Untitled Document

WORKFORCE 3ONE

TRANSCRIPT OF WEBINAR

Go Figure: SCSEP’s New Tool for
Calculating Enrollment and Spending

MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2009

Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.

BRIAN KEATING: All right. With that I’d like to turn things over to our moderator today, Judith Gilbert. She is with the SCSEP national office. Judith, take it away.

JUDITH GILBERT: Thank you very much, and welcome to all of you. Looking at the list of folks who have signed in and we’re on a first name basis with the vast majority of you already. So this is wonderful.

As you know, a major goal of the – for SCSEP for the Recovery Act funds is to spend those funds by June 30th of 2010. And this is a task that’s a big increase to the services that you’re already providing to many low-income seniors. We asked the Charter Oak Group to develop an analysis tool to help grantees determine how many participants they needed to enroll on a quarterly basis in order to spend the Recovery Act money. Now, I know that some you may very well have worked all this out already, but we also know that many have not. So we want to go through the tool which we sent you last week to explain it all and to demonstrate it to you and for you to use it if it in fact is helpful to you.

Please know that the tool is designed for use with Recovery Act funds, not for regular SCSEP funds. But if at the end of the time you think that a similar analysis and predictor tool may be helpful to you for PY09 for slots and dollars, it would be different in many ways because the different characters are going to be different – the different criteria. But please let us know and we’ll try to develop such a tool.

So here with us today is Bennett Pudlin, very familiar to all of you as a technical assistance consultant to the older worker office from the Charter Oak Group. Charter Oak is the one who has developed this tool for us and for you, and so at this point I would like to turn things over to Bennett.

BENNETT PUDLIN: Thank you, Judith, and good afternoon, everyone. As Judith said, we’re going to walk you through this tool, do it fairly quickly. I want to explain how and why the tool was developed, what parts of it you can customize and what it will show you. And then at the end I want to do a little bit of live demo with the tool itself to play out a couple of scenarios. And at the end of that we will take your questions.

But first, what is the tool designed to do? As Judith said, it was built specifically to help grantees determine how much Recovery Act funding they would spend at any level of employment for a single quarter and for the total of five quarters that the Recovery Act grant is designed to last. The tool will also give you an estimate of the number of participants who will be remaining at the end of the program, currently scheduled for June 30, 2010.

And the reason we were asked to develop this tool is that the normal tools you’re used to using in the regular program are not terribly helpful with the stimulus. And that’s because the regular program is a continuing program where new funding is provided on July 1st of each year and grantees are expected to be more or less fully enrolled on June 30 of the old program year and July 1st – on the first day of the new program year. And the formula that’s provided with your allocation based on the cost per participant is designed to give you enough money to support your authorized or modified slot positions for that entire year, with 75 percent going to wages and fringe benefits, 25 percent going to other costs and administration, regardless of whether you exit or enroll anybody else if you’re fully enrolled.

And of course the contrast with the Recovery Act is that we started the grant period with no carryover participants; we started with zero. And when we end the program on June 10 – I’m sorry – June 30, 2010, we will have the ability not to have anybody else in enrolled in the program. So we have to end with zero.

We also know that there is very serious attrition that goes on for new enrollees, especially over the first three quarters following their initial enrollment. All of that makes it very difficult to project how many dollars you’ll spend at any given level of enrollment when you’re starting from zero. And so the tool that we’ve created has factored in what we know historically to be the attrition rate for new enrollees over six quarters.

We were actually able to look at our data in SPARQ for the six quarters starting with quarter three in PY06 through quarter four in PY07 and follow six new cohorts of enrollees as they come in and stay in or drop out of the program over that six quarter period. And from that we computed the attrition rate for each quarter for each cohort, as well as the average duration of those participants who continue into the next quarter as well as those who come in new in that quarter. And thus we were able to factor that into the cost per participant and come up with a way of determining how many dollars you would spend in each of the quarters.

