Saturday, February 29, 2020

Federal officials work to reverse Education Dept.'s new formula for rural-school program, which would cut budgets

Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Susan Collins of Maine and others in Congress are working on a fast reversal of the U.S. Department of Education's new formula that sends less money to hundreds of rural school districts, Erica Green reports for The New York Times.

The department's change, reported Feb. 14 by Education Week and Feb. 17 by The Rural Blog, "alarmed lawmakers and advocates who questioned why an administration whose political base includes large sections of rural America would initiate such a change — especially in an election year," Green writes. "Rural school districts, which serve nearly one in seven public-school students, have long been considered the most underfunded and ignored in the country."

Rural schools have several sources of federal money, but the only program specifically targeted to them is the Rural Education Achievement Program, created in 2002. That law says districts "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," Green notes. "For about 17 years though, 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."

That can make for a big difference. "In Oklahoma, which will see the number of eligible schools cut nearly in half, Matt Holder, the superintendent 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," Green writes. "In a district where 60 percent of students live in poverty, literacy is a ladder to opportunity, he said."

The Education Department seems to be going along with the congressional fix. Its 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," Green reports.

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