Bookkeeping change blow to rural schools

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 United States.

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 Education

Department said a review of the program revealed that districts had “erroneously” received funding because they had not met eligibility requirements outlined in the federal education law since 2002.

The department said it would strictly enforce a requirement that in order to get funding, districts must use data from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates to determine whether 20% of their area’s school-age children live below the poverty line.

For about 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. Lawmakers have called on the Education Department to reverse its decision.

Department officials said they were surprised to find out 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, an Education Department spokeswoman, said the department “has drafted the legislative fix needed to use a free-andreduced-lunch funding formula.”

“When you discover you’re not following the law Congress wrote, you don’t double down. You fix it,” Hill said.