In the federal government’s view, an estimated 1,339 poor schoolchildren live within the affluent Arlington Heights-based School District 59. But the state counted 3,536 poor students when it doled out a “poverty grant” to the district this school year.
Across Illinois, the state counted some 1 million low-income students — more than twice the federal numbers — in calculating poverty payments to districts, a Tribune review of school finance data shows.
The more low-income children, the more poverty funding districts get. And the state’s use of an unusual and little-understood formula that liberally counts children as disadvantaged when they are enrolled in various social service programs has spurred a sharp rise in low-income students, the newspaper’s analysis shows.
Those numbers, in turn, have prompted skyrocketing poverty grant expenditures totaling nearly $10 billion over the past decade — money that also goes to the wealthiest school districts in the state, including Arlington Heights-based District 59.
“We really do have a lot of poor kids,” said Assistant Superintendent Ruth Gloede, whose district received a $4.4 million poverty grant this year.
The struggle for money during the state’s fiscal crisis has spurred questions and criticism about how the poverty funding is distributed and which districts should get first claim. Of chief concern is that, with so many more kids defined as low-income, the poverty grants are accounting for an increasingly larger chunk of overall state education aid.
That general state aid is designed to distribute money equitably and help districts that have lower property values and fewer local tax dollars to support their schools.
The “general state aid” for public schools is calculated at $4.8 billion this year. About $1.8 billion goes toward poverty grants, about 37 percent of the total, up from about 12 percent a decade ago, records show.
The Tribune analysis of state data showed that:
*Chicago suburban districts have seen the greatest gains in low-income students and poverty funding. So have many affluent districts scattered across the state. In fact, the 72 most property-rich districts in Illinois — the majority of them in the Chicago area — received $22 million in poverty grants, according to state data.
*Some well-off districts with small but rising numbers of low-income kids did not qualify for grants before but now receive poverty money. More than 100 of those districts, in communities including Kenilworth, Winnetka, Wilmette and Lake Forest, received grants this year, even though some already spend more than $20,000 per pupil.
*At the same time, Chicago Public Schools’ share of the poverty money has declined, while still representing $796 million of the roughly $1.8 billion in poverty grants offered this year. Two dozen of the state’s most impoverished districts also saw drops in poverty funding.
Among those poorer districts is south Cook County’s Gen. George Patton School District 133 in Riverdale, where enrollment has declined, lowering the poverty grant to about $1.1 million compared with a peak of $1.5 million over the last few years.
“How can you justify taking money from this district when we have so little?” Patton Superintendent Frankie Sutherland said.
Calculating poverty
Over the last decade, the state implemented a formula that counts low-income children enrolled in social service programs for needy families, including Medicaid, children’s health insurance and food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Numbers in some of those programs have ballooned, in part because families can enroll and still have income above federal poverty levels.
For example, the base poverty level for a family of four this school year is about $23,000 under federal guidelines. But income eligibility for a children’s heath care program — used in the state’s low-income count — can be twice that, about $46,000.
lllinois’ low-income population at schools spiked after the state began using so-called DHS or Department of Human Services counts, from 508,600 to almost 1.1 million between 2001 and 2011.
In contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau data on poverty in school districts — used to provide federal poverty money to states — estimates 443,000 children ages 5 to 17 living in poverty in Illinois, a figure that includes both public and private school students.
The state’s figure eclipses even the number of students eligible for free and reduced-price meals at Illinois schools — a measure that most states use to determine how much poverty money should be handed out, said Michael Griffith, a senior policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based research and policy group.
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Griffith said he doesn’t know of any other state that uses Illinois’ array of social service programs to count low-income children, in part because collecting that data has been a challenge.
Tim Knowles, director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, questions who is benefiting from the Illinois formula.
“I would argue that this has probably been a formula that has been adjusted and readjusted to meet political interests, particularly in the form of spreading the pot across a greater array of communities instead of concentrating it in the communities that need it the most,” Knowles said.
It’s not unusual for states to provide extra money to districts with disadvantaged kids. Being poor hurts students and lowers achievement, researchers say, and children in high-poverty schools need extra help to make the grade.
The debate is over how much money is needed and how it should be distributed.
Every bit helps
Gen. George Patton’s Sutherland said the high concentration of low-income children in her district and their extreme need should make such districts the primary focus of poverty grants.
