As Students Fail, U.S. Aid
Goes to Waste

The D.C. school system receives tens of millions of dollars a year in grants from the federal government for a host of programs -- yet much of it is wasted or spent on unintended uses, according to federal and District officials.

Abdusalam Omer, the school system's chief financial officer.
(Post photo by Bill O'Leary)

Abdusalam Omer, the chief financial officer for the D.C. school system, said the federal funds are more difficult to track than the money that comes from the city budget. Management of the money has been so poor that the system recently has been forced to hand back millions.

The biggest chunk of federal grant money comes through Title I, a program designed to help underprivileged children. The District received an estimated $25 million to $30 million in Title I money each year for the last decade, disbursed to about 100 schools.

The funds are intended to give needy children resources above and beyond those provided in a school's regular budget -- adding extra teachers, computers or science labs. The law calls for the development of "aggressive programs" to help children learn.

But in the District, such programs were never developed, and students never showed improvement, according to a 1994 report on Title I done by the private Committee on Chapter 1. Jim Ford, former staff director of the D.C. Council's Committee on Education and Libraries, said nothing has improved in the program since that report was issued.

The report found that 40 percent of Title I students in D.C. schools failed to make satisfactory progress in kindergarten and that the progress of other students could not be gauged because the school system was not tracking their test scores from one year to the next as required by the grant.

In one recent year, officials spent $75,000 for testing materials and $175,000 for test scoring services yet could not produce test scores for most of the students for whom the system had sought funding, the report said.

Other Title I funds were misused on such things as a $63,544 trip for administrators to Solomon Island, Md., for a "Summer Institute," according to the report.

In fall 1996, the National Science Foundation revoked a $13.5 million grant to D.C. schools, citing the administrative "implosion" of the system and other problems. Other federal agencies that had pledged $5 million withdrew their pledges.

According to Cynthia Bledsoe-Daley, who left the school administration Aug. 1 but had been a member of then-Superintendent Franklin L. Smith's cabinet and was in charge of obtaining grants, school officials spent $2 million of the science grant, "and no one knew where it went."