Up to 95 percent of children in the Columbus Municipal School District qualify for free or reduced lunch. Each school year, the district applies for nearly $3 millions in federal funds to make sure those children receive the same advantages as the district’s other children.
“The whole purpose of federal programs is to try to alleviate the discrepancies that you see between kids who come from high poverty backgrounds or disadvantaged backgrounds,” said Anthony Brown, CMSD director of federal programs.
At Fairview Elementary, every student is eligible for free or reduced lunch. There are 308 children who are eligible for free lunches and eight children who are eligible for reduced-price lunches.
Brown said that statistically, children who come from poverty perform below their grade level.
“What you can see from all the research is that you can adjust for race, you can adjust for sex but as long as you get the incomes the same, you don’t see a discrepancy. What you can’t fix is poverty,” Brown said.”What all the research clearly shows is that when children come from poverty they start out behind.”
Brown recalled an instance several years ago when he visited a Pre-K classroom in the district on the first day of school.
“The teacher held up a book and said, ‘This is a book.’ She pointed to the words and said, ‘These are words. These are letters. I thought, ‘What is she doing?’ So after the lesson I went and talked to her and asked, ‘Why are you doing that?’ She said, ‘I have kids who come in my class who don’t know what a book is.’
“That’s unbelievable, but it’s true. If you can imagine when a kid comes to school and nobody has ever read him a book, he doesn’t know what words are, what letters are, you don’t know how far behind that child starts.
“In the Columbus School District, we run at about 90-to-95 percent poverty rate. You can look at that and see why it’s so hard. You’re working with kids that haven’t had experiences that everybody should have. We have kids who don’t know what a zoo is, who don’t know what a museum is.”
In addition to serving public school children free or reduced lunch, the district pays local private schools Heritage Academy and Annunciation Catholic School $302 per child for their students who live in the city limits and qualify as low income. Out of 154 students at Annunciation, 10 children qualify for free or reduced lunch. At Heritage Academy, 10 children out of 496 qualify.
“They have very few but we give them the exact same amount per child. The money follows the child,” Brown said. “It doesn’t matter if they go to private school or public school as long as they live in our district.”
In addition to providing free or reduced lunch, the district also asked for $15,000 to allocate to children who do not speak English as their native language. Another $20,000 will be allocated to children who qualify as homeless. Finally, $56,322 was requested for children at Palmer Home.
Brown said the district will apply for $2,386,081 in Title I federal funding and $390,000 in Title II funding. However, that amount is not the same amount applied for as last year.
“These amounts are 85 percent of what we got last year,” he said. “We don’t know what the full allocation is, but there is a rule in federal regulations that they can’t reduce you below 85 percent of what you got the preceding year. So that’s all we can ask for in the initial submission.”
Brown said the district may get more than they asked for but said due to the federal sequestration, total federal allocations will be reduced by 5.11 percent nation-wide.
The CMSD school board held a special meeting Tuesday, primarily to address the issue of federal funding. Brown appeared before the board during the board’s regular May meeting but the board requested more detailed information about how the funds would be applied and the discussion was tabled. Brown assured board members he would give them a detailed budget one week before the next meeting.
During Tuesday’s meeting, board members Aubra Turner and Angela Verdell questioned why they only received the 50-page budget packet less than 48 hours before the meeting. Brown said he sent an email to Superintendent Dr. Martha Liddell the previous Tuesday and trusted she sent the information to board members.
“I can’t vote on this without having the proper time to review it,” Turner said.
The motion to apply for federal funding passed 3-1 with Turner opposed.
Sarah Fowler covered crime, education and community related events for The Dispatch.
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