Two Pell Grants in the Same Award Year

Best Practices identified by RMASFAA Members

Annual Conference October 11, 2010

  1. Run reports off your student information system to identify potentially eligible students. Additionally you may be able to refine your search to identify Pell eligible students who have pre-registered for summer term. You may want to send an email or letter to Pell eligible students prior to summer registration to let them know they may be eligible for additional Pell Grant funds during the summer term and under what conditions.
  2. There was consensus that our student information systems are lacking the programming necessary to identify and award eligible students. So creative financial aid professionals are developing “work-a rounds”. Many are loading potentially eligible students into a database of some type (Excel or Access). They are also tracking enrolled and completed hours to insure continued eligibility on the basis of progression on the spreadsheet. They are also listing the EFC and the Pell Scheduled Award on these spreadsheets as well. This is the list that would be checked periodically for a new ISIR load that could result in a larger Pell Grant award for the student during a crossover period.
  3. Many of our colleagues indicated that they have identified a Pell Grant expert in their offices who has focused on understanding the complexities of the statute and regulations. This is the individual (or sometimes multiple individuals) who is pulling and managing the lists, tracking progression, awarding the students and updating COD.
  4. Many indicated their systems cannot automatically update COD with the second scheduled award information necessary to originate the Pell and receive the funds. Some of our colleagues again are working on developing work-arounds to batch this information in COD. Some are opting to manually update COD as needed.
  5. We agreed it may be appropriate to actually map out work flow for managing the Pell Grant program now in your office. We also discussed the merit of creating a Pell Grant check list for each eligible student. This would a list that would reflect each step necessary to determine if/when a student is eligible for a scheduled award. It was suggested that this could be kept in the student’s record for auditing purposes. We mentioned this to NASFAA President Justin Draeger as something the training staff could perhaps develop.
  6. We agreed that our business offices have in some cases been taken by surprise by the increased Pell awards. In order to insure your fiscal officers can draw down the Pell funds as quickly as possible it is best to originate Pell disbursements for summer as early as possible.