Prerequisites for early collection of Income Surveys in RocketSCAN

Prerequisites for early collection of Income Surveys in RocketSCAN

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Introduction

RocketSCAN by Image One is of the few – if not the only – data collection systems that allows for the collection of Income Form data prior to the release of the USDA’s National School Lunch Program Eligibility Guidelines. However: The Eligibility Guidelines, historically released between February and May, ultimately determine the eligibility criteria for the students, so results cannot be calculated until those values are published. We recognize the need for districts to start collecting their income surveys before the start of the school year, but it’s crucial to weigh the benefits against the uncertainties and additional work involved so that you can decide if this option is right for your district.

See more about the requirements, software limitations, and the next steps below.

Requirements

  1. Early collection is only available for Income Surveys. If your district is using RocketSCAN for processing both NSLP and Income Surveys, the early collection option is not supported for your current system.

  2. We must have an approved form design completed for the target school year.

  3. Software maintenance payment must be current, including the upcoming school year.

  4. We will need to perform a rollover of your system for the upcoming school year. This work is included under your maintenance contract for the upcoming year.

  5. During early collection, the workflow is limited to scanning or online data collection. The ability to process (Validate) the income forms to determine eligibility will be disabled until the eligibility guidelines for the upcoming school year are released.

Items to consider

  1. For the best, most accurate results, it is recommended that our reference data (the student lookup data) does NOT contain any Direct Cert information until after July 1 of the upcoming school year.

  2. Once we configure your system for early collection, it is assumed that you are done collecting data for the current school year. You will be unable to process any more data from applications or income forms for the current school year, including generating reports.

  3. If the income eligibility guidelines for the upcoming school year have not been published by the Federal Government, then we can only use the standard online collection form that asks for individual household members names and incomes.

  4. You will not be able to generate eligibility reports on the early collection data until the eligibility guidelines have been released, the RocketSCAN support team has re-enabled your Validation function, and the district has performed the Validation task on the receive Income Surveys.
    1. This includes determining who has or has not submitted a survey.

  5. Image One’s development cycle for RocketSCAN includes major updates to the software’s features during the Spring/Summer, usually after the end of the current school year. Some changes to the system may require us “reload” the data submissions to upgrade your system to the current version.
  1. In this scenario, there is a possibility that you will need to perform validation twice on the submitted applications, and we may be unable to retain the original submission date.

Moving forward

If it is desired to move forward, Image One will prepare a quote for the form design and for the upcoming year’s maintenance and submit it for payment.

Our RocketSCAN customer Portal hasn’t been updated yet with the new features to enhance the new school year’s business – thus the approvals, drafts, communications, may take place in the portal under last years items or they may be completed outside of the portal.

We will ask for the district to sign off on all these items, terms, and conditions to ensure full understanding of the limitations of collecting surveys early before we commence the project.


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