A recent reduction in the amount of federal funding designed to help low-income and low-achieving students at Oak Park District 97 schools has some parents, teachers and community members sounding the alarm.
During a regular board meeting last month, dozens of residents demanded that the district identify where the federal Title I funding is being used, and that it immediately restore 100 hours of tutoring for K-5 students, which the residents believe has been taken away.
“Something along the lines of Title I is a necessity for the many. That was taken away. How do we justify that?” said Anthony Clark, a teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School and founder of the nonprofit Suburban Unity Alliance during the Dec. 6 regular meeting.
Title I funds are designed to “supplement instructional services and activism in order to improve the educational opportunities of educationally disadvantaged or deprived children,” according to the U.S. Department of Education.
D97 officials explained in a statement that individual school districts don’t control “money they receive or how that money is allocated among their schools.”
According to district officials, the actual reduction of Title I funding was less significant than the fact that the formula for distributing the funds had changed since last year. According to officials, D97 received $566,736 in Title I funds in 2014-15, $536,617 in 2015-16 and $530,162 in 2016-17.
Traditionally, the funding has been distributed to elementary schools in D97 which have percentages of low-income students that are higher than the district average. This year, Beye, Irving, Holmes and Whittier — all of whose low-income percentages were higher than the 20.5 percent district average — qualified as Title I schools.
Longfellow, which had qualified in the past, is no longer eligible for the funding since its percentage of low-income students has dropped below the district average for two straight years.
In addition to the elementary schools, this is the first year the district has identified both Brooks and Julian middle schools as Title I schools.
“Instead of four elementary schools, there are now six schools because we included the middle schools,” said Felicia Starks-Turner, senior director of academic and administrative services. “So the same pot of funding divided by six schools, instead of four, is going to yield less money. And because the middle schools have larger enrollments, they’ll get a larger percentage of the funds.”
In addition, district officials said, there were several factors that impacted the availability of Title I-related staff and services in the district for the 2016-17 school year.
“In terms of staffing, those factors included a delayed response from the state about whether it would officially recognize some of our Title I positions,” the district statement explained. “We need this information because it would determine the number of staff members we could fund using Title I money.”
District officials said two schools that aren’t eligible to receive Title I funds requested using money donated by their PTOs “to pay for tutors who would support reading interventions for their students.”
According to the district, there was a delay in processing those requests “because we needed to determine if there were any legal or policy implications associated with using donations to pay people for these services.” The requests were eventually approved in October.
But according to a group of community members, some of whom spoke during public comment at the Dec. 20 meeting, the PTO funding “causes inequities because some PTOs may not have the funds.” They also said the district should have taken money from its own budget to cover the funding gap so that K-5 tutoring hours wouldn’t be diminished — a program, the group added, that has experienced cuts while the district’s gifted and talented support program, “which serves a nearly all-white demographic,” remains “intact.”
The group requested that the district show them where all Title I funds are being used and that K-5 tutoring services be immediately restored.
In an interview on Dec. 19, district officials said Title I funding, which is spent at the discretion of school principals, is used to fund more than K-5 tutoring services. After the Dec. 6 meeting, they released a statement that included a list of some of its Title I-funded and targeted intervention programs designed to help low-income and low-performing students.
“It’s not just tutors giving services,” said Chris Jasculca, D97’s senior director of policy, planning and communication. “The money is used for Title I breakfasts, for software to help with math intervention [and] leveled literacy intervention for language arts.”
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com