I got a frantic question from a parent this morning about San Diego Unified repaying money to Title 1 and other federal programs that inspectors found was misspent: Does this mean that schools are going to lose Title 1 money?
No. In fact, it could mean more of those dollars for schools. This was not terribly clear in my original post on the settlement, so let me go ahead and break this down some more.
San Diego Unified used some money from Title 1, which is federal money for disadvantaged kids, to help pay for a bonus for exiting employees. The feds weren’t happy with that. So now the school district has to repay money into those same federally funded programs for local schools. It cannot use federal money to do that, with a few exceptions. So it has to find other dollars to put back into its own Title 1 and other programs.
Where will it find those dollars and who will it affect? I’m still trying to find out. Check back for updates soon.