Fiscal Year 2026 SRSA Grantee Welcome & Orientation

Greetings and welcome to the Small Rural School Achievement or SRSA Program Grantee Orientation. My name is Jordan Haydel and I'm a program officer here on the Rural Education Achievement Program or REAP team here at the U.S. Department of Education. On behalf of our team of program officers, we are so glad you're making the time to view this recording. We hope it helps you get started with implementing your local We have structured the recording to provide an orientation up to the program, essentially to highlight the main things that an administrator should know about the program in order to make decisions about a school district's SRSA grant. I would like to make sure you're aware that if you are following along with the PDF version of the presentation, you can find additional resource links in the presenter's notes. Any slide with a little orange bubble in the upper left-hand corner has a corresponding note to check out for additional resources. So before we turn to our agenda today for today's presentation, our team would like to congratulate you for successfully applying for and receiving an SRSA grant. For some, this may be your first experience with the SRSA grant. Others may have experience in implementing the program. We know that many of our rural school leaders take on multiple roles in your districts, and we hope this presentation will be an efficient way for you to get the information that you need. There's one point of clarification regarding REAP that I'd like to start off by highlighting. REAP is comprised of two different programs, the Small Rural School Achievement, or SRSA, grant program, which is the topic of this particular recording, and the Rural Low Income School Program, or RLIS. Both SRSA and RLIS are designed to help rural districts that may lack the personnel and resources to complete to compete effectively for federal competitive grants and that often receive grant allocations in amounts that are too small to be effective in meeting their intended purposes. A distinction is that SRSA grant awards are made directly from the U.S. Department of Education to school districts like you, which we refer to as Local Educational Agencies, or LEAs. Our team also makes the RLIS awards to State Educational Agencies, or SEAs, which then make those RLIS awards to eligible LEAs in their states. In the past, your LEA may have participated in the SRSA program by receiving a grant from us, or in RLIS by working with your SEA and receiving a grant from them. Today's presentation is not going to go over the details related to the RLIS program, nor are we going to delve deeply into the SRSA application from earlier this year. If you have questions about the RLIS program, we encourage you to reach out to your contacts at the state level. If you are looking for information related to the SRSA application, you can find relevant presentations on our resources page of the REAP website, which we will share at the end of today's presentation. All right, moving on to our agenda now. Our goal today is that you'll leave this presentation understanding the SRSA program, how to access those grant funds, and how to obtain support throughout the entire grant cycle. The agenda we'll be following during this recording will cover four key areas, including an SRSA program overview, how to access your SRSA award funds in G5, the uses of SRSA funds and flexibilities, and available resources and how to make use of them. If after viewing the recording you still have questions about the program, our team is always available to support you, but we hope that this will be time well spent for you and answer many of your questions. I'm going to pass the presentation over to Lainey now to kick it off with some SRSA program basics. Thanks so much, Jordan. So now we're going to dive into the most fundamental aspects of the SRSA program. The Small Rural School Achievement Program is designed to help rural LEAs use federal resources more effectively in order to address their unique needs. The program is authorized by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESCA, specifically under Title V, Part II, Subpart I. Eligible LEAs may receive funds and flexibilities under the program that enable them to participate more fully and effectively in many of the ESCA programs and allow them to provide better educational services to their students. As mentioned, an LEA must be eligible to qualify for SRSA. As the name implies, a local educational agency, which we refer to as an LEA, must be both small and rural in order to receive an SRSA grant. An LEA is small if its ADA is under 600 or if it's located in a county with a population density of less than 10 persons per square mile. An LEA is rural if all of its component schools are assigned rural locale codes by the National Center for Education Statistics, which is a 41, 42, or 43 for SRSA, or if the state has informed the department that this LEA is considered to be rural for the purposes of the SRSA program. The REAP team receives this data from your state education agencies each year and uses it to make eligibility determinations. On this slide, we're looking at a simplified version of the formula that we use to determine how much SRSA funding your LEA will receive. One of our most frequently asked questions is why is our SRSA grant award different from this year compared to last year? This slide will help explain that. We