As of March 24th, 2015, 11,197 schools and libraries have submitted their FY 2015 Form 471s to the USAC Schools and Libraries Division (SLD). The FCC has directed the SLD to issue a Funding Commitment Decision Letter (FCDL) for all “workable” funding requests by September 1st of the funding year, and the SLD is already working toward meeting that goal for FY 2015.
According to our March 24th analysis:
- 6,341 FY 2015 applications have already begun Initial Review, which means that the Form 471 has started the beginning stages of the approval process, and has been assigned a Program Integrity Assurance (PIA) reviewer.
- Another 355 Form 471s are in Final Review, which the SLD defines as having successfully gone through the Initial Review stage.
- The next stage in the application review process for the SLD to verify that the Initial Review and Final Review procedures were performed properly, known as the Quality Assurance stage. 659 applications are in the Quality Assurance phase of the review process.
- Over 8,200 Form 471s have been certified within the filing window, but have not yet been assigned a reviewer and a total of $884,155,026.66 has been requested to date.
In FY 2014, 27,223 applicants submitted applications and 47,271 Form 471’s had to be reviewed by the SLD. It will be important for school administrators to be on the lookout and be responsive to application review questions in order for the SLD to consider an application to be workable and eligible to receive a funding decision by September 1, 2015.
