Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Lancaster ISD “Compensatory Education Audit” late and unviewable

By Jeff Melcher

By July 27, selected school districts across Texas were tasked to review and report the state of their finances with regard to "Compensatory Education" funding. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) provides extra funding to school districts with significant problems or populations of "at risk" students or who have failed to show progress on key education indicators. These extra or "compensatory" funds are intended by TEA to make up for and correct local deficiencies -- "earmarked" for extended programs, extra course materials, and other out-of-the-ordinary efforts. They are not simply supplemental to "more of the same".

As such, TEA requires that the earmarked funds show and demonstrate that they have been spent as intended. An extra audit for the previous fiscal year is required of those particular funds and programs. Lancaster was one of the districts selected for such an audit, and in late August, Superintendent Larry Lewis told the Board of Trustees that the district had completed that special "comp ed" audit. (It was not clear from his public remarks that the district had the reports in by TEA's deadline.)

Public files now available on the TEA website show the district submitted the report for 2005-2006 on August 16 -- almost three weeks late.

As of Tuesday night, and after the district had been notified by TEA the previous Friday, the report file -- apparently in the TEA-required PDF format -- could not be viewed. The electronic file structure was corrupt and PDF viewers could not display any report contents.

It is therefore still not clear whether or not the district is spending earmarked "comp ed" funds as TEA expects.

Students submitting assigned work in unreadable files, without hard copy, and weeks past deadline, will no doubt enjoy pointing out the example set by their elders to any potentially critical instructors.

This story was submitted by a member of the Pegasus News community.

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• Lancaster ISD

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