FARM BILL AMENDMENT WILL HELP CSU LAND FED FUNDING

‘Central State deserves to be treated in the same way as other historically black colleges when it comes to accessing federal funding under the Farm Bill.’

Sen. Rob Portman Who supported passage of the Farm Bill

An amendment to the Farm Bill that allows Central State University to compete for more funding is headed for President Donald Trump’s desk.

Before the 2014 Farm Bill, Central State was not fully recognized as an 1890 land grant institution by the federal government. The 2019 Farm Bill as passed by the U.S. House and Senate would make Central State eligible for as much federal funding as other colleges with the designation. If signed into law by Trump, Central State could begin receiving additional federal funding by 2020.

The bill passed the U.S. House and Senate with the support of Republicans Rep. Mike Turner and Sen. Rob Portman and Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown.

“Central State deserves to be treated in the same way as other historically black colleges when it comes to accessing federal funding under the Farm Bill, and I was pleased this important amendment was included,” Portman said in a statement.

Brown spent some time last week personally negotiating with the leading Republican and Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said Brown’s communications director, Jennifer Donohue.

“Our amendment is a common-sense fix to a historical oversight, to make sure one of Ohio’s great universities gets its fair share of federal education dollars,” Brown said in a statement.

Last week Brown went searching for Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas and when he couldn’t find him headed to the Democratic Party’s cloak room. A cloak room is a small private area where senators can step off the chamber’s floor to make a phone call or have a discussion, Donohue said.

Roberts heard Brown was looking for him and Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and headed to the Democratic cloak room, something politicians of opposing parties don’t usually do, Donohue said. In the Democratic cloak room, Brown recited the famous baseball poem “Casey At The Bat” and the three senators joked and chatted about baseball before making a deal to include the Central State amendment.

The act of a Republican coming into the Democratic cloak room is a small and “rare show of bipartisanship,” Donohue said.

“It does not happen on a dayto-day basis,” Donohue said.

“It’s unusual. By coming to someone else’s territory ... what it really shows is that we mean business and that we’re here to hear you out.”

The bipartisan bill could be a big funding win for Central State, which emerged from state fiscal watch last year.

Central State was placed on fiscal watch in 2015, after it fell below a state threshold measuring financial health two years in a row. A decline in enrollment and students’ difficulty in qual- ifying for federal financial aid were major challenges for the historically-black university, CSU President Cynthia Jackson-Hammond has said.

Federal funding has historically been doled out to CSU “arbitrarily” and if the 2019 Farm Bill becomes law it would take a “look at how the funding is allocated across all schools with the designation,” Jackson-Hammond said during a press conference with Turner last week.

The funding will go into two separate categories, one for extension services which allows the university to go out into the community and help “under-served populations,” Hammond-Jackson said. Another portion of the funding will go toward teaching and research, she said.