Impact Aid Survey Form Software System to Manage Federal Claims for Education

Many local school districts across the United States include within their boundaries parcels of land that are owned by the Federal Government or that have been removed from the local tax rolls by the Federal Government, including Indian lands. These school districts face special challenges — they must provide a quality education to the children living on the Indian and other Federal lands and meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, while sometimes operating with less local revenue than is available to other school districts, because the Federal property is exempt from local property taxes.

The Impact Aid law (now Title VIII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) has been amended numerous times since its inception in 1950. The program continues, however, to support local school districts with concentrations of children who reside on Indian lands, military bases, low-rent housing properties, and other Federal properties, or who have parents in the uniformed services or employed on eligible Federal properties. The law refers to local school districts as local educational agencies, or LEAs.

To secure this funding, school districts send survey forms to their students' parents, collect the results, and submit the claim to the Department of Education.

Information from the Department of Education Impact Aid page

Challenge

As you can imagine, the federal government has a lot of workers and property in Washington, DC that don't pay local property taxes to fund education.

The Washington DC Public Schools (DCPS) consists of over 100 public elementary and secondary schools and learning centers. Each year DCPS sends out survey forms to determine the residential and parental employment status of their students. This information is used to determine Impact Aid funding for students who live or have parents who work on federal property.

By automating a process that was previously performed manually, FMS helped DCPS achieve increased efficiency and accuracy with an easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy, easy-to-support, and low-cost, multiuser Microsoft Access application.

Professionally designed and deployed, the FMS software program includes reports and processes to help DCPS identify a larger number of federally connected families, and file the forms to obtain federal funding. Connected to online resources, zip codes and street address lookups are used to resolve home and work locations of students and parents who qualify for Impact Aid funding.

The software application increased federal funding that more than paid for our services. It allows DCPS to devote more resources to their classrooms, and the payoff continues every year.

Let us know if your school system would benefit from more efficient processing of Impact Aid survey forms to claim these funds with our database application.