March 1 - Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools

Kansas Liberty: 06 March 2009Kansas taxpayers may have spent almost $52 million for the 2008-2009 school year onstudents who were actually ineligible for free lunches.Education committee attempts tountangle 'at-risk' funding messThe House Education Committee heard testimony yesterday on legislation that would alter how at-riskfunding is allocated to schools by incorporating U.S Census Bureau data into the distribution formula forfunding.Currently the at-risk funding is based on the number of students who qualify for free lunches under federalguidelines. The result can be a misdirection of resources resulting in massive spending errors. In 2008-2009, these errors may cost Kansas taxpayers more than $50 million.That figure comes from data included in a November 2006 Performance Audit Report in the LegislativeDivision of Post Audit that showed approximately 17 percent of Kansas students determined to qualify forthe free lunches were actually ineligible for the benefits.The report calculated the state paid out $19 million for at-risk benefits for about 23,000 ineligible studentsin the 2005-2006 school year. In 2008-2009, that figure may have risen to $52 million.Rep. Clay Aurand, R-Courtland, and chair of the Education Committee, said the legislation, HB 2357, seeksto ensure that school districts which deserve the funding are the ones to which the additional at-risk fundsare actually allocated.“I want to stop sending more money to the wrong schools for the wrong reasons,” Aurand toldthe committee. “And we should all agree that the money should go to the schools where thekids in poverty are.”Free-lunch students must have household incomes of less than 130 percent of the poverty level and themajority of the students determined to be ineligible through the report had household incomes greaterthan that allowed amount.The research used a random sample of 500 Kansas students who had been classified asqualifying for free lunches. From those 500 students, 85 were found to be ineligible for thefree-lunch program, with 62 households of those students having an income of 20 percent orhigher than the limit, and 12 of those 62 earned double the income of the limit.One of the students who was receiving free-lunch benefits had a household annual income of more than$168,000.According to the executive summary of the report, “many households are able to under-report their incomeand still receive free lunches because federal law requires school district officials to accept theirapplications at face value.”Cheryl Semmel, executive director of the United School Administrators of Kansas, said in her testimonythat it was important to note the Legislative Post Audit had access to information that Kansas schooldistricts can not legally obtain.“There has been continued speculation that school districts are over-identifying students,”