Hundreds of rural schools to lose funds
WASHINGTON — A bookkeeping change at the Education Department will kick hundreds of rural school districts out of a federal program that for nearly two decades has funneled funding to some of the most geographically isolated and cash-strapped schools in the nation.
More than 800 schools stand to lose thousands of dollars from the Rural and Low-Income School Program because the department has abruptly changed how districts are to report how many of their students live in poverty. The change, quietly announced in letters to state education leaders, comes after the department said a review of the program revealed that districts had “erroneously” received funding because they had not met eligibility requirements outlined in federal education law since 2002.
The department said it was simply following the law, which requires that for districts to get funding, they must use data from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates to determine whether 20 percent of their area’s school-age children live below the poverty line.
But for 17 years, the department has allowed schools to use the percentage of students who qualify for federally subsidized free and reduced price meals, a common proxy for school poverty rates, because census data can miss residents in rural areas.
Department officials said they were surprised to discover that the law had not been followed for more than a decade and agreed that census data was not the right metric to determine eligibility for the program.
Liz Hill, a department spokeswoman, said the agency “has drafted the legislative fix needed to use a free and reduced lunch funding formula.”
“When you discover you’re not following the law Congress wrote, you don’t double down, you fix it,” Hill said. “If that’s what Congress wants, Congress should pass it, and the Education Department will happily implement it. We will also continue to look for ways to help ensure students are not unnecessarily harmed.”
The department’s decision to enforce the tougher criteria drew swift, bipartisan condemnation. Rural school districts, which serve nearly 1 in 7 public school students, have long been considered the most underfunded and ignored in the country.
Congressional leaders indicated that they were prepared to take swift action. A spokesman for the Senate committee that oversees education said its chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., was “very concerned” about the change and working with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to “solve this problem for hundreds of rural schools around the country.”
“There is no reason that a change was made this year, and the Department of Education should listen to Congress and fix this problem quickly,” the statement said.
The department’s notifications rattled rural districts, which have come to rely on the program to supplement the costs of services that are far less accessible to rural students, such as technology, mental health and guidance counselors, and full-day kindergarten.
Congress created the Rural Education Achievement Program, recognizing that rural schools lacked the resources to compete with their urban and suburban counterparts for competitive grants. The program is the only dedicated federal funding stream for rural school districts, lawmakers said.
“Rural districts have budgeted for these resources, and the administration has given no consideration to how they will be impacted by this immediate cut to their funding,” said Sasha Pudelski, advocacy director at AASA, the School Superintendents Association.
In Oklahoma, which will see the number of eligible schools cut nearly in half, Superintendent Matt Holder of Sulphur Public Schools said the $30,000 cut to his 1,500-student district would cost him a reading specialist in his elementary school.
In a district where 60 percent of students live in poverty, literacy is a ladder to opportunity, he said.
“It’s important for us to have someone on staff to work with these students and get them where they need to be,” Holder said. “I feel like we’re cutting from the most vulnerable.”
Chuck McCauley, superintendent of the 6,000-student Bartlesville Public Schools in Oklahoma, said the district has tapped more than $100,000 per year for the past three years from the program to equip its students and teachers with computers.
“We started the technology initiative because we really needed to level the playing field for them in their next steps,” he said. “Without those funds, we would not be where we are today.”
In a letter this month to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Collins said her state would lose $1.2 million under the change. Following her lead, the entire Maine delegation wrote to ask DeVos to restore the money.
Collins, an author of the Rural Education Achievement Program, said the department’s move undermined the intent of the program. The fact that 100 of the 149 schools in Maine that qualified last year would lose funding this year under the census criteria speaks to the shortcomings of relying solely on census data, she said.
“If this decision is not reversed,” Collins wrote, “the department risks denying thousands of students living in rural Maine the chance to reach their full potentials.”