Jackson Free Press

Jackson is focusing more of its financial resources on schools with the neediest students, bucking a national trend, U.S. Department of Education data suggest.

In many school districts around the country, however, low-income schools are not getting their fair share of state and local funds. Many school districts are directing state and local funds to relatively affluent schools and depending on federal Title I money to fill in the gaps at low-income schools, the nationwide study of more than 80,000 schools in more than 13,000 school districts found.

Title I provides federal money for high-need, high-poverty schools. Districts are supposed to provide the same level of funding to poor schools that they do to more affluent ones, with Title I funds providing an extra boost to schools with the poorest children.

While Jackson has plenty of low-income schools, it has no affluent public schools to compare them with. Data from the 2008-2009 school year released with the study showed that all JPS schools surveyed were eligible to receive Title I funds.

At each JPS school, more than half the students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches--an indicator of low incomes. At all but four schools, 75 percent or more of the students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

Marcus Cheeks, state Title I director for the MDE, said earlier this year that only a small percentage of Mississippi's 152 school districts have a mix of Title I-eligible and ineligible schools.

"There are only about 2 percent of the school districts across the state that would have a direct comparison between Title and non-Title schools," Cheeks said. "Every school district in this state is receiving Title I funding."

Although all its schools benefit from Title I, Jackson still tends to allocate more money per student to poorer schools. Of the 32 schools with 90 percent or more of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, 20 received above-average per-pupil funding from state or local sources. Of the 24 schools with fewer low-income students, only four had above-average per-pupil expenditures.

The nationwide study found that many districts are using Title I funds to fill gaps left in state and local education budgets, and low-income schools do not get the extra advantage that Title I funding is supposed to provide. At more than 40 percent of the low-income schools the department studied, districts sent less state and local funding to low-income schools and depended on Title I funds to make up for the lack of other spending.

Title I requires schools to provide comparable services from state and local sources to low-income schools, but the Department of Education has not tracked spending at the school level before.

This study came out of information gathered through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which requires districts to report school-level expenditures per pupil, rather than more general, district-wide information.

"Educators across the country understand that low-income students need extra support and resources to succeed, but in far too many places policies for assigning teachers and allocating resources are perpetuating the problem rather than solving it," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement.

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