Schools Eye Aid for Extra Load

White House seeking $2.6 billion to pay for displaced students

12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, September 17, 2005

By ROBERT DODGE / The Dallas Morning News


WASHINGTON – Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Friday that the Bush administration is proposing $2.6 billion to help schools in Texas and elsewhere educate student evacuees from hurricane-ravaged states.

JUDI BOTTONI/AP
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who visited a sixth-grade class in Bellaire, Texas, on Friday, said a new plan would pay districts up to $7,500 for each evacuee student.

She said districts would receive money for each evacuee student for 90 percent of the state's average pupil expense, up to $7,500. She said the balance would be covered by the districts and by funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The education funds will be in a disaster assistance package to be approved by Congress.

"This is a very unique situation in many ways," Ms. Spellings said in a teleconference from Houston with reporters.

Federal education officials estimated 372,000 students from Louisiana and Mississippi were displaced by the storm. Texas officials say that 41,000 have already enrolled in the state's schools, and they expect as many as 60,000.

The $7,500-per-student allocation in emergency federal aid would add up to additional funding of more than $300 million for Texas schools.

The announcement drew praise from Texas educators.

"We're thrilled," said Donald Claxton, a spokesman for the Dallas Independent School District. "We certainly were counting on the Bush administration to help us through this time, and it clearly looks like a positive step."

Said Kathy Walt, press secretary for Gov. Rick Perry: "We are hopeful Congress will be encouraged to approve this funding, which will address the extraordinary impact on Texas public schools."

The U.S. Education Department said the funds would pay for things like teacher salaries, transportation, materials and equipment, counseling, tutoring, and special services for students with disabilities.

Ms. Spellings said the funds would be distributed quarterly during the 2005-06 school year so that the money can follow students if they move from one school to another.

In a move that is already stirring controversy, the Bush administration will make $488 million available for reimbursements by check directly to families with children in private schools. Ms. Spellings noted that communities in Louisiana had higher-than-average numbers of students in private schools.

But Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, said the reimbursement represented an effort by the Bush administration to advance an ideologically based policy – vouchers for private schools.

"Vouchers do nothing to solve the problems created by Hurricane Katrina," he said. "It is opportunistic and inappropriate to raise the voucher debate at this time."

Ms. Spellings noted that in four severely damaged parishes, 61,000 of about 187,000 students were in private schools. She said the effort was not intended to provoke a voucher debate but to "provide aid for displaced families whether they have been in public or private schools."

The secretary said she also was asking Congress for expanded authority to waive federal education requirements, most notably involving the No Child Left Behind Act. But she reiterated that waivers would be granted on a case-by-case basis and that there would not be an across-the-board lifting of the program's testing and accountability standards.

The Bush administration's package also contains $227 million in assistance for colleges and universities that have accepted students who were previously enrolled in Gulf Coast institutions.

The funds also would be used to help evacuees make payments on student loans and to provide assistance to institutions in storm-damaged areas.

Staff writer Tawnell D. Hobbs in Dallas and Terrence Stutz in Austin contributed to this report.