In a state with limited financial resources, it is always tempting to do government on the cheap. Time and again, though, this approach ends up costing more and creating a lot of problems. The latest example is the state’s migrant education program, which until recently was run by a single school department in Danforth. Thousands of students were wrongly identified as qualifying for migrant education services and the state owed the federal government $5 million for overpayments.

Fortunately, the Maine Department of Education moved to quickly correct the problems. The biggest change was that the department will manage the program itself. This is a wise decision, but one that shouldn’t have waited for such major mismanagement. With something as complicated as determining who qualified for migrant education funding – the complication is confirmed by the U.S. Department of Education’s investigation of numerous states for mishandling the funds – the decision shouldn’t have been left to one rural school system.

For many years, the migrant program was managed by SAD 31 in Danforth. The district may have been doing its best to oversee a program that received $4 million a year and was serving nearly 10,000 students statewide, but clearly this was too much responsibility for the small Washington County district, which was given the contract without competing bids. An ongoing federal investigation seeks to determine if the overidentification of migrants in Maine was a mistake or done deliberately.

The problems in the Migrant Education Program predated the Baldacci administration. The person in the department who was primarily responsible for overseeing the program was placed on administrative leave when the state was informed of the federal investigation and then resigned.

As a result of the overidentification, Maine received $4.2 million in federal funds for the 2002-2003 school year. It got $1 million for the current school year. Maine has banked enough money to repay $2.3 million, leaving nearly $3 million that state officials will have to find.

The Maine Department of Education should have run, not loosely overseen, the program from the beginning. It had the resources to interpret and apply the federal guidelines and would have been more likely to realize that too many students were being funneled into the program. The children of refugees from other countries were put into the program as were those whose parents worked in seasonal industries but didn’t move themselves.

Federal requirements limit migrant education programs to only students whose parents move to follow seasonal industries such as agricultural harvests. Now all prospective participants in the program will be referred to the department where their parents will be interviewed to ensure the students qualify for the federal program.

The U.S. Department of Education, which is investigating similar over-identification problems in other states, has praised Maine for its corrective efforts. This is nice praise, but it would have been better if the department had retained control so the mistakes weren’t made in the first place.