open modal window

I am working on a site where HR employees are managing applicants for jobs. I'm currently trying to add a modal window on a custom admin dashboard that will let a user quickly change an applicant's status.

The dashboard lists applicants by job title, with a few of the more important fields displayed (resume download, the date they applied, etc.):

Clicking on the "change" button below the applicant's status would open a modal window where the manager could select and save a new value:

I've figured out how to pass the appropriate post's Wordpress ID into the modal window, but beyond that I'm a bit stuck.

My change button is calling Thickbox, just to make the rendering quicker:

a href="#TB_inline?height=300width=400inlineId=modal" class="thickbox" id="changeStatus" target="_blank" data-id="?php echo $app['ID']; ?"small[Change]/small/a

And I have the modal window and script to pass variables in the same applicants.php file:

?php add_thickbox(); ?
    div id="modal" class="reveal-modal" style="display: none;"
        div
            h1Edit [Applicant Name] Status/h1
            p?php the_title(); ?/p

            div class="fetched-data"/div

            span class="input-text-wrap"
                labelinput type="radio" id="currAppStatusYes" name="currAppStatusRadio" value="yes" Yes/label
                labelinput type="radio" id="currAppStatusNo" name="currAppStatusRadio" value="no" No/label
                labelinput type="radio" id="currAppStatusMaybe" name="currAppStatusRadio" value="maybe" Maybe/label
            /span
        /div
    /div

    script type="text/javascript"
        jQuery(document).ready(function() {
            jQuery('a#changeStatus').on('click', function(e) {

            // get the id of the current post and pass that to the modal window to find the correct fields for editing
                var rowid = jQuery(this).data('id');
                jQuery('.fetched-data').html(rowid);
            });
        });
     /script

I think I need to use Ajax and possibly some other built in Wordpress functions but this is a little over my head. Any suggestions are appreciated!