California – Adjustments to Title I Allocations – NCLB Policy Letters to States

July 24, 2002

Ms Janet Sterling
Director
School Fiscal Services Division
California Department of Education
721 Capitol Mall
P.0. Box 944272
Sacramento, California 94244-2720

Dear Ms. Sterling:

This is in response to your letter to Joseph F. Johnson, Jr. requesting approval of the procedures that the California Department of Education (CDE) wishes to use in adjusting school year (SY) 2001-02 and SY 2002-03 Title I, Part A allocations for certain school districts located in Kern County for which this Department had determined the allocations.

These adjustments in our allocations are needed to correct for errors that the Census Bureau made in mapping the boundaries of four high school districts in Kern county. This mapping error resulted in a mis-tabulation of census poverty children among the high school districts and the elementary school districts that feed into them. In a letter of April 16, 2002, the Geography Division of the Census Bureau indicated that a significant number of high school age children were mistakenly assigned to the feeder elementary school districts rather than to the four high school districts. As a result, the elementary districts were over-funded and the high school districts were under-funded. The four high school districts affected were Delano Union High, Kern Union High, Taft Union High, and Wasco Union High.

In the procedures outlined for adjusting the Department’s Title I, Part A allocations, you indicated that CDE would first derive a census poverty number for each of the affected districts by taking the total number of 1997 census poor children for all of the affected elementary and high school districts and distributing that number based on each district’s share of poverty children using an alternative poverty measure. The alternative poverty measure used would consist of free lunch data (weighted by 0.3) and data from California’s Aid for Families with Dependent Children program (weighted by 0.7). After combining the derived census count with counts of other children included in the Title I formula, CDE would determine which districts were eligible and redistribute the allocations that we determined among the affected elementary and high school districts based on their respective shares of the derived formula data.

We believe that your procedures for deriving census numbers for these districts to reflect census mapping changes and adjusting LEA allocations for SY 2001-02 and SY 2002-03 based on these derived census numbers are reasonable.

If you have any questions or need further clarification, please contact Sandy Brown of my staff at (202) 260-0976.

Sincerely,

Jacquelyn C. Jackson, Ed.D.
Acting Director
Student Achievement and School Accountability Programs
Office of Elementary and Secondary Education

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California - Adjustments to Title I Allocations - NCLB Policy Letters to States