The Schools and Libraries Division announced that on June 29 it will release another 187 funding commitment letters, totaling $32.2 million, for the 2003 funding year. That will bring to more than $2.6 billion the amount that has been committed for the 2003 funding year, which started nearly a year ago.
By this date last year, the SLD had essentially wrapped up the bulk of its work for the 2002 funding year. An SLD press release released on June 25 said that it would continue to “issue additional funding year 2003 waves regularly until the process is complete.” Approximately $500 million worth of 2003 funding requests have not yet been resolved. Of that total, about $362.8 million is for internal connections requests, about $126 million is for telecommunications services, and about $64 million is for Internet access. The total includes some requests for internal connections that will ultimately be rejected because they fall below this year’s threshold for approved internal connections of a 70 percent discount rate.
So far, the SLD has committed about $271 million in funding commitments for the 2004 funding year, all of them for Priority One services.
