Federal school aid agency wants money back

Sometimes, if it’s not one thing, it’s another when you’re dealing a federal agency that gives you money.

Or takes it back.

Nespelem’s school board learned Monday that some of their Impact Aid money was being clawed back.

Impact Aid is a federal grant program for local educational agencies that have lost local property tax revenue due to the presence of non-taxable federal land.

Superintendent Effie Dean explained that the Impact Aid agency had found the school district’s 2019-2020 school year application for Impact Aid faulty, for two years.

Dean had received an email Dec. 7 saying nearly half a million dollars would need to have been paid back were it not for other errors canceling most of that out, but still leaving about $85,000 owing.

She was scheduled to meet with them Dec. 14 over Zoom and hopes to qualify for “forgiveness” due to hardship.

Dean said it all stemmed from an application improperly submitted for the year before she arrived at the district, according to the Impact Aid agency, an application that was basically copied for the next year’s application when the world, including schools, was scrambling to contend with the pandemic.

“It just seems insane to me that they would make these schools, that are the poorest in the state, pay this money back,” she said.

Dean said the dispute dealt with just nine individual students’ qualifications, most of whom attended Grand Coulee Dam schools, not Nespelem, but lived in the Nespelem district.

She believes the other district will honor a clause in a memorandum of understanding the two districts have operated under until recently to share their Impact Aid money. That clause indemnified Nespelem against such losses for children attending Grand Coulee Dam schools sicne that district gets that aid money. But the Impact Aid people said this year that that decades-old MOU is illegal, forcing the two districts to start a new agreement for paying “tuition.”

The Nespelem School Board passed that new agreement Monday night.