Not every bill before the South Dakota Legislature is a steaming pile of culture-war crapola. House Bill 1220 is a useful and timely bit of lawmaking responding to the GEAR UP/Mid-Central scandal:
The secretary of the Department of Education is hereby directed to rescind a waiver that the Department of Education requested from the federal government as part of the 2011application for a state grant under the Gaining Early Awareness And Readiness For Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) state grants program. The recision of the waiver will allow grant funding to be used to fund scholarships for Native American students. It is the intent of the Legislature that fifty to seventy-five percent of the total funding received through this grant go toward scholarships for Native American students as is the original intent of the federal law creating the grant program [House Bill 1220, introduced 2016.02.04].
Sponsors include Democratic Rep. Julie Bartling (the prime sponsor) from Gregory, Republican Rep. Lee Qualm from Platte, and Democratic Senator Billie Sutton from Burke. That’s the entire delegation from District 21, where the Mid-Central Educational Cooperative mismanaged the GEAR UP program to line the pockets of state Board of Education members, the former Secretary of Education who handed Mid-Central the program, and other crony consultants without apparently making any substantial improvement in Native American matriculation and college graduation. Sponsors also include Rep. Kyle Schoenfish (R-19/Scotland), an accountant who worked for the company that audited Mid-Central and found material weaknesses in their bookkeeping for eight years in a row.
HB 1220 essentially asks the state to run GEAR UP as a scholarship program, as the tribes have offered to run it. The Department of Education has assigned management of GEAR UP to the Board of Regents, who oddly don’t seem interested in refocusing GEAR UP to its original scholarship intent and instead seem poised to simply streamline the current strategy of the program.
HB 1220 is simple pro-student, anti-corruption legislation. It would shut down much of the opportunity for well-placed consultants to use GEAR UP as a slush fund and put most of that federal aid in the hands of the American Indian students who need it to go to college.
This is a step in the right direction.
This is how the program should have been set up in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the federal government hasn’t revoked the waiver it granted already because of fraud, waste and abuse under the non-existent supervision of the SD Education Department
There’s a key point about HB 1220, Ror. The sponsors aren’t asking for some creative, revolutionary, or untested idea. They’re just saying we should do GEAR UP the way it was intended by the feds, the way it works in most other places: give the money to the kids, not the grown-ups. Help the kids go to college. Simple.
Why so much overhead?
HB 1220 sounds like a good idea, but it’s expensive. GEAR UP requires a 1:1 state match for federal dollars received. If 50%-75% of the federal funds are dedicated to scholarships, then the state will need to find equivalent funds to provide the match. That would mean an appropriation of $1.4 million to $1.8 million annually through December, 2018.
The state match for GEAR UP is currently being satisfied through in-kind (not cash) local effort at the ~38 schools participating in GEAR UP.
Oops, I overstated the appropriation amount. We could get away with as little as ~$750,000 a year (half of half of $2.8 million reduced annual federal funds (see SDBOR revised GEAR UP budget). Half of 75% of the $2.8 million would be just over $1 million. Apologies for the error – my initial calculation was based on 100% of federal funds, not 50%-75%.
Good information, Michael. Now how much would the state have to come up with simply to, say – double, the paltry amount that has been given as scholarships under Gear Up previously? $100,000 a year state money ought to put both the kids and federal taxpayers in far better shape than they have been under the previous Gear Up kleptocracy brought to us by state government under the GOP party.
Thanks for that math and that correction, Michael. Scholarships might cost us more, but they’d be a good investment. Get those kids to college, support them there, and get them out with degrees and skills they can take back to their communities to build more opportunities.
Rorschach:
Two problems:
1) HB 1220, if passed, doesn’t allow us that option. The minimum would be 50% of federal *and* state money (remember the required 1:1 match)
2) The feds might have to sign off on a different waiver to allow SD to spend less than 50%-75% of the grant on scholarships while not spending zero. The key point is that we’re asking the feds to change the deal. We tried that in the 2005 GEAR UP application and ended up getting a 100% waiver.
I’m not suggesting we change the deal, Michael. I’m suggesting that the state could accept less than all of the federal money available thus lowering the amount of the state match dramatically. And the kids would still get more in scholarships than they have gotten in the past. So it’s not an issue of EITHER the state spends $1 million OR the state continues the kleptocracy. The bill could be passed. We could go back to the original intent of the federal grant. And SD could decide how much federal money to accept based upon how much it’s willing to pay in state matching funds.
Rorschach:
Perhaps. But radically changing the dollars and dedicating half or more for scholarships would change the deal SD has with the feds.
A little jargon: The feds have their own goals for funding projects with the “size, scope, and quality to be effective.” Yes, I know – SD’s GEAR UP is far from a shining example of that. However, the feds might not want to make the grant so small that it gives out only a relatively few scholarships. They want to see broad impact (defined as number of students) from their grant awards.
Also, the longest-running (since the late ’90s at least) and apparently most successful part of SD GEAR UP is the summer program at SDSMT. There’s a constituency there (students, alumni, K-12 and university interests) that would need to be dealt with in order to restructure SD GEAR UP that radically.