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Julie Shields-Rutyna: [00:00:00] Okay, so welcome everyone. My name is Julie Shields and I work at MEFA and I am just thrilled to be here this morning with my fabulous colleagues, Nile Fuentes and Kate Sendell from Desi and Bob Barwell from sca. And I’m so happy that we’re able to talk about this really important work regarding FAFSA completion.

So Bob, I’m gonna turn it over to you.

Bob Bardwell: Thank you Julie, and thank you for hosting us. Um, good morning everyone. Bob Barnwell, uh, proud executive director of the Massachusetts School Counselors Association. I’m happy to be a collaborator and partner in this work. And, um, whenever Nile says the data’s ready and we need to do a training, I say, yep, just tell me when.

So happy to be here. Um. For those of you that are just learning about FAFSA completion, this has been a journey. Uh, we are so excited to have been part of that, meaning we as Maska, um, because we knew other states were doing it and Massachusetts was not, [00:01:00] and Nile will tell us how long we’ve had it, but it’s probably been four-ish, five years, maybe more.

Okay, great. Anyway, it’s been around for a while, but some of our colleagues still don’t know about it, and that’s. Because this is useful information that will help you and more importantly your students and your families. Um, I always say, you know, you do a lot of, typically counselors do a lot of work to get the student to look at schools, to apply to schools to be accepted.

And then we sort of say, oh, we’re done. The rest is on somebody else. Well, if they don’t have somebody else in their world, um, then it might be still us. And so by having that FAFSA completion data, we are able to then say to the family. Or the student. Student, by the way, it’s not done yet. You gotta do something more.

And not that we’re gonna ever necessarily sit down with the family and fill out the numbers, but we at least can tell them if they’re complete or not. Which as you know, if they don’t complete the financial aid form, the, the research will show that they’re less likely to [00:02:00] attend a college. So it’s really important for us to help them get over that finish line.

Um, and so we’re gonna learn about it today if it’s new to you or hear updates, but certainly wanna thank everybody for being here. I’m gonna turn it over to Nile who’s gonna get us started.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Um, thank you Bob and Nile, just, I’m gonna ask this question quickly before we get started because I did have one person say they couldn’t hear.

I’m assuming it might be an individual issue, but could other people maybe just put something in the q and a saying that you can hear the sound fine. So I’ll feel confident about that.

Okay. Thank you very much everyone. Okay. And so the person who couldn’t, I’d say, try, try that volume button. Okay. Thanks.

Nyal Fuentes: All right. Um, good morning everyone. Uh, my name is Nile Fuentes. I’m from the office of college here in technical education. I am actually in this realm if I look a little cloudy. I’m not a ghost, I’m just, uh, the weird lighting in state buildings.

[00:03:00] Um, so again, I work in college, career teal education. I’ve been working on this for quite some time. I’m turn over my partner, Kate, to introduce herself.

Kate Sandel: Hi, I’m Kate Sand. I’m in the office and.

With a lot of different data projects and a lot of the resources that are within Edwin, which we’ll talk about are, uh, education warehouse.

Nyal Fuentes: Great. And before we really jump into this, uh, I really want to, Kate and I have a presentation style. I talk too fast. Kate will jump to slow me down. Mm-hmm. Um, we’ve done probably 1200 presentations together on different things.

We also work on the early win indicator system. Maybe some of you are friends of ours. Um. In the past. And I also wanna say, and I don’t think that, uh, Bob did a hard enough of a sale on this, how important it was for Masco, and particularly Bob and Katherine Chu at that point, who helped to really kick off this connection between taking this higher ed data from, um, from US Department of Education [00:04:00] and helping us to really advocate to match it.

With the data that we have here on the state level. So it is imperfect. Nothing is a perfect data representation whenever you have multiple systems. But really that Masa and other school and other school counseling association in general really helped to pull this together. So that being said, Bob often undersells himself.

Um, so today’s agenda here, and again, I talk really fast. We’re gonna talk about a little bit about what FAFs is, just to kinda level set. I think most of you know, most people in this room are probably school counselors and probably know a lot about this more than I do. I. About what actually FAFSA is gonna do a little bit of a state financial aid overview.

I think there’s a lot of great opportunities out there that a lot of families and kids don’t know about, maybe even some educators, uh, particularly for lower income kids that are available here. We’re gonna do a quick quickie on that. Um, we’re gonna talk, we’re gonna spend most of our time talking about these FAFSA Edwin reports, um, CR 3 0 7 3 or CR 6 0 7.

And again, just, I’m gonna say this 15 times. As we do this, the department cannot give you [00:05:00] access to Edwin. You need to go get it from your school district and your level of access is turned by school district and not by Kate to myself. It is ordinarily only available to school department employee, you know, employees of districts and charter schools, et cetera.

Um, although some people have partnerships that allow some college access agencies to look at it, there’s a lot of student level data in here. FERPA would not allow us to just let it go out into the wild. We are gonna talk a little bit about this coming soon and sometime in January where there will be a publicly facing dashboard about FAFSA that we’re really excited about.

Kate has done the lion’s share about this work, of this work. There’s a lot behind it, and we’re gonna talk about that quickly too, because as we’re moving along for people who do not have access to Edwin, um, the general public is gonna be able to look at this faft completion, um, information in almost real time.

Um, maybe a couple weeks behind, actually twice a month. Not real time, but you’ll, I’ll overload that. So that’s the agenda for today. Feel free to throw questions into, um, the q and a. Um, we can answer a lot of stuff on the fly. If it’s really [00:06:00] detailed, we might wait till the end. And again, Kate, jump in whenever you do.

And Kate, can you gimme a thumbs up if we move to the next slide? Move to the next slide. Beautiful. Alright, so I’m not gonna necessarily read this, but we know that for a long time, 2017 was kind of our apex of college en engagement. We had almost 70% of all students immediately going to college. Um, across all demographics.

We were seeing a lot of lift, and then there was kind of a crash. Um, and it’s gone down quite a bit. Um, and it, and only starting to come back in the last couple years, and we’ll talk about that. Um, we’re slowly increasing that enrollment, post-secondary education. Again, I think, um, uh, it’s COVID had a lot to do this.