“There are so many different degrees to poverty,” she said. “Are you talking about kids who can’t get school supplies, or are you talking about kids who can’t eat?”
But in wealthy Lake Forest, “every bit that we get helps,” said Jennifer Hermes, assistant superintendent of business services for Elementary District 67 and High School District 115.
“We are still under the same mandates as everybody else, and part of the original funding concepts of public education is that if we are under these same mandates, then everyone should get something,” she said.
Each of the Lake Forest-based districts had fewer than 100 low-income students and received about $26,000 in poverty grants this year.
DuPage’s Burr Ridge-based Community Consolidated School District 180 saw the biggest percentage increase in poverty funding in Illinois — nearly 3000 percent. It received about $1.4 million this year, compared with $47,500 in 2005-06.
District 180 is among the 72 most property-rich districts in the state, but Superintendent Tom Schneider said it draws many children from a 1,200-unit subsidized housing complex.
The number of low-income children in his district jumped from 99 to 586 between 2001 and 2011.
In Niles School District 71, another of the state’s most property-rich districts, Superintendent Amy Kruppe said her diverse one-school district is a place of “haves and have-nots,” and she needs the poverty funding to help her disadvantaged students.
The district received about $234,000 in poverty money this year and is using it to station multiple teachers and specialists in classrooms where they can help small groups or individuals.
“We rely on it just as everyone else does,” Kruppe said. The number of low-income children in her district has grown from 27 to 233 in the past decade.
No formula for allocating poverty funding is perfect, experts say.
Before the early 2000s, Illinois used U.S. census data for counting low-income kids, but district officials increasingly complained about that.
“At some point you were working with figures that were 10 years old, in communities that had poverty going up significantly or down in those 10 years,” said Dean Clark, a veteran member of the Education Funding Advisory Board.
That board recommended a more current low-income measurement of schoolchildren enrolled in social service programs. It was aware at the time that the DHS numbers were going to be far higher than U.S. census numbers and would increase the size of the grant program, records show.
Also at issue, Clark recalled, was that districts with less than 20 percent low-income children in their enrollment weren’t eligible for any poverty money. The advisory board thought they should get something — though less than districts with higher concentrations of poverty.
So in 2002, lawmakers approved allowing those districts to get poverty funding of at least $355 per pupil, a figure that stands today. The grants go up to a maximum of $2,994 per pupil, depending on the concentration of poverty in a district.
A year later, lawmakers also approved the plan to move to the DHS count of low-income children.
Larry Joseph, director of the Fiscal Policy Center at the advocacy group Voices for Illinois Children, prepared a study in 2010 showing what he said were significant flaws in the poverty grant formula, including the mushrooming DHS low-income count that caused disparities across districts.
His study determined that attendance figures in the formula worked in an unexpected way: Higher average attendance results in smaller poverty payouts because it reduces the concentration of low-income kids.
“There’s an incentive for truancy,” said Ted Dabrowski of the Illinois Policy Institute, which has raised concerns about the poverty grant program, including what he believes to be a lack of transparency and accountability.
The Illinois State Board of Education considered reducing the poverty grant dollars per pupil, but nothing was decided.
State School Superintendent Chris Koch said a larger conversation about retooling all aspects of the school funding formula should occur, and “poverty grants have to be on the table.”
‘All these advantages’
In Illinois, several school administrators interviewed by the Tribune said they had no idea how the state calculated the poverty grants.
“It’s just kind of a mystery as to where some of these numbers come from,” said Angie Smith, assistant superintendent for business and operations in the sprawling Plainfield District 202.
U.S. census numbers show 1,730 poor children there. But more than 6,000 were counted in calculating the district’s nearly $3 million poverty grant, records show.
Glenn McGee, president of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, used to be superintendent of the wealthy Wilmette School District 39. He said he doesn’t think his former district should get any poverty money.
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Wilmette received about $47,000 this year for about 150 low-income students, state data show.
“They have all these advantages,” McGee said. “That money could be going to communities that have higher concentrations of poverty.”
In Arlington Heights-based District 59, Gloede said her property-rich district gets little regular state aid, so the poverty dollars are crucial to help its disadvantaged children, many of whom live in mobile home parks near O’Hare International Airport.
Gloede knows there has been talk of reducing money to rich districts but offered this plea:
“Don’t take my poverty money,” she said.