The tool has built into it several formulas but there are certain fields that each grantee should customize for its own circumstance. And the first and obvious one is designated as Note 1 up at the top of the tool and that’s the amount of your Recovery Act grant. That is your target that you’re trying to reach by various combinations of enrollment across the five quarters.

The next thing that grantees need to customize is the modification factor for PY08 and PY09 because, as you know, the cost per participant that you’re given is based on the federal minimum wage and more than half of you have state minimum wages that result in your getting a modification factor. Those modifications factors have been provided to you. They’re provided to you periodically throughout the year. The current ones are the second tab on the tool. The first tab is the tool itself. The second tab lists for each grantee for both PY08 and PY09 what the modification factors are. And you can go into the tool and right under Note 6 you can enter your own modification factor for each of those two years.

And then finally, at Note 4 we have the average attrition and average duration rates. Those that are built into the tool are the nationwide rates based on this six-quarter history that I just described. A couple things to be said about that. Because it’s a nationwide average it probably won’t be right for any given grantee. Any one of the 74 grantees may have higher or lower rates for attrition or duration or both. This is a nationwide average. It’s all we have. It may be all you have. However, if you have better data – that is to say data that is more directly based on your own experience – you can go in and change those rates, both attrition and duration, to reflect what you know to be the case. You just need to understand, however, that those were computed for new cohorts – the attrition rates were computed for new cohorts following that same cohort quarter-by-quarter for five quarters. So it’s a little complicated and you don’t want to guess. If you don’t have really good data that you’re confident in, I suggest that you stick with the nationwide rates.

The other thing to say about the rates that we’ve built in is that they are historical. They’re based on what turns out to have been far better economic times than we’re currently facing or likely to face in the immediate future. We will be updating those rates when we get the actual data for quarter three in just another few weeks and we will share those with you, probably issue a new version of the tool at that time to reflect any changes. But for now it’s the best information we have. And I want to stress that the results you’re going to get from this tool are an estimate only. They’re not intended to be more than that, especially at the grantee level. They’re a rough guide at the nationwide level; they’re even rougher at the grantee level.

While I’ve just told you the fields that you must change and one field that you may change, there are two fields that you must not touch. Note 5, which is the cost per day, is calculated from the other factors so you should not mess with that at all or you’ll interfere with the formula that’s built in. In order to change the cost per day, you can do that by your mod factor. You can do it by the cost per participant, if for some reason you think that’s not accurate. We’re not recommending you do it. The takeaway message is: Don’t touch anything under Note 5 or Note 3.

Note 3 shows you the actual expenditure of dollars as a result of all the calculations that are built in. So all those fields under Note 3 are the result of the formulas. And the way you see different results there is by changing the fields that you can change. Don’t try to change the output.

Now, how do you use the tool? The main way you do it is under Note 2 you’ll see a number of yellow highlighted fields quarter-by-quarter. And what those show you – those yellow highlighting – is where you would enter the number of participants you intend to enroll for each of the five quarters. And you can play with those fields any way you like and adjust the flow – the ramping up and the ramping down – and see what happens to the expenditure rates as you do that.

So one reason that you – well, before we do that, I think now would be a good time to look at the tool itself. We’re going to call that up and you should see it on your screen momentarily.

MR. KEATING: And just a reminder, everybody, if what you’re seeing is too small you’ll have a couple of options. You can make it a full screen. You can also go to the scroll option. So feel free to adjust your settings if you want to.

MR. PUDLIN: So you should all be able to see my cursor at this point. I’ll just real quickly walk through the fields I was describing. Note 1 is where you list the amount of your grant. Note 2 is where you would enter in the yellow fields the number of enrollments for each of the five quarters. Note 3 is a field you don’t mess with; that shows you the resulting dollars that you spend for each quarter based on the number of enrollments. Note 4 gives you the average attrition and the average duration quarter-by-quarter. Note 5 gives you the cost per day based on the cost per slot; and again, you do not change anything in Note 5. And Note 6 is the modification factors and you can see there’s a separate mod factor for PY08 and PY09 and you would put in your own.

And I’ll just go down to the tabs to show you all the grantees have their mod factors listed for both years on the second tab.