It’s weird to read Coronavirus virus pandemic. I usually don’t write like that. Um, for all. Again, I’m saying with this, we’re starting to see this uptick. We just had our third consecutive fall term of growth in a public higher ed system. So this is good news. Um, it’s actually fall 2025, not fall 2024. I’ll change that before I send these slides to you.

Um, and again, this is a really driven [00:07:00] mo a lot by the community. College enrollment increases because of tuition free, um, c community college for all students. Um, we continue to have, um, college going gaps for historically marginalized populations, black, Latino, um. English learners, students with disabilities, low income kids in particular.

Um, also they’re not historically marginalized population, but huge gaps in the, um, gender between young men and young women attending college immediately. So these are all things we like to keep our eye on, and we have all sorts of other data tools that you can use to, to do that type of analysis. Um, there is.

State initiative and it’s mostly a logo now, and you know, but really thinking about going higher to really encourage kids to look at all their post-secondary opportunities. We know that all kids aren’t gonna college, we get that. But, um, higher education provides lots of opportunities for all of our students and we wanna really start thinking about closing these opportunity and achievement gaps.

Fafsa, as you know, is a free application for federal student aid. If people are [00:08:00] paying to do fafsa, then they’re being scammed. Um, of course people do pay for support and for, um, guidance and that type of thing, but most families who are eligible for FAFSA can do FAFSA fairly easily. Um, because I just, I’m a, I have a normal.

Not normal. Sorry. I have an easy two income family population for my daughter who’s now a freshman in college. It was really easy. It took me about seven minutes to do fafsa. I think that the changes in FAFSA have made it easier for a lot of families to get done. Still challenging. We know that costs.

Continues to be a barrier for a lot of kids attending post-secondary education, particularly for first generation college students. And again, FAFSA is one of the most important steps students in their families can take to college. I’m gonna speak to Mass in a second, but FAFSA, for the majority of our kids, uh, again, it’s free.

It doesn’t make you have to go to college or have to get a loan or anything like that, but it just is there to provide more opportunity. So it’s an important thing to look at. Um, talk a little about the access to affordability in the Commonwealth. This has changed a lot in the past three or four years.[00:09:00]

We have tuition and fee free community college for all students who are, I mean, there’s, there’s some rules around it. Yeah. They’ve been here three years. Um, so it kinda locks out some of our newcomer students. Um, but. There’s, you know, you know, you need to complete a Massachusetts high school or adult education program.

Been here for three years, but other than that, is tuition fee free for all student? It is. I’ll talk about that a little more in a second. There’s mass grant plus and Mass grant plus expansion. These are huge pieces, particularly for low income kids, um, that are available. And of course our tuition equity law, um, which I’m finding that some people still really haven’t heard about.

And this is a great opportunity for students who might have that assess the fafsa. Usually students are undocumented. This tuition free community college started. Um, it’s been fully, I implemented as last year. The first year. There’s kind of some two funding streams. You don’t really have to pay attention to this.

There’s mass reconnect that was really about students. That was how it first came in. These are kind of getting kids back, not kids, young adults and not, not just young adults. Adults back into college. Um, and then mass [00:10:00] educated opened up to all students, and this is income. It doesn’t matter what your income is for this.

You know, if you are a wealthy student or non low-income student, you still have access to, um, tuition and fee free community college. Um, so this is important for all students to go. You do need to complete fafsa. And you do need to, um, oh, there it is, right there. And it’s a, what they call a last dollar grant program, which means they’re gonna take your Pell and all that type of not loans, so you’re not gonna have to pay any loans, but they’re gonna take, um, your grant money first before they pay off the rest of your community college.

It’s for full and part-time students, and it provides a book allowance. So this is, there’s some really good parts in here. We see here some students from Cape Cod Community College, uh, one of my four mass public alma Maers. And, um, you can kind of see that this is providing all sorts of, um, opportunities for Cape Kids and other kids to, um, get the skills and, um, knowledge and experiences needed to, you know, be successful in 21st century economy.

Mass Grant plus is kind of a little bit of a different thing. [00:11:00] This is for our, you know, plus for our, mostly our four year colleges. We know that Pell eligible kids have free tuition and fees at all public institutions. So this means that you’re basically left with just paying room and board, or unless you’re commuting, and then you don’t have that.

And this is especially a, a boon for, uh. Low income students, and it’s available at all our state universities and UMass campuses. Again, you have to be admitted to those. Um, generally our, our, our state universities, there’s, you know, we’re admitting probably 90 plus percent of students for general admissions.

Not, not, not so for every program. UMass tends to be a little bit more competitive, but great opportunities for low income kids and also really there’s some. Again, this is the last grant piece. Um, they, they, they determine the award. It supports all of them at port four years, as I said, and you’re incur, and this is for students who are complet, fafsa, or mafa, important to look at those, um, financial aid deadlines.

We know that a lot of, you know. A lot of our state [00:12:00] colleges, state universities get kind of squishy with this and will allow kids to apply late, late, late. Um, would really encourage, you know, all of our kids or particularly low income kids to get their FAFs in as soon as possible and so we can start getting award letters to ’em, et cetera.

And most of you know more about this for me and Madison. I’m gonna get to y y’all in a second. Um, a little bit more here for, it’s also for other kids. Um, for kids that are not low income, but are kind of high, low income and it gets in the SAI level and that type of thing. But really look at this to see there’s a lot of students who are kind of not low income, but not, not low income, if you know what I mean.

And they have, might have opportunity to get significant aid for, um, going to a four year school. Again, important to get the FAFSA done, get it in there so they can start working on those award letters. Um, for the question, I think it was Madison, I apologize. I I read your name quickly. If I mispronounced your name.

I, um, I’m wrong. Um, couple years ago, maybe three years ago, uh, the Commonwealth passed tuition equity law and the intent of this was really to create a pathway [00:13:00] for, um, students to first get in-state tuition rates. A lot of our students who had lived here since they were three years old, um, and were, are not citizens or, um.

Legal residents, uh, had green cards, had to pay out-of-state tuition, weight rates, and sometimes international rates. It was huge. It was, it was impossible even for kids to go into a community college. So the first part of this, it provides a pathway to in-state tuition rates. Again, these are students who have attended high school in Massachusetts for three years.

