State of California says public school district illegally kept Title I funds from Catholic schools

It's been quite a while since I've done hard news reporting -- stories about facts, figures and who did what to whom, as opposed to personality features. But I was glad for the opportunity to keep my skills sharp with this assignment about a ruling by the California Department of Education that the Los Angeles Unified School District illegally withheld federal funds from Catholic schools.

Often people are unaware that, while the federal government cannot use tax dollars to pay for education with religious content, some federal programs are designed to provide aid in basic skills, particularly math and reading, to all students regardless of where they attend school. Public school districts have a legal responsibility to equitably share these Title I funds with private and religious schools whose students come from within the district's territory. In this case, the Los Angeles Unified School District was ruled to have suddenly and unilaterally reduced the number of Catholic schools receiving Title I assistance from 102 to 17.

In 2018 a dispute erupted between LAUSD and the archdiocese over how to calculate which Catholic schools qualify. The ruling upholds the archdiocese’s claim that the school district abruptly changed the process — sometimes multiple times in one year — then excluded every school whose paperwork it deemed inadequate.

“On its face, that was unlawful,” the report said of the LAUSD decision to consider only 24 schools that its auditors had personally reviewed, of which it rejected seven.

“It was also doubly flawed, because LAUSD had refused to consult concerning the review results and provide [the archdiocese] with an opportunity to provide alternative sources of poverty information, locate missing surveys, provide missing grades and/or other addresses, or otherwise to challenge or mitigate the results.”