LYNN – A portion of education funding divvied out to local cities and towns in the federal stimulus package may change in the coming weeks due to discrepancies in numbers provided by the U.S. Department of Education (USED), Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester announced Monday.Chester sent a letter to superintendents and school leaders Monday informing them that Title 1 allocations from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) outlined on the USED Web site are inaccurate for several reasons and communities could receive significantly more or less than originally thought.Superintendent Catherine Latham, who received the letter Monday afternoon, said the announcement from Chester caught her off guard and she isn’t sure how the department will be affected.”We are having a budget meeting today, I’m not sure what to make of this,” she said. “I thought we were getting additional Title 1 money, so I’m not sure what this will mean.”With a projected gap of $5-$8 million in the department for 2010, Latham and her staff are continuing to work on building a bare-bones budget while they await official local aid and federal stimulus payout amounts.The city knows for sure that it should receive just over $2 million in special education funding soon, but is awaiting official numbers for Title 1 and Chapter 70 funding from the state.According to the USED Web site, President Barack Obama’s stimulus package provides just over $163 million in Title 1 education money for local cities and towns in Massachusetts, but Chester says that number is just an estimate and any information regarding specific payouts to cities and towns is likely inaccurate.The Web site does not publicly provide allocations for individual cities and towns.”Although distribution amounts are posted on the U.S. Department of Education’s Web site, I recommend you not rely on them because they are incomplete,” Chester wrote in the letter, vowing to have final Title 1 allocation numbers available to cities and towns next week.Chester said the USED numbers do not take into account vocational and charter schools or funding that is supposedly set aside for administration and school improvement.In addition, the ARRA Title I criteria require that the money not go to all Title I districts, but rather to the highest-poverty Title I districts, which could mean some wealthier districts would lose a significant chunk of funding.Latham says the next step for the department is to finish costing out line items and expects a final bottom line soon.”(The budget negotiations) are going OK, we are ironing out a few issues right now,” she said. “We haven’t cost everything out yet, we are hoping to do that soon.”