Loma Portal Elementary School is celebrating a federal grant that will go a long way in shoring up deficiencies due to budget cuts and routine holes in school fiscal programs. But the school’s principal cautions that the nature of the new money isn’t necessarily equitable and in any event is sure to be short-lived.
The school is among the most recent to receive a share of the state’s Title I Academic Achievement Program, administered under the federal No Child Left Behind plan. As with all Title I awards, the $30,000 grant recognizes the work schools undertake to raise test scores for two or more consecutive years. At present, it’s used to fund the position of program resources teacher, who assesses the greatest academic needs as the result of input from teachers and administrators.
“But we’ve always been on the bubble for Title I,” Loma Portal principal Dina Pacis said. “Next year, we won’t have it at all.”
Pacis explained that the money is granted on the basis of student participation in the school’s free and reduced-price lunch program, which reflects a student’s socioeconomic level within the San Diego Unified School District. For a school to be considered for Title I funding, 41 percent of its pupils must participate in the lunch plan. Loma Portal met that figure last year but has now slipped to 36 percent.
“The irony,” Pacis said, “is that we use that money for supports in specific subject areas. We’ve used it in the past to create the position of [program resources teacher], who noted the need for supports in math in the fourth-grade population of our school, and we saw a substantial jump in our math scores the last two years. But now, we’ll have to find ways to fund other supports, because we’ve had to eliminate that position. We won’t have that personnel on campus next year.”
Loma Portal, located at 3341 Browning St. in central Point Loma, has an annual budget of $1.8 million, the bulk of which is paid out in staff salaries and benefits. About 380 students attend the school, which offers kindergarten through fourth-grade instruction.
The stated goal of the $25 billion No Child Left Behind program, begun in 2002, is that all children will read at grade level by 2014.
Last year, Loma Portal achieved a score of 851 on the state’s Academic Performance Index (API), a standard measure of a school’s academic performance and growth. The API scale ranges from a low of 200 to a high of 1,000, and its placement on that scale is an indicator of a school’s performance level. The statewide API performance target for all schools is 800. The current statewide median score is 750.
This year marks the fifth reporting cycle for the API, established through the Public Schools Accountability Act in 1999.
Lunch plan participants must complete forms that reflect family income level, which can range from $13,000 to $18,000. In several areas, however, the forms require little accountability beyond a simple statement of income.
Nonetheless, according to Art Palkowitz, the school district’s director of resource development, “That’s the criteria we use for Title I. I’m not really going to comment on whether there’s a better one, because I don’t know of any other one. Like many things, somebody could say there’s a better one. I guess if there was, it should be told to the federal government, and hopefully they would make the change.”
But they haven’t. And until they do, the state’s schools may be saddled with an incomplete set of criteria behind the very awards designed to help them.
“Coming from a principal who’s had a few budget cuts before,” Pacis said, “I’d say it doesn’t seem very equitable. If you have a big pot of money, you want to divide that money and get it to where the kids are at. I don’t suppose that’s a possibility.”