Alongside textbooks and technology, Texas school districts have doled out stimulus money to car dealerships, Atmos Energy, and neighboring cities. Why? It’s hard to tell, reports the Dallas Morning News. Districts must report whom they’ve paid when they spend at least $25,000 in stimulus funds, but they don’t have to say what they’ve purchased—and anything less than that doesn’t require federal reporting. The state education agency asks districts to explain how they will spend their share of $7.1 billion, but the public can’t obtain the information easily. Because few districts break down the purchases, most taxpayers don’t know how their stimulus money gets spent. Federal expenditure reports add to the confusion. They include payments to companies outside the district’s normal supply chain, but offer no further detail, making some acquisitions look questionable. The districts’ answers speak more to accounting than scandal—but determining the funds’ real use remains tricky because the federal Office of Management and Budget wrote the rules to cover all agencies receiving stimulus money, not specifically school districts, said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education. “Bottom line, [this was a] great first attempt at setting up a federal reporting system,” she said. “It works quite well for some programs, but doesn’t allow as much detail at the [district] level as we would have built in if we were designing it just for ED.”
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Schools face big budget holes as stimulus runs out
The nation’s public schools are falling under severe financial stress as states slash education spending and drain federal stimulus money that staved off deep classroom cuts and widespread job losses, reports the Associated Press. School districts have already suffered big budget cuts since the recession began two years ago, but experts say the cash crunch will get a lot worse as states run out of stimulus dollars. The result in many hard-hit districts: more teacher layoffs, larger class sizes, smaller paychecks, fewer electives and extracurricular activities, and decimated summer school programs. The situation is particularly ugly in California, where school districts are preparing for mass layoffs and swelling class sizes as the state grapples with another massive budget shortfall…
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