Migrant Education Costs

It is understandable that lawmakers are concerned about mismanagement, and possibly malfeasance, within the state’s migrant education program. The over-identification of students eligible for such services is a serious matter and may cost the state millions of dollars. But to compare the Department of Education problems with those of the Department of Human Services is irresponsible. The scope of the problems and the improvements made since they were identified must be kept in perspective.

The DHS bookkeeping errors and other mistakes totaled $113 million at last count. The entire annual budget for the migrant education program was $4 million. To reach the level of the DHS debacle, every one of the nearly 9,500 students in the program would have been there wrongly for decades.

This is not the case, although most districts were significantly over-identifying students who qualified for migrant education services. On average, half the students who got such services were not qualified to receive them, according to the Maine Department of Education’s own review. So, Maine’s migrant education budget, which comes from the federal government, should have been about $2 million. That means the state likely owes the government about $5 million, going back to 2000. The federal investigation currently goes back to 2000, but officials said it could be expanded.

Repaying $5 million – if that is the final figure – will put a dent in the state budget, but it is far from the gaping hole left by the DHS errors.

Perhaps as important as the money are the actions that Maine Department of Education officials have taken, before they were required by the federal government, to ensure that the over-identification problem is in the past.

First, the department for many years outsourced oversight of the migrant program to SAD 31 in Danforth. That has stopped and the department now directly manages and monitors the program. This should ensure that errors, intentional or otherwise, are caught early.

Second, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education, the Maine department has retrained everyone who works with the program across the state with an eligibility criterion. Some school districts thought they could include immigrants in the program. They cannot. Others assumed that a child could receive services because his parents worked in a migratory business although the family had not actually moved in the last three years to pursue such work, a federal requirement.

Although many of the errors fall into these categories, a U.S. inspector general is conducting a criminal investigation, suggesting that not all the mistakes were innocent. Having closer Department of Education oversight of the problem will lessen the possibility that such a situation could develop again.

The U.S. Department of Education, which is investigating similar over-identification problems in other states, has praised Maine for its corrective efforts. This should be helpful when it comes time for the federal government to decide how much money the state must repay.

The migrant education errors will cost the state, and the students who didn’t get services while the federal investigation was under way, which is inexcusable.

That is all the more reason to cheer the long overdue creation this month of the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability. This nonpartisan agency might not have immediately caught the problems at the departments of Human Services and Education, but it likely would have caught them sooner, minimizing their financial impact.