FORMAT (Free Or Reduced Meal Applicant Tracking)

FORMAT is designed to provide a quick and easy way of processing, printing, and verifying applications for free and reduced meals.

With FORMAT, you have the flexibility to link family members together, approve, temporarily approve, or deny applications along with report and letter generation.  In addition, we have made it simple for you to perform mandatory verification sampling and prepare for the next year.

FORMAT offers a wide variety of reports for tracking students, applications, status changes, and student history. These are a few of the reports that FORMAT provides.

1. Any Change Over Time

This report reflects any changes in a patron’s meal status and the date that it was changed. This report can be generated for any user-defined timeframe.

2. Agency Report

This report is used to generate a list of students whose parents or guardians have given permission for the school to share information with agencies outside of the school system, such as Social Services.

3. Applications Not Renewed

This report provides a list of patrons that have not renewed their meal eligibility applications. It reflects the patron’s name, student number, grade, homeroom, status (i.e., active or inactive), application date, meal status, and temporary status expiration date.

4. Eligibility Counts

This report can be generated for any user defined date range by day, grade, race, or school. It illustrates the number of patrons, by school, that are eligible for free meals, reduced meals, direct certified, temporary assistance, free milk, and denied status.

FORMAT Letter Templates   

There are a number of letter templates available through FORMAT that will allow you to stay in touch with parents and students. FORMAT takes advantage of the Microsoft Mail Merge feature giving you all the flexibility that Word has to offer. The FORMAT output is saved as a text file and then simply merged into a Word template for easy letter and label printing.

Many letters come standard with FORMAT, but you do have the ability to modify these or create custom letter templates. Letters that are available include:

Notification – This letter is to alert parents as to the results of their free and reduced application.

Request Additional Information – This letter is sent to notify parents that the free and reduced application that they submitted was denied because the form was not completed in its entirety. The application can be reviewed again once all the information has been provided.

Request Income – This letter is sent to notify parents that they neglected to fill in the income information on the free and reduced application. The application can be reviewed again once the income information has been provided.

Status Change – If changes are made to a student’s application during the verification process (i.e., income changes, number in household, etc.), then this letter is generated notifying parents about the change in their meal status.