April 3, 2007 — For the fourth year running, the U.S. Virgin Islands has come in dead last among jurisdictions in the use of federal funds for education, on a per pupil basis.
This time, the total funds sent back to Washington — because the local system could not figure out how to use them — amounted to $2.42 million, or more than $129 for each and every pupil in the islands' school system.
Last year the Source reported that $112 per pupil was wasted in this way. (See Unused Education Funds Top $2 Million Mark Again, Worst in U.S.").
These funds are available, under exactly the same set of rules, for every state and territory. There is no need for the territory to win an application- writing competition, no need for matching funds. All the territory has to do is to ask for the funds and then account for them in keeping with federal regulations.
In comparison to the $129 per-pupil reversion for the territory, no other entity was even close. Next down the list was Puerto Rico, which sent back $26 per pupil. The state with the worst record, South Dakota, let $9.38 per pupil slip through its hands.
The money that the territory did not get could not be used to reduce educational expenditures by the territory, nor could it be used to repair schools, but it would have been a $2.4 million addition to the islands' economy and could have been used to bring better education to the islands children.
The decisions or non-decisions that kept $2.4 million away from the islands were made several years ago, well before Alvarez and Marsal became the third-party fiduciary working with the Department of Education on its fiscal management (See "Third-Party Fiduciary Details Fiscal Dysfunction for Board of Education").
The reversion of the $2.4 million to the U.S. Treasury, which was the subject of recently unveiled statistics in Washington, was effective Sept 30, 2006, the end of the federal fiscal year. The monies involved became available three years earlier and had to be committed to acceptable projects by Sept. 30, 2004. Payments are then made if the school system involved follows the federal rules.
American Samoa and Guam, two Pacific territories with school systems of roughly the same size as that of the U.S. Virgin Islands, did much better with these programs. While the territory failed to use $2.4 million, Guam reverted only $124,487 and American Samoa sent back all of $3,156.
In the past, the Source has tried to get the V.I. Department of Education to comment on these numbers but was routinely told that it had no comment.
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