Posted on 02/29/2020 6:53:42 PM PST by ransomnote
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 was simply following the law, which requires 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 percent of their area’s school-age children live below the poverty line.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Shut it down. Failed experiment. Teach locally. Or not at all.
Love how they simply lie outright in this story. THEY NOT LOSING FUNDING THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSE TO HAVE HAS SINCE NY Times.
Federal education does not honor families. It is appropriate for armed forces. It really cheats the culture by having no religion or all religions. Where is the freedom of religion in that?
The semi-rural school I worked at really worked hard to get as many parents as possible to at least apply for free/reduced lunches. Prizes for students whose parents filled in the applications, that sort of thing. Besides getting the benefit of lunch subsidies, the more “poor” students a school has the more extra money they can get—I assume it is from this program.
Get the Feds out of this and give it to the states, implemented at the county level.
‘Some Rural Schools Cut Off Federal Funding To Dept. Of Education’ would make a much better headline.
Amazing how many of these little slush funds we uncovering. Like all Govt programs most of this “funding” gets eaten up by the bureaucracy, who pay union dues that get donated exclusively to life time career politicians
Ooops, guess we shouldn’t have let school districts make blanket promises about lifetime benefits and retirements, nor let school districts pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for triple dipping ‘superintendents’ - otherwise, there’d be no mad scramble for funding when the feds pull (our) dollars.
Gotta fix the public employee benefits to fix the schools.
This is why some school districts give EVERY child free food.
Good. This program is fraud from top to bottom.
L
Time to get American 6G running and shut down public schools.
NY Times is very concerned (during election season) that poor white rural Republican children will go hungry because the Dept of Education is following the law.
Meanwhile, Dept of Education is working with Congress to amend the law before the funding change takes effect.
No kids will go hungry.
The real story is restoration of the rule of law and government accountability under Trump.
How is the money from this program applied? Does it directly benefit students?
Wait, I thought Bloomberg said rural lives don’t matter and that big city NYT agreed.
It’s been horrible to see what public education and education programs in universities have done to generations of American minds over the past 50 years. That also has more than anything else to do with the march towards family destruction and socialism.
Did you see what was done to Brett Kavanaugh? That’s the real face of feminism. It’s a major prong for hard socialism, and we’re running out of time. Face it, and do something about it. Shut down the thousands of funding programs that feed it including public education.
So your not getting the money because you don’t have enough students under the poverty level. Social engineering project failure, gut the dept
States with school district affected the most should quit complaining. IF such programs should exist, they should be state programs, not federal.
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