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State Rep. Toni Walker: Suspects school poverty counts.
More New Haven families are sliding into poverty — at least according to a count of students that state officials are now second-guessing.
A year ago, state and local officials tallied up 14,919 students within New Haven’s school system who are growing up in cash-strapped households.
If those numbers are right, they would mean that, 2,997 local kids had recently fallen into poverty, qualifying them for a subsidized school lunch. That would mark a 25 percent increase in just one year, for a total of about 14,900 kids whose families are struggling to pay the bills.
To reach that level, their parents would be earning less than 185 percent of the federal poverty guideline, currently set at $46,435 for a family of four. Often, the parents make severely less.
Overall, “an increase of 26,000 [subsidized lunch]-eligible students is a five percentage point increase in the number of students identified as low-income,” said Michael Morton, a spokesperson for the CT School Finance Project. “An increase of this size would put the number of children identified as low-income at 16,000 higher than the highest [free & reduced price lunch participation] count in recent history at a period of declining enrollment statewide.”
If the numbers were right, they would mean that New Haven could collect millions more in funding, due to a special bonus for poverty in the state’s Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula, the primary mechanism for redistributing school funds to poorer cities that increased New Haven’s share by $2.69 million this year despite a decline in total enrollment.
If the numbers were right, they would also change the way New Haven is graded by the state, due to accountability metrics that award extra points based on the performance of high-needs students, including their scores on standardized tests, their chronic absenteeism and their six-year graduation rate.
But the Connecticut State Department of Education has said that it believes that their statewide numbers might be inaccurate.
In a legislative hearing earlier this year, Dianne Wentzell, the state’s former education commissioner, said that it’s hard to know exactly how many students are living in poverty.
Currently, the primary measure is the number of students who qualify for a free or reduced school lunch, but Wentzell said there are lots of issues with using that total.
“We have struggled for a long time to really try to find the best possible variable to represent need among our kids for the ECS formula,” she told state lawmakers in March. “The free and reduced [lunch] count had some inherent instabilities in it.”
For starters, Wentzell said, most of the family incomes are self-reported. Some parents might not turn the paperwork in to prove their eligibility, or they might not update their incomes after a job loss midway through the school year.
The state does, however, come up with some of the numbers on their own, which is how most of New Haven’s families are tallied.
Any children whose parents receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, as well as foster kids, homeless youth and Head Start participants can all be signed up directly.
Last year, the state also started including the number of kids who receive health insurance through HUSKY.
“We do believe that the direct certification is going to capture that more accurately and especially over time,” Wentzell said.
But officials said they weren’t expecting such a big jump right away, including spikes of 3,145 in Bridgeport, 2,997 in New Haven and 608 in Hartford.
How did districts explain what was going on? “All of them, without fail actually, came back to us and said it was because now there were HUSKY kids included in [direct certification]. And I don’t think that that’s probably, necessarily the answer,” said Cathy Dempsy, the state department of education’s chief financial officer.
“One of the things that we are doing right now is an audit of the districts that have the largest discrepancies, because 26,000 [more] students, it just doesn’t seem reasonable,” Dempsy went on. “Back at the office, that is something that they are working on right now to try and figure out what happened. Is it a matter of the fact that the districts didn’t understand the instructions?”
But in recent months, a state spokesperson said the counts were right.
“Ajit [Gopalakrishnan, the state’s chief performance officer] isn’t sure where you’re getting the info that the data isn’t accurate,” Peter Yazbak, an agency spokesperson, said in an email. “While the rules have changed compared to five years ago, we’re closer now to the accurate picture than we were in the past.”
He did not respond to multiple follow-up emails asking how to square that with what Dempsy told lawmakers.
District officials also did not answer questions sent by email earlier this month.
New Haven State Rep. Toni Walker, who teaches at the city’s Adult & Continuing Education Center, said she worries that the state’s numbers are inaccurate too. But she said that’s because she thinks the state is still undercounting the childhood poverty rate.
She said the state should ask families directly, rather than relying on who signs up for safety-net programs, which might have limited participation, especially from Spanish speakers.
“I’m just concerned that we are not getting everybody,” Walker said. “Families that want their kids to have lunch and food while they’re in school, they tend to apply for that a lot faster than some of the other entities that you mention.”
Experts agree that immigrants, in particular, might be missing from the counts.
And it could be getting worse soon, as the Trump administration rolls out a new “public charge” rule, that could allow the federal government to deny permanent residency to those who’ve relied on welfare programs.
Even though the rule creates exceptions that would allow kids to take advantage of some public-assistance programs, especially school-based Medicaid, parents might not know about those technicalities.
Experts from the CT School Finance Project have suggested counting all English language learners as if they were also from low-income families for state funding formulas to err on the side of making sure undocumented students aren’t left out.
When is NHPS data ever accurate?