Title 1 school funds in time for FY 2010

LYNN – Gov. Deval Patrick officially announced what most school districts had been anticipating as they prepared budgets for fiscal year 2010 Thursday: The federal government’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will contain $163 million for schools in poverty-stricken communities.The funding, released to the state under Title 1 regulations, will be allocated to cities and towns in time for fiscal year 2010, but how much each community will receive is yet to be determined.The funding is earmarked for 258 different school districts, along with charter schools and regional vocational districts.The grants supplement the amount of Title 1 money Massachusetts already receives annually, which was about $233 million last year.Earlier this week, State Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester sent a letter to school leaders and superintendents warning them that any specific figures in Title 1 funding detailed on the Department of Education Web site were likely inaccurate.That letter came four days before Patrick publicly announced the funding was coming to the state.”Although distribution amo-unts 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.Title 1 funds are awarded to districts based on the poverty level at each school, determined by the number of students that qualify for free and reduced lunch.The money can be used in a number of different ways as long it is to bolster programs at the school or add new programs that would otherwise be left out of the curriculum.Preliminary numbers would suggest that large, urban communities such as Lynn, where a greater majority of students receive free and reduced lunch could receive upwards of $4 million, but Chester again stressed that any preliminary numbers may not be accurate.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 and, 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.With a projected gap of $5-$8 million in the department for 2010, Superintendent Catherine 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.Along with the $2 million in SPED allocations, Patrick has also set aside approximately $1.7 million for Lynn public schools to make up for a projected gap in Chapter 70 education money, another number that could change before the budget is complete.