what that percentage is. And that's the number you need is that percentage. And something that's key here that I wanna mention is this is the number of students that are eligible for the program, not necessarily all of the ones that apply because that number can be different. Not every family who is eligible for the national school lunch program does apply for it. Some of them figure we're fine. We don't need the help. We are able to cover our children's lunches on our own. That's great. Some of them don't apply due to the perceived stigma of baby being in the program. So they might not apply, but that's okay because what you're looking for is just how many might be eligible for it, which is definitely going to be a higher number than what who may potentially apply. This is also something that is very important too. In the past we have had some pushback from our schools about not wanting to give out this information because it was a privacy concern and that people then know which children were in the program. We don't need to know which children are in the program. There's nothing that passes through that has anything to do with who they are or where they live, anything like that. All it is is numbers. And it's just numbers that are eligible and not that we're applying. So there's really no way of matching it up with who any of these children were. In the past it was a struggle here in Nebraska for libraries to get this information by calling the schools, calling the school district, find the numbers, but at some point in the past the Department of Education decided we're just posting all of it on our website so you no longer have to contact the school, call them, go through the right people to find out who even knows these numbers, to explain to anybody why you're asking for these numbers and what E-rate is or anything, just go to that spreadsheet and you find yours. Then USAC has posted up a tool, a website where you can look up your urban or rural status, find out what you are. It's based right now in 2010, census data, the most recent complete census. At some point after next year's census that will be updated. That's a future thing, but for now this is what they're working with. And the cutoff between urban and rural as far as FCC is concerned is a population of 25,000. So that's where you go on either side of it. And then once you have those two numbers there is this candy-dandy little discount matrix that USAC provides where you can look up and see based on the percentage of children that are eligible for the school lunch program what discount a library can receive. And you'll see here we have category one and category two and I'll get into explaining the difference between those are different types of things that you can apply for in E-rate. But you can see here from this matrix that even having less than 50% of your children eligible you can still get 60 to 70% off on your E-rate eligible costs. So this is your monthly internet bill. Any equipment you need to buy to make your internet work routers, switches, wireless access points, cabling, all of that. So it's a pretty good deal. Here in Nebraska, most of our libraries fall between 60 and 80%. We have a few in the 90, few lower but almost most of them fall into that area. So you can get a pretty good discount here. So this is something definitely to look into to see, is it something that we want to go through? E-rate can be a complex process. It's something you keep up with throughout the year. But if you're gonna be getting 60, 70, 80% off on your bills, it might definitely be worth it. All right, so eligible services list. What can you get an E-rate discount on? What is E-rateable as I say? I don't know if that's a real word but it works here. Every year, there is a new list that is published of what you can receive an E-rate discount on. The FCC publishes what they call their ESL eligible services list. They post them all up on their website. And you can see every year going back to very beginning what was eligible each year. Because there is a new list published every year, you do have to make sure you're working from the correct one whenever you're doing your application. So you're applying for the things that are actually eligible this year. Generally, those things don't usually change very much. Most of the time it's clarifications maybe in a new year of what, you know, if something was a little confusing last year, let's spill it out a little better this year. So make sure you're using the right list when you're applying. I did mention that you are currently, if you are applying for E-rate right now, you're applying for 2020, but we're in the 2019 year. So you may see me wrapping up some things related to 2019 funding year. So if there are questions from Musac or things you wanna look up, make sure you're looking at the right list that matches up with whatever year you might be working on at the time, depending on what you're doing for your process. Okay, so there are, as it says in the previous slide there, there are two different categories of services, things that you can apply for E-rate discounts for. Services providing category, the connection to the building is category one, and anything providing connection within the building is category two. So category one would be your monthly internet bill. How do you get the internet to your library in the first place? What are you subscribing to? Is it a cable connection? Is it DSL? Who's your service provider? What you're getting? Once you get it to the building, then how do you get it to all the different devices is category two. Do you have routers and switches and cables to your hardwired computers in your library and in your computer lab? Wireless access points that put out the Wi-Fi. All of that is category two. A good way to think about the difference between these is the walls of your building is in between each of these. Category one is bringing the service to the building. Category two is once it's within the walls of the building, how is it getting spread out to all of the different devices that need to access it? And category one is basically anything that can get high speed broadband internet to your library. And this is not an exhaustive list of things. This is just some of the most common ones. Cable modem, DSL, fiber, satellite, wireless service. Now in this case, wireless means the wirelessly getting the internet to the library, not the fact that you have Wi-Fi within the library. That's something separate. So this is how you get the connection, get your internet to your building in the first place. A little explanation of fiber, because they do mention both lit and dark fiber. Fiber is something that many locations are having installed, construction being done, putting it in, some places don't have it yet. That's true, but if you do have it, it is something that you can connect to, find a service provider who is offering fiber. They then sign up with them to have that be your connection. Now when the fiber lines were first laid in many places, trenches were dug and lots of fiber was put in, they put in more than was needed at the time for services, hoping that there would be an increase in need that people wanting to have more connections and subscribe to it. So they put in more than they needed and you can contact a service provider who may own this dark fiber and have them turn it on for you, for your library and then have that become lit fiber that you can then use. So there is sometimes a fee to turn that on. There might be more construction needed to get that dark fiber connected to where your building is, but that is something that you can have access to. You just have to see if there's any of that in your area. And there is a little note here about that if you are looking for a dark fiber to be your solution, you must also request lit fiber together. There's a combo or a deal to request both of those free rate discounts. This is just to cover all your bases, which is always a good idea. Don't just say we're just looking for dark because lit might already be available and you wanna make sure you don't miss out on anything. So they do require if you want that to investigate and to kind of reach out and see, is there any dark fiber in my area? You'll have to do lit along with it. Kind of makes sense anyways. Something else I'm gonna mention briefly here related to, oops, went a little too fast. Sorry, special construction. I mentioned construction might need to be done. If there is, if you need to have some construction done to bring that connection, whatever connection it is, whether it's new fiber to your, or dark fiber turned on, that can also be included as a category one cost. So you can find out that fiber exists, but it's actually only for, it's a few blocks away from my library or it's across the street. You need some sort of construction done, that cost of that construction, you can apply for an e-rate discount in category one as well. This also includes things like the design, project management, all those extra costs along with doing a major construction project. Any of that can also receive an e-rate discount. USAC also realizes that you can't necessarily make, you can't depend on your provider to be able to do this construction during just that funding year, that July through June time period. It may be, they have to do it when they do it, when it's on their schedule. And that's fine. USAC says that as long as it's within six months before the funding year, you can still receive a discount. So even though the e-rate funding year starts on July 1st of 2020, for example, if your construction needed to be done in April or May, just because of that's when it's on their schedule, that's perfectly fine. You can still get your discount on those construction costs. Now, something that I did want to mention, just because you may hear about this, voice services, this is telephone, anything voice related, used to be a category one service that you can get an e-rate discount on. The last year to apply for this was 2019, the one that you're in right now. So it's a past thing, it's no longer available. It was used by many, many libraries getting a discount on your telephone is part of a modernization of e-rate that the FCC dictated needed to be done. They decided they wanted to do more work as it says here to close the wifi gap to get more broadband internet service out to libraries and schools. So many libraries and schools are applying for voice services. And there was only, as I said, there was this budget of about $4 billion available. There was actually, e-rate was running out of money after category one was done and all the applications were completed. And going on to category two, which is your equipment and connections and upgrading, there was a limited amount of money and many library's applications were unable to be funded because they used up all the money. So they wanted to make their dollars go farther. They wanted to be able to really, really support increasing the internet connections. So they made the decision that we were going to gradually eliminate voice services as receiving discounts. They did it gradually through over a five year period until as of last year, the last libraries were able to get only 10% off on their phone bill. This year it's not available. It has been a hardship for many libraries in school districts. We know that it was a very big amount of a discount they got, but it is working as far as what FCC wanted to do, which was have money to be able to fund more applications that are related to internet. Since they did make this change, there's now been enough money to fund everything. They did not have to cut off on any of the applications for category two. So that's a good thing. It's a struggle for many schools and libraries, mainly the larger ones having so many phone lines, but even our smaller rural libraries, when you're getting 80, 70% off on a phone bill and suddenly you're not, that is a problem. But this is the change that the FCC has decided to go to give. There was comments made, there's a official process, the FCC puts out a rule, then anyone who wants to make an official comment, their opinion on it, that came from various groups saying that they didn't think this was a good idea, but since it is doing what the FCC wanted as far as being able to fund, so all the applications that come in for internet, this is gonna be the state of things from now forward. So that is our category one. Any questions about category one before I go on to category two? You can type into your questions section at any time you have a question and I can see it here and grab it and answer any questions you have. So anything, any questions about what we've talked about so far? All right, well, if you do have anything, I'll keep an eye on that and answer your question. So category two, this is the equipment and services once you've got your internet connection coming to your building. How do you get it throughout your library? This is your internal connections. That is all of the equipment, as I mentioned, routers, wires, cabling, all of that. Managed internal broadband services, a newish way of getting your internet that I'll explain in a bit and maintenance of your internal connections. So you need to have any repairs upgrading any of that done to your equipment in your library. So these are some of the things are eligible under category two. So your access points, cables, firewalls, routers, racks, wireless access points, power supplies and then any sort of improvements or upgrades that need to be done that have to do with your internet connection. And software is mentioned here and I'll specify about that. This is software related to running your network. Some software related to getting your internet working. So not discounts like we have Microsoft Word on our computers or anything like that but any networking software that you might have that makes your internet run. Managed internal broadband services is also called Managed Wi-Fi. This is something where a third party runs everything for you. Traditionally you get a service from your service provider and then you keep track of it and maintain it and make sure everything's working. Sometimes contact the provider for updates or fixes and things. But this is something you can totally turn it over to a third party and you really have nothing to do with it except for paying. So if you do have some sort of that situation available to you that can also be of it eligible to receive funding. And then the basic maintenance that I mentioned. So repair, anything breaks, anything