State withholds $4M from 2 school districts
The State Office of Education withheld just under $4 million from Washington School District and nearly $58,000 from Tintic School District, state associate superintendent Patrick Ogden reported.
Those are the districts' monthly installments of minimum school program money — the same bucks lawmakers will start haggling over when the 2007 Legislature begins Monday.
The districts missed the Nov. 15 deadline for annual fall enrollment audit reports, which is an outside verification of their head counts. They also missed the grace period, which expired Dec. 1. The state on Dec. 5 started withholding 10 percent of those districts' state funding.
Washington School District since has filed a report and will get its $4 million back later this month, Ogden said. Tintic, however, has yet to report, he said, and has about 10 days to do so before the state withholds another month's allotment.
Tintic officials did not return a phone message seeking comment Tuesday.
"We're working with (Tintic) and hopefully will get their money to them soon," Ogden said.
"This doesn't happen very often. In fact, it never should have happened," Bills said.
Bills said his district had difficulty getting some enrollment information from a couple of schools, delaying the audit. But when the district sent audit reports — one on adult education, the other on the regular school headcount — to the State Office of Education, it tucked them in the wrong envelopes, so they didn't get into the right hands, Bills said.
Once that was discovered, Bills says he called the state office and faxed in a headcount and thought the problem would be taken care of. But Bills said the information was not passed to the appropriate person in time.
Enrollment is the key to state funding, as state dollars mostly come in a per-student form. That's why the some 21,600-student Washington District's monthly state allotment is so large compared to that of Tintic, which enrolls 262.
Ogden says maybe one or two school districts push the deadline every year but added, "I don't know that we typically withhold money." He called the current situation "rare."
Money for schools is a sore spot in Utah. The state spends the least per student in the country. It's $4,860 per student in 2003, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers the State Office of Education used in its fall 2006 fact sheet, compared to the national average of $8,019.
Education bosses, teachers and parents routinely lobby legislators for more money.
E-mail: jtcook@desnews.com
You can be the first to comment on this story.