Category 2 Budget Calculator Worksheet

December 14, 2016

I know many of you are considering applying for Category 2 E-rate funding for FY 2017 and trying to calculate your C2 pre-discount budgets.  C2 school budgets are generally easy to calculate if you have not applied for C2 funding for a school in FY 2015 or FY 2016 (simply multiply $150 x # of students enrolled in a school).  Where it becomes challenging is when you have applied for funding in one or both of the previous two funding years.  It becomes even more difficult when you have submitted or are intending to submit a Form 500 to return some of your commitment that was unspent.

USAC has indicated that they intend to release an online C2 budget calculator in the coming weeks/months; however, I know you need to these budgetary figures NOW.  Therefore, attached is a spreadsheet that will help you though these calculations.

A few notes:

• If your FY 2016 C2 funding request is still pending, be sure to include it with your calculations as it WILL be funded and not available in your FY 2017 C2 budget for that school.
• If you were committed C2 funding and realize that you will not be using the entire commitment amount, be sure to file a Form 500 to “return” the commitment (not actual money) to USAC so that those funds are available in your C2 budget for a future funding year.
• Don’t forget, these are PRE-discount figures.  Your E-rate discount will then apply on top of that and you will be responsible for paying the non-discounted share.  (For example, if your pre-discount C2 budget is $10,000 and your discount is 60%, E-rate will pay $6,000 and you will be required to pay the vendor $4,000).
• Category 2 budgets are calculated by school and cannot be moved around.  The only exception is if you’re purchasing equipment that is being shared by multiple schools in which case you will use the C2 budgets of the schools connected to or utilizing the equipment.
• You may use the enrollment data from FY 2016 (currently in your EPC profile) or the FY 2017 enrollment, but it must be a complete dataset.  Meaning, you can’t pick and choose to update the enrollment for some schools and not others.  The FY 2017 enrollment/NSLP data (submitted by schools October 2016) will be coming out from PDE in mid-late January and I’ll send to the PA E-rate listserve as soon as it’s received.
• The spreadsheet shows an example where enrollment increased in FY 2017 and no additional C2 funds are available.
• The spreadsheet also shows an example where less than 62 students are enrolled and therefore they will receive the minimum $9200 C2 cap.

As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

— Julie

Julie Tritt Schell
PA E-rate Coordinator
717-730-7133 – o
717-730-9060 – f
jtschell@comcast.net
www.e-ratepa.org

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