needs to be replaced anything just needs upgrading your usual upgrading configuration updates, software updates that need to be done, tech support, anything like that that needs to be done to your anything that makes sure your internet works you can get a discount time. The way this works is you actually need to have some sort of a contract with someone ahead of time. This may be your service provider themselves that provides this and maybe a separate company, independent company, someone in your community that provides this service. And then you say you're going to have this available and then whenever it is needed and they do the work then you can get a discount on it. So if you are paying for example a monthly fee, I don't know if this is accurate but like $20 a month to have them on call that $20 a month is not eligible for every month. But if like three months in a squirrel choose through your cable and you need someone come and repair it and there's a cost for that work that was done then that work is what you can get your discount on. There's also some other things that can be eligible. These are all the extra fees. There's your basic fee for everything. And then of course you have taxes and surcharges and things. Even the universal service fee that I mentioned that you pay into the program you can get a discount on that. So when you're asking for your discount when you do your application forms here you do tell you SAC this is how much it's costing me. Make sure you include all of these taxes and fees in the total of what it's costing you not just your regular cost. If there are any charges related to if you're getting equipment and they're shipping charges training related that is included. Training would be training related to teaching any of your staff how to use the network equipment. Do you need to send them to training so that they know how to run the network or how to up trade the network? Those kind of training workshops would be eligible. And then any sort of installation and configuration that might be done of any of this equipment. As a note here, this is something new. So something to be aware of that previously when you purchased the equipment in the first place you had to have something in place something, you know, these what was going to happen for the installation had to be included in that original purchase. Now you can have someone else install it if you want to. So you can buy your router from your search provider have somebody else install it and both of those things can get a discount. Or typically your provider handles that for you but it does vary. All right, okay. To figure out some libraries do have concerns and difficulty figuring out what they need. What do I need to upgrade? What do I need to purchase to make my internet work? The IMLS and student museum library services funded this toolkit to be created toward gigabit libraries toolkit is what it's called to help you figure out what you have for your broadband what you have as equipment and what you can do what you might need to purchase to upgrade it. This is free, it's open source. We have a link to it on our e-rate website but here's also the direct link to the webpage about it. You can start off doing a technology inventory which is great for many of our libraries who you don't know what you even have. There's some computer closet over there and I don't know what's in it and I don't know how it all works. I let someone else handle that. You can do an inventory here either on your own or maybe bring in whoever is your tech person just so you can sit down and know, understand this is what I have this is what we're working with right now. It's all done on a question and answer type thing. You just answer questions throughout this document that's available of what you have that guides you through everything and then it gives the opportunity to do broadband improvement plan. That's a separate document where you can say, okay, this is what we have. We figured out from the inventory what we have now suggests to us what we could potentially do and the document will help you do that. So I definitely highly recommend taking a look at this seeing if it is something that could help you out even if you do think you know what's going on in your library. It's out there, it's free. Use it just to maybe get a different view on what is available. So any questions yet about category one or two services and what they entail before we move on to the next part of our workshop here. Type into the questions section of your go-to-webinar interface if you want me to answer any questions. If there's anything you've been wondering about that you wanna make sure that I cover type it into there too and I'll make sure we get to it. Let's go on. So category two budgets. This is category two, how you receive your discount for category two is a little different from how you receive it from category one services. Category one, your basic monthly internet.  If you pay $500 a month on your internet you get your 70, 80% discount on whatever that costs. For category two, USAC FCC has come up in a slightly different way, not slightly, a different way to figure out how you can receive your money. And what they call this is category two budgets. What they do is they calculate a budget for your library and how much they think you might spend over a five year period. Now this isn't a budget as in the traditional sense where here's a budget and here's the money that you get to spend. This is more of a imaginary, I think it is. It's just a mathematical calculation. They say this is how much we think you could spend over a five year period. They do it in five year chunks. For all the category two products and services that your library might receive. So they say this is how much you might spend. It will give you a discount on that amount.  And I'll show you an example of this. Now you do not have to limit your costs and what you spend to just that budget. They're just saying as far as E-rate is concerned this is what we will fund. We will give you up to this amount. You can go over that amount and that's fine. You may have a project that costs $20,000 for example to upgrade your computer lab. But E-rate says we only fund up to 10,000. And that's okay, you consider that $20,000 project you're not stopped from it. It's just that you only receive E-rate funding and E-rate discount on half of it. So how much is your budget? The four public libraries, the discount is calculated based on the total square feet of your library. So how big is your library building? This is everything within the library walls, all floors. This is probably something you can find out from your blueprints maybe. Here in Nebraska, we do a public library, you guys do a public library survey that you complete every year which just went live this week by the way. And on there, one of the questions you answer is what is the square feet of my building? So you can just look right there and you'll find out what that number is. And then there is an amount they multiply by every year. It is changed every year with an amount is it goes up a few cents. We don't know yet what the number is for 2020, but in 2019 it was $2.45. It's gone per square foot. It goes up a couple of pennies every year. So for 2020 it might be to 47, not sure when it's announced. It'll be in the information for e-rate. But there is a minimum of that. So $2.45 per square foot, but minimum of $9,793.04 which sounds like a very ridiculously ridiculous number. A little, why is it just a round number? It was originally a round number when they first started these five year budgets which was the first year in 2015. But when, and then every year that amount that it multiplies by is raised for element inflation is made that round number no longer a rounded number. So we just work with what the math tells us. The budget can be recalculated every year if the size of your library changes. So you aren't locked into the amount you have for the whole five years. If you do have an expansion, hopefully your library getting bigger, not smaller. So if you are building a new building that is larger than your current one and you move into it within that five years or doing an expansion or something, your budget can be recalculated in the middle of that five years and then raising your minimum, raising your budget based on what your new size of the building is. So for an actual real life example, so this is what helped me figure out what does this all mean? How does this work? Your library is 3,500 square feet large, 3,500 times July's of 45 cents is 8,575, but there is a minimum, the $9,793.04. So since that is less than the actual calculation, your budget is actually the 9,700 number. For easy math here, with a 15% discount rate, the library will receive half of that in a rate fund to spend. So what they're saying is we think you could spend $9,793 over a five-year period of on category two services and we're gonna give you, and then we apply your discount rate to that, so we'll give you the 50% in this case. If you had 60, it'd be 60%, 70, 70%. And that's what we'll reimburse you for over the five years. So you can spend this money in every, any way that suits your purposes. You do not have to divide it up evenly, the same amount every year in the five years. If you have a big project coming up, like you know, in 2020, we're building a new library or we're doing an expansion or I want to upgrade everything in our computer lab, you can spend your whole budget in just the first year. And that's fine, then you just don't have anything that you can do for the last four years of your five-year budget period. Or you can do things a little bit of time. If you decide you want next year, I wanna just buy some new wireless access points. I know those are old. And I, so we just do that. What they will do, and this is in your e-rate account, they keep track of the money for you. They will deduct once you submit your application and ask for the money, they will then deduct off of your full budget, how much you spent, and then you'll know how much you have left for the next four years. And so every year you can buy something different. For the next year, maybe you update all the cab cabling. You need new routers and switchers the year after that. Whatever you need to do each year and just gradually deducting from your full amount throughout those five years. So it's up to you how you use it. And you might not even know a whole five-year plan for your library and that's okay. Just start with the first year and then see what comes up over those five years you have coming up. Any questions about the category two budget and how it works? It is a little more confusing and complicated than the category one, but they do track everything for you within the system, which is great. If you have a question, go ahead and type it into the question section of your GoToWebinar interface and I can answer it. I can read it from there and answer it for you. I'll check in here now. So, you may also hear about the category two pilot to budget pilot. They did, wait, we have a, all right, someone has a question about, oh, I might have a typo here in the math. Oh, I might not have updated one of these to the new numbers. I think the 4,896 is the correct number. Let me just, then yeah, if we can just, let's see. Yes. All right, so sorry about this. I updated my slides from last year and updated one of the numbers and not the other ones in here. On the last bullet here, it is the 4,896.52 is the correct amount. On the second part, I didn't change it and that works as the equals. So that is what it should be there. If you do the math, you'll see that's the correct number. Sorry about that. I will update the slides before, so that we'll have the correct info out there. So category two budget pilot. When they first started this, they did a five year pilot project on this new way of doing category two. Originally category two were the same as one. You just get a discount of, oh wait, we have another question about the, ah, okay, another question about the discount. This is, so once someone wants to know is that 4,896 each year or is that, no, that's the total for the whole five years. So this is your, the 9,793 is how much they think you might spend in the next five years and you will receive $4,896.52 over that whole five year period. So this isn't a per year thing. This is for the five years as all together.  