Federal Universal Serv Charge

Look at your phone bill. You should see a line with a the title of this post on it. It's one of those charges that tend to annoy people because they have no idea what it's for. I can tell you what it's for...

The money collected through that charge partially funds the Erate program, a program by which schools and libraries receive discounts on telecommunications and internet charges. This library qualifies for a 70% discount, based on the number of kids involved in the free and reduced school lunch programs in our school system. We pay our phone bills up front and then have to apply for a rebate of that 70%.

In any given year we are juggling three applications. One application is for the coming fiscal year, in this case 2008-2009. Our application for the current year is still open because we have to report that we are receiving the services we applied for. Last year's application only recently closed when we received our discount rebate for the completed year 2006-2007. The application process is not much fun, as you can imagine any federal application process would be. But in our case it's worth the work because annually we receive rebates in the area of $1400.

By law, to qualify for this federal funding we have to have content filters on our internet access computers, which we do.

So now you know.