The start of a new school year often brings about increased requests for access to school employees from those soliciting financial services. Please allow this to clarify the Division’s practices regarding financial services vendors in the schools.

While ACPS Policy DJG (Vendor Relations) allows that “The principal may permit salesmen to make sales presentations in the school only if the presentation is related to education or is deemed to be in the best interest of school employees,” the Division does not view the presence of financial services representatives, none of whom are selling products or relaying information to our employees that have been scrutinized by the Human Resources Department, as being “in the best interest” of our employees. Because these contacts occur without the knowledge of administration, there is no way to ensure that our employees are receiving accurate and pertinent information regarding retirement benefits from these solicitations.

Information about all of our retirement planning options is readily available to all of our employees on the HR website (e.g., 457, 403b, etc). Additionally, we offer an annual retirement planning seminar, workshops on specific topics like our retirement benefits and other communications in this regard. Upon request, HR staff is happy to offer presentations to individual schools in order to ensure that employees receive accurate information. This will be particularly important this year with the upcoming changes to the Virginia Retirement System and the communications that will be required in order to inform our staff of their choices during the special enrollment period that will begin in January.

In the past, financial services vendors have implied to principals that they had the endorsement of the Human Resources Department to contact and schedule what were, in essence, sales pitches to Division staff. None of these vendors had such an endorsement, nor do they now.  The presence of these non-sanctioned vendors on school property implies that some sort of due diligence of these financial products has been done by HR when that simply is not the case and, as such, we strongly recommend that no such solicitations be permitted on school property.