Park Hill School District in Kansas City: An FCC Decision E-rate Applicants Should Know About

A years-long headache for the Park Hill (Kansas City, MO) School District has finally come to a satisfying resolution that could benefit schools and libraries across the US. Since Feb 2018, Park Hill has wrestled with the federal government to obtain E-rate funding for a fiber project connecting several of its schools. On April 27, the Federal Communications Commission finally granted Park Hill’s E-rate funding request in a decision that also sets a good precedent for the larger community of E-rate applicants.

Park Hill’s FY2016 E-rate application was approved without issue. Yet shortly after applying for additional funding for FY2017, the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) denied the Park Hill request and rescinded the FY2016 funding. USAC rescinded the funding because the network would not be exclusively owned and used by the school district due to the Kansas City partnership. Recently, the FCC reinstated and approved Park Hill’s E-rate funding for FY2016 and FY2017. In the Order granting the district’s request, the FCC made clarifications that offer more certainty to future E-rate applicants:

• A school or library can share a self-provisioned, E-rate-supported network with an ineligible third party, as long as the applicant uses cost allocation and the ineligible party covers its fair share of the undiscounted costs. 
• A school or library is not required to be the exclusive owner, operator, and/or user of an E-rate-supported, self-provisioned network.

The FCC’s Park Hill clarifications remove some of that ambiguity and sketches the beginnings of a road map for future applicants.