So now if we go back up to Note 2 and the fields for entering the data, what you’ll see here is that the scenario we gave you is a neutral one. It got as close as we could get to equal enrollment across all five quarters. You’ll notice we couldn’t quite get it equal and we didn’t quite spend every dollar. But this is was as close as we could get. And what it shows you is that by enrolling 15 new participants in quarter one, 16 in quarter two, 16 in quarter three, 15 in the fourth quarter of the grant and 15 in the last quarter, you will have enrolled a total of 77 new participants in the recovery grant over the five quarters of the grant. And at the end of June 30, 2010, the tool predicts you would have 53 people still enrolled and in need of transfer to the regular program.

Note that when I talked about enrolling new participants in the first quarter – quarter four ‘08 – it’s not literally new because the tool doesn’t know the difference between a brand new participant enrolled in the recovery grant and someone transferred from the regular SCSEP program. So all we’re looking at is the total number of people entered into the Recovery Act grant in that firs quarter. So it includes new enrollments as well as transfers. And again, this – what we might call scenario one is the so-called neutral scenario.

So what I want to do now is zero out these enrollments in order to try a different scenario. And bear with me a second as I do that.

And as you’ll see, we now have no new enrollments for any of the five quarters. So we’ve enrolled nobody in the grant whatsoever. We have nobody left over and we’ve spent no money. So let’s do a frontloaded scenario where, instead of doing our enrollments equally over five quarters, we try to do them all in the first quarter.

And if you will recall, in scenario one we needed a total of 77 enrollees. Let’s see what happens if we do them all in the first quarter. And what you see happens is by putting all 77 in the first quarter and none in the remaining quarters we have vastly over-spent the grant. We’ve also managed to reduce the number of people remaining at the end of the grant because many of them have left.

So if 77 is too much, let’s try 57 and see if that gets us closer. And you can see we’ve still over-spent the grant somewhat. Let’s try 47. Now we’ve under-spent. Let’s try 50. Slightly over-spent. And let’s try 49. And that seems to be about as close as we’re going to get.

So by enrolling 49 participants in the first quarter we wind up spending all the grant money. Note that we only have 23 left at the end of the period, versus 77 who we had to enroll under scenario one.

Now, let’s for contrast – not that I would recommend this – scenario one was this sort of flat enrollment across five quarters. Scenario two was frontloading everything. And scenario three let’s try back-loading everything. We do no enrollments until the last quarter. And let’s put the same 77 in and see if we can spend any money. And the answer is not. Right? We do not manage to spend hardly any money at all.

Let’s see how many it would take to spend the money. A hundred won’t do it. Let’s try 200. Two hundred won’t do it. Let’s try 300. Three hundred over does it slightly. Let’s try 290. Still slightly over. Let’s try 285. Getting closer. Two eighty – let’s try one more. Okay. Well, somewhere right around 279 is what we need to do in order to spend all the money in the fifth quarter by enrolling in the fifth quarter only.

So you’ve now seen three different versions. I suppose in some ways scenario two was the ideal one, but probably not a feasible one for most grantees. So you’ll want to experiment to see what you can do.

Let’s return to the slides for a bit.

(Pause.)

So why would you want to spend all of your money in the first quarter if you could? Well, I guess the first reason is programmatic. If you recall why the Recovery Act was enacted in the first place, it was designed to get money in the hands of people who would spend it quickly – people who needed it – and spend it in ways that would benefit the economy. So the sooner we all can support that spending, the more we can accomplish the purposes of the Recovery Act.

The second reason, perhaps slightly more selfish, is that the sooner you enroll, the more you spend. And that reduces your overall burden. You saw a pretty dramatic decrease in the total number of participants you had to enroll if you could frontload all of them into the first quarter.

And third, by this same kind of logic, by frontloading you reduce the number of participants who remain in the program at the end of the Recovery Act and for whom you have to make some accommodation back into the regular program.

