OAKLAND, LAUSD TO GET SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT GRANTS AFTER ALL …BUT CRENSHAW, MANUAL ARTS & WASHINGTON PREP DENIED $16,585,478

by John Fensterwald in The Educated Guess

August 25th, 2010-- With an hours-old waiver from the federal government in hand, the state Board of Education on Tuesday approved spending $413 million to turn around 92 of the state’s lowest performing schools. That will include $100 million from a reserve that the feds now said could be divided among two dozen schools in Oakland, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and other districts that had argued they’d been unfairly excluded.

The vote ends the suspense for districts that started the school year having made commitments to hire teacher coaches, add programs and extend the school day without knowing whether they’d get federal School Improvement Grant money. Some had put off  critical planning for their school transformations during the summer because of approval delays. The larger schools will receive as much as $6 million over three years as long as they adopt one of four improvement models prescribed by the Obama administration.

Faced with time pressures, board members approved the grant recommendations of Department of Education staff with some sharply voiced misgivings.

• The department revised the distribution formula somewhat to reduce huge grants for small and medium-size schools. But apparent inequities remained. Doug McRae, a retired test publisher from Monterey, pointed to “Golden Fleece” awards that he said indicated poor scrutiny by the department: $4 million for a 131-student charter school in San Diego with millions going to the district for oversight and possibly services and millions also going to the Coachella Valley district office for oversight of a high school on the list, among his examples. But Deputy Supt. Deb Sigman countered that all of the proposals had been independently vetted and warned that changing grant amounts for some schools could delay or jeopardize grants for all schools. It wasn’t apparent why that was true.

• The same was true with  grants for thee charter schools. Board members would have eliminated all money for  them on the grounds that lowest-performing charters should be shut down, not rewarded. But the board backed off on Sigman’s advice. Board President Ted Mitchell said that the board should consider instead new regs for revoking charters of failing schools.

• Board members from Los Angeles also questioned the department’s recommendation to deny any money to three Los Angeles Unified schools run by non-profit partnerships, , including Crenshaw High. The board heard testimony that in at least one case, Manual Arts Senior High, the school’s disqualification was caused by budget changes that the Los Angeles Unified district office made to direct more money to itself without informing the school. Board members promised to look into the dispute further but felt hamstrung to reject the recommendation.

SCHOOL	AMOUNT GRANT APPLICATION REDUCED/DENIED	REASON FOR REDUCTION see:http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/ag/ag/yr10/documents/aug2410item02a3.doc
Crenshaw Senior High	$5,590,885.00	Significant discrepancies between the budget narrative and the budget summary. Not enough detail has been provided to justify many of the expenditures.
George Washington Prep. High	$5,403,708.00	Significant discrepancies between the budget narrative and the budget summary. Not enough detail has been provided to justify many of the expenditures.
Manual Arts Senior High	$5,590,885.00	Significant discrepancies between the budget narrative and the budget summary. Not enough detail has been provided to justify many of the expenditures.

budget detail added by 4LAKids

The $416 million allotment to California is a huge infusion of one-time money to improve failing schools. The federal government wanted states to put a quarter of it aside. But granting the waiver to use it now means that the additional 96 schools on the lowest performing list that didn’t get a SIG grant will have little  money to apply for next year. McRae had urged the board to set aside $50 million by capping how much district offices could take and by further restricting grants by school size, but the board adopted the department’s proposal intact.