Friday, April 8, 2011

Impact of government shutdown on local education

There's much speculation swirling over what happens if the federal government shuts down; the NY Times today had a good list. One item that never seems to get mentioned is federal aid to education.
Title I and other aid of its ilk are reimbursements: in other words, the districts spends the money and then asks the federal government for the money so spent. This is done on a monthly basis and we are currently up-to-date on our reimbursements.
Because whatever budget eventually gets passed will have to include money for the time the government was shut down, one assumes (and the best guess right now) is that we would just get our reimbursements late. We'd have an interesting couple of Finance and Operations meetings where we shuffled money from one account to another, to cover what's usually reimbursed by Title I and others, and then shuffled it back to close the books at year end once the reimbursements came in.
Frankly, I'm more concerned about the proposed CUTS to these funds for next year's budget.

UPDATE: Here's the word from D.C. ('though now I'm confused about summer funding...)

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