PSC-ED-FSA-TISD
Moderator: Christal Simms
12-06-16/1:00 pm CT
Confirmation # 1528333
Page 1
PSC-ED-FSA-TISD
Moderator: Christal Simms
12-06-2016
01:00 pm CT
Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants will be on listen-only mode throughout the duration of today’s conference. This conference is being recorded if you have any objection you may disconnect at this time. Now I would like to turn the call over to our host, Mr. Richard Blason. Sir you may begin.
Richard: Wonderful, thank you very much. Well before we get started a few housekeeping items I would like to share. The first thing is we are going to have a survey sent to you after the presentation and we would certainly like to receive any feedback that you have. We always want to make sure that we make updates and changes in accordance to your ideas and suggestions. In addition there is a chat feature we have got several of my colleagues online that are going to answer questions throughout the webinar and feel free to ask as many questions as you would like and we will try to go through some questions as well as we go through the webinar. That being said, I would like to welcome everyone to the tools and resources webinar regarding financial aid toolkit for college access professionals. So as you can see this is the official website and it states ‘financialaidtoolkit.ed.gov.’ This is the official site. My goal here today is to do some navigating through this site so you can see all the different features that are available, that you and your staff can benefit from. So that being said I am going to click on the link and enter the site. So hopefully you can see the site and let us make it a little larger for you and as you can see, there are four mega menus. The first is about learning about financial aid, conducting outreach, get training, as well as search financial aid tools and resources. Now this particular website has been designed to develop for chancellors and college readiness professionals. This is not for parents and students. If parents and students wish to learn more about financial aid as well as the repayments and things of that nature, they want to go to studentaid.gov. And as you can see, there is a little help item here which can direct parents and students to different areas that can be very helpful. Also if you wish to search something and you know the name of it, you can type the information in this particular area right here.
So let us get started and take a look at these mega menus and what is within them. And as you can see, under ‘learn about financial aid,’ you have got ‘preparing for college,’ ‘types of aids and eligibility,’ ‘The FAFSA,’ where we have some sub headings FAFSA updates and FAFSA Completion Data as well as loan repayment basics. In all these areas, they have got a lot of very valuable information, but one in particular that I think you can benefit from, is to the FAFSA Updates. And by clicking this, you will see that we put all of our FAFSA information in this one specific area. So you don’t have t go all over the web, you just need to go to this particular area and you can learn about the FAFSA news and enhancements, the changes for this year’s FAFSA as well as the different materials and websites that are applicable. And we also look at the previous year. But what makes this item better, we break it down into these wonderful tables and as you scroll down you will see, 2017 -18 FAFSA materials and websites. You can access the FAFSA to this area; you could print out in English or Spanish PDF FAFSA. You can look at your FAFSA on the web worksheets; student aid reports samples, acknowledgments as well as the FAFSA demo site. Let us just go in here and show you what this looks like. Basically what this is, is a site where you can practice and you can train other staff and maybe go through different scenarios. And you simply click on this area, you enter the user name ‘Ed Demo’ and the password ‘FAFSA Test.’ So just to give you a general idea of what it looks like, we will take a look.
Now you can use data that has already been prepared and preloaded or you can simply go into the demo and just start placing some dummy data, and you will start seeing identical information as you would if you were completing the FAFSA. So we hope you take advantage of the FAFSA Demo site, it is very, very helpful and again it is a good way to train your staff and it is also the way to test different scenarios. Let us go back up. Sorry I am going to show you some more of these tables, actually we are going to scroll back. We are going to make sure you see everything that is within these different sites. Now we also have a nice document completing the FAFSA which will basically give you a lot of helpful hints. And what you need to do in order to complete the FAFSA, as well as the screenshots, we provide a presentation for you so you can share this information with your staff as well. Or maybe you are having a financial aid night and you want to pull some of those screenshots out and use them for a presentation at a high school or maybe a community center. We also have the EFC Formula guide. We are going to give you the summary of changes for that particular year. This is nice little area right here, these tools, it is called the FAFSA 4Caster; it is basically an estimating tool which allows you to put in information for the parents, dumpy data of course and it helps the student to get a general idea of how much federal students are either eligible or potentially eligible to receive. So when you are dealing with those parents that don’t want to complete the FAFSA, this might be a good tool for you to use because when you go through it with them with this particular tool, you can get estimates printed out and you can put it right in front of the parents and say “hey, there is 5,815 Dollars for one year. Multiply that by four or five years. We encourage you to fill out the FAFSA and this is why.” So again use this tool to help encourage parents to complete the FAFSA if they would otherwise not want to do that. Now you can see we have also got the school codes as well. And like I said we have got the 2016- 17 FAFSA that is just below it. And each year we will put the lateral FAFSA below. At least you can always go back and access that information. Again, learn about Financial Aid, The FAFSA, The FAFSA Updates.
We also have an area in her called the FAFSA Completion Data. This is nice if you are working with high schools and you are trying to determine how many students actually submitted FAFSAs and how many actually completed a FAFSA. So you can click on this link and what it is going to do, and I am just going to scroll down, you can read this at your leisure, it is called ‘FAFSA completion by high school and public school district.’ Scroll down, select the state that you wish to look at, select ‘go’ and it is going to give you a spreadsheet that contains every school in your state where at least five students completed a FAFSA. So it will download that particular file and once it is downloaded, we will open it up. The computer seems to be taking a little time. You can open it up and you will see we have a whole lot of different cycles here, 2016-17 cycle, let us actually go to the 2017-18 and you can see the name of the school, the city, and the state and there you will see the different cycles, 2017-18, 2016-2017. Number of applications submitted; number of applications completed. But what is the difference. Well, maybe there was a parent or two that didn’t want to complete that application that the student actually started. So again, that is the difference between these two columns.