Now, you can use this tool right now as you’re first planning how you’re going to spend all the dollars. And then what you can do as you have actual expenditure information for the first quarter, is reduce the amount of the grant in Note 1 by the amount you spend in the first quarter of the Recovery Act grant. Then enter zero into the enrollment field under Note 2 for that first quarter because you’re taking it out of the equation. And then use the remaining four quarters to try to spend the remaining dollars. And you can do that adjustment quarter-by-quarter as you have actual expenditure information available to you so that you’re planning for a smaller and smaller amount of the grant as you spend down.

Again, a caution that the tool is merely a guide and that there will be many factors that will cause your own spending to be different from what the tool projects. You should use the tool to the extent that it is useful to you and is a good predictor. If it turns out not to work for you, certainly don’t use it. We will try to refine the tool as we get better data. But the bottom line for you is that you have to manage your grant carefully, know how much you’re spending each quarter and make your adjustments accordingly.

So that concludes the formal presentation. And I guess, Judith, we’ll open it for questions.

MS. GILBERT: Yes. Thank you, Bennett. We’ve got a couple of questions already and we’ll ask them.

First question is, “Do we enter the entire grant award or only the participant wages and fringe benefit amount? Or in other words, do the calculations in the tool factor in PWFB or not?”

MR. PUDLIN: Yes. You enter the full amount of the award and the tool is based on the cost per participant, which is based on the full amount. So it assumes that only 75 percent of that is available for participant wages and fringe benefits and the other 25 percent goes to admin and other costs.

MS. GILBERT: Great. Thank you. And a question about – “When you put the number enrolled in Note 2, does it assume that the people enrolled in that quarter are enrolled on the first day of the quarter or something else?”

MR. PUDLIN: Right. No. It does not. And that’s the whole point that I pointed out with the attrition and duration rates. The formulas built into the tool are based on what we know to be the actual historical experience of how long people are in the program quarter-by-quarter from the first quarter they enroll. So that’s all factored in by the attrition rate and the duration rate. On average, of course, the average person is enrolled for the first time in the program on the 45th day and then, because some number of those new people would drop out before the quarter closes, the actual duration for new people in their first quarter is more like 40 or 41 days. So again, the tool uses historical averages and adjusts for all of that.

MS. GILBERT: Here’s another question. “When I try to put in the full number of modified – of slots into the first quarter, we still don’t spend all our money. Should I be using modified or allocated slots?”

MR. PUDLIN: Yeah. Slots are not used in this tool whatsoever. And as I tried to explain in the first slide, using slots is not a helpful guide for determining how many new people you have to enroll. Slots only work in SCSEP if you have carryover. And you don’t have any carryover. So what you have to do is just play with the tool and put in as many enrollments as needed until the total dollar amount at the bottom of Note 3 – that section below with all the dollars – shows that you’ve spent the amount of your grant.

In general I would say expect that you would have to enroll in total probably twice as many people as you have slots, if not more.

MS. GILBERT: Yes. We’ve tried to make the point that the Recovery Act funds are different from the regular grant funds. The whole idea of the number of positions that your regular dollars will support over the course of the year is based on how SCSEP works regularly. But the Recovery Act funds are different. And so we just really urge you to pay attention to the dollars and see how many dollars you have to – how many people you have to enroll in order to spend the dollars by June 30th.

Question, “Can we enroll a participant for more than 20 hours per week? Maybe 25 hours per week?” The goal is to keep your regular SCSEP participants and your Recovery Act participants at parody in terms of the hours. It would have been an easy thing, quite frankly, to have said, well, gee, if we got a 23 percent increase in our funds for Recovery Act, why don’t we just add 23 percent more hours – like two or three hours a week – for the people who are already in the program? Wouldn’t that spend the money and get it out into the economy? And the answer is yes, of course it would have. However, one of the goals for the Recovery Act is to serve more people. And so we are not allowing you to just spend the Recovery Act money by increasing the hours.

You should be functioning on the usual assumption that it is an average of 20 hours a week – anywhere from 18 to 22. The actual cost per for the regular grant is I think figured out at 21 hours a week and that’s the guideline that you should be using or the goal that you should be setting for yourself.