All right, I'm reading into the question that just came through here. Hang on a sec. So the entire cost, ah, okay, good question. Someone wants to know, so if we budget, if we want to submit a category two request, do we budget for the entire cost in case it is not approved for reimbursement? So that's the first question. Yes, the e-rate is, that's one thing too to know about e-rate, it is not a guarantee. There is a chance that you might be denied if there's something wrong and doesn't come correct in your application or they may adjust how much they give you, they may decide actually something you asked for isn't really eligible, so we're gonna give you less. So be prepared to either, if you do get denied to be able to pay it yourself or to be able to say, okay, we can back off this year and maybe try next year again. As I said before, most of the, most of the denials previously were because they just ran out of money. So there's no longer that issue. The only issue with being denied would be if something was wrong with your application. Did you apply for something that wasn't actually eligible? Was there a mistake? Did you not supply some sort of documentation, whatever, and then things need to be denied? So definitely be aware that any e-rate application, even your category one for just your monthly could potentially not get approved and you will then have to cover the costs of it. And then does USEC only pay us or do they pay the vendor directly like the category one discounts? Actually, there's two different ways you can receive your discounts that I'll go into later. When you are paying something and being reimbursed, it goes directly to you. It does not go through the service provider. They do direct deposits now directly to the library. So for category two, you would buy the equipment that you would submit and say, hey, we bought this stuff and then they would give you a reimbursement and it would go right directly to a bank account that you have your choosing, not to the provider at all. Ah, good question. Do you have to match that money or spend a certain amount to get the discount? No, this is not like a grant program or where you have to have a match or anything like that at all. No, this is just, you tell them our library is this big, nominative of square feet and they say, great, you have this much money to spend on anything category two that you want. And then you get that. There's no sort of, if you don't have the match, that's okay. If you start saying, you will pull the first year, you apply for a category two service that starts your five-year clock. So you have five years until you spend all that money. If you don't spend it, that's okay too. There's no, it's not like a grant program like that that requires you to spend it, requires you to show why you didn't spend the rest of it or anything like that. So there's no match that you have to have, no. Any other questions while we're here? While you're asking about category two or category one and how that works? Do you have any, go ahead and type them in and I'll grab them as soon as I see them. Come on, wait, wait. So this is a category two clarification here. So each purchase isn't just discounted, but can be paid if we have that amount in the bank, in the bank, so to speak with USAC. Correct, right. So you'll have in this example, the correct number, you have $4,896.52 that USAC will reimburse you in for category, anything category two that you purchase. So you can start purchasing things and you just keep going until you've used up all that money. And once it's done, then you just can't get any more discounts because you've gone through all the money that's there. Cool, it could make sense. Oh, good question. If the $2.45 amount goes up or down each year, how do you come up with the category two total? Yes, it will change each year, correct. It is recalculated each year, depending on what their amount that they call it the multiplier is. So there's actually a place, and I'll show it to you when we see what your online application, online account looks like. There's a place where they keep track of what your budget is and you can see how much you have in there and how much has been used, what the calculation is. So it will vary each year. It is recalculated every year, depending on what that amount is. So it's gonna adjust a little bit, but like I said, it is a couple of pennies that that amount changes, which then it does add up, of course, when you're talking about large buildings and that minimum of 9,000. So it will adjust every year, but they will within your account keep track of that for you once you've started the first year. So you can try and do the math yourself. You're welcome to do that, but you can also just pop into your account and look on your budget and see what it is at the current time. It will tell you what it's been calculated for, what you've already spent and how much you have left. So anything else while we're here? Let's wait another second to yours. I can't see if you're actually typing something. So I have to wait until the full question pops up. Okay, so, okay, so clarification question here. If each year the total is different, which of them governs the overall society? It will change year to year. Every year it'll be whatever it is that year of what you have left. They'll calculate in what you've already used, what you have left, redo the calculation and then you'll have a new amount of what you have available. And it'll just update that every year based on what you've spent is already gone, take what's left, multiply it, do the math again. So as I mentioned, there was a pilot project for this five year budget. 2019 was the last year of the pilot. They were testing out this as a new way of doing calculations for category two funding. And we are still waiting for the official release of the order on the future of the category two budgets, meaning, let's see a year. What will they do, just double checking? Yeah, okay. The FCC has put out their draft of their eligible services list. That's what's available right now, meaning this is our suggestions for what will happen for the upcoming year. It hasn't been officially approved. There's a little back and forth with that with people making comments. And generally they've, in some time in November, which is now, they do approve and say, yes, it is the official eligible services list now. So we don't officially have an announcement about what it will be. The last year of the budget of the pilot was 2019, but in the draft, it does say, and this is actually a quote that I took right from it, that we now propose to make the category two budget approach permanent. There was some discussion of what they changed it, would they come up with a new way of doing category two if everyone was very concerned because there was all this explanation. And if you did attend my training last year or I'd heard that there was a big to do that. 2019 is the last year and you need to get your category two in because we don't know what's gonna happen. Well, now we know they have decided they liked, they did a study, they saw what libraries did with category two, was it working, were they understanding it? Mostly, it is a little confusing, but it's working. Libraries are getting their money, they think it's a good way of deciding, a good way of giving out the money. So the FCC has said they propose to make it permanent. There's been no comments back to that saying that it was a horrible idea. So most likely it will go into effect as being the permanent answer that it will still have the category two budgets. So before we go on to the next part, any other questions about what category one is, what category two is, which eligible, how the discounts work? I can answer that right now before we go on to our next part of the presentation here. So if you have anything urgently you wanna ask right this minute, type it in. So we're gonna get into the actual e-rate forms themselves in the next part. On to the next page here. So before we get into the forms, there's one last thing we have to talk about related to e-rate and that is SIPA and filtering. SIPA being the Children's Internet Protection Act. Anything, any e-rate funding that you receive you do need to be in compliance with SIPA now. Previously because when telephone existed you didn't need to be in compliance for just receiving telephone services. But now anything e-rate related is related to internet, your access itself, your monthly bills, any of your equipment. So you do need to be in compliance with SIPA. What this means is this is having your filtering on your computers. This is any of the computers in the library. This is the filter that blocks all the bad things. Blocking any bad sites, malware, pornography, all the things that you don't want the children to be looking at on the computers.  Many libraries do not filter for varying reasons. There are libraries just don't do it because it is difficult to figure out which is true. We have many of our libraries in the state that are just I don't know what I should do. It's a little I don't have time to figure out what to do and that's fine. There are some libraries and some boards or communities that are of the opinion that filtering is censorship. There are some communities that refuse to filter anything at all that they think it should all be available for anyone to access what they want but then there are local community standards that say really don't do that on this computer and don't do that on the children's computer and et cetera. Making the parents be more in charge of what the kids can have access to and everything in between. So there's all the way from protect the children at all costs from anything bad down to don't even talk to me about filtering because it's censorship and anything in between. For e-rate purposes, however you do need to have filters and SIPA has you have to have the filter itself whatever kind you want. An internet safety policy which many libraries already have anyways. You hopefully have some sort of policy rules about how people can use your internet. Don't hack our computers, don't install bad software, things like that. And then some sort of a public meeting where you let your community know that you have are going to have these filters or you do have them on your computer. Some things to know about SIPA that I'll just briefly go over here as far as they call the technology protection measure that's the filter itself. They do not say which filter you have to use. There's no list of here's the ones you can choose from. There's nothing that specifies go with these companies or this. So it's open to whichever way you want to do it. We do have some information on my e-rate website about how to choose a filter and what ones are available. There's also no list of what you need to block.  What there is is a criteria that you must block things that may be harmful to minors, specifically visual depictions of anything that may be harmful to minors is the actual wording. So anything pictures. There's so far at this point in our tech level of technology, there is no software program that can do that accurately that can block the physical pictures. So we have to use things like words that might be mentioned on our website or lists of black sites, ad sites that these companies keep and good sites, black sites, white listed sites, the good ones. So we kind of have to do it that way. So it is a very broad policy. You are able to determine at your community's level what you are comfortable with, what you want your filters to be at. Let's say we do have a question about that. So if we've had filters for a while, would a notice be fine rather than a hearing and what constitutes proper notice? Sure, yes, many libraries have had filters and they're just now getting into doing e-rate and that's fine. Well, all you'd need to do is you need to have something that is a public platform, so to speak, where if your community wants to, they can comment to you about it. So it would have to be what would work would be an agenda item on an upcoming board meeting. Your library board meetings are open to the public, just have an agenda item on there, just that we are updating the fact that we have one over looking over our internet safety policy and filtering just something like that. It does have to be a public meeting that anyone who ever wanted to could come and speak at. So not just a notice saying, we're doing this, but it does have to be something like that that they can publicly come to. And so just having that as an agenda item on an upcoming board meeting would count. If nobody comes or has any comments, that's okay. There doesn't have to be discussion. There just has to be that it was available to people to come by and discuss with you what you're doing at the library, how is it working and all of those kind of things. SIPA also has some things that are very useful to us as libraries in that it is very vaguely written. It does say, like I said, it doesn't have a specific that you have to block, doesn't specifically say at what level you have to block. If you are concerned about blocking too many things, many of our filters that exist now do block things like breast cancer research website because it has the word breast in it, which is wrong. People should be able to access that. You can put your filters at the lowest level of security so it doesn't block as many things and it will still meet the SIPA requirements as long as you do have that. So it's up to you to decide how you're going to do that.  So it's not just on the children's computers that access the internet, which some people think it has to be on any computer that you do have the access to. Now, it also has a criteria that states you have to be able to turn off the filter at the request of an adult, and they say an adult is 17 or older, who requests that you do it for bona fide research, legal research.  So do keep that in mind, you do have to have it and have this all documented so that if e-rate does come back, they may come at some point and want to question you and just double check, do you have it on the computers? Did you have your meeting? Would you just let us know. So keep track of all of that. Question, just to clarify, the public notice meeting needs to be done on an annual basis, no, no, no, no, sorry. No, it does not need to be done annually, you do this once. As long as you have at one time had a public notice and meeting about what you're doing related to filtering, that's the only time you have to do it. It does not have to be a regular thing. The only time to do it again would be if you're changing something, maybe. If you're just changing to a different filtering product for some reason or choosing to no longer filter, which would then dump you out of e-rate. So no, it's just a one time thing. So if you did have this on at a board meeting 10 years ago when you first started filtering, just find those minutes and those notes about it and you're covered. So this is just a one time thing that you have to do. You'd never have to do it again unless something changed in your situation. All right. Any other questions about SIPA before we move on? Type into your question section and I can answer some basic questions about. Generally speaking, it's not too difficult to comply with. If you just do a little bit of legwork to begin with and it doesn't have to impose too much on what your users are doing because it can be very low level security if you want to. All right. There is information on the USAC website as well about SIPA that they have it up there explaining that they have about it. And there's information on our website as well that you'll see on our last slide here. All right. So on to the various e-rate forms. E-rate is an ongoing process that you do throughout the year. There are multiple forms that you submit and we're gonna go through each one of them now here. So there are four basic forms in the e-rate process. The first three here on the list and we're gonna go into the details of all of them. For 70, 71, 46, everyone always does those every year. So you have definitely one, two, three forms that you do. The last form for 74, 72 depends on your situation at that point and we'll get into the details about this. There is a fifth form that is a new one that is I'd mentioned earlier because someone did ask in order to get your direct deposit of your reimbursements, you do have to provide banking information to e-rate, of course, similar to indirect deposit for your paycheck. But that's a one-time form. So it's not part of our regular annual process. You do that once and tell them what your banking info is and then you don't have to do that ever again unless of course your bank account, whatever bank account the library is using changes. So first form in the process, you're asking for a service. I'm looking for someone to provide the service. Second form, you tell USAC who you've picked to provide that service and what the service is. Fourth, third form, you tell USAC I'm getting the service, everything started, so I'm ready to receive my money. And then the fourth form, depending on your situation, you are receiving your bills, you're getting the service, that's when you tell USAC how you want to receive your money. And we're gonna go into the specifics of how each one of these forms work. So this is just kind of a general overview here. So first thing to know about the forms though is document retention.  