Our business revolves around grant
funding to a great extent. We provide training,
grant-writing and evaluation services, for a fee, to a
lot of grant-funded programs. The number of ways we
have been asked to help people "meet the numbers" is
truly mind-boggling in the creativity shown.
"Well, those students who left the program and moved away, we don't actually know that they didn't graduate. Can we count them as graduates?"
No, not unless you have some documentation that they graduated. You CAN, however, count them as students served, because you really did serve them, and in your percentage of students who graduated, you can divide the number of students who graduated by the number of students for whom you know an outcome (graduated or not), but you should report that is how you did it. In other words, you cannot count people for whom you don't know the outcome FOR your program but you aren't obligated to count them against your program, either.
"Almost everyone has some type of weakness or something they can't do. Can't we just count anyone on the reservation as having a disability? They are all socio-economically disadvantaged. Isn't that a disability?"
First of all, no, being socioeconomically disadvantaged is not a disability and that is explicitly stated several places in federal laws and reservations. Secondly, not everyone on the reservation is poor.
"We're paying you. Doesn't that mean you have to write down whatever we tell you?"
Uh, no. That would mean you were paying us to lie. I checked. That is not in our contract.
Here is our other view on "meeting the numbers". If you are very far short on the objectives you have set for the number of clients to be served, drop in alcoholism rate, increase in percentage of students graduating, daily attendance, or whatever your target was, you should have known it well before now. This brings us to the next warning sign, Fear and Silence.