Other questions?

MR. PUDLIN: Judith, I think that’s an important caution. If they do share it with their subgrantees they must let them know that it is – will not work for the regular grant. It’ll get them in a lot of trouble.

GARY GONZALEZ: And I believe Marie may have raised her hand. Marie, if you want to jump in over the phone line it’s *1. Or for anybody else that’d like to participate, again, it’s *1 on your phone. You record – a prompt to record your name and then we will un-mute your line.

OPERATOR: We do have a question. Sorry. There are no questions at this time.

(Pause.)

MS. GILBERT: Bennett, a question and I’m not – I don’t know that you can answer it either, but maybe. “Does the cost per modified slot take into account FICA and workers comp costs? If so, what account amount is being factored for workers comp?”

MR. PUDLIN: Right. Not explicitly. And I know some folks have raised questions about the use of the cost per slot because they feel it does not accurately take into account their actual costs of maintaining a slot. We adjusted in the mod factor solely for state minimum wage; we did not make any other adjustments. But again, if a grantee wanted to, if you had your own cost data – historical cost data – that told you that the cost per slot for you was different from the official amount, you could just change in the tool the amount that’s listed for PY08 and PY09 for the official cost per slot to whatever you believe the number is. Use your own numbers in the tool and the tool will calculate it based on your numbers.

So if you think it costs you rather than – what is the amount, Judith? About 9,600 (dollars) or something ‘09? If you think it costs you 10,000 (dollar), put in 10,000 (dollars). It’ll just mean you’ll enroll fewer people. But how that will work nationwide when other people are using the official cost per slot, not clear.

MS. GILBERT: Question that says, “Aren’t there different modification factors for different states? If you are working in more than one state what do you use?”

MR. PUDLIN: The national grantee mod factors are a – are done state-by-state. So you would have to calculate this for each state in which you are operating. We do not have a weighted – oh, there is a way to get one, though. If a national grantee wants to do this on a grantee level rather than a state level, if you use the official spreadsheet that Phil send out periodically with the state minimum wage and the mod factors, at the grantee level on the first tab of that page each national grantee has its authorized slots and its modified slots listed. You can compute – and that is rolled up across all the states in which the national operates. And so a national could compute what their mod factor is based on the difference between the two and plug that in. So they could have that as well.

And if anyone wants, Phil and I could compute that for the nationals and send it out to them so that they could use it at all different levels of their program.

OPERATOR: You do have a question from the line of Bud Williams.

TONY SARMIENTO: Yeah. This is Senior Service America, Tony Sarmiento (sp). Hi, Bennett.

MR. PUDLIN: Hello, Tony. Nice to hear from you.

MR. SARMIENTO: I just want to make sure I understand. It seems to me there are two – the first critical use of this tool would be to help us map out what our initial plan is. So we punch in numbers for each of the yellow boxes, correct?

MR. PUDLIN: That’s correct.

MR. SARMIENTO: So we – it would help – so one goal is to help a grantee plan out what the next five quarters under the stimulus funding might be like. I just want to make sure I understand that.

MR. PUDLIN: That’s exactly right, Tony. That’s the first use. Plan today for what you’d have to do over five quarters.

MR. SARMIENTO: So let’s say we do a – we come up with our best plan starting April 1. What do we then do at the end of June – at June 30?

MR. PUDLIN: Right. Well, what you –

MR. SARMIENTO: What would be the updating of the plan?

MR. PUDLIN: Right. What you do then, Tony, is you take your actual expenditure in the first quarter of the Recovery Act and subtract it from your total grant amount because you now have spent that and what you have left is the difference. And you zero out the first quarter’s enrollment in the tool and you re-plan the remaining quarters based on the money have left. Right? The first quarter of the Recovery Act is gone by the calendar because you’ve said it’s now June 30 and you spent what you spent. So the dollars are gone. So start over again at the second quarter as though it were a four-quarter grant and you had only four quarters worth of money left, and that way you can keep planning based on your new reality.

