Lynn to be schooled on stimulus money

LYNN – Superintendent Catherine Latham will join school officials across the North Shore in attending a multitude of conferences and meetings in the coming weeks, all in an effort to clarify how education stimulus funds released last week can be used.
For Lynn Public Schools administrators, building the fiscal year 2010 budget has been a challenging task thus far as they await a final bottom line from the state, and the addition of over $4 million in total stimulus money, while welcomed, complicates the situation further. Superintendent Catherine Latham said Monday that she still isn’t certain how the combined $4.2 million the city received from Gov. Deval Patrick last week, or how and when it will even be payed out to the department.
She is hoping that a conference hosted by Congressman John Tierney this Friday at Salem State and a conference with Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester next Monday will help to answer the many questions administrators still have.
“We are still not sure (how the money can be used) but on Friday Congressman Tierney will be up at Salem State to try and explain how things will flow,” she said. “There is another meeting on Monday with the commissioner of education (Mitchel Chester) so we will get congress on one side and the commissioner on the other side so I assume we will be able to put everything together after that.”
Patrick first announced $1.7 million in general stimulus funds for education in Lynn Thursday, and followed that with an additional $2.3 million in special education funding for the city announced Friday.
Latham says that while her staff has come up with some very good ideas for using the money, she suspects the department may be required to write grants and explain their plans before the city ever sees a check.
“I am not positive, but I would assume we are going to have to write grants,” she said. “We do know where we want to place the money, and we have some good ideas being talked about around the office. There is just so much accountability now they are not just going to hand us over this money.”
Latham assured the School Committee earlier this month that any grant writing would be done by she and Deputy Superintendent Jaye Warry with the help of department heads.
Another stipulation surrounding the money is a request by Chester that school departments invest at least half of the funds in long-term sustainable programs that will continue to bring in money and longterm benefits so that districts can avoid future economic crises. Latham says if this is the case, it would add even more direction to where the department can use funds.
This could provide a slight roadblock to any plans of using the money in the salary line, or transferring money from other areas to the salary line to avoid teacher layoffs, but, again, Latham says it is simply too soon to know exactly what this means for Lynn.
“That is one stipulation that they made very clear to us, that all districts have to use 50 percent of the money on strategic investments that provide ongoing benefits,” she said. “So the programs that are supported will last longer.
“We are continuing to build our budget from the bottom up and look at every option, but this is encouraging (to receive stimulus funds).”
Business Administrator Kevin McHugh, who is in charge of plugging in these new numbers, says he hasn’t altered the way he is putting the budget together just yet because there are still too many unknowns.
“We don’t have any directive yet,” he said. “We haven’t recieved any official notification of anything from the state. We know where getting something, buit we don’t know what.”