first calculate an LEA's initial award amount. In the blue box, you can see that the initial award amount is found by taking your average daily attendance, subtracting 50, multiplying by 100, and then adding 20,000. The minimum initial SRSA award amount is $20,000 and the maximum is $60,000. Because the SRSA grant program is designed to supplement your other title program-based school improvement funds, we then factor in the amounts you receive under titles 2A and 4A in calculating your annual SRSA award amount. Keep in mind that these SRSA award amounts are also subject to what we call the rateable adjustment. This rateable adjustment helps us to right size the SRSA grant awards based on the amount of money appropriated by Congress in a given fiscal year versus how many eligible LEAs nationwide submit an SRSA application in that year. The rateable adjustment is the primary reason why the actual SRSA grant awards we make each summer differ from the estimated allocations we post in the spring on the REAP Master Eligibility Spreadsheet. We apply the rateable adjustment once all SRSA applications have been received and the full SRSA funding cohort has been identified. So, if you're seeing your SRSA award amounts fluctuate from year to year, it's likely due to the rateable adjustment, along with changes in your ADA or title 2A and 4A amounts. This slide is a breakdown of our grant making year for the REAP program, which consists of four phases. While the dates may shift slightly each year, the process remains the same. As you see on the left, the process for FY 2026 started in the winter. For the eligibility determination phase, the REAP team works with both the states as well as the National Center for Education Statistics to collect the eligibility data necessary to make awards under both SRSA and our other program, RLIS. Once we finish collecting the necessary data, we publish our Master Eligibility Spreadsheet, or MES. At that time, LEAs have the chance to review the MES and make any corrections to the data for their LEA. During this time, LEAs should also check the status of any other active SRSA awards they may have received. Every January 30th is a liquidation deadline for SRSA grantees awarded in prior years. We'll go over this in more detail later on. It's also essential to ensure that your UEI remains active in SAM.gov throughout the year. Your UEI registration in SAM must be renewed annually, so take note of your UEI expiration date to avoid any delays in your ability to draw your grant funds in G5. We'll go over how to update your UEI later on in this webinar. Following the eligibility determination, the SRSA application window opens in the spring. Each eligible LEA that is expected to receive funds from SRSA is emailed a personalized SRSA application invitation using the contact information provided to us by the SCA and by your LEA. Then, the REAP team uses the information provided in the SRSA application to finalize SRSA and RLIS cohorts in May and June. We finally start making grant awards in July, and that runs through September. We hope your LEA can refer back to this timeline throughout the year to ensure you're accessing funds and submitting information in a timely manner. There are deadlines for accessing your LEA's SRSA funds known as performance periods. It's essential to understand that each SRSA award has a specific performance period during which grantees must obligate and liquidate their awarded funds, particularly for an LEA that has received an SRSA award in previous years and must keep track of multiple performance periods. Currently, there are three active SRSA performance periods for fiscal years 2024, 2025, and now 2026. This reference to fiscal year is important. When we use the term fiscal year, we mean the federal fiscal year, which corresponds with the first school year in which the funds are available. For example, FY 2026 award funds are first available beginning in the 2026-27 school year. This chart shows that each SRSA award has a 27-month performance period during which your LEA can assign or obligate allowable costs to the grant. Your LEA must maintain transparent internal records that detail when and for what purpose you obligated your SRSA grant funds. Obligation deadlines always fall on September 30th. From there, your LEA has an additional 120 days after the obligation deadline to liquidate or draw down the obligated funds from G5, our grants management platform. Liquidation deadlines will always fall on January 30th. After the liquidation deadline, you will no longer have access to that grant in G5. So that covers the basics for SRSA. Now to Emily for more information. Thank you, Lainey. In the next several slides, we're going to review the process for accessing your SRSA grant funds in G5. G5 is the department's grant management platform. Your fiscal year 2026 SRSA award and any prior year grant funds you may have are stored in G5. On this slide, we will look at the actual grant award notification or GAN each of you received this summer as a notification that you received SRSA grant funds. The GAN is the official notice from the U.S. Department of Education that your LEA's SRSA award is available in G5. It contains a lot of important information including the amount of the award, the grant recipient contacts, and the conditions under which the grant was awarded. Both the primary and secondary contacts at your LEA receive a copy of the GAN and you will