During a high school diploma is equivalent and adult students the same way. And I, I don’t know, a lot of you work, work with adult students, but really checking that we have a great contact at Osfa, which is our student, um, financial aid support. Um, Stephanie Barbosa, if anyone really gets something tricky around these questions, she’s super helpful about reaching out to individuals at school, counselors getting out to that.

So feel free to, um, email the email we’ll give at the end. And. Turn you on to Stephanie in that case. Um, part of this tuition equity Act also created, [00:14:00] um, basically a replication of the fafsa. Um, it is a little more challenging. There’s an affidavit involved. It, you know, it takes some work to do this, and I know a lot of you have done this, um, but there is a mafa.

Application. The MAFA only makes students available to state for state aid, but all the aid I just talked about, those students are available to, they’re not gonna be available for eligible for Powell, um, SEOG or any of the other Federal, federal grant. Um. Form in federal grant or loan programs, but they are eligible for state financial aid, which is substantial particularly, and, and made it affordable for all of our students who are graduating from Massachusetts public high schools, and again, have been here, um, for a bit.

Um, so this is a great opportunity. We are hanging onto this as much as we can and kind of fighting against any, any legal threats that we’ve seen so far. But, um. You know, so, so far, so good with this, uh, and a huge, again, supportive people from, uh, SCA and other places to really get this done. A lot of our, and our [00:15:00] immigration support agencies have really helped to get this law passed and, you know, have a lot of our hardworking kids have access to financial aid and higher education.

Um, you can kinda see here, it needs to be a high school completer. It’s a two step process. It does involve an affidavit. Then you have to complete the math. So there are some hoops here. And some of these hoops are gonna be hard for, um, be very honest, hard for some of our, um, particularly low income undocumented, um, English as a second language families to go through this.

And of course, some trepidation about getting in to, um. Filing forms with the government. Um, but I think we’re being very protective of this. The, you know, attorney General has been very protective of our, of all of our students and getting access to this, but encourage you to go to this webpage and I’ll send you all these slides afterwards and kinda get more information about how we can get access for all of our students to, um, financial aid and college success.

Little more about the mafa here. I’m not an expert on this. It is available in English and Spanish, [00:16:00] and there’s an affidavit involved that kind of will talk about that the student is a high school completer, et cetera. Um, but again, dig into this a little bit for those you in communities particularly that have large numbers of students who are not eligible.

Fafsa, uh, might wanna take a close look at this and even have, you know, sessions with some of your students, um, who you know to be, uh, undocumented. All right. Any questions on the financial aid or, um, massive stuff before I move on? I seeing none in the q and a, but happy to pause for a second. Okay. The FAFSA window opened in late September.

Um, first time in three years that, um, it opened up because they were doing the change, the new fafsa. It actually opened up early. It was scheduled to open October 1st. I think we started getting the first date around September 26th or something like that. Um, so this is great. We already have a lot of kids.

I dunno, 33%, 34% of students, Massachusetts high school [00:17:00] seniors have already completed fafsa, which is great. Um, I think when we hit January 1st, we really get into that kind of, you know, sprint to March or so where most of our kids complete fafsa. But that continues throughout the summer even where, you know, people are sitting in offices waiting for students to trickle in when they mom finally says, you’re not.

Know, you gotta go to school, you’re not gonna just stay in your basement, do nothing. So, um, FAFSA’s open and we’re ready to go and ready to roll. We’re really trying to push this hard this year. Um, oops. Really? Oh, I’m jumping right into FAFSA tool. So now here, here’s the complicated part and you know, Kate, do you wanna take over for a little while?

Um,

Kate Sandel: I, well, I’m curious what was gonna be the complicated part?

Nyal Fuentes: Oh no, they have FA FAFSA tool in general. We actually start thinking about this.

Kate Sandel: Oh, okay. And

Nyal Fuentes: engaging this. So, uh, you wanna talk a little about the ed admin FAFSA tool? Happy to do so, but, um,

Kate Sandel: sure. So we have two, um, tools within Edwin, um, to help track FAFSA and aggregate [00:18:00] tracker and a student level report.

Um, and these have been live, uh, for the last week or two. Um, and there what we do is every night we, uh, the state gets FAFSA data from the US Department of Education. Um, and then, uh, we have, uh, the list of all students who are currently enrolled in mass public schools and grades 12 and as past grade 12 re receiving special education services.

And we, we match that, that data. Um, and then it’s, it’s available to, to see, um, and the information. So we do that match every night. The FAFSA data is really new data, probably five times a week, but most days there’s, so there’s new data in there a couple of times a week. You could go into check, like today, the data looks pretty similar to yesterday.

But tomorrow there might be more data in there. [00:19:00] And, and the data comes in a, a couple days behind. And again, Nile mentioned before access to Edwin is determined at the local level. There’s sort of an Edwin administrator. And the process for getting access to that is also determined at the local level.

But normally you reach out to that person. If you go onto, um, on our public website, ww or you know, the DESI website, Edwin. Um, you can find, uh, something that helps you figure out how to get access to Edwin. Um, and I’ll just give a plug to Edwin. There’s lots of other informa valuable tools and information in there, so it’s not just fafsa.

Um, but here’s a link that provides more information on using the tool. And we’re gonna walk through it and show a couple screenshots on the next tab. On the next slide. Slide. So here’s a little bit of information on logging into Edwin. Um, on the top of every one of our, the webpages on the DSI website, there’s something in the [00:20:00] top right corner that says security portal.

If you click on that, you get a login page, um, and you fill out that information, and then it’s multifactor authentication. So they’re gonna send you a code to the email address tied to your login, and then you enter that code. And you will, uh, be able to go into the homepage. And here’s another little, uh, link here to just a handy sort of couple page guide that walks you through some tips on navigating Edwin and running reports.

So strongly recommend that move. Oh, do we have some Q and As? I’m sorry. I’m, I’m doing

Nyal Fuentes: the q and a. Oh, you’re doing the

Kate Sandel: q&a?

Nyal Fuentes: Yep.

Kate Sandel: So. The reports within Edwin are grouped together by different content areas. The FAFSA reports are one of our high school and beyond reports. It’s part of our it, and within that high school and beyond, there are sub folders.

There’s post-secondary readiness and post-secondary success. [00:21:00] These are some of our post-secondary readiness reports, right? Like they’re reports for students who are in high school, but the, the goal of them is looking at post-secondary readiness. I’ll just give a plug. We have PO post-secondary success reports that helps track, uh, recent graduates, uh, to figure out how they’re doing in post-secondary settings.