And this is 10 years after the last date of service. That's the end of our funding year. Our funding years you remember go from July through June. So for 2020, which we're in right now, that is through June 30th of 2031. Seems like it's such a long time from now. So anything related to this year's application, you have to keep through them. So any contracts, any documentation. SIPA, as I mentioned just previously, if you, whenever you had that meeting and those forms or those meeting and install the software, you always keep that documentation forever because that will always apply to any future e-rate that you do. Anything else you just do for the 10 years. If you have a recurring contract, so you signed up with a service provider eight years ago and you have just an ongoing contract, you don't have to re-sign something every year, you will have to keep that as well. As long as it has, even if you signed the contract, as this example says in 2010, you're still getting the services in 2020 based on that contract that you first signed up with in 2010, you've got to keep those until the 2031 date as well. So certain things may have happened before 2020, but they affect 2020. You have to keep it through 2020's deadline, which is the 2031 date. You can keep this in any way that works for you. Does not have to be paper. You don't have to, I used to have binders full of things. I know some people describe file cabinet drawers, you don't have to have it that way. You can keep it electronically if you want to. So print out things as, or download things as PDF, scan any paperwork you have, keep it on a flash drive or in a folder somewhere in your computer in electronic form that's perfectly fine. You just need to be able to access whatever documentation USAC might want to ask you about in the future easily. So be able to get a hold of that to them. USAC does do periodically what they call audits, which does sound scary. It's not an audit like that. It's not like an audit that the IRS does is nothing to do the IRS audits. This is just a checks and balances type of thing where they randomly suit, choose some libraries each year to see how the process is going. Is it working? Do you like how it's working? Was it easy for you to figure out all of that? And they will then need you provide documentation of what you did in a particular year for that purpose. Okay, so someone has a question here about documents. Due to staff and board turnover, is there a way to retrieve any missing copies? As far as anything E-rate related, yes. We can access previous forms and documentation related to previous E-rate applications for you if you need them through your online account. They do keep track of it there. So anything they've contacted you with, yes. If there's something outside of their system like a contract you had with a company or something you documented yourself, that would be something, and fortunately you'd have to figure out where the old information went. Now something to be aware of, this 10 year number changed as of 2014, I believe it is. Previously it was a five year time period. You had to keep them for five years. They decided with some changes to the E-rate program to make it a longer time period, 10 years. So this only goes into a few, starting with that, going forward 10 years back. So if you right now only have five years because that's how what it was before for a previous year, that's okay, you don't have to suddenly find older five years worth for like a 2016 application. We only had to do, like in 2010 we only had to keep five years back. Do I now have to find 10 years back or something like that? No, you don't have to do that kind of thing. Each year it's whatever the years back were at that time. So don't have to suddenly go and find 10 years worth of information when the rules only said five at that time of that application. But yes, you can find, look at, and I'll show you actually where you can look up any of your current, any forms you've done in the new E-rate system. We can even look up things in older as well on the E-rate website, going back. As far as the program has existed, we can always look up older forms, older applications that has to do with that. But if there's, like I said, any documentation you were keeping, that would be up to you to be able to find that if you need to. Now the kind of things you need to retain is basically anything related to your application, the actual forms you submit, any responses back from USAC, any other correspondence from them asking questions, any bids for services, any companies that reach out to you saying, hey, we want to provide you with these services, the contracts that you sign, agreements, delivery, invoices, shipping information, anything related to getting equipment, any decision-making processes, why did you pick some company? And we'll talk about more detail of that. Any correspondence, anything related to what you did on that E-rate application you do need to keep for those 10 years. If you're not sure, just scan a copy of it and put it in the file, and at least you have something, and rather than trying to scramble for it, they come back to you three years from now saying, I want to ask you about this thing back in 2019. So any other questions about document retention? Basically, keep everything. So I've been talking about your online account, and this is the E-rate portal. E-rate has a new, their most recent incarnation of the E-rate online applications is called the E-rate Productivity Center Epic, is the acronym for it. The acronym is EPC, but it's pronounced epic by them. So this is where all of your E-rate activity happens. Almost all your forms, except for one, that we'll talk about are submitted online via this portal. You log into it and you can access all of your, everything you've done. And here everything's starting in 2016 forward. Anything previous to that was done on previous online systems or on paper forms. It used to be all paper forms. There are places on the E-rate website to look up what were, what those forms were in previous versions, but they're not in this Epic system. It's only the ones 2016 forward are in there. You can go to this URL here to get directly into it. It's a really good interface. They went through a couple of incarnations of an online form applications, and some of them not too pretty, not as useful. This one is pretty good. It's very slick. It's very neat. We'll see some screenshots of it here. It's one-stop shopping for everything you need to do related to E-rate. You submit your applications. E-rate will respond to you with any questions they may have. You can ask questions of them, all your notifications in there.  You can also access it from any device. Previously, there were some limitations on that. You can do it on your computer, your laptop, tablet. You can even look up things on your phone if you wanted to, on your smartphone. I would not recommend submitting any form, completing and submitting any forms on a telephone. That would be way too crazy, too difficult, but we just need to double check on an application. Check a notification. You could easily log into your application there, at least check and see did they send me this notice. And you can use any browser. Previously, we were limited to using Internet Explorer only for E-rate online forms, but now you can use anything, i.e. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, whichever is your browser of choice. Now, you log into the website link that I gave you before, and you set to create an account for your organization, that's your library, and one person designated as an account administrator, the one person in charge of everything in your account. If you've previously applied for E-rate, this would be the person who had done your forms in the past, you're automatically set up with an application, or with an account.  You can have other users, if you wish, if you have other people in your library who you want to be involved with submitting your application, entering information or anything, you can create user accounts for them as well, and there's different levels of permissions you can have for these people as well, which is nice. You can have full users, so you can do everything and anything, complete the forms, file things, certify, answer questions, whatever. Partial, where they can help enter information, this might be an IT person needs to provide you with details about what you're applying for, but you don't want them to actually submit the forms because they don't have that kind of authority, or view only, they can just go in and look at anything, but really can't make any changes to any of your applications, so it depends on what you want people to do. Here in Nebraska, most of our libraries, it's a single person doing it, so it's just you as the account administrator, and that's perfectly fine. So this is the USEC, the e-rate website, usec.org slash sl for schools and libraries, and everything we have here is gonna do screenshots of the forms just because it's much easier to make sure everything works. On their website, there is a link under Resources and Tools to the e-rate Productivity Center. When you click on that, you have some information about it, you can see here there's some general guidance underneath there, there's videos, there you've got lots of good training on their website and their online learning library, short, not even five minute-ish videos of how to use different parts of the system, how to do different parts of your e-rate forms. If you are a new user, as I mentioned, and you've never used Dunny right before, or you don't know what's up with your account, there is a Contact Us option right under there underneath the Epic button there to log in. That will just tell you call our 800 number, talk to someone in our customer service department, and they'll get you all set up with your account. Now when you do click on the button, you agree to the usual terms and services, and then you get your log on screen. Your username is gonna be your email address, whatever email address you have told them is the one you wanna use, and then you create your own password. They do not generate passwords for you, USAC, and we do not know what your current password is, there's no way to look that up, it's all under your control. But there is some criteria, the usual security criteria of what you have to do to create a password. At least eight characters long, can't be the same one from the previous four, you have to have at least one number, one special character, one uppercase and one lowercase letter. That does sound very crazy and confusing, but this is the standard of what you need to do to have a strong password. What I recommend is you don't need to create a new password every single time it makes you do this. That's one thing about the system as well. It does require that you create a new password every 60 days, which does sound crazy, and a little bit extreme, but that is a security thing. Some security companies, like the company that has created this service, the interface for USAC has said, that's what we need to do to be secure, you got to change your password regularly. If you have a strong enough password, which actually meets all of these criteria, it's really hard to hack. So there's differing opinions on what you need to do to be secure. Most security experts are coming up with changing your password regularly, it's actually less secure because people don't remember it. They have to write it down somewhere.  These guys are still on the side of change it regularly. So you will have to change it on a regular basis. What I recommend is don't come up with something brand new every single time. What will happen is periodically you'll have to log in to do a form and it will say, yeah, your password's expired, you need to do a new one. Come up with a format and then just change one character of it each time. So for example, your password could be e-rate, pub-live, number sign one, the number one. And then when it comes up and asks you to change it again, change the number one to a two. Leave everything else the same. e-rate, pub-live, number two. Capitalize E, capitalize maybe the P in pub, whichever you want to do. Then when it says again, change to two to three, three to four, et cetera, et cetera, until you've gone all the way through one through nine. You will go past that previous four passwords limitation and you won't have to re-memorize a whole brand new password every time. So just don't create something brand new every time. Give yourself a nice formatted one and then just change one thing. It could be the number, it could be the special character, whatever you want. I do mine, I have a format one. It's not the one I just told you. But it's a certain format and I just change the number every time. And I've done it multiple times. I've been doing this since the system came out, was done in 2016. And I've gone through one through nine already a few times and it works. So make it easy on yourself that way. See, we do have a question. So I'm guessing since no one has used e-rate, excuse me, at our library, since the e-rate portal, since Epic portal began, I would use the contact us and make a new account. Yes, what I would say is use the contact us on here and reach out to them and tell them what library you're from. And they may be able to find a account, something already set up for your library potentially. It was kind of iffy about whether organizations were automatically set up and I've never been able to figure out which ones were and which ones weren't and why, but have them look up your library and there may be in a library account. They just need to set you up as an administrator of it. If not, they may need to go to the whole route of setting up an actual library itself and you as an administrator of it. They do also say they will ask for some official documentation. Generally a