The evaluation design for my project is generated from a necessity to reduce health care cost for public school districts.  The cost of health care has risen recently for a variety of reasons, but especially because of the Affordable Health Care act of 2011.  “Dependents may stay on a parent’s health care plan until the age of 26, if the dependent’s employer cannot offer health care coverage” (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-activities/resource-center/faqs/young-adult-and-aca).  This unfunded mandate is just one of the many recent changes that has resulted in higher health care costs.  Lifestyle factors, genetics, exercise, relaxation, and environmental factors all impact the cost of health care as well; this evaluation will collect data for analysis and will present the findings and develop solutions for all parties involved in an effort to help districts cut health care cost.

The stakeholders that will be involved in this evaluation are the Allegheny-Clarion Valley School District, Rishini Group, and five randomly selected school districts from the Northwestern Health Care Consortium.  Public school districts in Pennsylvania have been inadequately funded since the 2007-2008 school year, and, due to this funding gap, schools are exploring all options for savings.  In addition to the funding issue, the districts listed above are all part of the North Western Health Care Consortium that are struggling with rising health care costs.        

This evaluation plan will include a data collection instrument as well as an evaluation matrix.  The evaluation plan will outline the evaluation questions that will be used to drive the evaluation.  The information gathered from this evaluation will be used to identify ways to reduce health care cost by providing data from the survey to help analyze overall cost and seek ways to reduce this cost.  Once the contributors to the high health care cost are identified and a wellness program has been implemented, the researcher will use the retrospective design theory for further evaluation to show “a comparison between posttest data the retrospective predate” (Russ-EFT, Preskill, 2009, pp.188) by using this theory of research.  This information can be used to not only make changes, but to support these changes and keep wellness as a focus of lower health care cost and an improved workforce.     

There are six stakeholder groups that will be incorporated into this evaluation.  The first group of stakeholders is the Allegheny-Clarion Valley School District; the business manager and the superintendent are identified as essential parts of the evaluation.  The plan is to select five random school districts from the Northwestern Health Care Consortium that will also include the district’s business manager and superintendent as part of the evaluation as well.  Rishini group will be a stakeholder in the evaluation since it oversees the Northwestern Health Care Consortium; this is the health care consortium in which all the previously mentioned school districts belong.