How much will your school district receive under the Stimulus Plan?

by Kristina Chew · 2009-02-01 15:09:00 UTC
Topics:

$17 billion has been allocated for special education in President Obama's Stimulus Plan, out of a total $150 billion in new federal spending on education. Estimates of how much funding each school district will receive under the American Recovery and Reinvestment bill can be found on the EdLabor journal, from a document prepared by the Congressional Research Service:

This document estimates what each school district in the country would receive under the bill’s program allocations (not including the $79 billion State Stabilization Fund) for Title I ($11 billion), IDEA ($13 billion), and K-12 School Modernization ($14 billion) over FYs 2009 and 2010.

These are estimates only based on available and current data and may not reflect exact allocations that school districts receive when these funds are actually allocated.

PDF files with estimates for each town/district in each state are provided; as a commenter notes, higher levels of funding are given to districts with "larger concentrations of lower-income students."

The Wrightslaw blog considers whether the long-term consequences of the stimulus package positive or negative, and quotes these opinions:

“Education experts across the political spectrum wondered how school districts could spend so many new billions so fast, whether such an outpouring of dollars would lead to higher student achievement, and what might happen in two years when the stimulus money ends.” (Stimulus Plan Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education by Sam Dillon, NYT, January 27, 2009)

The New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that monitors education spending reports that the formula does not effectively allocate the most money to states with the greatest need. “Stimulus funding does not take into account districts with large special education and English language learner populations. These districts with the socially and academically neediest students will benefit the most from the infusion of additional federal dollars.” Read First Look at Stimulus Spending.

Hiring in some areas has been frozen in my own school district and certainly extra funds will be welcome. But will the Stimulus Plan address the long-term needs of districts to fund special education under IDEA?

Photo by kevindooley

Kristina Chew
PREVIOUS STORY:
Online Schools Naturally Accommodate
NEXT STORY:
Why I'm Asking Aetna to Cover My Surgery

COMMENTS (5)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.