But here are the two reports. The CR 3 0 7 is that aggregate report. That summary report and CR 6 0 7 is a student level report. And so that lets you, it’s gonna be a roster of all the currently enrolled students and understand their current FAFSA status.

So again, we got the summary and the student level. It’s updated several times a week, and it’s a few days lag time, like right now. Uh, if you run the report, the most recent. Data is, uh, 1213, so it’s only from three days ago, but there’s only a couple from that days. There’s a few [00:22:00] more from 1212, so it runs on less than a week lag time generally.

And as I said before, it comes in, normally there’s new data on Monday and new data on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday and Friday. Um, and when you’re choosing award year. Uh, at the top of the report, there’s gonna be a series of filters and, uh, award year for the current 12th graders is the next academic year.

So it’s the 26th, 27 award year. And there a couple of different options. So we have all that FAFSA data we get from the state, uh, from the federal government, goes to Department of Higher ed, um, and we match it with, um, our, our currently enrolled students. And what we’re able to do is say sort of, do we find that student in that FAFSA data having filled out information, we are able to mark those as submitted and then from submitted, we say, is it complete?

[00:23:00] Are we able to get an SAI for that student who’s filled it out? Then we determine it complete. Or is it incomplete? We don’t have an SII, they’ve, they’ve done the fafsa. They’ve started the fafsa. They’ve complete or they’ve submitted it, but it’s not. Uh, done yet. And the other option is, uh, not found. And we’re gonna dig into that.

Not found ’cause, not found is our best attempt to say we don’t find the student in the FAFSA data, but it is slightly imperfect. Right? We’re not saying they haven’t completed it, we’re just saying we haven’t found them in the data.

Nyal Fuentes: N do you wanna add to that or, yeah, act actually, Kate, I’m just gonna jump to a couple questions because I’m not realize Yeah.

And I don’t realize if, sorry, I’m clicking through these too fast. Um, there was a question from my friend Albert, um, around Mafa data. We will not be providing Mafa data in any Edwin report as far as I can imagine. Uh, mostly because of, you know, it is very, um, what’s the word [00:24:00] I’m looking for? Secure information.

It for the safety of our families. And we just don’t want that type of data really getting out to the public. I mean, there might be people, even school districts who have, you know, views about things and, you know, have access and share that information. And we don’t, we wanna make sure we’re protecting our students and families.

So we really trust in our, um, schools and districts, administrators and counselors to communicate with, um, students and families around this. Sorry. I mean, I can understand the need, want for that, particularly in districts with lots of undocumented students, but it’s, um. It’s, um, it’s doubtful that we will ever share that unless someone else makes that decision.

And also there was a question about, um, that Julie answered. I, again, I don’t know if everyone can see the q and a, so I’m just gonna answer it anyway. Um, about, um, going to college and do students need, who did not decided to go to college, need to fill out FAFs we’re graduating. Question is, no, it’s not. In the current graduation requirements, there’s a huge, huge graduation requirements.

I always think it’s a good idea. Because it doesn’t cost anything and it doesn’t do the student any harm. [00:25:00] Obviously. I think most of you’re run, um, situations where like particularly there are families that don’t wanna do more paperwork or it’s none of my business. I don’t want my kids get a loan and have, um, so I just wanted to make sure.

I think it’s a good practice. To, um, at least say I, I think our Gear Up Friends in College Access Program, some of our districts do the counseling and have students opt out of doing FAFSA or mafa if they haven’t done it. Just to say that you’ve given this kid a lot of advice around their opportunity here.

And also just to see if you’ve followed the kind of. Grad requirements working group work, um, FAFSA completion is one of the recommendations. So we’re way far from that becoming into fruition. But it also is probably good practice to have something ’cause you don’t, so you don’t have to like rush and get something done around FAFSA completion of your kids in case that does become part of the state level graduation requirements.

And I think that covers the answer, the questions for now.

Kate Sandel: This is just a helpful reminder within, uh, [00:26:00] Edwin. Um. We’re, we’re gonna show you a, a, a page there. As I mentioned, there are some prompts at the top. So let’s say you’re running that, um, student level report, the CR 6 0 7 FAFSA student level report. You’re gonna go in and you might, uh, have to make some sort of adjustment.

And if you do, just be sure to hit that view report button. It’s gonna turn green when you make a change. Um, and that’s so that it actually takes into account the changes that you’ve made. Um, on, on the, uh, thing. Sometimes it seems like it’s taken, sometimes the screen will flash and you’ll think, oh, I, it’s now taken into account that I only wanna run it for 12th graders and not 12th graders and sp or something like that.

Um, it’s just sort of an important thing if you’re not in Edwin a lot. I always like to do that reminder. So if you see that, that the view button is green, you need to press it so that um, the report takes into account the changes you’ve made to [00:27:00] the filters.

Nyal Fuentes: Great. Um, so I’ll start and then Kate, jump in.

Okay. Um, so this is, um, one of the reports. And again, to get here, um, you have to be in the security portal. So you have to have security portal access, and even within that, given permissions to see particular things. Um, this is, um. The school and district view report. Um, we used Worcester ’cause it’s a big school with lot district, with lots of, um, with lots of students.

And we know that they’re very active in using some of these tools. And you can kind of see here, um, what Worcester looks like. There’s a state comparison here, and then you go down to kind of this school, whoops, that’s not what I wanted do. I was scrolling down like it was in the, um. You

Kate Sandel: had two, you had two tabs of this.

This is the state that has,

Nyal Fuentes: nevermind I’m dumb. Um, lemme start over. This is the state level one. Let’s back up 15 seconds. I pretend I didn’t say any of that. This is the state level one. So this gives you an indication of what’s [00:28:00] happening on the state level. Um, you can see here, I think we ran this, you know, three days ago.

Um, it’s the number of students here again, 12th grade, and what are, what are called SP students. So these are your students that are enrolled in your school but not enrolled in a particular grade. Ordinarily, these are students. Who might be in your school are out of district placement. Um, the SP kids, they’re not all your special education kids, it’s just the kids that kind of, most of ’em are staying until they’re 22.

