Warnings that four high school teachers could be forced to drop their assistance programs attracted dozens of protesters to last week's Missoula County Public Schools trustee meeting. The teachers, two each at Hellgate and Big Sky high schools, lead special classes for students from financially struggling families.
“Dropping a program that has helped many students make it through high school will result in an increased dropout rate and poor academic achievement - if they do stay in school,” Big Sky counselor Marolane Stevenson wrote the trustees. She warned that at-risk students “do not easily connect with people, nor do they have many people who advocate for them unlike parents of college-bound students.”
But individual schools must also qualify. That happens if a school has at least 35 percent of its students signed up for free and reduced lunch. In Missoula, participation ranges from a high of nearly 70 percent at Lowell Elementary School to a low of about 15 percent at Cold Springs Elementary. Lowell, Russell, Hawthorne, Lewis and Clark, Franklin and Paxson elementary schools and C.S. Porter Middle School all meet that 35 percent threshold. So does Seeley-Swan High School.
Hellgate and Big Sky high schools each have around 28 percent free-and-reduced participation, but they have been allowed to have full Title I funding. Sentinel High School's family income levels have been too high to qualify.
Under the federal rules, school districts are supposed to rank school buildings by their free-and-reduced participation, and dole out block allocations in that order. If a school district wants to spend Title I money in an unqualified school, it must first give qualified schools 125 percent of their regular allocation.
In past years, MCPS filed separate elementary and high school requests for Title I funding. For the 2008-09 school year, Missoula is sending a combined K-12 funding request. But it appears, no matter how the math is done, the money runs out before Hellgate and Big Sky receive any money.
The four teachers now working on high school Title I services would be reassigned to other classrooms if the cuts come through. Title I teachers at the elementary schools would probably not be affected.
To complicate matters, Missoula school officials have been getting mixed messages about who's responsible for the impending changes. Trustee Jim Sadler stated in a recent public letter that “the state superintendent of schools is now giving the Title I allocation to K-12 as a whole, and not separated into K-8 and 9-12.”
At last week's meeting, MCPS assistant Superintendent Gail Becker told the trustees that the state Office of Public Instruction was pushing the combined request, in part because a recent federal audit had forced OPI to tighten its supervision of Title I allocations.
But on Thursday, state Superintendent of Schools Linda McCulloch said the decision to apply as K-12 or separate districts was a local call, and her office was not recommending one way or the other. She also said there were no federal penalties or restrictions imposed on the distribution of Title I monies.
Furthermore, McCulloch said Missoula had used the combined K-12 application for this current school year as well as next year, without the loss of its high school programs. Larger school districts often switch their application method from year to year, depending on how the math works best for them, she said.
In response, Becker agreed the combined application decision was made independently in Missoula, and that she may have misinterpreted messages coming from Helena.
“In fairness, we heard it differently,” Becker said. “Our sense was we were being encouraged to have one application, and we suspected the direction we were getting was because they had just come through an audit. I suspected the audit had something to do with what we were hearing. That would be the wrong impression.”
Reactions radiated in different directions. Some MCPS trustees called for rigorous recruiting of low-income families into the program, while others bemoaned the logic of depending on free- and reduced-lunch forms to qualify for remedial education money.
That debate spun into a side channel about how high school students pay for lunch. There's a strong belief that qualified teens won't take their lunch discounts because they must use a different-colored ticket, and that exposes them to ridicule.
Fixing that requires a recordkeeping improvement to track student lunch accounts by computer instead of by paper ticket. Trustee Nancy Pickhardt suggested linking school and welfare agency computer databases, so MCPS can easily determine how many families qualify for the programs Title I tracks.
Other threads of discussion weighed the choice of paying for existing Title I programs with other accounts or helping students without the Title I framework at all.
Becker called Title I a helpful tool, but not an essential crutch to keep kids from dropping out.
“This is the danger of having a program like Title I, and special ed has gone through this, too,” she explained. “When students are identified, they're looked at as needing to go to these other programs. It becomes somebody else's responsibility for their learning. But the classroom teacher has the capacity to work with all those children as well.”
She added that Missoula's ongoing No Child Left Behind low test scores don't come from the free- and reduced-lunch students, but from the students in special education programs. Title I funds don't apply to children with developmental challenges, only those with financial hardships.
To further confound the issue, no one has final word on how much money the federal government will send. Missoula Title I staff know parts of the equation, but not the numbers to plug in.
That equation includes lifting 20 percent of the federal allocation off the top to teacher professional development. That's because MCPS must take “corrective action” for failing to make adequate yearly progress in its No Child Left Behind tests.
The potential allocation gets reduced another 10th by conservative accounting: OPI does recommend plugging only 90 percent of the projected funds into an annual budget in case Congress makes last-minute changes.
Except that while elementary Title I funding has been slipping, the high school allocation may see a big jump. OPI figures show the 2006-07 Missoula payment was
$1.98 million for elementary programs and $543,568 for high school. This year, it was $1.95 million for elementary and $537,001 for high school.
Next year, the projected figures for Missoula are
$1.94 million for elementary programs and $836,539 for high schools. But nobody knows if that's the actual amount that will show up in the mailbox.
“We're still waiting for the confidence to plan on the numbers,” Becker said. “All of this is premature. We don't have the final allocation. We may be able to bring back part of what we had.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com
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