The following priority notice contains two important notices for districts.
1. Urgent Title V eligibility verification
To align the Title V (Rural Education Achievement Program -REAP) Grant timeline to other Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Federal Programs, the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) has revised data collection and submission dates with a more aggressive timeline. This revision will allow Title V (REAP) Federal funds to be awarded to states on July 1 of each program year.
Each individual school district must verify their data and contact Daniel Weeks (Daniel.R.Weeks@maine.gov), Title V Coordinator of any inaccurate data by December 6th.
Several districts have yet to provide complete Average Daily Attendance (ADA) data. These gaps directly affect funding for ALL Title V grants (Small Rural Schools Achievement (SRSA) and the Rural Low-Income Schools (RLIS)). Please review your data carefully.
We realize that the turnaround time is very limited, and for that we apologize. Initial communication from the USDOE was received on November 21, 2017, which provided Maine DOE minimal time to collect and compile the necessary information into a single tangible spreadsheet. This spreadsheet must now be reviewed by school districts for accuracy. Each individual school district must verify their data and contact Daniel Weeks (Daniel.R.Weeks@maine.gov), Title V Coordinator of any inaccuracies by December 6th.
The data to be reviewed can be located here: http://www.maine.gov/doe/rural/
Please verify the following data elements:
- Column M (Average Daily Attendance)
- Column Q (Alternate Poverty Data for districts with a population of less than 20,000)
- Column S (FY17 Title II A Award)
- Column T (FY17 Title IV A Award)
Please note:
Column M (ADA) directly affects funding for ALL Title V grants (SRSA and the RLIS).
Column Q (Alt. Poverty Data) directly affects eligibility and funding for the RLIS Grant.
Column S & T (Title IIA and IVA Awards) directly affect funding for the SRSA Grant.
For further questions or concerns please contact Daniel Weeks, Title V Coordinator at (207) 624-6749 or Daniel.R.Weeks@maine.gov.
2. Graduation and Dropout Reporting dates further delayed
On November 20th the Department issued a notice announcing that the due date for Graduation and Dropout Reporting was extended to December 21st. The Department has just learned that the data needed prior to launching the updated Graduation and Dropout reporting module in NEO is not yet available. The NEO module went through an update to fulfill federal reporting regulations and the Department is not willing to launch the updated module before running test scenarios to ensure product quality.
The Department hopes to learn early next week when the data will be available. The Department has notified the federal government of this delay and will issue a new reporting timeline when information is confirmed.
The Department is aware of the angst that this second delay may cause. We assure you our teams are doing everything in our power to get efficient and accurate data systems operative and available for district reporting.
For further questions contact the Maine DOE Helpdesk. Further updates will be forthcoming through the Maine DOE Newsroom.