001All right, we are at the last part of the training which is application review, amendments and closing. Um just a reminder that after this section uh is concluded, we will continue with part five which is uh shared services shared service arrangements. Um, and after this section, if you plan on leaving us, if you'll hold tight to uh take a look at the uh training evaluation link that'll be posted in the chat so that you can provide us with feedback on this training um so that we could uh better serve you um in your needs. So um we will continue with uh part four application review amendments and closing. Thank you, Himeme. Um, I'm going to go over the public comment requirement in title 8 under the general provisions. There is a requirement um that before
002the application is submitted, the applicant has afforded a reasonable opportunity for public comment on the application and consider such comment. also within the ESSA provisions and asurances that can be found um on grant opportunities um behind the they are the last part of the program specific provisions and asurances there is an assurance letter I that states that by certifying submitting the egrants application the applicant is assuring it's in compliance with all the provisions and assures within the application. Um so an example can be like a public hearing if you have a board meeting where you can share um the application and what's being applied for what activities will be um be provided with the federal programs uh can is an opportunity but um the LEA should follow its local policies and procedures for obtaining any
003kind of public comment. Tasha, thank you. Good afternoon everyone. I am Tasha Clifton Roland and I'm a manager in the grants administration division and I'm going to begin the conversation on application review processes and amendments. So now we've gotten through all of the fun part, right? We've completed all of the required schedules and egrants. Our table of content shows that our schedules are complete. So we're going to talk a little bit about what happens after the a uh applications are submitted. But before we we do that, I want to give a little reminder to always double check that your application has in fact been submitted. We find instances sometimes well into a grant period where our school systems think that applications haven't have been submitted but they haven't. And this can be done by checking
004under the grants tab. Lori talked about the grants tab earlier and all of the statuses that can be found there. So always check under that tab after you complete any any steps in egrants just to make sure that the application is sitting where you expect it to be. If the application has been certified and submitted, it should be sitting under submitted and not under draft. So if it's sitting under draft, that means it has not been submitted to TEA. Another way to check is to look on that GS2000 certify and submit page. There should be a name as well as a recent date and timestamp. Now, we're working on some things to help to help you better identify that um or some kind of notifications to um let you know that drafts are still in
005process. So, stay tuned for that. All right. So after applications are submitted to TEA, they do go through a review and approval process to ensure that the application is in compliance with grant requirements and this is started with the negotiators. So it's going to be the negotiator review that most of you are familiar with. During that process, applicants or grantees may be asked to make changes to or updates to their applications. And this is what we call negotiation. Since the application is in egrants, if changes need to be made, they're going to be communicated in e-grants as well. They'll be communicated through the GS2300 negotiation comments and confirmation schedule. When TEA makes the application available on the grant's side for corrections to be made, email notification goes to the authorized official and two contacts that
006are on the GS2100, the applicant information page. So, make sure that that information is up to date. It is a process. It's a process. So on average it takes about 30 days to move an application through uh the review and approval process. There are often thousands of applications moving through at one time. Busy summer months can impact the timeline as well as if the application requires negotiation that could affect the timeline and the time that grantees take to get their corrected information to tea. So, we always encourage people to start early. Start very early. Okay. And I'm going to turn it over to Nelly to talk to you a little bit about postawward compliance review. Thanks, Tasha. So, uh, the post award compliance unit or the pack unit is part of the federal fiscal compliance
007and reporting division. Like I mentioned earlier in the presentation, um, our unit conducts reviews of federally funded grant applications. The applications are reviewed for compliance with the applicable statutes, regulations, non-regulatory guidance, and grant guidelines after grants administration has no them. Uh along with these application reviews, the postawward compliance team is also responsible for several random data validations including a BS616 IDEA BLEA random data validation. uh the newly added title 2 part A and title three part A ELA supplement not supplant professional develop random validations and the title one part A homeless reservation random validation introduced with the PS3101 slides today. So, if the postawward compliance unit identifies items of non-compliance in an application, the subreient will be notified and you'll be issued a preliminary report. The report will contain applicable technical assistance resources to support
008you through the amendment process andor revised documentation submission. The report will contain any areas of identified non-compliance issues. It will include an invitation for you to request a phone call or a Zoom meeting to discuss the preliminary report and your necessary amendment. And then it will also include the deadline to submit an amendment andor revise documentation submission to address your non-compliance issues and submit the amendment needed. So, if you receive a preliminary report from the postawward compliance team, please know that we're here to assist you in the process of addressing the issues in the report. So, please just reach out to us for that assistance and we'll be happy to help you. Thank you. Hey, um I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the postawward uh review that we do for the
009title one part A uh campus selection schedule. Um the the SC5000 is a really important schedule in the application because that's the schedule where LEAs identify their title one campuses and uh determine uh what type of title one program the campuses are going to operate. Um so I wanted to let you know what the scope of our review is uh for the postawward uh review of the SC5000. We will be looking at uh the data that are submitted for the uh all the eleas in general for the SC5000 and we'll be running a set of queries uh against that data to find issues that there may be with title one campus eligibility was what we don't want to have happen is eleas to serve a campus as title one when actually the campus wasn't eligible
