The Schools and Libraries Division announced August 22 that next week it will begin issuing funding commitments for 2003 internal connections down to the 85 percent level.
Those commitments will be included in the tenth wave of funding commitments, which will total $88.4 million in 583 letters. The SLD announcement did not indicate what portion of that would represent internal connections. So far, the SLD has approved $877.7 million in commitments for the 2003 funding year, which started July 1.
In terms of overall commitments, the SLD is about $100 million ahead of its commitment pace for the 2002 funding year. More significantly, it is well ahead of the pace with which it was able to review internal connections commitments. It was not until the end of March 2003 that it announced it would be able to support any internal connections funding requests below the 90 percent threshold. Ultimately, the 2002 internal connections threshold was set at 81 percent.
