Education Dept to Cut Off Federal Funding for Some Rural Schools

Yes, that is a real headline.  Betsy DeVos quielty destroying our educational system and hence our future.

A bookkeeping change at the Education Department will kick hundreds of rural school districts out of a federal program that for nearly two decades has funneled funding to some of the most geographically isolated and cash-strapped schools in the United States.

More than 800 schools stand to lose thousands of dollars from the Rural and Low-Income School Program because the department has abruptly changed how districts are to report how many of their students live in poverty.

Trump is waging war on America’s rural communities. First, it was the tariffs that hurt farmers, now he's targeting students in rural school districts.

The department said it would strictly enforce a requirement that in order to get funding, districts must use data from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates to determine whether 20 percent of their area’s school-age children live below the poverty line.

For about 17 years, the department has allowed schools to use the percentage of students who qualify for federally subsidized free-and-reduced price meals, a common proxy for school poverty rates, because census data can miss residents in rural areas. 

This is wrong. We need to make sure we are investing in K-12 education – especially in our rural communities.

The department’s notifications rattled rural districts, which have come to rely on the program to supplement the costs of services that are far less accessible to rural students, like technology, mental health and guidance counselors, and full-day kindergarten.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/us/politics/rural-schools-funding-cut.html