Following school board approval on Monday, Indian Prairie School District 204 is applying to the Illinois State Board of Education to have three of its schools — Brookdale, Gombert and McCarty elementary schools — designated as Title I schoolwide, a designation for schools with high percentages of low-income students, next school year.
Title I funding helps schools pay for resources meant to improve students’ education and help ensure they meet state academic standards, according to the state board.
Brookdale, Gombert and McCarty all have percentages of low-income students between 20% and 39%, per a memo from the district’s Deputy Superintendent Louis Lee that was part of Monday’s meeting agenda, so the district is going through a waiver process with the state to allow the schools to obtain schoolwide status, which allows them to use the funding they receive for all students in the building, regardless of income level.
Schools with low-income student populations above 40% qualify for the schoolwide designation automatically. But schools with at least 20% but less than 40% low-income students can also operate as schoolwide Title I programs if they apply for and receive a waiver from their state educational agency, in this case the Illinois State Board of Education, according to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Two other elementary schools in the district, Georgetown and Longwood, have had the schoolwide designation, meaning their low-income student population was at or above 40%, since the 2018-19 school year, a district spokesperson said, and are being designated as such for the 2025-26 school year as well.
Title I, Part A is part of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. It provides additional financial assistance to school districts for children coming from low-income families, with the goal of closing “educational achievement gaps by allocating federal funds for education programs and services.”
Title I allocations are based primarily on local education agencies’ poverty estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and then are allocated within each local agency to schools based on their poverty rates, commonly measured by the number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Title I funding is provided by the federal government to the state, which then disburses it to the schools, Lee said.
But which schools qualify for Title I funding can change from year to year based on enrollment. Gombert and McCarty have received Title I funding since the 2018-19 school year, according to a district spokesperson. McCarty’s percentage of low-income students used to be over 40%, but has recently decreased, Lee said. And the district is applying for a waiver for Brookdale for the first time this year.
In their applications, school districts need to provide rationale for why a school needs a schoolwide waiver.
For Brookdale, for example, the district noted that the school now qualifies for Title I funding because it is seeing rising numbers of low-income students.
Gombert was previously supported by targeted funds, but has had schoolwide status for several years, and the district said in its application that, since receiving Title funding, “the growth of students has been significant due to the added layers of intervention across the school and support provided to families.”
McCarty previously had a schoolwide designation, and the district wrote that continued schoolwide status is still needed to improve academic achievement and support social-emotional learning.
Lee said there are a number of reasons low-income student populations in schools vary from year to year and are part of overall changes in the student body, like slight declines in district enrollment and increasing ethnic diversity.
But he sees supporting a diverse student body as part of the district’s strength.
According to ISBE, last year Indian Prairie received just over $2.2 million districtwide in Title I, Part A funding and funding for neglected and delinquent children, which goes toward schools with high percentages of children from low-income families and to educational programs for children in state-operated institutions or community day programs, respectively.
The Title I funding is reimbursement-based, and the district files expense reports quarterly, according to a district spokesperson.
Title I funding provides the schools that receive it with additional funding on top of what they’d receive already, which can go toward things like arts and social-emotional learning programs or to pay for additional staff in a school to work with students in smaller groups, Lee said.
And they have flexibility in how they spend it, he said. A school’s leadership can determine how they use the Title I funding, though Lee said at Indian Prairie all the Title I schools meet regularly to share ideas about what kind of programming is and isn’t working.
Now, after obtaining board approval on Monday, the applications for the three schools’ waivers will be submitted to the Illinois State Board of Education. The United States Department of Education released Title I, Part A funding on May 14, according to a state board spokesperson, and the state agency is in the process of releasing its allocations.
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com