Again you are going to see every school within that state, so a lot of great data right there. So if you are working with school districts or counties, or a city in particular, you can find a lot of great information here. Let’s go back, let us take a look at Financial Aid toolkit. As you can see we have sites for preparing for college and we are going to give information from a chancellor’s perspective of what we think you should share with your parents and students. Okay, we are going to give you potential checklists, search tools, how to support underrepresented students. Again we cover a lot of different items; I highly suggest you take the time just to see what we offer. As you can see ‘College navigator,’ maybe you are trying to take a look at a school, you want to see what the graduation rates are, what does it cost per year minus scholarships and grants or what does it cost monthly, things like that we think could be very helpful for you to provide to your parents and students so they know what type of school they are getting into.
Also, we want to make sure you understand about the different programs that are available through TRiO and Gear Up that basically focus on underserved communities and first generation students. So, let’s go up; we are also going to cover obviously our financial aid. And we want to make sure you not only know about our Federal Aid, we want to make sure you also know about State Aid as well, and this is a nice way to locate information regarding a particular state. So you click that link, you select the state that you wish to learn more about and you can locate your State Grant agency right here and many other agencies that are affiliated or that deal specifically with education. Okay, so we highly suggest not only learn about Federal Aid, learn about State Aid as well and as you can see we have got websites, phone numbers, so on and so forth.
Another thing that’s very helpful with this particular site is that we have a scholarship search area here as well, and again, finding scholarships. This will take you directly to the Department of Labor and basically what you could do is develop a profile to see what type of scholarships might be of interest to a particular student or that family. Again it’s one-stop shopping financial aid toolkit and within that there are so many different areas that you and your students can benefit from.
So let’s keep navigating. We want to make certain that folks understand about repayment options, forgiveness, cancelation options as well. So we have put a lot of information in this particular area so that you can help educate your communities. A lot of folks don’t even know who their loan servicers are; you can select this particular link. Repayment plans, what are my options. Are there better repayment plans for me where I can actually save. This is where you go. Forgiveness plans, cancellation, discharge; again please, help make the communities aware of these different opportunities or loan consolidation. But what is someone is in default. This is something right here that could be very valuable to help someone learn that they can rehabilitate their loans and then get into a nice repayment plan and then hopefully a forgiveness plan. So again a lot of options that are available and you simply just have to go right here, and as you can see ‘Resolving Disputes.’ So again counselors, mentors this is going to be vital for you to help your communities by knowing where to find information.
We also want to help you when you are conducting outreach. Maybe you want to host an event, you don’t know where to start and you want to get involved. Well, we provide presentations, factsheets, info graphics, so on and so forth. We provide so many free items that we really want to make it easier for you to help develop these different events and activities for your schools or your communities. We will tell you what to do in order to make a presentation; we are targeting particular audiences, what should you share with them and what information do you think you need. Again we are going to suggest things; we are going to give you talking points. Social media, we are going to give you different items, you can take what we have already either placed out on Twitter or Facebook or something else and you can share that. Everything we have you can share. We have got articles and emails you can already access that have already been prepared and you can share it with your students at a high school. We have public service announcements as well. So I think the main idea here is take the time to navigate and see what is applicable to you and your communities.
Here is another mega menu item here called ‘Get Training.’ We have been working with NT4CM for quite some time, The National Training for Counselors and Mentors, this is where many different State Agency, Grant Agency partners and college readiness professionals get together and provide this training. And as you can see when you click on this, you could scroll down and you can learn more about this. Again, free training, webinars, our webinars are recorded so if you miss that particular date you can always go back and take a look and you can see what the program details are, we have training materials you can download and frequently asked questions. They are always very helpful because whether you are in California, Texas or New York, many people have the same questions regarding financial aid. And as you can see this is sponsored through us as well as NASFA, NESA, NAACP and the rest of the fine partners that we work with.
So we really encourage you to take advantage of our trainings that take place and we also want you to look at your State Training Programs. We want you to supplement what we have but take advantage of what the states have because they are not only going to cover federal information, they are going to cover state information as well and you want to make sure you know what is the name of you State Grant or scholarship and how do you access that and this is where you go. You just simply scroll down to your particular state to determine where you need to go.
Next we have search financial aid tools and resources. Again we are trying to take away a lot of the stress and the thinking of what you need. So if you tell us a few items of basically what type of resource you are looking for, we can help you with that whether it’s info graphics, presentations, what audience type are you interested in sharing this information with, high school students, adult students. The topics, what is important, I want to know types of aid, FAFSA, maybe this year FAFSA as well and maybe the time of the year. And when you are done, just simply select ‘Get Resources’ and we are going to suggest what we think is important, what is the first thing you should do. Start thinking about creating and using your FAFSA ID, this is a presentation, here is a graphic, FAFSA Dependency Status, am I independent or am I dependent. Well, let’s take look at the graphic. And these are things you can import into a Word document, PowerPoint, a poster you can place on the window of the counselor’s office or the principal’s office and it’s basically going to share what you need to know in order to determine if we need your parents’ information because that’s basically what it means to be independent or dependent. If you are independent, we do not need your parents’ information, if you are dependent we do and in order to become independent you need to answer ‘Yes’ to one of these questions. Again we are really trying to simplify what things look like and we do that by developing these different info graphics, factsheets, things such as that.