U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) recently urged against the Department of Education creating an arbitrary threshold for private schools to use their COVID-19 federal relief funds.
Dedicated funding of $2.75 billion was made available in December 2020 for private and parochial school relief in the Emergency Assistance to Non-public Schools (EANS) Program, which ensured that services and assistance related specifically to COVID-19 were prioritized for schools that enrolled low-income students, according to an April 8 letter that Sen. Cassidy sent to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
The American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed last month, provided a second round of EANS funding and included a new provision stating that assistance was for schools that enroll a “significant percentage” of low-income students. Now, the Department of Education is trying to determine what “significant percentage” means, according to the senator’s letter.
“Our objective in adding this targeting language was to make clear the congressional intent that COVID-related services and assistance should go first to schools that serve low-income students, as they are more likely to have greater costs incurred during the pandemic,” Sen. Cassidy wrote. “However, at the same time, we sought to make sure that governors’ hands were not tied by arbitrary thresholds that determined how services and assistance are to be targeted and allocated based on a certain percentage of low-income students served.”
Sen. Cassidy noted that targeting funding in the EANS program in this manner had bipartisan support and was the byproduct of “laborious negotiations” to ensure that schools serving low-income students received some assistance regardless of the amount or percentage served by the school.
“Unfortunately, while the American Rescue Plan Act did include another round of funding for the EANS Program (EANS II), it did so by putting an unnecessary barrier on the eligibility of schools that qualify for COVID-related services and assistance,” he wrote.
The new requirement that services and assistance provided in EANS II go to schools that enroll a “significant percentage” of low-income students is vague and should not result in limiting services and assistance to only those schools that meet an arbitrary threshold determined by the Department of Education, according to Sen. Cassidy’s letter.
“If an arbitrary threshold is established, there will be schools that serve low-income students but do not qualify because they are one or two percentage points under the cutoff point, despite having significant COVID-related needs that could otherwise be met through services and assistance provided by this funding,” he wrote.