St. Louis-Area Schools to get $9.35M in Stimulus (MO)
September 27, 2010
More than $9.35 million in stimulus grants have been awarded to 21 struggling St. Louis -area schools through the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced the first-year competitive grant awards Thursday as part of $17.3 million in federal SIG money that’s going to 32 Missouri schools statewide this year. The awards are part of a $54 million federal grant Missouri received for targeted school improvements over the next three years.
That funding is part of $3.5 billion in federal stimulus funding, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, earmarked for the lowest-achieving 5 percent of public schools over the past three years, based on state reading and math assessments or graduation rates.
For the SIG program, the U.S. Department of Education identified four intensive school-reform models: turnaround, restart, school closure or transformation.
To be eligible for grants ranging from $50,000 to $2 million, Missouri school districts had to demonstrate the capacity to implement the model they selected.
Only one school selected the school-closure model (Ervin Jr. High in the Kansas City area’s Hickman Mills School District) and none selected the restart model, the state agency said.
The transformation model, chosen by 17 Missouri schools, includes strategies such as replacing the principal, reforming the curriculum and extending learning time. Fourteen schools selected the turnaround model, which includes transformation strategies and requires adopting a new governance structure, screening existing school staff and rehiring no more than half the teachers.
“All states are being required to take a more aggressive approach in working with schools that have consistently strug gled with academic performance,” state Commissioner of Education Chris Nicastro said in a statement. “With the SIG funding, schools will have immediate access to additional technical and academic assistance to support specific turnaround strategies and staff development.”
The largest St. Louis-area grant went to the St. Louis Public Schools, $4.3 million.