E-rate 471 Step 1: Selecting Your Vendors
Message Posted January 24, 2009
~ Only 19 days until the 471 deadline! ~
After the Form 470 is posted, there is a mandatory 28 day (minimum) waiting period during which vendors may submit proposals to you for consideration and/or contact you for more information relating to the services you listed on your Form 470. Then, at least 29 days after your Form 470 was posted, you may select a vendor, sign a contract (unless MTM service) and submit the 471.
If contacted by a vendor about a specific service listed on a 470, applicants are required to provide relevant information to prospective vendors so they may submit solid proposals for your consideration. Applicants should not simply ignore these inquiries as it would be a violation of the E-rate competitive bidding requirements and applicants are encourage to keep a log of all vendor inquiries and your responses to these inquiries.
1) What if a vendor contacts you but it is not in response to your 470?
One big problem with the 470 is that it provides a publicly available marketing list of school and library applicants. One way to know if the inquiry is legitimate is see if their contact references your 470 number or the specific service on that 470. If it is for services not related to your Form 470, or if they are just "phishing" for business and aren't seeking to inquire about YOUR specific services, their inquiry may be ignored. In addition, inquiries from "brokers" or mass e-mails that are not specific to your 470 are not considered legitimate inquiries by the SLD.
2) What should we do if we only received one bid, or no bids, for a service listed on our 470?
In such instances, the SLD advises that applicants write a memo to their files explaining why they selected that particular vendor. For example:
* At the conclusion of the Form 470 28-day waiting period, we only received one bid, which was from [fill in name of Vendor]. We reviewed the bid for cost effectiveness and selected [fill in name of Vendor] as the provider for [fill in description of service].
OR
* At the conclusion of the Form 470 28-day waiting period, we did not receive any bids. [Fill in name of Vendor] can provide [fill in description of service] service to our entity and is cost effective. Therefore, we selected [fill in name of Vendor] to provide our entity with these services.
3) Do we have to select the lowest bid?
No, but you are required to select the lowest responsible bid after you have completed a bid evaluation process. The SLD has been asking more and more applicants to provide all of the bid responses received as a result of your Form 470 competitive bid, as well as your bid evaluation process in order to prove that you selected the lowest responsible bidder. Keep in mind that price of eligible services has to be the most heavily weighted factor, which means that if you have 3 criteria that you judged the proposals on, price of eligible services must be at least 34% of the total weight.
A sample bid evaluation worksheet is available on the PA E-rate website at http://www.e-ratepa.org/helpful_docs.htm under the Form 470 column. Please note that in all E-rate audits thus far, applicants are expected to have either a memo to file indicating no bids were received, or a bid evaluation worksheet showing how they selected their vendors.
In addition to selecting the lowest responsible bidder, E-rate rules require you to certify that the winning bid is the most cost-effective means for meeting your entity’s educational needs and technology plan goals. Please keep this in mind if you are considering selecting a service that has excessive costs.
4) What if I only marked 7a (seeking a MTM or T service) but now want to sign a contract?
The SLD has stated that if you marked 7a, but now want to sign a contract, this is permissible. You cannot, however, sign a contract with voluntary extensions unless you checked the appropriate box under 7b. In the future ALWAYS check all boxes under 7a and 7b!
5) Is there anything we can do during this 28 day waiting period?
Yes!
a) You are permitted to reach out to vendors and encourage them to submit proposals in response to your 470 posting.
b) Begin your Form 471 online by completing Blocks 1 - 4 and 6. Then when you select your vendors, you can just complete Block 5. Don't forget to save your 471 number and security code when you exit the incomplete application so you can return and finish it. It also will enable you to submit your Item 21 attachments online.
c) If you didn't electronically certify your Form 470, be sure you mail a paper certification asap.
d) Doublecheck that your technology plan has been written and contains all of the necessary elements. This should have been done prior to the posting of the Form 470, but it doesn't hurt to doublecheck it now just to be sure.
As always, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me at jtschell@comcast.net. Next messages? Signing Contracts and Submitting your 471.
Julie Tritt Schell
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