“Census Day” has arrived, and the Palo Alto Census Office has been preparing for many months to count the populations in the 194 census tracts for which it is responsible — including Stanford, a “hard-to-count” area based on 2000 census statistics.

Participation in the 2010 census may sound simple — it involves filling out a form and mailing it back to the Census Office — but huge resources are necessary to carry out this once-in-a-decade operation.

Obstacles in past years have included mobile populations like the homeless, language and culture barriers and misconceptions about the count. And participation among populations living in large institutions — for example, the student population at Stanford — have historically seen low rates.

“There are so many different kinds of neighborhoods that each one has its own challenge,” said Tom Banks, the assistant manager for field operations at the Palo Alto Census Office. “Stanford itself is a challenge. Most universities are. Students are incredibly bright, and they’re very focused on the incredibly hard task of getting through Stanford.”

Educating international students about participation is another challenge, Banks said.

“Many of the people from overseas don’t realize that the census applies to everyone over here, not just citizens,” Banks said. “Many international students get the form, think it doesn’t apply to them and just throw it away.”

Privacy is another concern, said Lisa Knochenhauer, a staffer at the Census Office.

“Everybody understands the concept of what the census is pretty quickly,” Knochenhauer said, but “there are some pretty sophisticated privacy concerns … the approach I’ve taken involves dealing with the administration.”

The University does not allow census employees to enter student residences.

“We want to ensure that our safety and security standards of our houses remain as our students expect them to,” said Cora Gerdes, the associate dean of Residential Education central operations. “So the census is providing us with all the envelopes that contain the census forms and Residential Education staff are passing them out to our students, collecting from our students and then giving them back to the census.”

Residential assistants (RAs) have been officially deputized by the Census Office and have taken a confidentiality oath, allowing them to handle confidential information.

Meanwhile, the Census Office has responded to hard-to-count populations by dividing their job into two groups — Partnership and Field Operations.

Partnership is in charge of community outreach, including familiarizing communities, especially those with low response rates, with the census process. Field Operations, on the other hand, is concerned with counting forms, personally visiting people who did not submit a form and running special operations at institutions like jails, hospitals and dormitories, where mail does not work especially well.

Each group is specifically equipped to handle a variety of challenges: for example, outreach messages have been translated into 59 languages.

Census forms are set to be distributed to students on April 5 and should be returned to RAs by April 12, officials said.