Veterans Upward Bound Program

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Letter to VUB Project Directors
Annual Performance Report 2018-2019


May 2020

Dear Veterans Upward Bound (VUB) Project Director:

It is now time for you to prepare your annual performance report (APR) for reporting year 2018-19, the second year of the 2017–22 grant cycle.  We are grateful for your understanding that the Department’s response to the Covid-19 emergency delayed unavoidably the opening of the VUB APR.  As of May 1, 2020, you will find the APR form and instructions, plus links to the secured VUB APR web site maintained by our contractor, at https://www2.ed.gov/programs/triovub/report.htmlYour APR is due to us by June 1, 2020. 

Do not rely solely on the VUB APR web site in completing your APR; be sure to read thoroughly the U.S. Department of Education’s APR documents at the web address above.  Should you wish to revise your report after having submitted it, you may ask the Help Desk to “unsubmit” it, but you must make final submission no later than the due date.  Also remember that, within five business days after final submission of your completed online APR, you must scan and upload a signed copy of Section I of the report form.  Section I must be signed both by the project director and certifying official; you may wish to alert your certifying official of this requirement in advance.

Notes specifically for the 2018–19 APR

Move to case numbers:  You may be aware that, in the 2017-18 reporting year, Student Support Services became the first TRIO program to move from using Social Security numbers in the APR to case numbers as a prime identifier.  As of the 2018-19 APR, case numbers will allow the Upward Bound programs and McNair as well to continue to track participants and their outcomes over a number of reporting years with greater security.  We have prepared a separate document (available at the web address above) on use of case numbers in VUB and how they will affect your work, but we also advise you to read carefully pages 2-5 of the General Instructions.    

Your first opportunity in the cycle to earn prior experience (PE) points:  The years in which the Department will assess prior experience are the second, third, and fourth of the 2017–22 cycle (that is, 2018–19, 2019–20, and 2020–21); thus, this year’s report will produce your first PE assessment. For each of the five years of the cycle, after you submit your APR, the web application will produce for you a report that shows the extent to which you met your objectives, such as participants’ academic improvement and enrollment in postsecondary education.  In the first and fifth years of the cycle the report is referred to as the Standard Objectives Report; in the second through the fourth years, it is the Individual Prior Experience (PE) Points Report, which you will be able to view after submission of the APR during the three years.  All five years’ results are based on identical formulas that are explained in the “Policies and Procedures” document also available at the web address above.  Be sure to keep in mind that, in any of the three assessment years, if your project fails to serve at least 90 percent of the agreed-upon number of students, you will earn no PE points at all for that year.  We suggest that, at least a few days before the due date, you submit your APR, examine the PE points report, and ascertain whether it shows the results that you might have expected.  If not, be sure to check your data and the formulas provided in the “Policies and Procedures” document.  If you find that you made mistakes that do not do justice to your project’s actual accomplishments, you can ask the Help Desk to “unsubmit” the report so that you can make corrections and resubmit by the June 1 deadline.

Format of the APR:You may notice that the APR has a sleeker design that we hope will aid your work.  We no longer have two tiers; you will see Section I, Section II, and the “Review and Submit” section.  In addition, the data fields are no longer broken out into tabbed groups, so as to improve navigation for you.

Dropping older participant records from the APR:  In the past, the Department has required grantees to retain in their data files all student records found in the previous year’s APR.  In the APR web application, we provide a file allowing grantees to download data from the previous year.

Grantees that have participated in VUB for many years—primarily those that held grants in the 2007–12 cycle—are aware that TRIO  has identified a large number of prior-year participant records that the Department no longer needs for PE calculations or for other important measures.  We are continuing to eliminate such records from this year’s download file.  If one or more of your old records are among those we deleted, you will not be able to report on those specific individuals in 2018-19 or thereafter.  Please see pages 2-5 of the General Instructions, available at the web address above, for further information.

Other important reminders

Reminders concerning cohorts (field #38):  A cohort may be set for a participant only when he or she completed the VUB program in one project year and enrolled in a program of postsecondary education no later than the end of the subsequent project year for the first time since completing the VUB program.  Please note that any participant who completed the program in the 2017-18 project year (field #31, Completion Year = 2017) must have enrolled in postsecondary education by the end of the 2018-19 project year to be counted as a member of a cohort; otherwise, the participant will not qualify for one. Therefore, you should be sure to ascertain whether these individuals enrolled in postsecondary education before the end of the 2018-19 project year, and, for those that did enroll, you must report in field #37 the date of first postsecondary school enrollment in the 2018-19 APR.  Such participants who enrolled within the period August 1, 2018 through July 31, 2019 will be members of  the 2018 cohort; those who enrolled within the period August 1--September 30, 2019 will be members of the 2019 cohort. Also note that all participants who qualify for the 2018 postsecondary enrollment cohort must be reported in the 2018-19 APR; this includes any individuals who completed the VUB program in 2018-19 and enrolled in postsecondary by the end of the 2018-19 academic year, that is, by July 31, 2019.

Protecting personally identifiable information (PII):  The only location in the APR in which you should provide participants’ birth dates is the data file that you will be uploading securely.  Do not include PII in such places as the text boxes within the APR web site for the Current Participants and Eligibility Status Report and the Critical Fields Verification Report.

The Help Desk: If you encounter technical problems accessing the web site or using the web application, please contact the Help Desk by either telephone at (703) 885-8008 or email at generaltrio@collabralink.com. Please note that the Help Desk will try to contact projects within two business days of receiving a telephone call or email. The Help Desk will be available to respond to your questions on weekdays that are not Federal holidays from the “go-live” date of the web application through June 1, 2020. During peak times, it may take longer for you to receive a response; thus, I encourage you to prepare and submit your performance report as soon as you have collected complete data. For any questions regarding the APR requirements, please contact your program specialist directly; to ascertain his or her name, telephone number, and email address,please visit  http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/trio/staffdirectory-cupt.html.

Thank you for the time and effort you devote to preparing your APR each year and for your commitment to providing complete and accurate data. Please retain source documents in readily accessible form so that they can be verified during an on-site visit.

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Sincerely,

Gaby Watts
Director
TRIO Upward Bound and Educational Opportunity Centers Division
Student Service

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Last Modified: 04/30/2020