Blog Post #7 - E-rate

In you blog, post the e-rate funding that you found for your institution in 2009 and 2010. See if you can find out what it is for? (hint: the three e-rate categories)

Since Universities do no qualify for e-rate, I decided to research the school district that I attended as a child.  My initial guess what this particular school district would be receiving a larger percentage of support from this program.   The district students consisted of a rural population, and many students receive reduced/free lunch.

Funding began in 2001 at a rate of ~40%, and in 2009 has increased to 52%, suggesting the economic status of the school district is lower than in the past.  There were two interesting things that I discovered during this research.  First, no funding has been posted for year 2010.  I assume that either the proper documentation/applications were rejected for some technicality, or the new business manager that started in the past year did not complete the paperwork at all.  It will be interesting to look next year to see if funding is granted once again.

The second thing that was a bit confusing to me was the lack of funding for internet and phone services.  There was no evidence of financial assistance for phone, ever.  Internet service was listed as late as 2005, and provided almost $6,000 in additional support.  From 2006 to 2009, however, only telecom support was listed.  This is perplexing to me since it is the more "unreliable" or difficult funding to receive.

I decided to look at other competitor schools in the area, and oddly, most of them also only contain the telecomm designation.  After seeing this, it occurred to me that perhaps the term telecom encompassed more than what I had assumed.  It seems that my suspicions were correct.  Telecom service now includes services such as T1 lines and phone service if the company providing the service is called a telecommunications provider.  Basically, the funding shifted because of the shift in service providers.  It is becoming increasingly popular to have one service providing tv, phone and internet, and this appears to be another example of this shift.  It may be beneficial for usac.org to take note of this and define funding in a more specific way to better identify where funding is being dispersed.