As a step in combining three of the Elementary and Secondary Education surveys of the National Center for Education Statistics to produce one database linking local education agencies, schools, and teachers, the merged procedures and collections forms were pretested. Different methods were tested by splitting the pretest sample of 220 public schools and 75 private schools into five treatment subsamples and using a different methodology in each subsample. The different methodologies addressed the following questions: (1) Should the principal designate a school coordinator to coordinate collection activities or should the survey assume that the principal would do this? (2) Should the coordinator be paid for time spent coordinating collection activities? (3) Should telephone or mail prompts remind the coordinator of follow-up? (4) Are there differences between public and private schools? (5) Are there differences by questionnaire type? Focus was on selecting the treatment that will provide a high survey response rate. Results indicate that the designated coordinator was important. Responses to telephone prompts were higher than for mail prompts. Returns from the public sector were higher than from the private sector. Paying coordinators did not significantly improve return rates. The different questionnaires did not produce significant differences in response rates. The full survey will utilize telephone prompts to unpaid coordinators. Eleven tables present pretest data. (SLD)