see that the secondary contact we have on file is listed in box 3. Keep in mind that the names on the GAN have no special authority to draw down funds in G5. In order to access your grant funds, someone at your LEA must be assigned the role of payee in G5, which we will discuss a little bit later. As a general rule, we do not make changes to the contact information on the GAN. If your primary or secondary contacts have changed since you submitted the application, you can contact us at reap.ed.gov and we can send you a copy of the GAN. We will also update our internal contact list so that any new communication goes to your new contacts. This slide shows an image of what the first page of your GAN looks like. Block 2 contains the PR award number. All SRSA grants, regardless of the year, begin with S358A. The two digits following this initial code relate to the federal fiscal year that the award was given. So a PR award number with S358A-26 would indicate an FY26 SRSA grant. The last four digits are unique to your award. Block 6 contains a 15-month award period. The terms and conditions of the SRSA grant are laid out in Block 10 and it is there you will find an explanation of the additional 12-month period of obligation that applies to SRSA grants. This means that in total there is a 27 month performance period for your SRSA grant. Block 7 shows the award amount. Note that this number may differ from the estimate in the Master Eligibility Spreadsheet or MES. This is because the MES contained award estimates based on the number of eligible LEAs there were in addition to an estimate of how many LEAs might apply. The amount listed here in Block 7 of the GAN in G5 is your final amount. On this slide we illustrate the relationship between your LEA, SAM.gov and G5. In order to access your SRSA fund, grantees need a G5 account and payee access. In other words, G5 is where you access and draw down your SRSA funds. Your SRSA funds in G5 are associated with your UEI number in SAM.gov. Think of your actively registered UEI as completing the loop between your LEA and the funds you want to access in G5. Maintaining an active and registered UEI year-round ensures smooth and uninterrupted access to your grant fund. Since your UEI is key to accessing your grant funds, we are going to provide some basic information regarding unique entity identifiers. A UEI is a 12 character alphanumeric ID assigned to an entity by SAM.gov. All entities doing business with the federal government must have a UEI. Your entity should have only one UEI. All SRSA grantee LEAs were required to have an active UEI registration in SAM.gov in order to access SRSA funds in G5. Those UEI registrations do expire each year and it is the responsibility of each grantee to renew their UEI annually. You can check the status of your own UEI by logging into SAM.gov and using the entity status tracker tool. Our week team suggests that you take note of the expiration date and set a reminder for yourself three to four weeks in advance to start that renewal process each year. You can also take the time to invite another staff member to share the role of entity administrator. In the event of staff turnover, having more than one entity administrator in SAM.gov helps ensure that there is always someone available to renew your UEI. If your LEA currently has an inactive UEI, you will have a flag on your G5 account and will not be able to access your funds until the UEI is renewed. We do track on your UEI updates and we can remove the flag and allow you to access the award once your UEI registration is active. Feel free to contact us at REITs.gov if you require any assistance with your UEI registration. Our team has collected a number of resources to support your UEI management. You will have access to this slide deck and all the links you see here on this page. REAP's website page for UEI support is a great place to start if you have further questions. I would also like to highlight the FSD.gov information at the bottom here. Although the REAP team works hard to help track your UEIs and remind you of the requirements, we do not manage the FSD.gov website. If you need technical support, please submit an incident ticket or utilize the live chat tool on FSD.gov. This is the help desk for all FSD.gov users. And with that, we're going to shift over to talking about G5 access. Once your LEA has an active UEI registration and SRSA funds have been awarded, you can start spending and accessing those funds in G5. This will require someone at the LEA to have payee access. For some LEAs, this might be an individual who is named on the GAN, but it does not have to be. Remember, who is listed on the GAN has no bearing on who can access and draw down funds from G5. Your selected payee will need to create a G5 account and submit the payee user access request form to G5. The instructions for how to create an account in G5 and then request payee access are included in REAP's Accessing Funds in G5 guide, which is linked on this slide. Once granted payee access, the payee can also ensure the LEA has a bank account connected to your award. The payee can reach out directly to G5 if necessary. The G5 help desk is an excellent resource. You can call or email G5 for help in setting up payee access or other issues related to the platform. We recommend reaching out to G5 with questions related to that website before reaching out to the REAP team. And with that, I would like to hand it back to