Just like a Basecamp expedition requires careful planning and preparation to reach the summit, navigating the E-rate funding year 2025 cycle demands a strategic approach to ensure a successful journey. As you embark on this new cycle, it’s essential to lay the groundwork, prioritize your goals, and allocate resources wisely. In this article, we’ll provide you with the essential tips and insights to help you start strong, stay on track, and reach the summit of a successful E-rate funding year ’25 cycle.
Sketch out a strategic plan.
Gather your E-rate team—those responsible for the district’s E-rate journey—and ensure everyone’s on the same page. If there are any Account Administrator or personal contact changes that need to happen with USAC in their EPC system, it’s good to take care of those prior to school starting. A majority of respondents to past Funds For Learning surveys have indicated that there is just one person at the school who was well-versed in the E-rate program, its rules, and processes. This can be scary, as it can amount to a single point of failure in many cases. If that’s you, you may want to find a buddy–someone who will reliably serve as back-up if something happens and you’re unavailable to help with E-rate things in the upcoming year.
Identify specific needs.
The team (or at least you) should also assess things like what Internet bandwidth speeds your organization will need a year, or perhaps several years, down the road. Will the current bandwidth speeds will suffice and/or will a new procurement need to occur in order to obtain the speeds that you want in the future? Review the status of current contracts to see what options are available.
Also address whether infrastructure upgrades will be needed any time between April 2025 and September 2026. If network equipment needs to be refreshed or licenses need renewing, you should assess your organization’s available Category 2 budget (calculated as $167.00 per student.) Perhaps there has been an increase recently in the student population, and if this is indeed the case, a higher Category 2 budget should be requested from USAC.
A reminder, also, that funding year 2025 will be the 5th year of the five-year cycle for Category 2 budgets; any money remaining in your Category 2 budget at the end of funding year 2025 will NOT be rolled over – it will be replaced by a new budget amount for funding years 2026 – 2031.
Review the status of enrollment and NSLP data collection.
Team up with your Food & Nutrition staff member (or crew) to ensure you’re on track for collecting National School Lunch Program data, or reporting Community Eligibility Provision data, for the 2025 school year; or perhaps you use one of the alternative methods like a survey or collecting income data which also need careful planning to execute. Be ready to gather this data when it becomes available so you’ll know what your discount percentage will be for the coming year.
Keep an E-rate calendar and plot out some milestones and important dates.
Depending on what E-rate is going to look like for you in 2025, you may want to include things like:
- Planning your procurements – if there is a particular board meeting that a procurement has to be on the agenda ahead of time using milestones can help achieve this;
- Updating site information – there is a particular Administration Window period in EPC during the Fall to update school or library entities which have (or will be) opened or closed, or perhaps moving locations, during the funding year;
- Discount percentage verification – October is a common time frame for reporting enrollment and school lunch numbers to the state.
Setting some milestones now will help to plan when you’ll need to carve out some time in your schedule to do all your E-rate activities and make sure they are done in a timely manner.
Finally, don’t forget to wrap up any loose ends from the previous funding year. You will want to finish invoicing for 2024 recurring services and review the statuses of your 2024 Category Two projects.
We hope the above tips will prove helpful to you on your E-rate journey in planning for Funding Year 2025. Feel free to contact Funds For Learning for more detailed assistance on this topic. Onward and upward!
