The United States Education Department has announced that a bookkeeping change would see over 800 rural school districts lose thousands of dollars from the Rural and Low-Income School Program.
Recently the education department abruptly changed how districts are to report how many of their students live in poverty, invariably ending a program that has been in place for rural school districts for nearly two decades.
The department said it was only following the law, which requires that to get funding, rural school 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.
The new policy was announced in letters to state education leaders after the Education Department said a review of the program revealed that some rural school districts had “erroneously” received funding because they had not met eligibility requirements outlined in the federal education law.
Liz Hill, an Education Department spokeswoman, said the education department had drafted the new act to fix needed to use a free-and-reduced-lunch funding formula.
She 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.
Education Department officials added that 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.
Teachers reaction in rural school districts
Many teachers have received the education department’s decision to enforce the more stringent criteria with massive condemnation of the new act.
Several lawmakers, advocates, and education enthusiasts have questioned why the current administration whose political base includes large sections of rural America would initiate such a change.
Rural school districts, which serve nearly one in seven public-school students, have long been considered the most underfunded and ignored in the country.
Chuck McCauley, the superintendent of the 6,000-student Bartlesville Public Schools in Oklahoma, said the district had tapped more than $100,000 per year for the past three years from the program to equip its students and teachers with computers.
Notably, for about 17 years, the education department has allowed schools to use the percentage of students who qualify for federally subsidized free and reduced-price meals.
Congress reaction
Congress created the Rural Education Achievement Program, recognizing that rural school districts lacked the resources to compete with their urban and suburban counterparts for competitive grants.
Congressional leaders indicated that they were prepared to take swift action. A spokesman for the Senate committee that oversees education said its chairman, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, was “very concerned” about the change and working with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, to solve this problem for hundreds of rural schools around the country.
Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, Miss 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 education funding.
Rural school district advocates express the hope that a new administration would, in part, because of rural and small-town voters would pay more attention to rural children.