010to be served. as title one. So we want to be sure that the campuses that have been identified as either schoolwide or targeted assistance campuses are eligible to uh function as that. So that's one of the things that we will be looking for. We will also be looking for um whether uh campuses that have been identified as schoolwide program campuses are actually eligible to be schoolwide campuses. So, they have either met the 40% poverty threshold or they have established that 40% threshold in a prior year or they have uh a schoolwide eligibility waiver under Edflex. We'll also be looking to see if the ELEAs have followed the Title One rank and serve requirements. Um basically I mean there there a lot of weeds we could get into there but um basically we need to be
011sure that uh campuses that are above 75% excuse me have been served before campuses that are below 75%. So we'll be ter determining whether campuses have been skipped if they've been skipped if they've been marked that way. Um there are also times when um eleas may mark a campus as skipped when it's not really necessary. And so we want to be sure that they understand that that it's not. Um it can be uh hard for eleas to to skip a campus because they're required to provide additional supplemental funds to those campuses in the amount that they would have received under title one part A. So if they're not required to skip a campus, we don't want the LEA to be having to provide that campus with extra supplemental funds. So, we want to be sure
012that um eleas understand those uh ramifications. We'll also be doing a review of the supplement on supplant statement of exemption. Um eleas may not realize that we do any of these things. Um if there's a problem, we will notify you about it so that you'll have an opportunity to make an amendment to to correct the the issue. Um but basically that we just are trying to do our due diligence to um be sure that um districts that have been identified as title one eligible actually do meet the requirements and I'll turn it back over to Tasha. Thanks Vivian. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about amending the application. start by establishing what an amendment is. After a grant is awarded, um a grantee may need to make changes to their application. Once
013they submit a new document, that is what we refer to as an amendment. Now, to amend the application, since we're working in egrants, the applicant will go back through eGrants and navigate again to that grants tab. This time, we're going to look under awarded grants, right? because we've already submitted the grant. So, it should be sitting under rewarded. We're going to select the grant title from the our list. And after we do that, a button that says amend will become active. After you click on that button that says amend, you'll have access to the grant schedules and you will complete all of the schedules that need to be updated, including the purpose of amendment. And we're going to talk a little bit about the purpose of amendment on the next slide. So here's an example
014of the egrants's purpose of amendment. Part one of this schedule is the justification. Part one a is a question. Is the amendment being submitted as requested and required by tea's postawward compliance review unit? So, this is not the negotiator review um that is completed once you first submit your application. This is a postawward review that Nelly's is talking about after your application has been submitted. So, this box should only be marked yes if the post award compliance review unit has contacted you to make a change. So they will have sent you a report and communicated with you through um outside of egrants outside of egrants. So sometimes we we mark boxes because we want to make sure that we're crossing tees and dotting eyes, but in this case it should only be marked yes if
015you've been contacted by the postal work compliance review unit. Part 1B is where the actual amendment justification is entered. You will describe very briefly why the amendment is needed. For example, reducing payroll costs to add funds to supplies. You may have vacant positions resulting in salary savings and you want to rebudget those funds. So that simple statement is sufficient. Um, as Tammy mentioned earlier, we don't want to include brand names here because if you go with a different one, that could require an amendment. Um, and we don't want you to include dollar amounts here. And the reason for that is because sometimes grantees will make a change in the supporting schedules later and then forget to come back and change it on the purpose of amendment schedule. And that simple uh discrepancy can require you
016to need to make a revision. So we don't want that little change to delay the awarding of the amendment. So in part two, you check the box to confirm understanding of the amendment effective date. Again, we want to make sure that all schedules that need to change have been updated. We do receive amendments from time to time where the justification page has been completed and no change has been made to the application. So once we've verified that all of our schedules have been completed, we want to go back and certify and submit our amendment. Go back to that grants tab just to make sure that it's sitting where it's supposed to be. Okay. So, now we're going to talk about when to amend the application. We're going to talk about when to amend the application.
017Grantees are afforded a little bit of flexibility in terms of when an amendment is required. Some changes you can keep on your books while other times a formal amendment must be submitted to TEA. and we have a document on the web called when to amend the application. It's on the grant resources page and we're going to walk through that a little bit. So, what I have on the screen is the actual first page of that document and we are going to spend a little bit of time there because the first page is jam-packed with important information and I will pull out some of the key information there. The first one is related to item number one on the document. Indirect costs are not required to be budgeted in the grant application to be charged to
018the grant. So item number one says that grantees must have a rate on file from their federal um from their cognizant agency to charge cost but the expenditure reporting system will allow you to claim indirect cost whether it's budgeted or not. So there is no need to submit an amendment only to claim indirect cost. The second bullet is related to item number two on the document on the screen. The ER system or the expenditure reporting system won't allow payments where no funds are budgeted in a class object [Music] code. So although supplies and materials don't require specific approval, they still must be budgeted on that BS60001 in order to charge supplies and materials to the grant. Unfortunately, our cash management and fund control team see this quite a bit where grantees are requesting reimbursement for
019funds and they don't have any money in that class object code. So, it is important that program staff or grant staff are communicating with the financial staff at their agency throughout the life of the grant just to make sure that everything is aligned um that the budget is aligned with their needs. And we recommend that people draw down funds frequently to catch some of this earlier. So, don't wait until the end of the grant. Number three is another one that comes up a bit. If negotiators complete budget adjustments on behalf of our school systems, amendments are not required unless based on the rules in this document, you determine that a change is needed. So sometimes many grantees submit amendments and the justification will say adding final amounts or carryover when TEA has already completed it.
