School List and Directory Information

LETTER TO:

FROM:

DATE:

PAGE: 0

APPENDIX A

LIST OF SCHOOLS REQUEST LETTER

[DATE]

Dear [District Contact]:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank your district for participating in the FAFSA Completion Project expansion. The FAFSA is a critical component of access to postsecondary education and increased FAFSA completion rates are vital to meeting the President’s goal of having the United States once again lead the world in college graduates by the year 2020. Your LEA’s participation in the project will help provide research evidence that could move us toward achieving that goal.

We are writing to request that your district identify which of its high schools would like to participate in the project and receive information about the FAFSA completion status of their students. As you are aware, the project involves a staggered roll out of FAFSA completion data in each district. Half of the participating high schools in your district will be selected via lottery by the Department to have access to FAFSA data beginning in January 2013, with the remaining half receiving access about a year later. A staggered start will give multi-high-school districts an opportunity to “pilot” their program in some schools before full implementation, but still let all schools participate at some point during the project. This design also allows for a rigorous evaluation useful to education policymakers.

We have attached a list of schools in your district that served 12^th grade students or were ungraded according to the most recently available Common Core of Data, which was collected by the Department’s National Center for Education Statistics in the 2009-10 school year. Please indicate using a checkmark which schools wish to participate in the study. If there are additional schools that are not listed (perhaps because they opened since the 2009-2010 school year), please write them in the lines at the bottom of the page.

Please return your list of schools to me via US mail or by emailing a PDF to the project mailbox (FAFSAcompletion@ed.gov) by [DATE]. Providing this list of schools is required of all districts participating in the FAFSA Completion Project expansion. Failure to submit the list by the deadline could result in your district being denied access to student-level FAFSA completion data.

We look forward to working with you to get the FAFSA Completion Project expansion up and running. If you have questions about the project or this request, please feel free to contact me at Dena.Bates@ed.gov or (202) 377-3204.

Sincerely,

Dena Bates

FAFSA Completion Project

Federal Student Aid

U.S. Department of Education

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