Each year school districts are required to fill out their CIPA compliance form and run a compliance test to verify that they are in compliance with CIPA. This is considered our annual Content Filtering Maintenance procedure as required by the FCC and SLD. This information is used in the event that it is requested in the E-Rate application process or during an E-Rate Audit. It is critical that all information provided on the compliance form is well-thought out with your school district's administration which should include your technology coordinator.
As an additional step in becoming CIPA compliant all school districts were required to have a public notice and hearing of their Internet Safety Policy for the school or school district. It is important to note that this procedure only needs to be completed once to be considered compliant with CIPA, but complete documentation of the procedure must be met.
From the FCC: "The authority with responsibility for administration of the school or library must provide reasonable public notice and hold at least one public hearing to address a proposed Technology Protection Measure and Internet Safety Policy."
In order to ensure that we can adequately fulfill requests for evidence that this public hearing took place we need the following information from each school district. All four components should be from the same public meeting:
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Evidence that your meeting was advertised by public notice. The notice must explicitly state that "Internet Safety Policies and Procedures" will be discussed at the meeting. This meeting can be a part of a regular board meeting, but the fore-mentioned item must be clearly stated in the agenda and in your meeting notification. One of the following may be used as supporting evidence that the notice was properly provided. Please note that the method used must be an approved method by which your school district can provide public notice.
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Newspaper page with the notification (date of publication and news paper name must be clearly visible)
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Dated Photograph of notice in public window
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Dated screen shot of the notice on your district website
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Agenda for the Meeting with a discussion or action item that explicitly states "Internet Safety Policies and Procedures".
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Approved Meeting Minutes in which any discussion or action is clearly documented for the "Internet Safety Policies and Procedures".
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A copy of the Internet Safety Policies and Procedures as presented and/or adopted by the board at your public meeting.
Copies of the above four items can be submitted to SW/WC by mail or electronically. To ensure the complete security of all E-Rate funding up to this point in time we are highly recommending that a best effort be exerted to locate this information as far back as 2001.
If you cannot find any one piece of the above stated information we highly recommend that you make this a part of your next board meeting. Even if you can sufficiently provide this information for previous years it is our recommendation that you review your policies and follow the above guidelines annually.
At this time this requirement needs to only be completed ONE time since 2001. This information needs to be held irregardless of the year of origination as it is still considered "current year" information under document retention laws.
Please return this information to:
Mail
Josh Sumption
SWWC Service Cooperative
1420 E. College Drive
Marshall, MN 56258
Electronically
Fax
507-537-6985