Hundreds of ‘duplicate’ students could cost district $4 million-plus
The School District of Lee County could lose more than $4 million in funding due to “duplicate” students.
The issue was addressed during the School District of Lee County board meeting Tuesday.
The workshop presentation highlighted duplicated students due to Family Empowerment Scholarships and Personalized Education Programs.
Director of Budget Kelly Letcher said there are students who are receiving scholarships for alternative schooling while also listed as being enrolled in the district during the October FTE (full-time equivalent) student survey.
There are a total of 546 such cases.
Thirty-six students are receiving the Family Empowerment Scholarship in their school district, 10 of whom dropped out of the school after FTE, three who enrolled in the school after FTE and receive the Family Empowerment Scholarship.
There are 451 unique abilities duplicates — nine of whom dropped after FTE and one who enrolled after FTE. The personalized education program has 59 duplicates.
“I am not sure what they are going to do. This is about a $4.5 million hit to the district if they don’t make an adjustment and we lose for these students,” Letcher said.
The adjustments are based on October actual student FTE numbers. The FTE is based on instructional minutes students earned over the course of the year.
Superintendent Dr. Denise Carlin said they have been in contact with the legislature and the Department of Education concerning duplicates.
“There is no flag. We don’t receive notice of that until they enroll into the system,” she said. “The funds are already out there. That is why we brought it to the legislature. They are aware of the exact issue and trying to work through it, to rectify the situation so we are not in the same situation this time next year.”
Business Services Executive Director Sarah Cox said they wait for the state to send files and then it is identified which students are enrolled in public schools. She said some of the issues are created by the timelines – paying new and renewing the scholarships.
“The information is given to us after the fact. The accounts are frozen once identified. The student accounts are frozen,” Cox said.
She said phone calls are made to identify if they are enrolled in public schools, or if the withdraw form is completed.
“The money is sitting in limbo until there is a response from the family as to where their student is located,” Cox said.
Board member Armor Persons said the problem is that the students do not all have a student ID number when they go to a charter school, private school, or become home schooled.
“They go by their name. A definite student ID number could be an easy fix,” he said. “The legislature is looking towards that goal. That is probably the best answer from listening to the legislature. That is the problem — not a universal way to track these students like it is within our school system.”
Carlin said the legislature and Department of Education recognize the enormity of the impact and assured them they are working on the problem diligently to get it turned around.
Letcher said on day 10 for traditional schools the FTE was down 1,474 from school-by-school projections — district forecast — which resulted in pulling back approximately $9.2 million from schools at the time. The second survey, October FTE numbers, looked at the weighted FTE, base student allocation and comparable wage factors.
“We are down about 2,083 FTE from the forecast, about $8.2 million. Our charter schools are down 618 FTE, (possible loss) of $3.5 million and the district is down 1,465 FTE (possible loss) of $3.7 million,” Letcher said.
She said when they allocated funds to schools at the beginning of the year the legislation session had not ended. Letcher said it was her best guess, or projection.
“I over projected,” Letcher said.
With the school allocations being funded at higher levels of losses, the funds were at different levels. She said the base student allocation, and comparable wage factor allocated was $100.42 per WFTE more than they received.
“I allocated greater than I had to. I allocated at a higher rate that I actually received,” Letcher said for ESOL allocations. “I allocated additional over what is actually received from the state. We got hit twice on this one – the largest area of our decrease that we saw in the FTE was our ESOL population. We lost regular allocation and above allocation for that.”
Carlin said they will be more transparent with schools in terms of dollars receiving based on students walking through the door.
“There are some glitches in the process and our principals are willing to go back and work on it,” she said, adding that there were a handful of students that lost pretty significant amounts of money. “We have a mechanism in place that schools are closely monitoring. Exceptionalities and ESE funding is different than 1.0 FTE. We will be doing that work through the fall and into the winter with allocations for next year.”