Where are Year 4 Funding Commitment Letters?
Message Posted June 9, 2001
Year 4 Funding Commitment Letters Expected in Late June or July
Many of you have written or called to express concern about why you haven't received your Year 4 E-rate Funding Commitment Decision Letter yet. Actually, no one in the country has received a Year 4 funding letter yet, and there are a few reasons why.
First, as you know, the SLD is in the process of attempting to retrofit the E-rate program to comply with the new CIPA (filtering) legislation. Under the rules, all applicants receiving Internet Access and/or Internal Connections must certify on their Form 486's that they have been in compliance with the law since start of services (and in the first year of funding, that can be as liberal as "taking action" to comply with the law). And because this required the SLD to modify the 486 to include such certifications, the form then had to go to the FCC and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for re-approval. Long story, short... the new 486 is not ready yet and therefore funding letters cannot be issued. The latest word is that letters for Telecommunications Services and Internet Access should be mailed at the very end of June or beginning of July.
Second, as you know from previous updates, demand for Year 4 was so high that very few applicants will receive Internal Connections funding. In fact, there isn't enough to even cover all requests at the 90% discount level. The FCC is currently trying to decide how to allocate those funds and they seem to be down to two choices: 1) provide Year 4 internal connections funding to applicants that did not receive internal connections funding in year 3, OR 2) provide the 90% discount applicants with a percentage of what they requested. And although it was first believed that the available funding would provide less than 30% of the original request to each 90% applicant, the SLD has since released information which estimates that the 90% discount applicants would receive approx. 73% of their original request. (Therefore if the 471 listed $100,000 as the undiscounted amount, and therefore with the 90% discount the request would have been $90,000... the actual funding amount would be 73% of that figure -- $65,700.)
The FCC has not made their decision yet on how to allocate these funds, but it is important to remember that whatever they decide has nothing to do with requests for Telecom Services and/or Internet Access. There is plenty of money to fund these applications. However, because the FCC may not make their decision for a few more weeks, it is highly likely that the funding commitment letters that are released this summer will be for Telecom and Internet only.
And finally, many of you have questioned why you have not received a call from PIA yet. I called the PIA supervisor this week and she informed me that there is a small percentage of applications from PA that have not been reviewed yet... but we are seeing a nice trend this year... in that there are many applications that have come through PERFECT and no contact from PIA is needed.
As soon as I know when funding letters will be mailed, or updates on the Internal Connections funding, I'll let you know.
-- Julie
Julie Tritt Schell
Director
Office of Educational Technology
Pennsylvania Department of Education
333 Market Street, 10th Floor
Harrisburg, PA 17126
(717) 705-4486
(717) 787-7222 - fax
jtritt@state.pa.us
www.L2L.org
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