State CN Agencies and Local Education Agencies (Directors and Key Staff) - SLT

OMB Approval No. 0584-#### Expiration Date: XX/XX/20XX

Appendix E5. Reminder Email to Schedule LEA Telephone Interviews

Subject: Reminder – Evaluation of Independent Review Telephone Discussion

Dear [LEA DIRECTOR NAME]:

We recently sent you an email to schedule a telephone discussion with you regarding your experience implementing a second, Independent Review of Applications (IRA) for school meal benefits. This is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) IRA Study. We would really appreciate your participation in this discussion and would like to schedule a call with you as soon as possible.

Your local education agency (LEA), [INSERT NAME], has been selected to participate in the telephone interviews [IF APPLICABLE: and to provide household applications]. Our study team would like to interview you to understand how the IRA process works at your LEA. Specifically, we will ask about the steps to conduct the second review, the challenges you face, and the opportunities you see to improve the process. The interview will take up to 90 minutes.

[If applicable] Following the interview, we will work with your staff to collect a sample of household applications for school meal benefits for two, nonconsecutive school years. Westat will review the applications from these LEAs in order to help assess the effectiveness of the IRA process at reducing certification error, and will report the results at the aggregate level (i.e., without identifying individual LEAs).

Your participation in this survey is completely voluntary; however, the law governing the school meal programs requires organizations participating in the programs to cooperate in studies such as the IRA Study. Please know that your responses will be kept private as required by law.

We encourage you to identify 1-2 key staff in your organization who will be able to join you and contribute to the discussion. In the tables below, please provide us with the contact information of these key staff who plan to attend the discussion and let us know what times work best for you and your team.

The following staff will attend the discussion:
Staff Name	Email

During which dates and times below are you and your staff available? Select all possible times.
	DATES
9:00 AM -10:30 AM EST
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST

We will email you the meeting invitation and dial-in details for this discussion prior to the call. Please email us at [study email] or call [study phone number] if you have questions.

Your partnership matters to us! We look forward to receiving your valuable input.

Thank you,

The IRA Study Team
Westat

According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, an agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a valid OMB control number. The valid OMB control number for this information collection is 0584-XXX. The time required to complete this information collection is estimated to average 3 minutes per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information.