P-EBT and ISBE Attendance Reporting
2/23/2021
The Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) program is part of the U.S. government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of P-EBT is to provide food assistance to families with students who would have received free or reduced lunch while attending school but are not receiving meals due to COVID-19 restrictions. Through P-EBT, eligible families can receive temporary emergency nutrition benefits loaded on EBT cards that are used to purchase food.
https://www.isbe.net/pebt
Illinois parents do not need to apply to receive these benefits. Eligible school districts submit data to the ISBE through the recently updated attendance report. The ISBE shares eligible student data with IL DHS which issues P-EBT benefits starting March 2021. Eligible students can receive $6.82 per day. To our knowledge, no similar programs are available in other states served by SchoolInsight (OK, MO, and NH).
https://www.isbe.net/Documents/020321-pebt-ppt.pdf
SchoolInsight was updated last night to enable reporting this data. Our understanding is that the first deadline for data submission is 2/25. We encourage all eligible districts to submit this report by the deadline so eligible families can receive benefits from the first batch of funds.
School District Admin Main > Import/Export > ISBE File > Export ISBE Files
The timeline for this project has been very short. The IL program was approved on 1/29/2021 (about 3 weeks ago) and it took time for the ISBE to issue guidance for schools and vendors. We have all been “fire drilling” to meet these new reporting requirements. We’d like to thank our very helpful partners at the ISBE for their continued support as we’ve rushed to make the new features available.
https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/resource-files/Illinois-Approval-Letter-schools-0128.pdf
Due to time constraints, the first version of our attendance report uses our existing data model. As a result, the initial report may have some inaccuracies. While the data should be mostly correct, in some edge cases historical data may not be. An important goal was to make the first upload available to unlock P-EBT funds for families, even if the data is not perfect.
We plan a second software release to extend our data model and produce precise reports. The ISBE allows updated submissions in later months, so later attendance report uploads will overwrite the initial submission with more accurate data. We gave more details about the problem in a previous news release. We’ll notify customers when this release becomes available.
https://www.teacherease.com/app/news/article/ISBE-Attendance-Reporting-Changes-Illinois-Only-20210219
Thank you for your patience. We strive to be a responsive and reliable technology partner for our customers, and support new requirements as they arise. We’ve been tested recently by external events, and hope we’ve met expectations. As always, we’ll provide more news when additional updates are ready.
The Common Goal Team