Jordan to discuss use of these SRSA funds. Awesome. Thank you, Emily. So, in this section, we're going to talk through how to use your SRSA funds, including a review of the requirements and the flexibilities available under the SRSA grant program. To begin, it is helpful to remember that the REAP program, including your SRSA award, is authorized under Title V, Part B of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. As with many federal funds, the use of your SRSA award funds is governed by the uniform administrative requirements, cost principles, and audit requirements. Most notably, these include requirements that the costs you cover with SRSA grant funds be reasonable, necessary, allowable, and allocable. SRSA grant funds also have important supplement, not supplant, requirements that we will review here in a moment. As discussed previously, the intended use of funds that you indicated on your SRSA application is not a binding commitment. You are free to use your awarded SRSA grant funds for any allowable activity, and you are free to change how you wish to spend your grant monies at any point during the 27-month grant performance period. We know this flexibility is crucial in meeting your LEA's needs. Please remember, it is your responsibility as a grantee to ensure that each use of funds is allowable and meets supplement and not supplant requirements. On this slide, we have included several important questions to consider as you use your SRSA grant funds. Pay special attention to the questions, is this allowable and is this supplanting? These are especially important SRSA considerations. On to allowable uses of the funds. SRSA funds can be used for any allowable activities under Title I Part A, Title II Part A, Title III, Title IV Part A, and Title IV Part B of the ESEA. The chart on the right of this slide outlines these usages. When considering use of funds, it is your responsibility as the grantee LEA to determine the ESEA title program or programs under which your proposed expenditure is allowed. The REAP team can help you with this determination, and if you have questions about use of funds, you can always email us at REAP at ed.gov. The chart you see on this slide can also be found in the uses of SRSA funds section of the REAP informational document. An additional resource that can be helpful for LEAs is the REAP use of funds guide. This guide, which is available on the REAP website and will be linked in the slides where that orange bubble is, provides a list of allowable expenses. Please note that these are only examples and not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the ways REAP funds can be used, but we do hope that these examples provide you with a helpful starting point as you are considering how best to make use of those SRSA grant funds. The last point on this slide is a reminder that for reporting purposes, your REAP SRSA funds are always linked back to Title V, regardless of which of the allowable ESEA title program activities you support with your grant monies. For example, if you use your SRSA funds to support an activity allowable under Title III, the funds do not become Title III. On this slide, we're going to detail the supplement not supplant requirement. Your awarded SRSA funds can only be used to supplement school improvement activities allowed under the ESEA school improvement title programs we've discussed. They cannot be used to supplant any local, state, or federal funding sources. So how do you tell if your proposed uses of SRSA funds is supplementing? Well, in general, when considering if a proposed SRSA activity is supplemental, an LEA should determine whether it would have funded this activity with other federal, state, or local funds if no SRSA funds were available. If you determine that no other federal, state, or local funds are available to fund the proposed activity, then you are probably on solid grounds in terms of supplementing, provided of course that this proposed use is an allowable use of SRSA funds. Because each LEA has their own unique set of funding sources, it is the responsibility of the LEA to determine if an activity is supplementing or supplanting within their own context. The REAP informational document is the best resource available for help with the information on this topic. And now, how to spot supplanting? There are three situations when it will be presumed that supplanting has occurred. First, if the activity is one that would ordinarily be covered with other federal, state, or local funds. For example, in most cases, standard textbook purchases would ordinarily be covered with state or local funds. Second, if the LEA previously funded the activity with other federal, state, or local funds. And third, if the activity is state-mandated or required by federal law. For example, provision of certain services to English learners is required by federal civil rights laws. If a proposed activity falls into one of these categories, it does not automatically mean that the activity is supplanting. Rather, in these situations, the grantee LEA would need to demonstrate that the proposed activity is supplemental. Now, we're going to review what's called the Alternative Fund Use Authority, known as a FUA. In addition to the ability to spend SRSA funds for allowable activities under multiple title programs, LEAs eligible for the SRSA program are granted even wider uses of their federal funds under the Alternative Fund Use Authority. A