Adjusting for New (COVID) Scholarship Season
What are your organizations doing to adjust for the upcoming scholarship season? Ours typically "runs" from November 1 through late July. What will you do different because of COVID19?
Are you going to shift due dates around? Our deadline was February 15, 2020 which we bumped back a week to account for some non-COVID related school closures for the flu and bad weather, but we had to revamp all of our in-person committee meetings as those typically would have met from late February through early April. This year, depending on how several factors go, we might do a few Zoom meetings but are thinking most committees will be online.
We serve a 25-county region plus a dozen non-Tennessee counties with our scholarship program. It's all over the board which school districts are all virtual, who is doing a hybrid, and even those who are doing in-person. What accommodations are you making to help students, counselors, and schools with your application process? Are you adding in COVID-related questions? Reducing the amount of required documents to upload (transcript, FAFSA SAR, letter of recommendation)?
Thanks for any and all ideas! We are in the process of looking forward and trying to do our best to help our students.
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Hello @AshleyButler! I do not have all of the answers to your question but there is one change we are making that has received several positive responses from our community. In light of all of the registration cancellations from SAT/ACT tests and as part of our journey to make our application process more equitable, we will not be using any SAT/ACT or GPA scores in our scholarship rubric this year. We are reading about how colleges plan to include assessment questions instead as a better way to identify work ethic within our applicants.
We are currently operating under the same timeline as your organization - November 1 open and deadlines mid-February. In the past we have held scholarship workshops with students at libraries and after-school but will be shifting these to zoom and online trainings.
Sorry I do not have many answers :) Best of luck!
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Thank you for your information @KatieMcConville! That's very helpful! :)
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