Arizona Wrongly Distributed $62 Million In Federal Aid For Poor Students Over 4 Years
By Jim Small and Evan Wyloge
The Arizona Department of Education was alerted in March 2015 that it was improperly distributing federal funds intended to help low-income students, but the department didn’t undertake serious efforts to identify and fix the problem until early 2017.
As a result, the amount given to every school district and charter school that qualifies for the funding, known as Title I, received the wrong amount of funding for four school years. In all, the department misallocated $62.2 million, according to AZCIR’s analysis of data provided by the department.
The lion’s share of those errors resulted in school districts being given too much money during those four years: $46.8 million was over-allocated to local education agencies (LEAs), the federal term used for school districts and individual charter schools, while $14.9 million was under-allocated.