Dr. David Holbrook
This month and next, I’m going to discuss a couple of the most common compliance findings when it comes to how local education agencies (LEAs, such as districts and charter schools) spend their Title III funding. This month we’ll explore the issue of paying teachers with Title III funds. Next month we’ll look at paying for translation and interpretation services with Title III. (If you have a Title III Compliance Topic you want to know more about, let me know and I’ll try to include it in an upcoming article.)
I was a state education agency director for six years (starting in Title III), and I also contracted with the U.S. Department of Education (USED) for two and a half years, helping USED monitor states for Title III. In addition, I’ve studied USED monitoring reports over the years to examine the compliance findings related to Title III and ELs (in other Titles and grants). The two compliance findings mentioned in the first paragraph are by far the most common.
Can you pay teacher salaries with Title III funds?
That is probably the most common question I get when it comes to how to use Title III funds and avoid supplanting. The answer is complicated, and while it is YES, there are hoops to jump through to make sure that the expenditures are compliant with Title III’s Supplement not Supplant requirements.
Title III has one of the most restrictive Supplement Not Supplant (SNS) requirements in ESSA.
Title III, Section 3115(g) says, “Federal funds made available under this subpart shall be used so as to supplement the level of Federal, State, and local public funds that, in the absence of such availability, would have been expended for programs for English learners and immigrant children and youth and in no case to supplant such Federal, State, and local public funds.” I put in bold the word Federal because that is where the significant restrictions come in. Supplement not supplant in other Titles usually covers state and local funds, but Title III also includes federal funds, which means that many things required in Title I or other Titles cannot be paid for with Title III funds.
Teaching Core (aka) Required Subjects vs. Teaching Supplemental Offerings
To understand how to use Title III to pay teacher salaries, it is first necessary to understand what is required to be taught using federal, state, or local funds. This is because, if something is required to be taught using federal, state, or local funds, Title III cannot be used to teach those offerings. We are all familiar with core content or subjects like mathematics, reading/language arts, science, social studies, etc., that are required to be taught by state and local laws. Since these subjects are required by other laws, core subjects cannot be taught using Title III funds.
Where things get complicated is that EL students have an additional core requirement that comes from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and related Supreme Court Cases like Lau and Castañeda and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act (EEOA). These laws and related court cases established the requirement for LEAs to provide services to help ELs overcome language barriers and both attain English proficiency and acquire content knowledge. Civil Rights laws are federal laws, and they establish this requirement for LEAs to provide core EL programs. And because Title III includes federal requirements in its supplement not supplant provision, this means Title III cannot be used to pay teachers who teach in an LEA’s core EL program.
Then how does an LEA use Title III funds to pay teacher salaries?
Title III funds can only be used to pay teacher salaries if the teacher is teaching in programs or activities that are not part of an LEA’s core EL program (aka supplemental). The services that LEAs provide to meet the Civil Rights-required core EL program should be written into a plan that is most often called their EL Program Plan or their Lau plan, after the Supreme Court Case mentioned above. For LEAs, Title III-funded teacher salaries must include documentation that the services the teacher is providing are not included in the LEA’s core EL program.
The best way to document this, and avoid a supplanting compliance finding, is to use the job description for teachers who teach in the LEA’s core EL program and compare it to the job description of teachers providing services to ELs whose salaries are being fully or partially paid with Title III funds. The job description of the Title III-funded portion of a teacher’s salary should be different from the job description of the teacher who teaches in the core EL program. There should be no overlap between what is paid for with Title III and the core EL services the LEA is required to use state or local funds to pay for.
Can we use Title III to pay for a supplemental teacher to provide class size reduction?
The short answer is NO. The most common way I’ve seen compliance issues related to paying teacher salaries with Title III is when Title III funds were used to pay for class size reduction of the LEA’s core EL program. The thinking goes like this: “Our LEA has enough funds to pay for two teachers in our core EL program, but the class size ends up being too large for just two teachers, so we use Title III to pay for an additional teacher’s salary to supplement our other teachers who teach in our core EL program so that our class size isn’t too large.” The problem is, in this scenario, the Title III-funded teacher is providing core EL services, which, as we’ve discussed, cannot be paid for with Title III. The salary appears to be supplemental, but because of what is being taught, it is actually supplanting.
