- Start from the funding commitment. Every row is federal E-Rate
committed support for funding years 2021–2025, from USAC's
FRN Status
dataset, filtered to Form Version = Current and FRN Status = Funded, counted once per
funding request. No estimates and no modelling.
- Attach it to a billed entity. Each funding request names a Billed Entity Number
(BEN) — a district, school, library, library system, or consortium.
- Set consortium dollars aside. — committed by
— consortia stays at the state line. A regional or statewide
network buys on behalf of many members, so splitting its dollars across counties would
invent a distribution USAC never reported.
- Resolve every other applicant to a county. The BEN is looked up in USAC's entity
master for its physical-address county and coordinates, then matched to a Census 2023
county GEOID (5-digit FIPS):
- — by county name within the same state, after
normalizing the suffixes Census carries and applicants omit — County, Parish, Borough,
Census Area, Municipality, Municipio — and Saint/St.
- — by point-in-polygon on the applicant's
coordinates when the name does not resolve. This is what carries Connecticut's
planning regions, renamed counties such as Wade Hampton → Kusilvak, and independent
cities whose names collide with a county.
- Report what did not land. — has no usable county
on file — almost all of it entity records carrying a literal
N/A county string.
It is excluded rather than spread around.
What a county figure counts. A county figure is the
sum of applicants whose physical address sits in that county. It is the county the
billed entity is in, not a service-delivery geography. A district that straddles a county line
is counted whole in the county holding its administrative address, and a county office of
education serving several counties is counted where it sits. For a finer grain, the map's
district view places 93.1% of school-district dollars on an NCES school-district boundary
instead.