And we’ll talk about this in a second ’cause you can actually select grade, but we’ll, we’re gonna save that for a couple slides. But it gives you an idea of the total number of students, how many submitted, how many are complete, incomplete, and not found. Um, submitted are those who have kind of hit submit on that, sent it on, um, complete means they’re done.

They’re ready. Stuff is gonna be sent to the feds. I mean, not the feds to the schools that they applied for. Incomplete usually means there’s something left. You still need to talk to these kids like, yeah, you submitted, but you might’ve forgot a social security number, a signature, or something like that.

I think this incomplete is happening less and less now that everything is electronic, but there’s still gonna be a [00:29:00] number of kids. Not found is a little bit different. Um, again, as Kate said, we match data from between Sims. We’ll talk more about this in a second, and US Department of Education data. So it is imperfect.

There are a lot of things that happen with, um, particularly with Hispanic naming conventions. You know, the e so if you’re Perez e Soto or something like that, where they’ll just put Perez on one of the, on either what they filed with the feds or what here. Or people who came from places and changed their name from a name that might be complicated for English speakers to something like Mary or Lisa or something, and you’re not getting that match or the date of birth is switched off.

There’s nothing we can really do to facilitate those matches. But we’re gonna talk about an unmatched file in a second. Um, on here you’re gonna see a list of schools. Um, anytime you see that blue link, it’s magic, you can click on and drill down into that information. I’ll show you a little bit more as we get into the state.

This, god dammit, the school level one here. Um, again, district level one, this is wsa. Um, you can click on each of these high schools. You can get, this is a good view for like your superintendent or [00:30:00] school committee or something like that. If you’re doing a report, this is what we’re gonna look at. And again, if you click that blue link, you’re gonna go to a student level report about that particular school.

Kate, you wanna take this over while I gain my, get my voice back?

Kate Sandel: Uh, yeah. Hold on one second. Uh, Carlos asked about how to get access to Edwin, and I just put a link to a getting access guide that walks through how to find your local. Edwin administrator, and that’s who you sort of reach out to and ask for, for access.

And again, to, for access. Access comes at two level. There’s sort of an aggregate role or you can get access to student level data, um, within your school or district. Um, in order to see the CR 600 student level FAFSA report, you would need that student level role. It’s called school or district administrator.

Um, it gives access to student level data. It does not give access to individual, um, [00:31:00] educator data or educator evaluation data, um, that has additional security roles to get that level of access. So if your local Edwin administrator sort of box at that, um, you can loop us in and, and we can clear up that, that confusion.

Bob Bardwell: Um, can I just jump in? Excuse me, Kate. ’cause I forgot to say this earlier. Um, and I say this, I, when I do trainings, um, thank you for making that clarification. It, it can be done, it should be done, but it often isn’t done because people at the central office typically get worried about data and sharing it with people.

Um, you know, it’s no different than sharing the free and reduced lunch list with us. Like we could really do a lot with that list. People don’t wanna share it because they’re worried about concerns. Um, just being be aware that Masa and Dessi have said counselors should have this level of data. It is makes sense if you wanna help them, you can explain what this webinar is [00:32:00] all about and why it’s so important.

But there’s tons of other things that they can do besides this, which you won’t get into. But there’s other benefits to you as a school counselor. And I would just say, you know, we are trusted with students’ lives. Not to hurt themselves or someone else, but yet we’re not trusted with data to help them get to college or whatever.

So it really, I scratch my head sometimes when I hear feedback from counselors that the school central office people won’t let you have data access. And I just say, well, how are we gonna help kids if you don’t give it to us? And that really important about that educator part. Yes. There was a concern at one point that we would get, go in and see all the teacher ratings.

That’s not the case. No, no, no. It’s separated. So just. Keep banging that, that door down if you have to, and use your resources here to help you if you want access, but you’re being denied.

Kate Sandel: Yes. Yes. Th Thank you, Bob. And, um, so this is a report and, uh, this screenshot is more or less, I think we’ve, we’ve [00:33:00] exported this report into.

To Excel and, and done a screenshot so that we’ve removed the district names, uh, the district school and student names and that, and that’s sa uh, ’cause that’s a personal identifier. And we’ve also removed the date of birth here. Um, but you sort of have all the information, uh, the demographic information.

If you ran the report right now, today, this demographic information for current 12th graders would be blank. Um, but it should come in. Um, probably next week it’s once our, our Sims data is loaded, that, that will populate. Um, and so then you have some information, some demographic information, and then the, the order of this is story, the FAFSA completion date, and then the submitted a fafsa, yes or no.

And then that status complete or not found. And so you see completion dates are tied. If the status is complete. [00:34:00] Uh, incompletes are marked as submitted, but don’t have a completion date. And then those not founds, um, are there. And again, some of these students we’re gonna ding a little, some of the students they might have been in, but their name didn’t match because in, in our student system.

The, the name is hyphenated and in the FAFSA they’ve, uh, split it up as middle and last name. Um, so it can be, be a little messy, but you have this report and then yeah, you can export it into Excel or CSV for continued monitoring or an merge it with other data sources.

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah, so the beauty of this report, it’s not only, I mean, I think a lot of people will do that traditional highlighter and marker thing, like what a lot of.

Good counselors do and they just say, I got this kid, I got this kid, I got this kid, I got this kid. Highlight some kids. But to Kate’s point, if you put it in Excel and you see that you have a lot of Latino ELs in this list, you’re gonna realize like, maybe I [00:35:00] can get this group of kids together or their families together with someone, some Spanish speaking resources, et cetera, to really focus on that group.

And it really allows you to kind of do some, um, desegregations. By these student groups so you can really make sure you’re serving the students who, um, are kind of on the lower end of the opportunity achievement gap here. And again, with income and low income students as well. We know by looking at some of our FAFSA data, that there’s a, between low, non low income and low income students, there’s about a 25%, um, percentage point difference in fasta completion between low income and non low income with non low income kids completely at a much higher rate, when in fact low income students have, uh.

You know, the most to gain by filling F and going on to college because they will have access to more, um, grant funds. So, really important, I think, to look at these. We really wanna focus on equity. That’s part of why we have these student groups here, and we’re gonna publish it in what we know in our public facing document as well when we get to that point.[00:36:00]

Okay. Did we do this already? Oh, no, this is you.

