The head of the Schools and Libraries Corporation told an education funding conference Nov. 6 that she is "even more confident" that the SLC will begin sending out funding commitments in mid-November because it had just gotten a clean bill of health from its outside auditors, PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
That was one of the standards the SLC had to meet for the General Accounting Congress after Congress asked it to review the SLC's procedures earlier this year.
Moore said the SLC got signoff from PriceWaterhouseCoopers on Nov. 4 and the SLC wrote the Federal Communications Commission the next day to say that they had fulfilled all of the GAO's recommendations. She said GAO staff members would be briefing the Senate Commerce Committee, which had requested the GAO study, on their findings. If all of the audits pass muster, the funding process should be able to move forward.
However, the SLC is continuing to do program integrity reviews on applications, including requesting to see technology plans for applications with big price tags and asking for more detailed information about applicants' ability to support the technology they have requested.
The SLC has said that when it begins to distribute funding commitments, it will do them in waves, with schools that requested support only for telecommunications services and Internet access on a Form 471 receiving the word first. It is anticipated that some schools may not receive notification until well into December.
