Parents at Oak View and New Hampshire Estates elementary schools in Silver Spring are urging Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) to ensure that Oak View can maintain staffing and its summer school program now that it will no longer be designated to receive some federal aid.
Oak View is among four schools—including Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville and Viers Mill and Strathmore elementary schools in Silver Spring—that will lose their Title 1 status in the 2024-2025 school year. New Hampshire Estates, which serves kindergarten through second grade, is the feeder school for Oak View, which serves third through fifth grades.
Title I is a federal aid program under the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 that provides grants to schools with high economic needs and student poverty rates, according to the MCPS website. At MCPS, whether a school received Title 1 status was typically determined by the number of students receiving free and reduced-price meals (FARMS). The district is allocated a certain amount of Title I funding annually from the federal government. For the current school year, MCPS received more than $51 million in federal Title I aid to serve 45 schools, according to its fiscal year 2024 operating budget.
According to MCPS, Title I schools receive funding that supports additional instructional specialists, teachers and paraeducators, summer school, an extended day program and family engagement programs, supplemental funds for instructional and school materials, professional development and other school initiatives.
Title I status can change from year to year due to changes in poverty levels at schools, school officials said. However, changes in status for the coming school year came into effect after MCPS began participating in a federal free meals program during the current school year. The Community Eligibility Provision program provides free breakfast and lunch for all students in schools and districts in low-income areas. This school year, 58 schools are participating in the program, with the majority being elementary schools including Oak View.
The district’s participation in this program is a “win” for the school district and its students receiving free breakfast and lunch at school, Chief Operating Officer Brian Hull told the school board at its Feb. 22 meeting. However, it altered how the district calculates school poverty rates and therefore resulted in the change of Title 1 status for the four elementary schools, causing concern among parents, teachers and principals.
In addition to the four schools losing their status, six schools will now be designated as Title I in the next school year, starting when the next fiscal year begins July 1. They are Benjamin Banneker Middle School in Burtonsville and the following elementary schools: East Silver Spring, S. Christa McAuliffe and Waters Landing in Germantown, Meadow Hall in Rockville and Strawberry Knoll in Gaithersburg.
Worried about the impact of Oak View losing its Title 1 status, the joint PTA serving New Hampshire Estates, which serves, grades kindergarten through second grade, and Oak View, which serves grades three through five, is conducting a letter-writing campaign asking MCPS to:
- Fund summer school for the students who need it this upcoming summer;
- Provide replacement funding that will enable Oak View Elementary to maintain current staffing levels in the 2024-2025 school year; and
- Revise its Title I formula so it is inclusive of all low-income students regardless of whether they receive federal benefits.
In a Feb. 23 letter to the Oak View community, Principal Jeff Cline said the loss of Title I status is “significant for our school” and expressed concern with the transition of students from New Hampshire Estates to Oak View.
“The needs of the [NHE] students and their families will transfer to Oak View once the second graders move into third grade and, consequently, they will not receive any of the supports that our current students and families receive as part of being a Title I school,” he wrote.
Annie Tulkin, parent of a second grade student at New Hampshire Estates and member of the joint PTA, said families are “seriously concerned” that their kids will not get the support that they need in the upcoming school year. She said that the loss of Title I funds will result in the loss of teachers, paraeducators, staff and summer school programs.
Tulkin said she was especially concerned about how undocumented students would be accounted for if their families are not receiving federal benefits.
“It’s kind of shocking to me that students who are coming from the highest poverty school in the county and going into the next school in our neighborhood would not receive the same services and supports that they had at their K-2 school,” she said. “They magically haven’t been lifted out of poverty overnight.”
In his letter, Cline wrote that for the past several years Oak View’s poverty rate had placed the school in the middle of the rank order of MCPS Title I schools. The district’s new formula resulted in the school dropping to No. 51 in rank and out of Title I consideration, he wrote.
He noted that the district’s inclusion of data from its fourth and fifth grade gifted and talented program (the Centers for Enriched Studies) – which pulls students from surrounding elementary schools who may come from higher-income households – also impacts the school’s poverty rate because of the change.