Kate Sandel: Um, this is just the, uh, showing. Oh, so some additional information about this. I, I think I, I feel like I’ve already walked through the different column, column things. The only thing to call out here is there is this blue hyperlink underneath that sa, um, or it’s the blue, the SA appears in blue.

That hyperlinks to then, uh, another report that really digs into the academic history of that student. I think FAFSA is great, but school counselors should have access to the PR 600 student profile report. Um, I just, it, it, it’s made for them. Um, so that’s sort of a big thing for you to be able to go in and get more information about that individual student.

Um, and then, yes, the demographic information will fill in once October Sims is loaded, um, which we hope to do this week, so it should be live next week. [00:37:00] And then I think the non matched, which is the one I I wanna talk about. I think that’s next. Oh no, we put them in different orders. This is important.

Okay, so downloading your files. So in the top corner there’s a, a handy DMD button that says Export. Um, I recommend this. If you’re down, I recommend downloading to Excel. ’cause then you’re gonna have a tab that has all your match. So it’s all your kids enrolled. You’re gonna have whether or not they completed or not.

Matched is whether it is sort of the, the, how we we’re pulling the data tied to PAFs up. So are you’re gonna have a tab of all your currently enrolled kids and say whether or not they’re, uh, submitted complete or found or not found. Um, and that’ll be on there. And then I think the next thing is actually the grade filter.

Yep. And so next, oops, shoot. Oh, nope, this is good. This is okay. The next, there’s the grade filter. So again, we have it for grade 12 or, and sp um, [00:38:00] you can run, it just, we, by default, it will show all those students. If you just run it, wanna run your grade 12 kids, you can select that. Or if you just wanna run your SP kids, you can select that.

But the unmatched kids is, and this is the hard one that we, we wanna make sure people understand. So there are kids that. They fill out the FAFSA and they said they went to Malden High School, or they said they went to Abby Kelly, but they’re not currently enrolled in Abby Kelly. Like we can’t match them to any student enrolled in Abby Kelly.

And some of that could be naming conventions or differences in date of birth. That’s another one. Sometimes it’s, you know, um, the month, year versus year month. Uh, it, it might be reported wrong in, uh, probably our student information system. Or it could be a student who actually graduated a year ago and didn’t go to school.

Um, and you know, so they’re only 19 years old and they’re applying to college for the first time and we can’t really dis like [00:39:00] separate them from one of your currently enrolled 19 year olds and, you know, uh, someone who graduated a long time ago. So there might be some former students or some students who have transferred, but they’re still sort of tied.

So that non matched list. A couple of those. So if you have a student that you’re sitting down with and they say, I filled it out. I filled it out and on this report we’re saying not found, take a look at non matched. Um, but then the, the big thing is we, we cannot do a one by one, uh, rematch of that just ’cause there’s so many students in the state.

So unfortunately we can’t sort of fix that. If it was a naming convention and you wanted to fix the naming convention within your student information system to match fafsa. That we would then be able to match it. I

Julie Shields-Rutyna: think that,

Nyal Fuentes: yeah. Yeah. So I think, um, just, I’m looking at a couple of questions from the chat, um, if the columns are blank.

Jacqueline, um, I hope I pronounce your name. I’m having problems with my. Mouth [00:40:00] today. Um, if they’re blank, the all the ones that are, um, demographic related are blank right now ’cause we do not have sims for October um, certified

Kate Sandel: yet. Scroll over on your screen and you’ll see the FAFSA completion information further over to the right.

Ah,

Nyal Fuentes: true. So I don’t know which ones you’re speaking of, but I think that’s one that,

Kate Sandel: that is probably it, because I had the same response when I opened first this year. I was like, there’s no data.

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah, no, I did the same thing and I’ve used this tool more than anybody and I’ve still, I still suffer. Um, if

Kate Sandel: you’re able to run the report, you have access to.

Yes. The demographic is blank

Nyal Fuentes: and I am.

Kate Sandel: And so that the matching the non match, if they’re non matched because of the name, like let’s say in your student information, you have a kid listed as Tom, and in the FAFSA it says, Thomas, if you updated the student information system like what your school sends to us and says, no, it’s not Tom anymore, it’s Thomas.[00:41:00]

We could then match that kid. But if it’s something more it. The school changing how you, uh, refer to the kid to match the non matched. We, we can’t do it. Like you can’t call us and be like, Hey, can you say that Tom is really Thomas? We can’t do sort of ad hoc fixes. If that makes sense.

Nyal Fuentes: Um, and also just important, I don’t know if we talked about this, these matches are what are called claimed students.

These are students that your high school, well, your school, your high school has said are in your school have told us, and that’s where you’re seeing the matches. So a lot of times in the unmatched vial, you’ll see students there who’s like, oh, we used to have that kid, but they’re not here anymore. So there’s a lot of noise that you will find in the unmatched file, as well as finding some of your real kids that are in front of you that we couldn’t match.

So there’s a lot of noise in there to look at. And for Carver, I just looked and I see kids. So Chrissy, if you wanna email us afterwards, we can follow up on that. [00:42:00] Alright, who’s next here? Um, again, this has to again, a little bit more about, I, I use the name Alex ’cause no, miss I did it. And so this is a little bit about the unmatched in case you’re trying to explain it to someone else in your school or district.

There’s really not a way for us to fix this. We can’t go in and fix things on our end and call kid a different name after the school said they had a specific name, um, or date of birth. If it gets changed in your student information system, Aspen, whatever you use, um, that match will. Probably happen, but sometimes people think it’s worth it, sometimes not.

Kate Sandel: Yeah.

Nyal Fuentes: Uh, I’m sorry.

Kate Sandel: I definitely feel like at some point, and I I, I, I know we we’re track, you’re, you’re tracking progress and it takes a lot of work. So you should get credit for all the work you do, but at some point. Give yourself that credit. I’m sorry, we’re not able to, to sort of, to, to, to market, but like check it off.

You, you, you’ve done that kid. It’s probably your effort is better [00:43:00] spent on other kids instead of ensuring sort of our bookkeeping. But yeah. Let’s move on to the, I think the next lists talk about the public FAFSA tool. Yes. Which slightly different.

Nyal Fuentes: Is there any questions about, and again, we’re gonna give you our email ’cause a lot of, you’re gonna have individual questions about this.

