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Applicants funded in Waves 1-6, who filed Form 486s after the deadline, are now starting to receive Form 486 Notification Letters indicating that their PY4 funding awards have been reduced. As an example, if an original Wave 6 award was for 12 months of service discounts, but the applicant did not file a Form 486 until February 1, 2002, the SLD would deny discounts on all services from July 1, 2001, until the belated filing date. In this example, the loss would be 7/12th of the original amount.
Any applicant whose funding is reduced for missing a Form 486 deadline is advised to appeal. Since the Form 486 CIPA certification deadlines and the SLD processing procedures are new, challenges to the rules can be expected. Potentially successful grounds for appeals might involve:
Funding reductions on telecommunications services. (Argument: CIPA does not apply to telecommunications-only services.)
Form 486s submitted before the deadline, subsequently rejected by the SLD, then resubmitted after the deadline. (Argument: SLD processing delays prevented timely resubmission.)
Wave 1-6 Form 486s submitted after the October 28th deadline. (Argument: All subsequent applicants given a full 120 days from date of funding.)
If any of these arguments are successful, only applicants with pending appeals are likely to benefit retroactively.
While on the subject of CIPA certifications, it is worth remembering that most applicants will have to be in full compliance, not just "undertaking actions," to take advantage of PY5 funding beginning July 1, 2002. Full CIPA compliance means Internet filtering and an Internet Safety Policy.
A primer on Internet Safety Policies, discussing CIPA requirements and optional issues, is available on our Web site.
Although not required by CIPA, one point made in the primer is that schools may want to thoroughly address plagiarism issues in their policies. Internet-driven plagiarism in Piper, Kansas, was a front-page New York Times story this week. Although the school district noted that it begins teaching source citation in the fourth grade, some insisted that "the students did not realize they had done anything wrong.they thought the admonition was against copying from previous students' papers, not taking simple descriptions from research material."
Interestingly the Internet itself helped uncover the problem in Piper. After a teacher noted that certain student projects were "far more sophisticated than previous assignments. A plagiarism Web site showed one in four were laced with lifted material."
Given the breadth of information available on the Internet, and the ease of copying material, it is not sufficient to simply say "thou shalt not plagiarize." A broader admonition and discussion is clearly needed.
The staff of the Common Carrier Bureau decides most E-rate appeals to the FCC. A Bureau decision is identified by the letters "DA" (indicating the Bureau's "designated authority"), two digits for the year, and a sequential decision number. An example is the decision "DA 02-283" discussed below (see DA 02-283):
An applicant who disagrees with a Bureau decision has an option of re-appealing the issue to the full Commission, a request known as a "Petition for Reconsideration." In an E-rate decision this week, the Common Carrier Bureau spelled out the conditions under which such a petition would be entertained. Specifically, the applicant must show that:
"the petition relies on facts which have occurred or circumstances which have changed since the last opportunity to present such matters; or
"the petition relies on facts unknown to the petitioner until after the last opportunity to present such matters could not, through ordinary diligence, have been learned prior to that opportunity."
In somewhat plainer words, this means that any applicant filing a Petition for Reconsideration, must clearly demonstrate changed circumstances and/or new facts. Simply providing additional clarification is not enough.
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