This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 31, 2009 - The federal Department of Education has given some Missouri school districts one more reason to be confused about how much stimulus money they will get. The confusion stems from a federal formula that seems to give the poorest districts less money than districts serving fewer poorer schools.
Under the stimulus program, Missouri is projected to get $1.11 billion in stimulus money for education. The amount includes $195 million for Title 1 and other school improvement programs; $920 million in stabilization funds to help shore up school budgets to prevent layoffs of teachers; $9.7 million in education technology grants; and $11 million in vocational rehab grants.
Under the federal formula, for example, the St. Louis schools, where poor students make up about 30 percent of the students, would get $1,307 a student in stimulus money. But the Caruthersville district in southeast Missouri would receive only $823 a student -- even though 44 percent of its students are poor. Likewise, South Pemiscot, another Bootheel area district, would get $559 a students even though it serves a student body that's 34 percent poor.
Missouri education officials offer this advice: Ignore the federal chart and wait until the state releases its own information about how it will distribute the stimulus money. The state's allocations will differ from that of the feds, says Becky Odneal, the coordinator of the stimulus program for the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Rather than relying on the federal formula, Missouri uses alternative measures, including free and reduced lunch counts, in deciding how much each district will receive. Odneal says the state's formula and the breakdown of money going to Missouri school districts won't be available for at least two weeks.
Although Odneal said the federal numbers for Missouri were inaccurate, she could not say whether the state's own formula would correct cases where districts with a high percentage of poor students would receive less stimulus money per student than districts with a lower percentage of poor students.
Nor did she know whether such imbalances occurred in Title 1 allocations during previous years.
These imbalances are very real for some districts, according to Jennifer Cohen, a researcher at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington.
Cohen gives an example. Say a district has 200 students, and 150 of them are poor. It would receive more money per poor student than a district of 2,000 students with the same percentage of them poor. On the other hand, she says, a district having 200 students, with 25 percent of them impoverished, tends to get less money per poor student than one with 2,000 students and the same percentage of impoverished students.
"Funds should flow to states and districts with the neediest populations," Cohen says. "Instead, allocations are the result of complicated Title 1 funding formulas that don't appear to do a great job of providing the maximum benefit" to states or districts with large impoverished populations.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The New York Times that no formula was perfect, adding that school officials were simply thankful to receive additional funding through the stimulus package.
"I'm aware of these disparities," he told the newspaper, "but we've received zero complaints."
Whether that will hold true in Missouri won't be known until DESE publishes its guidelines and amounts of funding going to each school district.