020So that's not necessary. Now for the ESSA grant, our school systems normally add these funds on their own through an amendment these days. But in the event that you're working on another grant or for some reason um you weren't able to get it in the grant and TA had to do it for you um an amendment is only needed if you determine based on the changes um that you see in this document um then an amendment is required and let's see one final thing that I wanted to draw your attention to at the bottom of this page is the language that says an amendment is considered to be effective on the day it was repro approved it was received sorry in substantially approvable form so for amendments in egrants that's generally going to mean the
021day it was submitted to tea so not before it's going to generally mean the day it was submitted to egrants and the the reason being is that egrants has edit checks that helps us ensure that the necessary components are there So, okay. So, now let's take a look at some of the actual rules in the when to amend document. First, I want to tell you how to read the document. The rules vary based on the type of grant. So, you're going to look under the column for the specific grant that you're working on. It could be a formula funded grant, a discretionary competitive grant, or a discretionary non-competitive grant. So today we're talking about ESSA, right? So that's a formulaf funded grant. So that is the column that we're going to pay attention to. And
022I'm going to cover some of the more common items that we see quite a bit. I won't go through all of the items here. The the document is available on the website. So number one, adding a class object code not previously budgeted. This is standard across the board. So adding a new class object code requires an amendment regardless of the grant type. Remember the expenditure reporting system is not going to allow a payment request to go through if there are no funds budgeted in a class object code. And this is one that we see way too often. We see this way too often and a lot of times it's at the end of the grant and sometimes it's even after the grant has closed and after a grant has closed there there isn't anything that
023we can do about it. So please please please check this early and often. Number two, increasing the amount of funds in a class object code by more than 25% of the total award amount. And I believe I saw a question in chat about this one earlier. So, um, that's pretty standard across the board. It's going to require an amendment. The expenditure reporting system will not allow a payment request to go through if the change is greater than 25%. And again, this is another one that we see quite a bit. And this is cumulative, right? This is cumulative. So if the changes across all of the class object codes is more than 25% that's when an amendment is required. So I hope that answers your question. All right. So on to the next page. Number seven.
024Number seven. And I I think I saw this somewhere as well. Um adding a new line item on any of the supporting budget schedules requires an amendment for any grant type for any grant type. So we see that one um quite a bit from our monitoring team where they don't see um an item listed on the the budget schedules. In fact, we had one today on break. So, so please make sure that you if you have any new line item for any type of grant program to go ahead and submit an amendment. So number 10, adding a type of payroll position not already approved requires an amendment across the board. So, for example, if the administrative support or clerical staff box on BS6101 um wasn't included and you need positions for that, an amendment would
025be required. Okay, last page. Number 11 is one that we see quite frequently as well. Adding a new item or increasing the quantity of capital outlay requires an amendment all across the board. So, we use this this resource daily u because we don't know all of the rules all the time. So, we use it and we want to encourage school districts to use this as well. And if you're having any trouble with this document, always feel free to call your negotiator and they can help you determine if an amendment is needed. And while we're talking about amendments, I'm going to go a little bit a little bit off subject u just a little bit. I wanted to point out that sometimes we see instances where a grantee previously requested cost for a class object code
026and then they submit an amendment and they take that class object code off. I just want to make sure that everyone knows if you have requested reimbursement for funds previously, leave the class object code there. And I'm going to say that one more time because I want to make sure it's clear. If you have requested reimbursement for funds and then you submit a subsequent amendment, leave the class object code there because this is something that we see frequently as well. So the amendment is going to replace the previous version of your application. It's not added to it, right? So make sure anything that you've already drawn down funds for remains in your amendment. All right. So I'm turning it back over here. All right. So, um that concludes um the first four parts of today's
027uh training. Um as I mentioned um earlier, we're going to have we have an evaluation link. So, don't leave us just yet. I'm going to paste the evaluation or feedback uh form link in the chat so that you can provide us with feedback. Again, we wanted to give you a quick reference of the instructions for all the schedules. Um, the only this is one of the only places you'll find them all in one place is on this on this slide. Other than that, they are uh in the egrant system on every single schedule. So, you might want to keep this handy as you're working through your application. Um, here is a presentation feedback uh link as well as a QR code. If you'd like to scan the QR code and uh provide us with your
028feedback using the QR code, you can do that or you can um utilize the link that has been placed in the chat. Again, the training is not over unless you've decided that you do not want to stay for part five, which is the part on shared services arrangement. Um, if you're leaving us now, thank you for coming. Please provide us with feedback so that we can uh continue to provide you the best service possible um and and provide you with uh the training that you need uh to implement all these uh federal programs um that you uh work on. Thank you for everything you do for us. And we're going to now continue with part five.