letter, a memo on library letterhead or the city's letterhead if that works for you saying, yes, this is so-and-so person at so-and-so library and they should be the account administrator and please set them up for e-rate. So they'll want you to send something in print to do that. And if you're just not sure, you think somebody did do it and this happens a lot too. You had a previous person at your library, a previous director who did the e-rate, then they left and did not leave behind any of their passwords or log in information. That's very common. That's fine, you just reach out and that same thing, contact us, explain your situation on the new director. The old one didn't leave me anything. I have no idea what's going on. They'll set you up as an account administrator on your library's account. So once you get logged in, you end up on your applicant landing page and that's what this is and we're gonna go into all the parts of this. This is a pretty big screenshot of just to show you the whole thing here. There is notifications where you can look up anything about any of your applications. There's a link here to look for information about your organization, customer service cases listed here at the bottom. This is where you can look up forms. So when you're asking, where do I find old forms? All of your old forms are listed here. You can search them. On the upper right, you can go into all different, the different application forms that you'd submit and look at more information about your account. So we're gonna go into all the different parts of this. First, right across the top, there is a bar here with some menu items that go into a few different things here. The first one all the way on the left is called news. This is news items. Kind of self-explanatory, I suppose. Anything that USAC is keeping track of you for your library or some general things. This here is showing a screenshot of the SL, Schools and Libraries News Briefs. Once a week on Fridays, they put out a newsletter. It's an email newsletter that you can sign up for and get sent to you in your email if you want to or it also comes up in your Epic account. So this is where you can see each one. Usually the news of the week, I highly recommend signing up for it if you do wanna keep up with what's going on with E-Rate, what's coming up, things you need to be worried about, deadlines, tips and tricks on how to submit things. However, it also does include everything, all news items. E-Rate applications and everything you do at E-Rate is public. Anyone can see what you've submitted, who's applying, all that information. If you wanna just see what's your library's news, you have a better way to get to just seeing what's related to your library. From your landing page, and I've zoomed in a bit here, under here it says welcome and your library's name would be here. Click on your library's name and then you've got a sub menu here of a whole bunch of different things about your library. Click on the news item here and this will bring you to just news items related, just items related to your library. So here, this is me getting a notification letter, funding being certified, acknowledgement letter and if I scroll down even more things. So if you just wanna see the news items related to your institution, rather than everybody's go that way to get your news. I'll also point out here while we're here, this is where that category two budget is tracked as well. So you see here, there's a link for category two budget in the upper right there. That's where you can click on and see what your budget is, what you've used, how much you have left. Now the second item across the top in the blue bar is tasks. This is things that you're in the middle of doing, things that the E-rate wants you to do or they want you to do. So when you submit, you start working on a form and E-rate in Epic, it tracks, it saves as you go. So you can do a form if you get interrupted or you realize you need to go look up some other information. It will save where you left off and then you can pop back into it. It will leave that as a tasks here when you're in the middle of something. The wording is confusing. I wish they had a little more control over it from the programmers of what it's called but create form, whatever it means, that's when you're still in the middle of creating. That's the way of thinking of it. It doesn't mean it wants you to create one. It means this is a form you've actually started. That's the only reason to be on this list is you went in and started something. That last one there was reviewing a PDF. You finished up the form. They might review what you did before you finally did the actual final submission. So anything you need to work on or keep up with, this is where you'll find that. The third item across the top is records. This is a long list of all these different kinds of things you can do with the system. Lookup different forms you submitted. Lookup different if you have an appeal for an app for something. Consulting for customer service cases you've done. I've actually got a second screen so it goes farther down. Changes to things, looking at service providers, looking at users, all these different things. Just a long list of things that you can look at there. Some of them you use regularly, some you'll never even go into. Reports, they don't have much on there yet. This is where you can pop back to your landing page. We'll link back to start. And any request changes. When you submit a form, you still, you always have a chance to change it afterwards. There's a certain time where you can realize you made a mistake and you can see your changes there. And then actions, kind of some leftover things. This is where you can reach out to their customer service. Thing, you can search for certified forms of yours down here. And then one here in the middle is an example. If there's any sort of things that are affecting the E-Rate deadlines. Generally things like natural disasters or something that they know will be affecting so many libraries and they're gonna give special dispensation for them to be late with their forms or contact USAC if you need to talk to them about whatever. There's orders that go out helping them be able to get, be able to not lose out on their funding. So back to your applicant page, your applicant landing page. In the upper right hand corner, there is a little head silhouette here. This is your profile for you as an individual. And remember you logged in with your email address. So this is you using E-Rate for your library. So you have a whole bunch of user information for yourself.  If you click on it, it brings up a little menu of where you can change your profile, change your settings, or this is also where you can log out of the system when you're done using it for the time. If we click on profile, we get this page. It looks very social media-ish. I think this program that they have, they're using here to put E-Rate into, does have those applications. We don't generally use it for those purposes, but it's in there. You'll notice in the middle there's your head and it says edit profile and then there's just big red notice across the bottom. Now this says please use the manage epic user profile related to action located in the top right of the screen to edit your profile. Do not use the edit profile button located under the user picture. They've updated the system for whatever reason. I don't know that we were told the reason why, but this edit profile just brings up and shows you what your profile has in it, but it doesn't let you actually do anything. You do need to use the manage button in the upper right. Hopefully at some future update, they'll clean this up a little bit. So as of now, this is what it tells us to do. And if you do hit that, then you get where you can go in and change any of the information about you as a user. This is good if your library has moved, you have new address, full number of things like that. Name changes too. You'll notice here, I've got a little mismatching here of last name, Krista Porter, Krista Burns. I got married a couple of years ago, three years ago, but I started using e-rate. Originally Burns was my last name and it was my email address. So that was my login for e-rate, but since then my last name is Porter, my email address at my work here at the library commission has changed to Krista.Porter at Nebraska.gov. I'll show you how we can change all of that. If you're in a library where you are the new director, but you have like a standard director email address like a library director at publiclibrary.org. And you just need to change the name that's being done. You can just do that here and there's leave the user name the same because it's the same email address. If you need to change the email address, however you do have to do some other steps here. This is just the bottom half of that page just to show you it's the rest of the address, the mailing address. Now on our landing page, we can manage users. This is where you can add or remove or update any other people you might wanna have use your library's e-rate account. You check in the box for your organization. Now this may seem confusing and a waste of a step to many of our libraries. We have in Nebraska, most other public libraries are individual libraries, just a single organization. The e-rate system though is built for up to the large organizations as well which have multiple branches of a public library or multiple locations of a school. So in their situation, there would be a long list of things here and they have to pick the right one. We just use it as it is here. So we choose what ours is checking in the box there. And then here I'll show you how you can create a new user. This is where you'll get a blank form and this one I filled in with all the new user for me as a new user with my new email address, Christopher Porter at Nebraska.gov. So if you have just another person you wanna add, you would do this once you create this. An email is sent to that person at the email address telling them they've had an account created and notifying them, okay, now you go log in, create yourself a password and using the forget password option on the main login screen and then they'll have access to the account, to the library's account. This is also how if you are having a situation like I have where my email address changed and I wanna change that in the e-rate system because I can no longer get email notifications at my old email address or I'm a new library director and we each have our own personal email addresses that we need to use and by our name. The way you do that is you create a new user for either in this case I'm creating me with a new email address or you, the current email address. You create that, there is below this, there's the user permission section as well where you can decide what kind of access this person will have and you can see here you can do it by form, by what they can do each different thing. If you're the only person doing e-rate for your library, you would do everybody gets, I get full rights across the board, I need to be able to do everything. They do have this apply all option at the very beginning there where you can just say, I want full rights for everything with one click, boom. Then you would go into your library's account here using the welcome link and when you go into your organization information and the upper right here there's an extra menu here that you can open up where you can modify your account administrator. So this is I am the, in my case I'm just changing my email address so I'm creating a new username, I'm gonna switch it to that one with a new email address or I'm the new director and I have a different email address than the previous director so I need to use mine, you're gonna modify it because you're the current account administrator, you're gonna modify it. Now, if you don't have the login info for the old director you might need to contact USAC to help you out with this but if you do or you can just have them set you up with it, yeah. You have the same, if you have the email address, if you have access to it you can just change the password, use it, make it your own account user account and switch it over. So when you do that, you see you'll have a list here showing here at the organization who is the current account administrator and all the available users. So you can see I've got me as the current one with Krista.burns and there's me, the new one I created Krista.porter. I move the checkbox uncheck that, check that one instead and then it will confirm so I'm here is the current one Krista.burns is gonna be changed to Krista.porter submit. And now when I go back to the organization you'll notice down here in the lower left before we go on to the pop up menu up there it shows who your current account administrator and general contact are. There's two different contacts here. And you notice here just gives the name. It doesn't show the email address which is the login. Could be better because I'd like to know that since my name is the same you know, no matter what the email address was but you just have to go in and check and see what they look like. So over here now you also want to change your general contact as well if that's something if you're gonna be the one person doing it that may be the old email address, old name as well. Same thing, same exact thing it's just now you're talking about the general contact uncheck the old one Krista.burns check Krista.porter. You'll see who's the current one who the new one's gonna be you submit and now you're all set and everything has been switched over to you as the new one. I could go in and delete the old user account if I wanted to for me as Krista.burns I can leave it there. Now that I'm the account administrator it's all under my control though so it's all good. Now you can also manage your organization in here where you can change anything about your library check in the box, manage organization and if your library moves change the address change your urban and rural status this defaults to the information that's given out by the US Census you can change it if you need to this is a long page scroll down there's a mailing address other ways to contact you library information what kind of library you are here this is for me as the library commission I'm a state library agency you would of course be just public library this is also where you enter your square footage of your library to be used for your category two calculation so this is a required field so this is where you would put that in and you just enter