Education Commissioner says rejecting federal dollars would not be simple

Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds (Photo by Tennessee Department of Education)

Tennessee Department of Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds told state lawmakers there’s no easy way for the state to avoid federal education requirements by simply rejecting federal education dollars.

Some Republican lawmakers have expressed an interest in rejecting more than a billion in federal education dollars to avoid complying those requirements and Tennessee General Assembly leaders created a Joint Working Group on Federal Education Funding to evaluate the idea’s feasibility earlier this year. This week members of that group are holding three hearings including one Tuesday morning highlighted by Commissioner Reynolds and her administration.

“Many federal requirements are also codified in Tennessee state law and the issue of accepting or rejecting federal funding is a complicated one, with numerous legal implications and uncertainties. For these reasons it’s hard to project exactly how decisions would play out if made,” said Reynolds.

Commissioner Reynold’s staff told members of the joint working group that local school districts receive about 10 percent of their funding from four federal grants including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, and the USDA Child Nutrition program.

All 148 school districts receive one or more of these federal grants and 62 percent of the state’s public schools receive federal funding to implement an ESEA Title I program to serve economically disadvantaged students.

The department says federal funds support close to a million public students in Tennessee, including more than 151 thousand economically disadvantaged students, more than 128 thousand students receiving special education services, 66 thousand English language learners, and more than 78 thousand career cluster concentrators.

The USDA Child Nutrition funds provide dollars to multiple nutrition programs including the National School Lunch Program. The department says those funds combined to provide children with 161 million meals last school year.

Tennessee Department of Education Deputy Commissioner Sam Pearcy told lawmakers it would be hard to predict whether the state could actually pick and choose what federal funding to accept because the functions of each federal grant are bundled together.“Our other (ESEA) Titles stem from how Title I is calculated so if we don’t necessarily take Title I, that’s gonna create some additional questions about how those others might work,” said Pearcy. “We just don’t know what the federal government would do.”

Pearcy told lawmakers because of this, the state stopped could put an entire federal education grant at risk if lawmakers chose to stop accepting any part of it.  That would mean a loss of more than $469 million for ESEA, more than $310 million in IDEA money, and more than $30 million in Perkins grant funding.

The department also told lawmakers that rejecting some of these federal grant dollars wouldn’t remove the state completely from having to pay for the services they fund. Assistant Commissioner Debby Thompson pointed out the requirements provided for students with disabilities that are in the federal IDEA grant are also codified in state law.

“We would still need to implement what’s in state law,” said Thompson.

Members of the joint working group are scheduled to hear from the Tennessee Comptroller on Wednesday along with a representative from the James Madison Institute and the Center for Practical Federalism.