So you do it today, give it your best shot at a plan. What you do or what you spend may be different from what the tool tells you, you should be doing in the first quarter. And then whatever your actual experience is for the first quarter, you subtract the dollars out of the grant amount, zero out the enrollments in the first quarter and re-plan for the remaining four quarters.

MR. SARMIENTO: So in the box where it says – adjacent to Note 1 – “enter amount of recovery grant,” what you’re saying is we would adjust this for the remaining amount of the grant at the end of each quarter.

MR. PUDLIN: Yes. And in fact, Tony, let me scroll back if I’m still authorized to do that. And we’re on a slide now. If we can – there we go. Thank you.

There’s a slide – should be on your screen right now that says exactly to do that as you go forward each quarter.

MR. SARMIENTO: Okay. We’re trying to get it up on our screen.

MR. PUDLIN: But it’s just what you’ve described, Tony. It’s just re-calibrate based on your actual expenditures.

MR. SARMIENTO: I guess I – let me – one related question. Is the assumption that the participants are ideally to stay on the stimulus funding through to June 30, 2010? And if not, then is there anything in this tool that would allow us to have a gradual phase-down of – (trade ?) phasing participants earlier in – let’s say in Q3 ‘09?

MR. PUDLIN: The tool does not account for your efforts to cause people to leave the program. The tool factors in what we know historically people do, a combination of people leaving for personal reasons and leaving to get jobs. But if you were to make a concerted effort to change the duration patterns, that’s not built in.

MS. GILBERT: And it does not – it’s not built in to respond specifically to what Tony asked, and that is perhaps moving someone who is in the Recovery Act to the regular grant before June 30th of next year.

MR. PUDLIN: What you could do, Tony, if you wanted to do that – I’m going to call up the tool again. Let me bring that up so everyone can see it. And let me go back to what I recollect scenario one was. And I may not have this exactly right but let me just put something up there that we can talk about.

(Pause.)

Okay. That’s pretty good. All right. So Tony, if you – can you see the screen now?

MR. SARMIENTO: Yes.

MR. PUDLIN: Yeah. So you see what happens is, if you look at the first cohort of 15 people who go in this quarter, the tool projects that there are only 13 of them left in the second quarter, nine in the third, eight in the fourth and seven in the fifth. What you could do is you could override – if you wanted to take two of those people out in the third quarter – quarter two ‘09 – you could change that nine to seven. You could override the formula and then it would make the adjustment. But it’s not designed to do that. It’s not designed to have you creating new rules to move people out prematurely.

And again, remember, this is all nationwide. So if you have a grantee durational limit of 11 months or 12 months, which a few grantees do, this won’t work for you, right? Your attrition and duration’s going to look very different from the nationwide average. So it’s very high level. Averages can be useful but they can also be misleading in any given situation.

MS. GILBERT: I would just point out that no grantees have yet received permission for an individual durational limit other than what’s in the statute.

MR. PUDLIN: Sorry. I forgot. I was thinking of the regular program for ‘08.

MS. GILBERT: But certainly there’s nothing in the Recovery Act that would preclude you from moving participants to the regular program sooner than June 30th. What that will mean, obviously, is that you have to enroll more people in the stimulus funding in order to spend the money. But that’s a management issue for all of you to struggle with, I’m sure is the appropriate –

MR. PUDLIN: Yeah. I mean, Tony, obviously one could have truncated this and had nobody in the program in the fifth quarter, right? You could do that too if you wanted to. So you could zero out – instead of 15 in the fifth quarter, as I show here, you could put a zero there and then re-adjust to spend all the money by the fifth quarter and still frontload it.

MR. SARMIENTO: Well, thank you, Judith and Bennett. This is very helpful because that’s precisely what we are considering at this point, and that is it seems like all the grantees are going to be challenged to have a smooth transition from – of all the participants that remain in this stimulus-funded program to the regular ‘09 program. And being able to spread out that transition from the stimulus to the ‘09 makes – appears to make a lot of sense to us, given that it’s probably going to have to happen – it’ll vary state-by-state since money can’t be transferred from one state to another in either grant.

