How To Create a Financial Aid Manual

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Curious to know how to create a rewarding and helpful Financial Aid manual? Check out this week's topic to learn tips and tricks on how to create a compelling and helpful document that really benefits parents and staff alike.

Creating a Financial aid manual can be a lot of work up front, but once it is created, it will assist your team in awarding Financial aid fairly in accordance with your school’s mission. Over time, your Financial aid manual will address most--if not all--of the questions and situations you encounter while overseeing the financial aid process at your school. A financial aid manual will show parents a clear and concise path through the financial aid process and will make the process smoother for all parties.

You will first want to think about what questions you typically get throughout the Financial Aid process. These can be questions that come from parents, donors, or employees. Your goal is for your financial aid policy manual to provide a clear path forward for everyone involved in the financial aid process. Some questions you might consider are:

What documents should we require our parents to upload?
Will our awards limits be based on percentages of tuition or need?
How do we handle award appeals from parents?
Who is on the financial aid committee?
I am divorced/separated, what should I do?
I just lost my job, I am not sure how I can continue to make tuition payments, can you help?
I own a business and I filed for an extension, what taxes should I upload?
I am re-married but my finances are separate from my spouse’s, do you need his/her info too?

As you can see, these can be questions that could be internal(school) or external(parent) based. Each question can be used to make a policy for your school!

Once you have created your list of common questions, you can start working on creating your school’s policy. For example, let’s look at the common question ‘I am divorced/separated, what should I do?’ First, you will want to consider the following:

What is best for your school?
What follows the mission of your financial aid program?
Is it important for your school to include both parents’ information in the analysis of what the family can afford to pay?
What if one parent refuses to comply?
What if one parent is completely out of the picture?

Once you have looked at all the possible scenarios, you can draft your policy. You may want to write one version of the policy that is internal facing (for your school) and one version that is external facing (for parents). In this case, your policy might look something like this:

Internal:

At “State School,” it is vital to the equitable distribution of financial aid that we have the most accurate information for each applicant family. Therefore, any family whose parents are divorced or separated are required to complete two separate applications, one for each parent. Each application is separate from the other, and each parent will never have access to the other’s information.
- This requirement is for any two parents who are in any way part of the child’s life, regardless of their desire for the child to attend our school, and regardless of any financial arrangements made between the parents. Our school is not bound by any agreements made between the parents.
  - If one of the parents will not comply with this request, but the other is willing, we may make an exception for that family and this will be done by the Financial Aid Committee.
- If one of the parents is completely out of the picture, only the active parent needs to apply.
- If it is discovered after an award has been given, that one of the parents is present in the life of the child, we will not change an award mid-year. However, we will ensure both parents apply the following year.
- If one of the parents is remarried or living with a significant other, the second parent’s information will be included on the application in order to provide the school with the full financial picture of that household, regardless of how the parents have their finances arranged. The school is not bound by the family’s financial agreements.

External:

At “State School,” it is vital to the equitable distribution of financial aid that we have the most accurate information for each applicant family. Therefore, any family whose parents are divorced or separated are required to complete two separate applications, one for each parent. Each application is separate from the other, and each parent will never have access to the other’s information.

Once you have created your policies, you will want to get your policies approved by your Head of School or School board. This will make sure everyone at your school is on the same page about your Financial aid policies. This means if a parent has an issue with one of your Financial aid policies, you will have the backing of your school board and/or head of school.

Once your policies have been created, you can publish your Financial aid manual. Some schools will put their entire financial aid manual on their website, while others will just include the high points. With our example above, schools may only want to publicly state the simplified version for parents and let the school-specific policies be part of individual discussions with parents. You will want to keep your Financial Aid manual somewhere where it can be accessed by any part of your Financial aid team.

That’s going to do it for today, but make sure to come back on Thursday as we have even more content coming your way. If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the blog to stay up to date on all of our latest posts. See you on Thursday!

News Blackbaud K-12 Solutions™ Blog 09/08/2020 9:00am EDT

Added by Derek Nichols

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