School districts finding new path to share federal funds

A federal funding problem that could have cost the Grand Coulee Dam School District millions in future years, and several just past, has apparently been averted, Nespelem School District Superintendent Effie Dean said Monday.

Federal authorities reviewing a practice the two districts have used for decades to share federal Impact Aid took exception to it last spring.

The two districts, since 1995, have operated under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that some of the money from the federal Impact Aid program coming into Nespelem would be passed through to Grand Coulee Dam according to the number of students from Nespelem Elementary actually served by its neighboring district, where students go on to high school.

The Impact Aid program helps offset money spent by schools to educate students whose parents are employed by the federal government or who live in a district impacted by federal land ownership that prevents collection of property taxes, a major funding source of public schools.

That MOU wasn’t valid, Dean said federal authorities told her. The two districts have been working since May to change their minds and find a workaround.

That came in the form of a new “retro tuition” agreement between the two, Dean said, to legalize the last three school years of the apportionment the districts had worked out, each year coming to between $775,000 and $858,000, nearly $10,000 per Nespelem student who attends school in Coulee Dam.

That retroactive agreement is in the works and was due to be signed this week and submitted for federal approval, Dean said.

If it is, that will mean the Grand Coulee Dam district won’t have to repay Nespelem those last three years’ worth of Impact Aid.

That still leaves future payments yet to be negotiated, but a framework is there the feds should recognize. Dean said it may look a little different.

“We will be working that out with Grand Coulee, but that one’s going to take a little bit longer time due to recent discoveries that this can be such a big issue, and it is a lot of work for us,” she said.

A new agreement for the 2023-24 school year must be submitted for Impact Aid approval by Jan. 31, 2023.