Biden Asks Congress to Double Title I on top of Stimulus Dollars: Why Is All This Money Needed? | janresseger

Biden Asks Congress to Double Title I on top of Stimulus Dollars: Why Is All This Money Needed? | janresseger

Biden Asks Congress to Double Title I on top of Stimulus Dollars: Why Is All This Money Needed?

On March 11, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, COVID-19 relief bill, which will provide $125.4 billion for state K-12 education programs including investments to help kids catch up, provide after-school programs, offer summer enrichment, undertake facilities upgrades and “stabilize and diversify the educator workforce and rebuild the educator pipeline.”

And on April 9, President Biden proposed doubling the annual Title I allocation in the administration’s FY 2022 federal budget proposal. Title I was created in 1965 as a federal supplement to compensate for inadequate state funding for the nation’s school districts that serve concentrations of poor children.  It has been chronically underfunded. Chalkbeat explains: “The proposal would take the Title I program from its current $16.5 billion to $36.5 billion… The budget plan also includes a boost for special education funding… more counselors, nurses, and mental health professionals in schools… more for child care and Head Start… a big increase for the relatively small Community Schools program (schools with wraparound medical and social services for families)… and more money for the Office of Civil Rights.”  Of course, Biden’s budget is just a proposal for now—the first stage in several rounds of negotiations with Congress before a final federal budget will be passed by September 30.

None of us can fully comprehend what all these billions of dollars will mean. Probably some of us wonder whether they are really needed. In fact, those of us who live in school districts able to pass regular local property tax levies might imagine that all American schools probably look like ours—adequately maintained and at least adequately staffed. But in a CONTINUE READING: Biden Asks Congress to Double Title I on top of Stimulus Dollars: Why Is All This Money Needed? | janresseger

Coronavirus means free school meals across the U.S. What if that stayed?

Coronavirus means free school meals across the U.S. What if that stayed?

Coronavirus means school food is free across the U.S. What if it stayed that way?

Free school meals, the gold standard for child nutrition advocates, may be one good thing to come out of the coronavirus’s effect on the future of education

YAKIMA, Wash. — Tracy Renecker has been working almost nonstop since the coronavirus pandemic set in. A kitchen manager with the 16,000-student school district serving this central Washington city,  Renecker has been ordering ingredients, packing entrees and sides, and filling grocery sacks to build the five-breakfast, five-lunch kits passed out at the drive-up distribution point outside Washington Middle School, where she works.

Renecker knows what the bags of cut vegetables, single-serve cereal boxes and heat-and-eat bowls mean to parents picking them up each week. They are a lifeline to families, including her own. The school meal program “helps to stretch our money,” said Renecker, a former nursing assistant raising a 6-year-old and a 13-year-old in Yakima.

“I was a hungry child at one point, and I would hate to see any child go hungry,” she said. “I know they can’t learn when they’re worried about when they’re going to be fed.”

Yakima, an agricultural hub surrounded by orchards amid dry hills, was hit hard by both the pandemic and the attendant economic collapse. Summer brought spikes in infections — at least three of which sent children to the hospital — and unemployment, which nearly doubled in the area.

Many Yakima families qualified for food stamps or other forms of federal assistance before the pandemic hit, and that softened the blow in one specific way: The city’s schools already offered meals to all students for free, year-round. That’s because they participate in several U.S. Department of Agriculture programs, including one allowing school CONTINUE READING: Coronavirus means free school meals across the U.S. What if that stayed?