According to Cline, if data from students enrolled in the gifted and talented program were not included, the school’s poverty rate would increase to 88.7%. He wrote that this change is not the fault of students or families but due to the “fundamental” change in how the poverty rate is measured.
Tulkin and other parents said the formula that MCPS now uses to determine Title I status needs to be studied, especially for elementary schools that don’t share Title I status.
“Part of the challenge that we have is that injection of students from elsewhere sort of dilutes the challenges that the students who have such high needs have,” Tulkin said. “So, it skews the numbers. It makes it appear more affluent than it actually is.”
School board members are also seeking more information about how the district’s participation in the federal free meals program impacts Title 1 status. Board President Karla Silvestre asked MCPS officials to provide more information after board members expressed concerns about equity in the Title I calculation changes during the board’s Feb. 22 meeting.
On Friday, Silvestre told MoCo360 that briefing board members on the issue was important because the school system goes through the process of losing and gaining Title I status every year, with some schools missing status designation “by a hair.”
“This year it just got more complicated because of the Community Eligibility Provision – and that’s growing, and it brings other benefits,” Silvestre said.
Member Grace Rivera-Oven said she was “disturbed” by the changes at the February board meeting. “I think we really need to put ourselves in the shoes of the families we serve,” she said. “…These are our kids, our communities that we’re making decisions on. … I really need to have a briefing on this solely because this is impacting our children, and it’s impacting our most vulnerable children and the people that work with them.”
Stacey Lynch, a fourth grade teacher at Strathmore Elementary School asked the board and MCPS officials how changing Title I criteria was equitable.
“MCPS knows that we have families in our school who are undocumented or reluctant to fill out federal forms and therefore do not receive aid from federal programs. How is this equitable for us?” Lynch said.
“As staff numbers decrease, we anticipate a lack of consistent support as remaining staff members will be utilized to cover unfilled substitute positions and lunch/recess duties when necessary,” Lynch said. “Again, I ask, how is this equitable for our scholars?”
MCPS spokesperson Chris Cram wrote in an email to MoCo360 that the school system’s focus on equity will remain regardless of the Title I status of a school. “Title I funds aid in this, but their absence at any school does not mean we deviate from this work,” he said, noting that schools may transition on or off of a Title 1 designation as their populations change.
In his letter, Cline encouraged the school community to implore MCPS to find a way to negate the gifted and talented program’s impact on Oak View’s poverty rate and fund the school at its current staffing level.
According to Cline, being fully funded “would equate to funding almost two teacher positions and eight paraprofessional positions providing thirty-seven hours of support to students daily” at Oak View.
“We cannot deny students and families from the district’s highest economically disadvantaged school the support needed as they move from [New Hampshire Estates] to Oak View,” he wrote.
According to Cram, MCPS uses two different poverty measures for Title I status now that schools are enrolled in the federal free meals program:
- Direct certification, which identifies students in households that receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or Medicaid benefits; and
- FARMS applications for schools not participating in the federal free meals program.
Cram said the adoption of the federal free meals program as a poverty measure for participating schools has resulted in schools shifting in their poverty ranking. The new federal free meals program does not require families at these schools to fill out a FARMS application, causing a drop off in the number of forms submitted, school officials said. Before the 2023-2024 school year, MCPS measured school poverty rates using FARMS data for Title I eligibility.
School officials acknowledged during the February board meeting that the change in status would be “painful” for the four schools that have long had Title I status for years.
MCPS has not received its Title I allocation for the coming school year from the Maryland State Department of Education, according to Cram. The district is also anticipating less Title I funds than last year, he said, due to lower poverty rates across the county according to U.S. census poverty data.
Cram added that the four elementary schools losing Title I status are Community Schools and will continue to receive “a great deal of support for families and students.” Community Schools are established community hubs that provide students and families with wraparound services and receive grants under the state’s educational reform legislation, Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.