CLAREMONT – After the school district announced an estimated $5 million deficit last August, officials have said one contributing factor was the district’s failure to seek reimbursement for federal grants, including Title I.
Title I money is federal assistance to support schools with high numbers of children from low-income families.
In recent months, the district has focused on applying for the reimbursements it can still collect. At Wednesday’s School Board meeting, Kerry Kennedy, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction and assessment, read off a monthly list of reimbursements and announced the district had received nearly $700,000 going back to December 2025, with more than $1 million still to be received.
“It has been a huge effort to get this money back, and that was our goal,” Kennedy said.
School Board Chairwoman Candace Crawford said the district had to spend the money first, which it did, but never applied for reimbursements until now.
The district has until Sept. 30 to request reimbursements for the 2024-25 fiscal year ending June 30. Superintendent Timothy Broadrick said the district would request all outstanding reimbursements it is eligible for.
“The crisis (of not asking for reimbursements by the deadline) will have been averted in two more weeks,” Broadrick told the board. “We just have to keep it up.”
Kennedy also said teacher salaries for the 2025-26 fiscal year for Title I must be applied for before the end of the month. But reimbursements for other expenses under the federal program can be submitted over the next year.
“So we still have more drawdowns (reimbursements) we will be making,” she said.
Crawford explained that much of the money the public thought was “missing” was, in fact, listed as revenue but never received.
“I think for the public last year when we had these financial problems prior administrations reported receipt of those grants when in fact they had not been asked for or received,” Crawford said during the meeting.
“This year, we made a really concerted effort to make sure we got those monies, and this is the first step.”
Crawford said Friday that when the MS-25 report was filed with the state Department of Revenue Administration for the affected years, the revenues listed were incorrect because they were anticipated but never received. Consequently, the local school tax rate was set artificially low, she added.
“It is not that we were missing $5 million; it is because when they set the tax rate, the state identified anticipated revenues that were never received,” Crawford said, adding that grant reimbursements were not the only reason for the deficit.
It is too late to seek reimbursements that were not requested for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, but Crawford said the district still needs to apply for other reimbursements from state and federal grants.
Regarding the actual deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026, Crawford said the administration has identified nearly all expenses for the last fiscal year but is still finalizing revenues before settling on a deficit figure.
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com
