Making the District’s Job Easier – Sample RFP for Learning Recovery Vendors

Several months ago, the National Comprehensive Center released Promising Procurement Practices to Maximize Learning Recovery – Increasing the Effectiveness of Contracting with External Vendors to Provide Services. The guide includes suggestions and promising practices to improve procurement practices in districts. While doing the research to develop the guide, we realized that districts would benefit from having a draft RFP (Request for Proposals) that they could use as a template or adapt to their own needs. This new companion document, Sample RFP: Procuring Vendors for Learning Recovery & Acceleration Efforts, includes suggested language and a suggested process for school districts to use while procuring vendors to support learning recovery & acceleration efforts. Throughout the document there is guidance, suggestions, and considerations that districts need to think through when developing their RFPs and contracts with external vendors. We also include examples of traditional and outcomes-based contracting (OBC) for reference, as we highly encourage districts to consider using OBCs for all external vendor contracts that utilize American Rescue Plan (ARP) dollars. There’s a great opportunity to improve the procurement process to maximize both the efficient use of funds and maximize learning outcomes, and we hope this tool will help districts take to refine their procurement practice.