Pennsylvania EDS Program
Have someone check your EDS worksheet before you submit it
Worksheet due September 30. We review yours and tell you what is wrong and what it is worth.
Request a worksheet review
Tell us where to reach you. Jeff will reply with where to send the worksheet, and we come back with what we find before the September 30 deadline.
Please give us your name, school and a working email address, then try again.
Would rather talk it through first? Book twenty minutes with Jeff
Got it, thank you
Jeff will reach out within one business day. If you would like to put time on the calendar now rather than wait, that is the faster route.
Five schools this month found errors in a worksheet they thought was finished. Every one of them was about to claim less than their students qualified for.
What the EDS program pays
The Economically Disadvantaged Schools program is the third Pennsylvania education tax credit, alongside EITC and OSTC. It carries a 99 percent credit for corporate donors on a two year commitment, and it pays qualifying schools up to $2,000 per student, capped by that student's outstanding balance.
It is administered by BLOCS. Schools do not compete for it in the usual sense. The state determines which schools qualify, and qualification turns on one number.
The 51 percent test
- At least 51 percent of your total enrollment must fall under the Pennsylvania EITC income limit, and
- those same students must receive a baseline tax credit scholarship of $500 for pre-K and grade school, or $1,000 for grades 9 through 12.
Awards from any Pennsylvania scholarship organization count toward that baseline, not only BLOCS. The denominator is total enrollment, which is the part that catches schools out, because it is never printed on the worksheet itself.
What we keep finding
These are the five defects that show up in nearly every worksheet we review, in the order they cost the most money.
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The outstanding balance column typed over the formula
The most common and the most expensive. Somebody pastes a value where a calculation used to be, and from then on the column quietly drifts away from the real number.
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Numbers stored as text
A single stray character turns a cell into text. The total skips it without any visible error, and the column runs light. Nothing on screen tells you this happened.
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Pre-K pulling the percentage down
Pre-K students now count in total enrollment. If they are not receiving a $500 award they sit in the denominator and not the numerator, and a school that qualified last year can miss this year. Half day counts two for one. Full day does not.
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Sibling rows copied across
A pre-K student carried at a sixth grader's tuition. One keystroke makes it, nothing on the sheet reveals it, and it distorts the balance that caps the award.
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Students missing from the list entirely
Usually the biggest number on the page. Every enrolled student who never made it onto the award list is up to $2,000 nobody asked for. Some are over the income limit and some never applied for aid, and those are two different problems.
What the review gives you back
We rebuild the worksheet, repair the arithmetic and formatting, and return it with a funding model showing where you stand against the 51 percent test, what your coverage gap is worth, and which rows still need a decision from you. Anything that is a judgment call about a student's real situation we flag rather than change.
We do not inflate a cost of education and we do not touch anything that belongs to your judgment rather than ours. Most of what we find is arithmetic that drifted.
Questions we get
We already submitted. Is it too late?
Usually not. Worksheets can be corrected after submission, and it is worth knowing what is in yours either way, because the same defects tend to carry into next year's version. Send it over and we will tell you what we see.
We are below 51 percent. Is there any point?
Yes, and this is the case where a review is worth the most. Pre-K counting and the income multipliers for documented students can move the percentage in both directions, and schools that assumed they were out have turned out to be in. If you are genuinely below the line, the contact at BLOCS is Kathleen Harvey, and September 30 is the moment to have that conversation rather than after the deadline.
What do you need from us?
The worksheet itself, your total enrollment, and whether your pre-K is full day or half day. That last one changes the arithmetic more than people expect.
Do you charge for this?
The review is how we introduce ourselves. If it turns into a longer conversation about your fundraising, we will have that conversation openly rather than through a review.
What is EDS, versus EITC and OSTC?
They are three separate Pennsylvania credits. EITC and OSTC are the ones most schools run, open to individuals through a special purpose entity as well as to businesses. EDS is corporate donors only, carries a higher credit, routes through BLOCS, and is limited to the schools the state identifies as having the highest need. A school can participate in all three.