I’m glad people are digging in. Um. But would love to, um, just go into kind of what we’re gonna talk about. Public. This is gonna be sometime in January. Be public facing. This is an initiative, well I guess I wrote it on the slides. I shouldn’t talk about it. Um, I’ll talk little about the dashboard when the actual dashboard, Kate, I’ll hand over you to talk about.

’cause it is really, um, the work that she’s been doing. Um. Kate has been working hard with our IT teams to kind of get this publicly facing dashboard together. Um, it really is to provide public updates around FAFSA completion. Um, this is, everyone will be able to see this. You might see it on your local newspaper, these data, um, you might see, you know, your mom can look at it, you know, your school committee, et cetera.

So it really is developed some transparency around [00:44:00] fancy completion, which I know is gonna create. Some issues in some districts, but we really wanna get as much information out there to everyone. And this will allow our college access partners and colleges also to dig in and hopefully focus on school districts that have lower, fast completion to um, really get in there and increase those, increase fast completion and, um.

Limit those gaps. Um, there’s a couple, just to give you a state view. There was an a care recommendation about this, which was a group that, um, a governor’s initiative came together after the Supreme Court, um, affirmative action decision to really still focus on our historically marginalized students and making sure they’re going to college as well as, um.

Uh, fafsa, um, a FAFSA revolution, both boards, the Board of Higher Education and Bess e our bosses, um, to really set some completion goals. And we’re gonna hear more about this as we go on, and also really use to target our communications and our limited resources where they need it our most. Um, if you know Kate and I need to go and present about the FAFSA tool in places that are low, fast completion, or [00:45:00] regions even better, I’m happy to do that.

And we really wanna go to places that are, you know, struggling with fast completion. Um, how’s it different Edwin Reports again, it, these, this word, this letter salad I shot, I probably spelled out. It’s um, department of higher ed, us and our executive office education working together. They, to put this out there will be a whole, there’s a whole release strategy.

So you’re getting kind of a preview of this whole release strategy in, um, January with press releases we had to write and stuff like that. So there’ll be more information about this. We’re using the same data source here that we use for the stuff that’s in Edwin. Um, we’re using match data, so the numbers are gonna be a little bit lower than actual completion, but we’re gonna do the best we can.

Um, we’re gonna pro, we’re gonna, we’re gonna, but in this tool, we’re gonna do something a little bit different. We’re going to, um, we’re gonna report it twice a month, so probably the first and the 15th of every month. We’ll be reported starting in January, but the information will go back until October. Um, again, publicly available.

We’ll suppress small numbers of [00:46:00] students, slightly different in that we are using as our denominator. Stick with me for a second on this. Um, on this fraction talk is gonna be focused on kids who are high school seniors in October of the senior year. So traditionally what you’re seeing, enrollment rates that we use for chapter 70, um, what you’re seeing kind of on our profiles, reports, et cetera, that’s where we’re gonna be using.

So, denominator’s gonna be slightly different than what’s in Edwin. Edwin is gonna stay the same because we have a strong belief that every student in front of you is important. But as far as looking at data and setting goals, we wanted some stability in that student group. So it’s gonna capture the vast majority of your students in this tool, but not all of them.

And I think the number are gonna be slightly higher here because we’re not gonna include this sp the SP students, the students who are staying till at 22, who complete faft, like a 0.5%, um, rate. Um, so the numbers be slightly higher than you see in Edwin, but that’s okay. They’re tools for two different uses.

Um, and that’s kind of really important to remember. [00:47:00] Um, Kate, you wanna take this over because this is your, your baby. Yeah,

Kate Sandel: so the data, it, it has a state view and then we also get to dig into school and district level, um, information. And then you are, we’re gonna be looking at it as, um, all students and then by various, uh, student groups.

Um, and this is. Maybe a little different even than the student. Well, it’s not different necessarily, but it’s, you know, we’re gonna have low income, non low income, special education, non-special education. Um, so really high highlighting a lot of the different subgroups. Uh, the dashboard has a state overview tab, a school and district overview tab.

And then we’re also gonna have something that is high flyers and it’s gonna showcase. Uh, the, I think it’s 25 districts with the highest overall completion rates and then big movers to highlight districts that have seen large percentage point increase in [00:48:00] completion rates over by default the last two week period.

But you’ll have the option to sort of all, um, change the, the time period that you wanna look at. Um, again, this, uh, we, it also will allow for year to date progress, easy year to date progress. We’ll, you’ll get to see that the chart that will show where you can sort of see your, your uptick from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50% completion rate.

Um, and in future years we’ll be, we’ll be able to allow for, uh, like point in time comparison to prior years, like how does this march compare to last March? But we sort of have to save the data throughout the FAFSA cycle to enable that feature for future. Um, and I know I saw, we had hoped this would be live this week actually is when we hoped it would be live, but um, unfortunately there have been some data delays.

So we, it will be launched in early to [00:49:00] mid-January.

Nyal Fuentes: And the question about access, it will probably be on the DES E-C-C-T-E site, but I think that’s to be determined whether it’s actually posted.

Kate Sandel: Yeah.

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah.

Kate Sandel: Yeah. Well, oh, now you’re in charge of that, so, yeah.

Nyal Fuentes: Oh yeah. So yeah, it will be. I just didn’t know if you wanted put on data anyway.

We’ll figure that out.

Kate Sandel: Yeah.

Nyal Fuentes: Okay. Um, we’re, we’re gonna show you, we’re gonna spend like four more minutes looking at a couple screenshots, and I wanna stop for five minutes left for some questions.

Kate Sandel: So the next screen, this is the state, we’ll have a headline at the top that says the overall completion rate.

Um, and then you get to see it by all the different student groups and a little spark, uh, bar chart there. And then we have the year to date. And so what this is showing last, this is showing last award cycle, um, because that’s the data that we have been testing and building, building it with. So of course.

When this goes live in January, there’ll only be a handful of, [00:50:00] um, increments at the, at the, in this chart, and it will build throughout the, the cycle. Um, so, but

Nyal Fuentes: we’ll get to

Kate Sandel: mark that.

Nyal Fuentes: For those of you with really close eyes on this, there is some flop between submitted and completed, but so the numbers will be right when it comes out, but we’re still messing with some stuff, so there will never be more completed than submitted FAFSAs.

