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 United States.
More than 800 schools stand to lose thousands of dollars from the Rural and Low-Income School Program because the department has changed how districts are to report how many of their students live in poverty. The change, 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% 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.
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, an Education Department spokeswoman, said the department "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 bipartisan condemnation and alarmed lawmakers and advocates. Rural school districts serve nearly one in seven public school students.
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.
Rural districts have come to rely on the program to supplement the costs of services that are far less accessible to rural students, like 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, the advocacy director at AASA, the School Superintendents Association.
In a letter this month to Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, 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 Education 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."
Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., wrote that 220 of his state's most remote, impoverished school districts would take a $400,000 cut from the change.
"The department should be focusing on elevating school districts with the fewest resources instead of punishing small schools with harmful, last-minute policy changes," Tester wrote.
A Section on 03/01/2020