FUA allows SRSA eligible LEAs greater flexibility in spending the funds they receive under Title II Part A and Title IV Part A. If an LEA is SRSA eligible, it has the flexibility to take any or all of its Title II Part A and Title IV Part A funds and use them just like an SRSA grant to support allowable activities under the SRSA fund use categories we just spoke about. Title I Part A, Title II Part A, Title III, Title IV Part A, and Title IV Part B. A FUA does not authorize the transfer of funds from one program to another. Rather, it gives an LEA more options for spending its Title II Part A and Title IV Part A formula funds. A FUA is available to all SRSA eligible LEAs, including dual eligible LEAs that choose to participate in RLIS rather than SRSA. A FUA also extends to those eligible LEAs who did not submit an SRSA application. One caveat is the LEAs must notify their SEA if they intend to exercise this authority. SEA's state educational agencies, if you may recall, are responsible for setting a deadline by which LEAs planning to exercise a FUA must notify their SEA. If you're interested in taking advantage of this flexibility, we encourage you to contact your state coordinators directly to learn more about these requirements. I hope you found this section to be helpful in determining how best to make use of your awarded SRSA grant funds. And, as always, feel free to contact the REAP team if you have any additional questions. And I'm going to turn it back over to Lainey now. Great, thanks so much. So to round us out, in this section we'll briefly review some helpful REAP resources, including the REAP informational document. The informational document was created to give REAP grantees a comprehensive resource where they can learn more about the processes related to the REAP, SRSA, and RLIS programs combined in one user-friendly document. It can be accessed on the main REAP webpage. This is a look at the informational documents table of contents page. We know that there is a lot of information in this document and we want to help you understand how to access it easily and find what you're looking for about the SRSA program. Since the document covers REAP, it's divided into sections that address both of the programs, SRSA and our other program, the Rural Low-Income School Program. As an SRSA grantee, you may be particularly interested in the introduction, SRSA eligibility, and a number of topics related to the SRSA program, including the application requirements, use of funds, and a FUA, which you just heard described earlier. Some of the key features included in the document will help you understand the statute relevant to the SRSA program, answer frequently asked questions, and quickly navigate to parts of the document that you may need. In addition to our helpful documents, REAP sends out LEA financial status reports on a regular basis to our SRSA grantee LEAs. These reports come from our REAP at ed.gov mailbox. REAP will send these reports to the two current contacts for each of our SRSA LEAs with an available balance of $100 or more on any open SRSA awards. We will be updating our contact information on a regular basis, so if there is ever a change in staffing at your LEA, please inform us at REAP at ed.gov as soon as possible so that we can update our records. You'll see on this slide a mock-up of the tables included in the LEA financial status report email. For each available award with the remaining balance, we'll list the PR award number, the total award amount, the remaining balance, the date the report was generated, and the upcoming deadlines for obligation and liquidation. These reports also include how much time you have left to spend the remaining SRSA funds, information on how the funds can be used, steps you need to take to access the funds, how to update your contact information for your school district, and a link to the PDF document, the G-5 guide for a step-by-step process for gaining payee access and drawing down funds. These reports are a snapshot on a particular date for what is available in G-5. Sometimes there may be a lag between the data in the report and your current G-5 activity. You can always receive the most up-to-date information on the balance of your award by logging in to G-5 and checking your balance in that system. Please note that the REAP team does not operate G-5 and cannot process updates to payee access or bank account information. For those questions, please contact the G-5 help desk directly for assistance. You'll find their contact information on the last page of the PDF guide included in the financial status report email. For our last piece of content today, we have a list of resources on this slide. To highlight a few, first you'll see a link to the Master Eligibility Spreadsheet, or MES, which lists LEA and REAP eligibility, the REAP informational document I just mentioned earlier, the REAP resources webpage, which is a collection of assistance materials that cover a wide range of topics and is a great starting place for if you have any questions, and several more resources to help your LEA navigate the SRSA program. With that, thank you so much for watching today's webinar. We hope you found the information useful and have some new resources to consider as you spend your SRSA grant. If you have any questions that were not answered by the presentation, you can always reach out to our team at REAP at ed.gov. We wish you a great school year ahead!