Our last post explained why the weeks before October 15 decide your low-income count. This one is only about how a district gets a digital survey live in time — the procurement question, answered.

You can have this running before the count without an RFP. It can be live in your building this month, it comes in through a purchasing co-op your district already uses, and it is charged per form. What it needs from you is one forward.

Who this is for

If you are a principal and you want this September to go differently, the rest of this is for you. It is short, it is specific, and none of it needs your signature.

7,000households in a large New Jersey district completed the survey digitally, on the district's own site, instead of on paper.
99.6%accuracy on the Free, Paid and Reduced determinations — settled at the point of submission, not calculated by hand afterwards.Our own measurement

How it gets done — and it isn't you doing it

Two moves. You forward this to your business administrator. After that it is ours to carry.

We come in through a cooperative purchasing vendor already working inside districts like yours. The co-op invoices the district against an award it already holds — so there is no RFP, no new bid, and no procurement cycle to wait out. That is the part that normally kills a September decision, and it is the part that does not apply here.

It goes live in about a week: your letterhead, linked from your own site, English and Spanish. Those are the two languages we ship, and we would rather tell you now than after you have announced it.

What it costs

Charged per form, and only per form. As low as $3 per submission, with discount tiers as student counts rise. No license. No setup fee. Nothing per building. A household that never submits is never billed — you pay for forms you actually got back.

Your business administrator will want that in one sentence: they are paid per completed form, and only for completed forms.

You don't need purchasing authority to fix this. You need to show central office that a zero-RFP co-op route already exists — before the October 15 count. The signature, the budget line and the certification are theirs. Putting it in front of them, while there is still a September left to fix, is yours.

One email · thirty seconds

Send this to your BA

This opens your own email, from your own address, with a subject and two lines already written. Change them, delete them, write your own — it sends from you, not from us, and we never see it. Do it this week: in November the count is closed.

No address collected, nothing to fill in here. We only hear about it if they call us.

If you are the business administrator reading a forward

Fifteen minutes, and we will bring your own numbers: your schools loaded, the returns view your office would be watching in October, the co-op paperwork, and the per-submission price against your enrollment. If it cannot be live before the October 9 return-by, we will tell you that on the call rather than after you have committed to it.

If you are the business administrator reading a forward

Fifteen minutes, and we will bring your own numbers

Your schools loaded, the returns view your office would be watching in October, the co-op paperwork, and the per-submission price against your enrollment. If it cannot be live before the October 9 return-by, we will tell you that on the call rather than after you have committed to it.

By the middle of October this is settled either way. As a decision your district made, or as another paper September that nobody chose.