it here once and that's always used for all your future applications but the last part of this is where you have your school district if it knows it will put in one if there isn't one in there as you're associated you can do a search and find out which ones are local to you and then choose select them to be your school district the school district is who enters in the information to the Epic system about the school lunch numbers you don't have to actually enter that number those information in there anymore we used to have to as libraries we just let the schools do that for us and because we're connected to them by this it automatically fills in the right discount for us the last thing on here is an FCC registration number this is something that's now required and anyone doing business with the FCC which you are because you're participating in e-rate has to have one of these numbers I didn't know that we had permission but we did and I was able to find it there's a website from the FCC to look up and see if you have one and if you don't to go ahead and request one it's a quickie form fill out they send an email in just a few minutes boom you have it a couple of the things to be aware of identifying numbers for each organization each library is assigned a build entity number it's called your Ben number that you'll get asked about a lot sometimes from USAC that's something like a social security number for a person it's the number for e-rate purposes associated with your library that set up from the first time your library is set up in e-rate and is for the life of the library is there service providers have their own ID number it's called a spin number that you have to use to designate who which service provider you're gonna be working with they may have more than one so if you're not sure what's the right one to use if you're doing something new the service provider double check with them on which one to use if you're still continuing with the same old service you've always had with them you should be good to just use whatever one you've always been using so that's the basics of the Epic system itself now let's get into some actual forms the actual forms themselves so any questions about the system in itself and using anything in there we go in the form in the just the basics of the system okay so the question says earlier in the presentation you should website links and the steps for getting our discount but just now you showed us with an Epic system so are the websites just yes so the website's just for looking at what a discount would be yes the website's the information out there is just to find out so you can look up if you want to before getting deciding to do e-rate what your discount could be once you're doing e-rate it's all automatic by the numbers that the school's put in and it automatically does the calculation for you in there yeah do all vendors we might use there's another question for category two purchases need to have a spin yes anyone participating in e-rate who wants to participate in e-rate whether it's for you as an applicant or a service provider as providing you with the equipment or services needs to apply to be part of the program so that USAP can track who they are and then pass on the discounts and everything to them so they would have to do their side everything you're doing here e-rate related they have their own forms that they're submitting as well on their side to participate in the program they don't apply for the discounts you do but they say yes we are going to be a participant so they do need to have a spin number as well and there's a whole part of the USAP website that is all about for service providers I don't help service providers do their thing so I know but I know enough of some about it so they wouldn't come to me to help and do it but there's a whole page that says go here to sign up for the program they just have to submit forms basically and then give you the discounts there's an annual form they make sure they submit every year saying yes we're still participating they have a lot easier time than you guys had it but they do all have to have a spin number for you to use yes so yes things like Best Buy or Amazon would it would be they wouldn't be able to unless they have somehow put together yeah we'll do E-rate and the thing is too your discounts if you're buying something and getting reimbursement it's not going through the service provider anymore so it is much easier for them to just say yeah we'll participate if I can just fill out a form every year and then you buy from us and you get the discount so for some local companies it might be easy for you to convince them Best Buy or Amazon not some yeah no unfortunately all right so the first form in the E-rate process is the Form 470 this is something you submit right now it's been available since the summer this officially opens what they call a competitive bidding process you are when you're doing E-rate putting an open call out to anyone out there who might potentially provide a service saying we're looking for someone to provide us with this service if you have a current provider that's fine you don't have to start new and say oh no we're gonna have to pick somebody new because somebody different contacted us it's not necessarily but you are just saying there is some we're looking for anybody to provide us with this in Nebraska generally our libraries there's not very much competition out in 90% of the state in the rural areas it is whoever you have it's who you have and that's fine but every now and then new companies pop up and you might find some competition and maybe a potential better provider you never know there are some times when you do not need to do a 470 however if you have a multi-year contract with a company and this is as in a contract with a beginning and an end date a specific beginning and date where you for example you said the provider said if you lock us in with us for a three-year contract from this year to three years down the road we will lock in your price and then you only do a 470 the first year when you're first looking to get that contract the other years you're no longer need to find a provider because you're locked in with them you actually skip and just do the second form of the process confirming to e-rate every year that yes we are still working with this company so you would only do it the first year if you're just doing paying month to month where you signed a contract five years ago and it just keeps going and going and going without having to sign a new contract every year that's not the same thing as a multi-year multi-year contracts means contract with an official end date where once that three years is up you will have to re-sign a new contract in that case you do this if you're just doing months to month every year you do the 470 also something new trying to encourage companies to provide this kind of really fast, really cheaper service if you have somebody in your area who is offering at least 100 megabits per second download for $300 a month you don't have to even do any sort of competition you just go with them and that's it you just skip the 470 and just start with the 471 saying hey we found somebody who provides us with this service when I first started doing this three years ago it wasn't really out there but I'm starting to hear that some places are actually offering the 100 megabits I'm talking more obviously rural areas here in Nebraska so look and see if this is available if it is it can save you and your service provider a lot of work now to get to your 470 from your main landing page there's an FCC form 470 link up there in the top it automatically fills in your library's basic info and then you have to give the form a nickname this is something for your purposes name it whatever you want just so that you can track this particular form since you will be working on multiple years at the same time as I mentioned earlier it's good to know which one is which this is how sometimes you secrete out to you too so here I did FY 2020 470 for your standard on the bottom here there's a discard form save and share, save and continue buttons three different buttons you can use discard is if you realize no wait I didn't want to do this form I just want to get rid of it you can discard your form save and share is if you have someone else within the e-rate system like another user you need to pass this on to generally that's for the situation where I'm a librarian and I can fill out some of this but only our superintendent of our schools is officially allowed to certify and actually submit the form that kind of thing for most of us though we're just doing it ourselves so we save and continue the next screen just confirms all the information about your library if it's all correct you're good to go on if not you'd go out into that managed organization and fix anything so save and continue again contact person, oh consultant information there are companies out there that you can pay to help you do your e-rate application I am called yes your state e-rate consultant for libraries I'm not the same kind of thing you guys don't pay me it's my job to do this for you as working at the state library here but if you do consult with some firm that does it for you generally large organizations need someone to do this for them you would enter that, have that entered there but if you're the main contact you just say yes and it automatically pulls in your information there as you can see here I did the screenshot before I changed my email address I'll take that and save and continue and now here's where you can ask for whichever category of service you want you can either do one category one request just category two on this 470 or you can do both whichever works out for you some people like to keep category two and one separate on two separate 470s and that's fine just so they can keep those kind of projects separate in their minds and in their paperwork category one being mainly maybe just my monthly internet that I have category two being this special project that we're doing with upgrading the computer lab and I wanna keep all those paperwork separate that's perfectly fine to keep them on two different things you just go through this 470 twice or you can do one form where you do everything all in one your choice for this demonstration I've done both together RFP a 470 serves the purpose of RFP or a quest for proposal or a quest for quote so to speak where you're giving the information out to any potential providers who might wanna contact you but if you have some bigger project more than just what this form can provide or you need to give a lot more detail about we're building a new library and here's all the information about it or you need more detail you would have some sort of separate document that's already been created that you could then upload here if you want to to give them all that info for my purposes I'm gonna say no saving continuum and this is where we can choose our particular things we wanna discount on there's category one at the top category two at the bottom so I'm gonna add a new service request a new request for discount on a service and when I first go in there it opens up a nice pull down pop up with some helpful information about what are the different things you can ask for and I'm just gonna explain a bit about a few of these the first one there is your lit fibers if you just know you've got fiber and that's it you just do fiber the second one is anything basically everything else is not fiber internet access and transport together for all the other kinds of connections that are not my fiber connection so if that's the kind of service you know you have or that you're looking for you would choose that one the next two generally speaking for most school libraries in Nebraska you don't choose those those are for like larger organizations sometimes their internet service and the getting the service to their building are two separate things and very much separated in their bills and who they get it from and they ask for it separately if you do that you're gonna get a call from USAC saying are you sure you only wanted transport because that means you're not getting the actual service you just got the connection or are you sure you just want the service and not the connection because if you just did the internet access one ISP service only and not transport how are you getting it to the building it's confusing yeah so generally speaking for most of our independent libraries doing the standard you don't do that you want that bundled one above it because that come encompasses everything and then there's the least dark and lit together that's what I was talking about if you're you know fiber exists but you wanna explore and see if there is any dark fiber to be turned on you do that combo one and then there's the ones for maintenance and operation everything so that's just some help there now if we go up to above it is where we actually have the pull down menu to add this what we want and then we can choose whichever one we're doing and you can do multiple ones of these I'm gonna do an example here of just doing the internet access and transport bundled just for the non fiber so I'm looking for that but if I also wanted to explore and say I wanna know just what's out there I would go through all this process a second time and maybe do at least dark and lit fiber as a second service request just to say I wanna see just what's available in all types of connections and see who contacts me but your 470 is really your wish list of what I would love to have all the different things I might wanna get you don't have to end up getting everything you list on the 470 that's your second form where you say where you actually ended up with the 471 this is my if I could have the highest internet connection the highest the best fiber connection I would love to get it in the end you might end up with something else but that's okay so here I've chosen internet access and transport bundled and then I've got a few other questions I have to answer quantity I just one connection to my building and then what speed there's a pull up menu here for both minimum maximum speed it goes all the way from like I think something kilobytes down all the way up now to multiple gigabytes and everything in between as a whole range so you choose from here what you want definitely go think bigger than what you know you can get so if you know you're currently getting 25 megabits per second for maximum don't just put 25 down because faster might be available to you and you