So for example, where our subgrantees are successful in enrolling a large number at the beginning of this period in one state, while another state you may be less successful. It may end up that some participants will start to move into the ‘09 program earlier than another state.

So I think we will look into this because it seems to me that’s one way to help achieve President Obama’s hope to bring on as many people into our program as quickly as possible.

MR. PUDLIN: Yeah.

MR. SARMIENTO: And then it also takes into account the fact that the historic attrition rate may not be the same as the attrition rate in this historic recession.

MR. PUDLIN: Yes. And Tony, we said that at the very beginning and you may have missed it. But we are going to update the attrition and duration based on the quarter three PY08 actual data as soon as we can get our hands on it. And I suspect you’re right that the numbers will look different.

The only thing I would caution, though, is that as I understand the stated objectives for the program, it’s that grantees are expected to have their regular enrollment in the regular grant and the stimulus enrollment is supposed to be in addition to that. And so by prematurely transferring people from stimulus into the regular program you’re filling slots in the regular program with people who were previously in the stimulus so the net new enrollment will be less than it would otherwise be.

MS. GILBERT: Except that they will have to enroll more people through the stimulus –

MR. PUDLIN: In order to make it work. Yeah.

MS. GILBERT: – in order to make it work. Are there other general questions? I think that we certainly have the capacity to provide individualized TA for grantees who are playing around with the tool and something comes up and it doesn’t quite – they don’t quite understand that.

I do see that a number of you have said yes, a tool like this would also be helpful for the regular program. So we will take it under advisement that we need to develop that. But a caution yet again that you should not use this specific tool for your regular grant funds because it won’t work and it will lead you astray and that would be the last thing we want to have you – have happen.

Any other questions before we wrap this up?

OPERATOR: There are no further audio questions.

MS. GILBERT: Great. Well, then thank you so much all of you for participating and playing around with the tool while the webinar was going on. And thank you so much to Bennett and the folks at Charter Oak for developing it and working with some of you actually to refine it before it was ready for primetime. So we hope this has been helpful. As we said, if the tool is useful to you, knowing all of the caveats that we placed on it, then we certainly hope that you will find that you can use it. And you can certainly direct questions to Phil or Bennett on how – if you get into sticky situations that you need some help on.

So with that we will say thank you very much and turn it back over to Brian.

MR. KEATING: Thank you so much. Just a note about Workforce3One. It’s a tool built for you and by you encouraging peer-to-peer learning among your various colleagues. And the success of Workforce3One relies on contributions from people like you. So we’re encouraging you to share your ideas, innovations and more with others. We welcome suggestions for documents to share, programs to feature and really any relevant news or information that you’d like to exchange with your colleagues. So to submit your content, visit the Suggest Content page on the Workforce3One Web space, which is located at the URL featured on this slide.

All right. Like I had said previously, all the webinar resources such as the PowerPoint, the recording, the transcript, et cetera, are going to be available for download from your My Dashboard page on Workforce3One. The PowerPoint has actually already been posted to Workforce3One and the recording and the transcript are going to be made available in about two business days. And once again, the way to access that is you click that Resources tab and then you can do a search filtering by “webinar recording.” Type in something from the title and once that’s been posted in about two business days you’ll be able to access the webinar recording and the transcript.

Just a little bit more about the workforce investment system. You can learn more and stay connected with trends and innovations by logging onto Workforce3One where you’ll find engaging communities of practice; where you can share ideas, questions and innovations, and connect with peers; learning through live Web conferencing events that feature leaders and experts from industry and from government; and a means of registering to be informed of news and events as they occur. So we encourage you to make note of Workforce3One. It’s a powerful new tool funded by ETA and powered by you.

You can also learn more about the workforce investment system by visiting www.careeronestop.org and by calling 877-US2-JOBS.

And with that, on behalf of Workforce3One and today’s webinar presenters, I’d like to conclude today’s session by thanking you all for your time and letting you know we look forward to seeing you on future webinars. Have a great day, everybody.

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