While most public schools participate in this program via their school district, most independent schools are unfortunately unaware that this program exists. Furthermore, since independent schools do not have an E-Rate expert through their school district, the responsibility of taking on E-Rate falls on a school representative. (CFO, I/T Manager, Director Of Finance, etc) Learning and navigating the complexities of E-Rate within time-critical filing windows is often more than most school officials, who have other primary responsibilities, have the capacity to undertake. This is why Provision Scout exists, to be your school’s E-Rate expert.

We handle every aspect of the e-rate program; from educating the school, to discovery of ALL eligible services/hardware, to qualifying your school, to answering e-rate information requests, to annually filing for your refunds, to tracking/ensuring quarterly payouts, and more. We strive to provide competency, communication, and character through a long term positive relationship with our schools.

Funds are generally distributed from USAC on a quarterly basis. The method depends on the vendor, service, and product. Typically if it’s a recurring service, it would be credited directly to your account with the vendor. (ie: Comcast account for internet service) If it’s a product or one-time purchase, than it’s typically dispersed in the form of a check.

This program is NOT funded at all by the government. Government Funds come from tax dollars collected and administered through a government agency. E-Rate, established by an FCC mandate, is required to be self-funded (non-tax dollars) by “Universal Service Fees” that we all pay on our internet bill and managed by the non-profit Universal Service Administrative Company. USAC’s website states “USAC is not a federal government agency or department or a government controlled corporation…”.

This will not open any school up to Title IX due to the fact that this is not a government funded Program. To ensure this, we have a legal letter from the founder of First Liberty Institute law firm In Plano Texas, Kelly Shakelford, stating that the funds received through E-Rate are NOT considered Federal Funds and will not expose schools to things like Title IX mandatory compliance, which they will stand by. We will gladly provide this letter to your school or board upon request.

We exist to simply capture funds that your school is already due and we have built a properly incentivized compensation model based only upon a win-win scenario. The better we do at our job, the greater the funding is for your school, and the greater we are compensated. Conversely (per our contract) in the very unlikely event that we do not secure funds for your school, we are not compensated for our work at all.

Many of our clients have switched to us from other consultants purely out of frustration with either the complicated process or difficulties with their current E-Rate consultants. Provision Scout maximizes your reimbursement through proactive discovery to ensure each area of your technology spend is accounted for and filed for reimbursement. Without this dedicated process, many schools have later discovered that they have been missing out on funding in several areas and unfortunately USAC does not allow retroactive filing for historical funding years. Other consultants will only do large schools or school districts because “it’s simply not worth the time investment” for them. Some consultants ONLY do Category 2 for new building and some consultants only do Category 1 (they don’t want to take on the complexity of Cat2). A few of our schools previously started the process with a former consultant only to have them stop half way through prior to funding, leaving the school stranded without funds. We file not just for your largest refund amounts, but everything including your smallest qualified funding amounts. The bottom line is that Provision Scout is focused on building a long-term relationship with our schools by learning their needs and endeavoring to improve their technology position while maximizing budgetary savings through E-Rate reimbursement.