Thanks for the wonderful grant support you've offered recently to community colleges. With enrollments up and state support down, it couldn't have come at a better time.
That said, though, I wonder if a simple procedural change could save untold reporting and staff costs, and allow us to focus more resources on direct service delivery. I'm referring to "time and effort reports."
As anyone who has worked on grant-supported projects can attest, time and effort reports are detailed accounts of how people who receive grant support spend their days. Personnel whose salaries are partly or entirely grant-supported are supposed to spend a proportionate amount of their time on grant-related activities. That means that someone whose salary is half Perkins funded and half college funded is supposed to spend two and a half days per week on grant activity.
While I can appreciate the idea behind time and effort reports - they're a way to prevent 'supplanting' college resources with grant money - they're untenably detailed, and they focus on the wrong thing. They focus on inputs, rather than outputs. They reward "but I tried really hard!," as opposed to "I got it done." And the paperwork involved in doing them is non-trivial.
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