Reducing Rates for Disadvantaged Children

You can set up the Fees package to reduce the fees for students your district considers to be disadvantaged. For example, your district could charge a student 50% of the standard fee based on the student's value for the Meal Status field.

How are reduced rates defined?

On the Reduced Rates panel of the Fees Building Configuration page, you can define reduced rates to apply to students based on their having a specific value for a field in a Registration table, district-defined record, or current date-tracking record.

Different rates can be defined for each of the available fee types: Course Fees, Activity Fees, or Student Fees. For example, disadvantaged students could have reduced fees for scheduled courses, but not for activities fees.

For each fee type, you can define multiple levels of reduced rates, but only one reduced rate will be applied per student. The order you assign to a reduced rate determines the order that the rates are processed. Assign higher priority to the rate that should be used when a student meets the criteria for more than one rate.

Example: If you reduce fees 100% for students who have a Meal Status of Free Lunch and 25% for students who have a Classification of Special Education, you would assign higher order to the rate of 100% so students who were both economically disadvantaged and classified as special education would receive the greatest discount.

Can certain fees be excluded from being reduced?

If no students should receive a reduced rate for fees in a certain fee group, you can specify in the Fee Group page that the group does not allow reduced rates to be applied.

When are reduced rates applied to student fees?

Reduced rates are applied when fees are automatically billed by the Create Billed Items and One-Time Billing options.

Reduced rates are not automatically applied when you add a new fee for a student on the Student Fees page, but you can change the amount of the fee if the student should be billed for a reduced fee.

How are reduced rates applied to a fee?

1. The Create Billed Items option checks the appropriate set of reduced rates for the fee type for a fee group. If you are running the One-Time Billing option, it only checks the Student Fees reduced rates.
2. The program checks the reduction rate definition for the rate with the highest priority.
   • If the student meets the criteria defined in the reduction rate, the program continues to the next step.
   • If the student does not meet the criteria, the program checks the criteria with the next highest order number, and so forth until there are no more reduced rates to check.
3. The program converts the Reduced Rate to a decimal value. For example, a Reduction Rate of 25% would be converted to.25.
4. The program calculates the fee to charge the student using the following equation:
   Fee - (Fee x Reduction Value) = Reduced Fee
   For example, if the fee was 10.00 and the reduction value is.25, the equation would be:
   10 - (10 x.25) = 10 - 2.50 = 7.50
5. The program sets the sub-category for the student's fee record to the sub-category associated with the reduced rate. The sub-category is not displayed on the Student Fees page, but can be used to group fees on the Fee Category report so you can analyze the fees which have been reduced.