might be able to afford it so put choose 50 as your maximum or choose 100 even whatever you want to just has to make sure it falls within that range of your minimum and maximum what you end up with if you say maximum is 25 but you end up finding a company who will offer you 50 megabits per second you'll only get a discount up to 25 the cost of up to 25 megabits you'll have to pay full price for the rest so think big think all-encompassing and you'll end up with something in the middle there number of entities served you're just one library and do you need installation in this case I'm saying this is just for us to continue with our current provider I don't need it installed it's what we already have so I don't if you are willing to have needing knowing I'm gonna have to have a new connection run because this is a new building my internet service for the first time whatever you would say yes I would like to have installation and then you click the add button and you'll see now it puts into a little table there with all the basic information about it if I wanted to add also I wanna look for fiber I hit add new service request that blue button again choose the fiber option put down its speeds and it would add it as a second option there is a little narrative if you like you can enter more details in there about it I just wrote here monthly internet service for the library any little extra details you might want to add into here this is kind of like I don't need to write a full RFP like that previous choice where I upload a giant document but I wanna give a little detail about what we're doing you could enter that here and if you scroll down below that there's an installment payment plan question for large construction projects you sec knows that sometimes these companies will let you pay as you could pay in installments and if that's the case if you are doing that kind of a project they just wanna know that that's how the money's gonna be paid now we can do a category two service works the same way as a category one add a new request here's the pull down menu for that you can choose the internal connections all your equipment your basic maintenance of those connections or that manage broadband services so I'm just gonna do the internal connections and you can see here I've got a list of all the different kinds of things cabling, caching, rack router WAP is wireless access point so I'm going to pick cabling there we go I chose cabling as an example a thousand feet I don't know if that's enough I just picked that as a number and then there is a manufacturer a huge pull down menu of all these manufacturers you don't have to pick one if you don't want to no preference is fine but if you do it's gonna say a particular manufacturer or equivalent you don't wanna limit yourself to just one brand because then if your front company doesn't offer that brand you don't get the right I won't even let you do not equivalent so that's just to show you that's what will come up you're still just one entity but in this case, yes I do not know how to install internet cabling so I would like someone to please install it for me I hit the add button just like the first one and there it is on the category two list and now I'm gonna show you I went through and added a couple of more and this is just what it looked like afterwards going through I said I also want one router and three wireless access points these are the kind of things I'm gonna purchase next year and I want an e-ray discount done so I just hit that add new service request multiple times and adding all the different things I wanted so you'll maybe just have to go through this for all the different things that you'll want either category one or two until you've got them all listed out there now this is a full screen of just showing what you have here all this is what you'll end up with you'll see all of your category ones that you're asking for all your category twos you can confirm is this everything it's all there showing me on one screen if it is then I save and continue at the bottom after that ask do you have a tech person do you have a technical contact someone that's not you who these companies could potentially reach out to to ask more questions if it's just you you'd say no if you have someone else you could have them you have created them a user account if you wanted them to have access to e-rate your applications in my case I did the enter details manually because my tech person Sue she doesn't care about applying for e-rate she just installs my stuff and she does not need her own account in the Epic system to e-rate but she will be the person I prefer the companies to call and ask the details about our network closet and whatnot so and or her information and save and continue and then do you have any state or local requirements if this is any bidding requirements that you have that your city or your county if your county based puts upon you about anybody doing bidding for services to you you'd need to put links to that in here in Nebraska at the state level we do not have any requirements but you'll need to check your local level and see if there is and if it is it'd be a yes and then there'd be a link an option to give the details about what that is and now that's all the information for your 470 we now have a review the form option rather than save and continue because we've entered all the information needed it will then say when it's ready a task will become available to complete your certification that's approving and actually submitting the form and that's in your tasks option the top there you can see in this screenshot it just said tasks but if I go to the next one there's a little number of peers of their in parentheses next which show me how many tasks I have so you just have to watch your screen sometimes it takes 3, 4, 5 minutes for it to process through and come up as a task so just keep an eye on it refresh your screen a few times maybe but you see it there then you go to the one that says certify the form and then you'll see here is where you can actually sign off on that I do want to submit you'll notice here the continue to certification button is grayed out it's a light blue not that bright blue like the ones we could click on it's not live yet because you'll see that box that says by checking this box I certify the information that PDF above is correct we haven't checked that box yet what it wants you to do is click on this link download a PDF of your form and double check it so you want to do that this is also a way of getting yourself a print copy of the form so here's the PDF of what I submitted just shows you it entered scroll down a bit there's your category ones it's very small on the screen but just so you can see there's my category two technical contact all the information save your PDF for your purposes go back check the box if everything's correct if anything's not correct you see there's that back button you can always go back and change things you need to go back, back, back to the part you need to fix but if it's all good you check the box and you continue to certification you do not send that is send to someone else in the system like I was mentioning before a different person who's authorized to certify and submit the form unless you're in that situation you would send it to somebody else who has an account in here in your organization otherwise you continue to consider certification because you're the one authorized to do it it will then confirm this is going to actually go to them you actually want to do this at this point you can't go back and this is the certifications there's a whole bunch this is all the legalese where you're agreeing to all the legal terminology related to it and I'm going to zoom in here so you can see all these boxes that you have to check in if you don't check all these boxes you won't be able to certify you'll notice here in the lower right there is the certify button just like before it's still light blue not able to be clicked yet until we check all these boxes it won't be live for us to click on so this is just the I certify that I'm the one who's allowed to do this then I'm going to follow all the rules that I'll review everything correctly et cetera, et cetera feel free to read it all if you want to once you check all of those and hit the certify button because it has become blue you will get now the the scary legal notification false statements in this forum may result in civil liability and or criminal prosecution don't panic that's just the legal that it will if you do anything wrong basically follow the rules don't try and you know I'm breaking that you rate rules you do have to agree to that if you're going to submit your application so you say yes and then you've submitted it now if you want to double check and see make sure that I do it all right down at the bottom on your landing page this is where you can look up any of your forms and I'm going to zoom in there you can choose form type in year because the last time the library commission did this was in 2016 that's my example here but you choose whatever form you want to look up what funding year and then you can see the status on the right there it is certified that means it's submitted all good it's done and complete I'm still in the middle of that one that's one that you'll see it'll keep popping up in your tasks saying you complete this form don't you got to do this form so you know that one's still out there if you do have things in your tasks that you are not that are not complete it will the system will email you reminders letting you know you need to submit this form you need to do this you need to create this form and it will get a little confusing because it says create a form but if that's just the reminder saying don't forget you're in the middle of this one lots of people do get confused with this where they think well to go in to update a form I've got to click on that FCC form up at the upper right every time you click on that it creates a new form you always want to go to your tasks to continue a form but if you accidentally started new ones that you don't really need them anymore just go into them use that discard form button and get rid of them clean it up that will stop the system from constantly sending you email reminders that you don't need now from this when you have looked up your form the nickname over here you know it says blue it's a hot link you can click on and see the HTML version of the form so you can see everything on here of what you submit as well just like PDF but in the web version after you submit this you will receive a receipt notification letter it's not actually a letter that's mailed to you we've known it's called the letter it's an email that goes into your news section in your Epic account saying it's been received this is also where you can make any changes if there is anything that you realize oh I made a mistake I put something in wrong you can make a fix this also gives you what's called your allowable contract date after you do your 470 you have your open bidding process you have to have that open for 28 days by FCC rules before you can pick officially who you wanna go with even if you're just sticking with your same current provider nothing's changing you still have to give anyone else potential chance to reach out to you and contact you this is what competitive bidding is all about and you have to wait 28 days before you can go on to the second form and say who you ended up with this is what it looks like in your Epic account and you can see the very end of that very first paragraph that says the allowable contract date is and in this case it was in April and 2016 so that's the soonest you can do your second step the 471 okay we have a question about the receipt notification letter will they save the R&L or do we have to save a copy in records of paperwork they will always be there in your news you can always go back to historically all the way back to any previous news any previous forms you've done will always be in your Epic account you can print it out if you want to from here you can see those links they will give you a copy of it but it will always be in here as well they have said they will always track everything for us in there I recommend if you want to making your own copies you know they say they will keep everything but you know things can break internet can crash things like that you might want to look at something when their system is down for maintenance or whatever so it doesn't hurt to make a copy like I said but I would recommend electronic everything just make PDFs, save things, scan things whatever and just keep it in little file you know 2020 e-rate, 2019 e-rate any other questions about the 470 it's pretty easy for them the hardest part about the 470 is figuring out what you want and that's the prep work you do beforehand or what are we going to ask for a discount on now competitive bidding is what is actually happening after you've submitted your 470 if any there is competition now as I mentioned earlier here in Nebraska half the time there's nobody there's no competition you've got one company in town that's it you're just going through the e-rate process to make sure you can get your discount and that's fine but it is the process that you are formally going through where you are saying opening up for bids saying we are looking for someone to provide us with internet service we're looking for someone to sell us a router and install it and whatever you as I said it's 28 days you have to wait and let companies contact you they can read what you've posted they can reach out to you they may ask questions about what do you need what are you actually talking about you can pair all the offers that you receive see what people are offering to you after the 28 days are over that's when you can make the decision and go on to the second farm and report to USAC who you've picked you must select the most cost effective bid is what e-rates states and I'm going to explain what that means first you must have a fair and open bidding process I mean you treat everyone the same you can't have a company, a vendor a potential service provider help you fill out your 470 meaning you can't go to a company and say even your current one is saying hey we're doing e-rate we want it to be you we're going to work with you tell me what to put on this form so I can process it through you can't do that what you can do is go to them and say if I would like to upgrade maybe two fiber from what you have tell me what I might need so you don't say in relation to e-rate I