But, um, bear with us as we work through these data issues. These are

Kate Sandel: not final, final, these are screenshots from

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah, some of our, um, building efforts. Someone would notice, okay,

Kate Sandel: yes, of course someone would notice. And then just to point out, and I’ll, I’ll point out on this. Uh, thing because we’ve gotten this feedback, um, on some of our dashboards, uh, across the top, you notice there are buttons for the different tabs.

We have a home tab that just introduces you to sort of the FAFSA and the thing, but then there is a navigation tab that just has a couple of like, things to keep in mind as you’re navigating. It talks about the, uh, [00:51:00] you know, identifying the, um, dropdown menus and sort of where to, where to look for those and what, what those are.

Um. And also there’s like hover features, um, and some other filtering options where like if you click on certain things, it will filter somewhere else. So that navigation tab is just a really high level thing that helps users, um, uh, navigate it. So just as you’re doing it, clicking across the buttons can sometimes help so that you take a pause on the navigation to ensure you know how to use the dashboard.

Here we have school and district overview. This is one where we’re figuring out, uh, um, or yeah, we’re either going to embed the district year to date chart on this one, or it will be a separate district trend tab. Well, we’re figuring that out, but this mirrors the state one. But it just lets you look at your, their district and then if you’re the individual high schools in your district and compare those completion rates.

And then the student groups, uh, you get to see it by all the [00:52:00] student groups and just notice. Uh, you will have to scroll to see some of the, the information in this dashboard. There are little scroll bars next to the, um, tables that don’t fully fit, so there are additional student groups. Then I think we just have a screenshot of the hot bars.

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah. I do wanna point something out just really quickly here, and this is just something you can look at and see really quickly. Malden. Has obviously been some doing some work around looking at low income, um, FAFSA completion. I mean, you’ll see here their rate is 52.5. Um, and you know, the rate, um, is 46.9 for the, you know, the gap is much smaller than you see on the level of the commonwealth.

Still, I’m sure they would say we have a long way to go. Um, but there has been, you can kind of tell how their work, um, last year around getting low income kids to FAFSA is paying some dividends initially.

Kate Sandel: And then, hi fire again. This is just a tab just to highlight some of the districts that have the highest, um, [00:53:00] overall, uh, completion rate. And then you can run it for all students or for the individual student groups. And then we’ll update after you hit the selection. And then the date as of is, I think, yeah, it’s.

Typically you would run it the most recent, but if you wanna say, well, who had the most, as of, you know, last month, you could.

Nyal Fuentes: So, and just so you know, in mid-January or whenever this actually comes to fruition, um, we will ha we have some communication plans that includes MEFA and, um, Masa. They might not even know that yet. And if we wanna do another session for, uh, you know, I think getting your principals in here would be helpful.

Um, even some district staff. Um. To kinda look at this and say, Hey, the whole world can see this. Now let’s really pay attention to this. Um, it would be important, our last slide and we can stop. And, and wow, we went almost right at time, Kate. Um, here’s a cat saying thank you. Um, this email address is easy to remember and also Kate and I will both look at it in case one [00:54:00] of us is out.

Um, really encourage you to use that for kinda all these data type questions for us. Um, uh, I’m gonna send these slides to you to. To Julie to send you shortly a little bit here about the fast tool itself. The Go Hire campaign is also here. There’s a good cheat sheet in there and kind of mass grant and the free community college stuff and some links there.

It’s just a good place to start. It’s, it’s a nascent site. There’s not a ton of info there, but there’s a logo and then of course our friends at the Office of Student Financial Assistance are great. Again around, um, on sfa. Stephanie Barbosa is freaking awesome and will kind of answer individuals, counselors, questions about specific students and really digs in and really cares about this and does good work.

And I wish Stephanie was here to hear that. If anyone talks through, you can let her know I said that. And that’s our presentation for today. Um, happy to take any questions from anybody. If not, we will go on with our week. Julie.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Thank you so much. This was, [00:55:00] this was just fantastic. I know I can say that I know everyone who has been listening in feels the same way.

I don’t see any further questions. You were also awesome at answering everything as they came up. Um, yes. I will be sending out the, uh, recording. The presentation slides tomorrow, so you’ll have them and share them widely with your colleagues who maybe, you know, had something else come up today. And with that we can wait 30 seconds or so.

But I don’t see any open questions. Okay.

Kate Sandel: Did the person from Harvard find them? I’m seeing you in, I see. 3 0 7. Okay.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Oh, let’s see. I think so we have an answer. Yes.

Kate Sandel: Okay.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Because I was like, I did check and I do see, so, and Bob, I’ll give you the last word if you have anything to say,

Bob Bardwell: um, just keep up the good fight.

I say this, uh, a lot these days. Uh, there’s a lot on our plates more so than ever [00:56:00] before. It’s a tough time to be an educator. It’s a tough time to be in a role supporting all students when there’s so many things happening in our world. And so I just wanna say thank you for continuing to do this work. Um, our students and families need you now more than ever, and this is just one little piece of what we do, uh, but an important piece.

And so just please keep up the good fight because, um, our kids need us so.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Thank you, Bob.

Bob Bardwell: You’re

Julie Shields-Rutyna: welcome. Thank you, Nile. Thank you Kate. Thank you everyone. Oh, there

Bob Bardwell: is, there’s another question there about, um, high demand scholarship from the state.

Nyal Fuentes: I would go to the Osfa page that is linked in here. It has information about all, um, do I have the os?

It’s in the, it’s in the presentation. Um, they talk, there’s things in there about the herder scholarship, the high demand scholarships, and all the different stuff that’s really run about Department of Higher Education, and that might be more helpful to you.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Thank you, and lots of people are thanking [00:57:00] all of you, so yeah.

Nyal Fuentes: All right. Yeah, so thank you all for being, you know, in this season of lights being, you know, a candle in that light. Um, it really, you don’t get thanked enough for the work, and we do appreciate it.

Julie Shields-Rutyna: Have a good day, everyone.

Nyal Fuentes: Bye

Julie Shields-Rutyna: bye.

Bob Bardwell: Nile, can I ask you a question?

Nyal Fuentes: Yeah.

Bob Bardwell: When Julie stops recording,

Nyal Fuentes: oh yes, when I do that, hi, record again.