Selective Review-First Contact

I was called by a PIA reviewer to check on my vacation schedule. I recognize the reviewers name from a Selective Review last year. It's nice to know that there's an experienced professional at the other end.

When I said I had no vacation schedule (no vacations for the self-employed), he said he'd fax over a Selective Review Information Request (SRIR) right away. I don't know what happens if you say you'll be on vacation, but I have seen situations where people have gotten extensions for months, and my experience with PIA is that if you let them know you need an extension, and you have a good reason, you get it.

This year the SRIR is 20 pages, instead of the famous 17, but only because there's a fax cover sheet and a cover letter. Otherwise, it doesn't look like much has changed.

So the clock is ticking; I've got 14 days to respond. I have all the paperwork on hand for the competitive bidding process, since I manage that for my clients, but I need to get an approved budget and annotate it with the revenue and expense budget lines which cover the undiscounted portion of the requests as well as the "required-but-not-eligible-for-funding" costs: training, maintenance, end user equipment/software, and retrofitting.

There are a number of other little pieces of information I need to collect: numbers of servers, workstations, network drops, training hours, percent of staff trained, etc. But since we had a Selective Review last year, I have a baseline to work from, so I'm not too concerned about getting those numbers right. The Technology Implementation Level Worksheet (page 13 of the SRIR) also won't have changed much.

I will, however, have to run my response by several people in the district, and I'm afraid a lot of them will be in Disneyland or "down the shore" (as we say here in NJ). So this will probably take a day or two out of my week next week.

I'll post more on what I compile, but unfortunately, I don't know if I'll be able to scrub out all identifying info and post the response as a sample. We'll see.