want to do this you've got to be very specific that you're not talking to them about it because you want to get e-rate that you're just investigating things like that you also just look on their websites find out what's available but you have to give everyone the same information too if one vendor contacts you and asks you a question you have to answer their question about it you can't not give them information and give someone else preferential information so you have to treat everyone fairly if you do get contacts you also must choose what is the most cost effective bit cost effective as I'm sure we've all experienced in our life in general does not always mean cheapest cost effective installs there's other factors you want to take into consideration when you're considering buying something and that works for e-rate as well cost must be your primary factor the most important thing you look at but not the only thing and I have a way here for you to document what you're doing and to compare companies this is an example of how you can potentially compare different companies you can do whatever works best for you but this is one way that you can have documented if multiple companies contact you it's a good thing to have just in case they or you sat come back later and ask you why did you pick so-and-so over so-and-so company this will show what your reasoning was price being the most primary factor and this is how it works you can say these are all the things that matter to me price do I know the company prior experience what do they charge for other things how will they give me a discount are they local anything else that might matter to you do I know their customer support what do I know about them and you assign points that they can earn for each of those things price they have to be able to earn the most points as you can see here they can earn 30 points up to 30 points for having the weather prices and then everything else is just less points adding up to a total of 100 you can see here three companies contacted me and we gave them the vendor two had the cheapest pricing but then there's all these other factors involved and in the end a vendor three had more points than anybody else that is the reason why I went with them because price was the primary factor they were able to learn the most points there but there's a lot of our things that matter other things that matter to me and overall they ended up the most in this case what's obvious what is most likely happening is here is a new company came into town vendor two you know nothing about them no prior experience so they earn zero points for that but the other two companies you do know that's where they earn their points and the third company was not as cheap as the second company but that's okay you do know them you know what their prices are for other services they might have been better local or not so overall because they earned the most points in total that's okay for you to pick them even though vendor two was the cheapest you're perfectly fine going with vendor three definitely good to have this especially because vendor two might come back and be a little upset they will say we know we are cheaper than vendor three they should not have picked them I wanna know what happened I want to know why they picked them I think this was wrong I think something is right and they may come to you sec they may come to you and question it if you have this you can show them why we don't know you that's why we didn't give you anything your reasoning might be another thing that a lot of libraries have mentioned to me is customer service we know we've heard about this company and their customer service is horrible we gave them as your own customer service sorry you may be the cheapest but your customer service is not that great so this is how you can do a comparison if you need to now what if you have now this might not actually be there might not even be a need to do a comparison because there isn't any competition for example what if you have an existing contract with your current service provider and you want to just start doing e-rate after you've already signed a contract with them that's okay what you do is you do your 470 no problem just like usual you wait the 28 days like you always do but then you take your existing contract your current what you currently have set up and that's one of your bids is considered one of your bids and then if you do get other companies contact you you take that current situation compare it to the other ones if the existing one is the winning bid based on this for example prior experience they're probably gonna get high numbers because they are your current company then they win and it's all done all good it's now eligible and your current contract can just be used to start getting e-rate discount on even if you've never done it before you don't have to start wait to start from scratch if you have a current contract if you're in the middle of a multi-year contract it's okay you just do it this way make your current contract being one of those bids what if your city pays for your library's internet I've had a lot of libraries telling me well it doesn't matter the city pays for everyone so I don't have anything to get discount done actually you can if you can separate what is the libraries part of the internet that the city pays for from all the other departments you can get a discount on the library's portion not on the whole service everything the city pays for but at least the part that is used by the library you may have statistics you can get from the service provider showing who uses what by IP address or computer you would submit an estimate of this or the actual stats and then only apply for e-rate for the library's part takes a little bit of work a little knowing the numbers and everything but your city may be happy to say you're gonna at least save them you have 70, 80% on part of their internet bill so you can use this cost allocation method to get a discount on just what the library uses what if you only get one bid or you get no bids that's okay you do not have to have a competition at all if you only get one bid and it's cost effective you can accept it especially with your current provider just write yourself a little memo or email saying for 2020 only company was this art this one so that's it in case anyone questions it later after the 28 days if you haven't received any then you can reach out to companies before that 28 days no you're just sitting back and waiting and letting them come to you but after that 28 days if nobody has reached out to you you can start saying you're poking them and say hey, we're looking for E-Rate definitely good point at this good idea this point if you're gonna be sticking with your current provider just let them contact them and just say are you still gonna continue with us? Are you still doing E-Rate? Just confirm with them little email back and forth maybe so you have that documented that yes they're gonna still be your provider and they are still going to participate in E-Rate for you so then on or after that date that 38 days that's when you can officially close the committed bidding process as of 28 days you can say we're done we're not accepting any more bids you then you can officially evaluate choose who you want sign a contract if necessary if you need to sign a new document and then do your 471 you can go longer than that doesn't have to be on that date if you're still waiting to hear from companies it's just get a definitely wait those 28 days you can put in your in that narrative part of your 470 some specifics about we will only accept bids up to the allowable contract date any bids accepted and you submitted to us after a certain whatever date we determine you put it in there will not be accepted I've had libraries have that situation where they waited the 28 days they picked their company they decided they want to go and then three weeks later some new company another company sends them a bid and I'm like but we already made our decision that's okay as long as you document in your 470 that's how the process is going to work no late submissions you didn't meet our deadline that we put on that 470 you're out of luck just make sure you put it on there your 471 does have to be done also just during what we call the application filing window and we'll talk about that a certain period of time when you can do your 471 now when is your allowable contract date up it was given to you when you first submitted your 470 but e-rate USAC will also proactively send you an email letting you know and this is an email actually out to your personal email address not just within the Epic system where you have to go log in and check because you've got your email address is your login they will send an email to you poking you saying hey your allowable contract date has been reached you can now start doing all the other stuff you can now evaluate everything and do it so this is great this is a new thing part of this new Epic system that they will actually reach out to you and nudge you to make sure you're ready to go on to the next steps you don't miss it any questions about the 470 or competitive bidding 95% of the time I'm just guessing here in Nebraska there is no competition to worry about you put it out there it's going to be your provider you just can continue with them but it may come up so now you know how it will all work and that allowable contract date email will also appear in your Epic account for you as well so the second form in the E-Rate process is your 471 this is where you tell Usak who you decided to go with you must do this every year you let them know who you picked what service providers your discount calculation if it appears in there so as a reminder again where do we put the deadlines so vendors know they can't submit when you're doing your 470 there was that free text box where it was called a narrative it's right underneath where you put in the specific service you're looking for that you can type in anything that's where you can put in and explain how it's all going to work you could also write up a little RFP and attach it during that RFP process but for something simple like this that box would serve that purpose so it's the narrative in your 470 so the 471 this point you can communicate with your provider they actually recommend that you do because at this point is when you need to find out exactly what are we going to be getting what speed is it going to be what is our connection what brand what's all going to end up being what the price is going to be so this is when you would definitely reach out to them and to let them know how you want to get your discount money that we'll get into too so you do this after the 28 days have passed after your level contract date has reached after you sign a document if you need to sign a new contract or something legally binding and during the application filing window the application filing window is something that happens generally during the spring 471s are only available in the short period of time it's usually about two to three months and it's the only time when the form is live when you can submit it your 470 you can submit pretty much any time during the year but they have a certain time they always announce when these dates are they vary every year the beginning opening and closing date of the window hopefully in December sometime they'll announce the actual dates so you'll have to wait till that window is open to do your 471 if you try now it won't even work because it's not working and it's not available when the dates are announced I push it out on our mailing lists on our website it'll be everywhere on our pages everywhere on the e-rate web pages because it's not available exactly right now I'm not going to go through the entire 470 here like I just did the 47 or the entire 471 like I just did the 470 but I'm going to give you some specific details about it get into the 471 it's an upper right hand corner there starts off the same way I can show you this this is the start page as you can see for the 2019 form you enter a nickname just like the first one and then you go through it I don't as I said I don't have the actual screen just going through it but I will tell you about how it works with the 471 it's a few different things with the 471 than the 470 first you do need to file a separate one for each category of service category one, category two for the 470 you could have both of those in one form if you're doing both category one and category two you have to submit two form of 471s one for all the category one things and one for all the category two there's also a two-step process for entering all the information about what you're getting there's first you create the request itself the funding request is what they call it whatever the thing is you're getting my monthly internet I'm buying a router, a wireless access point whatever then there's the line item information about that item you're getting which is the money telling how much it's going to cost is it a monthly cost is a one-time cost this is where some people kind of lose it in the process they create the refunding request saying what they're getting and then they don't go deeper into the second step of how much did it cost if you haven't entered any money information into a 471 a dollar amount of what's going to cost you're not you haven't finished it yet you've got to use something it's going to come up with an error message anyways and let you know most likely that's a thing that you've forgotten to do after you enter all that information it's got certifications just like the 470 they're very similar once you get into them this case and a 470 you're saying here's what I'm looking for the 471 here's what I ended up with you'll also get a receipt now letter from about that same kind of thing you can use it to make changes if you want to if you realize something that needs to be changed money-wise you can request reductions in your funding but not an increase if you need to make a change so if you said it's a cost you got to make sure you've done the right amount there a preceded knowledge letter goes right into your e-rate in your epic system just like your 470 does so the 471 is pretty easy it's just confirming what you ended up with the hardest part with that is going back and forth the provider about what you're going to actually get and that once again is prep work before going in and doing the form any questions about the 471 so once you've so once you've submitted your 471 the second form this is where you sit back