[Oasfaa] OTAG 2006-2007 Award Payment Schedule &, Flat Rate Award Amounts & Program Reminders

[Joyner, Shiela]

At their meeting earlier today the State Regents approved the 2006-2007 OTAG Award Payment Schedule.  A copy of the schedule is attached for your information.  With no significant increase in funding for the 2006-2007 award year, the EFC cutoff remains 1500, and we anticipate that the awarding cutoff will be in late April.  More specific information regarding the cutoff date will follow soon, and for now, you can safely award otherwise eligible students with FAFSA receipt dates through April 15, 2006.  

Also attached is a list of institutions that participate in the OTAG program and their flat-rate award amounts for 2006-2007 (one amount for full-time undergraduates and one amount for part-time undergraduates).  The amounts shown are for the full award year, one-half of which can be paid in each the fall and spring disbursement cycles.

Important Reminders:

*	Again in 2006-2007, OTAG will not send award notices to students, and institutions should instead include OTAG award information in their award notices sent to their students.  
*	There is no award transfer process for OTAG, and students who change institutions should not contact the OTAG office to report their transfer.  Instead, the new institution needs to simply include the student in their OTAG Award Claim Form, if they find the student to be eligible for an OTAG award at their institution.  We will appreciate your assistance in making sure your staff members and other departments working directly with students are aware of this so they can respond appropriately to student inquiries.  Also, please check your websites to make sure they reflect this updated information as well.
*	Only undergraduate students will be considered for awards in 2006-2007.

The OTAG statutes continue to require renewal priority for students who were awarded by the program in 1999-2000.  We will continue to identify any students who qualify as renewals and who require renewal priority in order to qualify, and we will notify any affected institutions (there was only one renewal student who required award priority in 2005-2006).

OTAG policy changes effective beginning in 2006-2007 are:

*	Students are no longer limited to 10 FTUG disbursements
*	Eligibility is limited to students who have not already received their first bachelor's degree
*	Pro-rated awards have been discontinued
 
New reports delivery process beginning in 2006-2007:

We are pleased to let you know that a new web-based reports upload/download process will be ready for use at the beginning of the fall semester.  We recently worked with a couple of volunteer institutions in conducting a test on the system; they suggested a few improvements, and our IT staff expects to have the process operational soon.   This new process will allow us to discontinue sending and receiving reports as e-mail attachments, and will eliminate the need to use password protection to open reports.  It will automatically send e-mail messages to alert institutions when OSRHE has placed a report on the site for them and will send e-mail to the appropriate OSRHE staff when an institution has placed a report on the site for us.  This reports upload/download process will be used not only for OTAG reporting, but also for OTEG, OHLAP, and Academic Scholars.   More information regarding the reports delivery process will be forthcoming.

Several institutions have asked when we will be ready to send out pre-populated Award Claim Forms.  While we are not planning to accept Award Claim Forms for payment until August, we will soon be ready to provide "work copy" reports.  We would not, however, want institutions to use these early reports to request funds since the ISIR data will in many cases become outdated as corrections are submitted to the CPS and the OTAG database is refreshed with data from the later transactions.  If you would like to receive a pre-populated report for your early use in your internal processing, please send a message to reports at otag.org.

More information regarding the 2006-2007 OTAG program will be forthcoming.   As always we appreciate your assistance in delivering OTAG funds to Oklahoma's students.  If you have questions regarding the 2006-2007 program, please contact our office.

 <<2006_AWD_PAY_FLAT RATE_APPROVED.doc>> 	 <<06-07 Award Flat Rate.xls>> 

***********************
Shiela Joyner, Director
Oklahoma Tuition Aid Grant Program
Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education
P. O.  Box 108850
Oklahoma City, OK 73101-8850
Internet:  sjoyner at otag.org
Voice: (405) 225-9378    Toll Free (877) 662-6231
Fax: (405) 225-9392

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