How Collecting The Federal Impact Aid Survey Online Increases Impact Aid Payment

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Collect Impact Aid Online

Collecting Impact Aid Survey and its Challenges

In 2018, the Federal Government’s Impact Aid provided over $1.4 billion to school districts with federally connected children. Around 1200 school districts with 980.000 federally students rely on Impact Aid Funding to keep the schools running, with some districts relying on the Impact Aid to pay for 70% of their total expenditures.

While Impact Aid Payment is so crucial to the livelihoods of many school districts, a large number of them are not receiving the maximum amount of their share due to a paper-based data collection process that leads to administration inaccuracy and low parent participation rate.

 

The Process

According to a Government Accountability Office survey, 35% of school districts still find the lack of parent participation to be an issue in securing their share of the funding.

Since the survey only takes 1-Minute for parents to complete, the real bottlenecks lay within the communication and distribution of the survey. Most parents that don’t complete the Impact Aid Survey stated they think that they are not eligible, the form never got to them or that their children misplaced it.

Collecting Federal Impact Aid Survey manually requires the forms to be passed through several different people, from teachers to students to parents then to students to teachers, then back to the survey coordinator. This increases the chance of forms getting lost or misplaced.

 

Federal Impact Aid Survey Collection Overview
Federal Impact Aid Survey Collection Timeline

 

Does Collecting Impact Aid Data Online Comply with Government Regulation?

Moving Impact Aid data collection online can seem like a challenging task. A concern that is often expressed by schools is whether electronically collect Impact Aid Survey is secure and comply with government regulations.

According to the Federal Impact Department, Local Education Agencies (LEA) can securely collect survey data online for counting federally-connected as long as the software used to collect data has the following capabilities:

  1. Authentication Mechanism to ensure only parents can access and complete the child’s forms.
  2. Date Authentication to capture the date when a parent signs and prevent schools from altering the date and data after the survey is submitted.
  3. Ability to collect Electronic Signatures.

 

How Collecting Impact Aid Survey Online Increases Impact Aid Funding

  1. Parents can complete the Federal Impact Aid Survey anytime, anywhere. Schools can reach more parents and raise parent participation, which increases Impact Aid Funding for the district.
  2. Collecting Impact Aid data online improves accuracy and efficiency. With an online forms solution like RYCOR, coordinators can tabulate and finalize forms data in minutes with accurate data collected straight from parents.
  3. Improve Parent-School Communication by using an Email Campaign Tool to keep parents informed on instructions, reminders, and deadlines.
  4. Ensure Privacy and Security through an authentication mechanism that only allows parents to access the child’s account.
  5. Collecting survey digitally get the forms from school directly to parents, eliminating the student’s returning role, which minimizes the chance of forms getting lost or misplaced.
  6. Sorting and tabulating data from paper forms can be time consuming and fallible. Collecting forms digitally will neatly organize survey data where Impact Aid coordinators can quickly tabulate in minutes.

 

Collecting Impact Aid Survey Using RYCOR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wq2878EMKM&feature=youtu.be

 

Results

RYCOR eForms deliver the easy to fill Impact Aid Forms straight to the parent portal and generate reports in a preferred format for districts to help submit all the data to obtain Federal Impact Aid Funding. By automating the collection and data entry processes that were previously done manually, RYCOR eForms improve efficiency and accuracy, increase the safety of student data, and maximize the impact aid payment that your schools receive annually.

Implementing RYCOR eForms increases impact aid payments more than the cost for our services. It allows districts to devote more resources to what happens in the classrooms instead of time-consuming administrative tasks.

Interested in learning more about automating Impact Aid Survey Collection?

Schedule a Demo