Schools are required to submit student poverty data to their LEA to determine eligibility for ESSA Title programs. Participation in the free and reduced price lunch program is just one allowable measure the district can use to calculate poverty at your school for participation in Title I. The law allows four alternative ways to measure poverty at private schools.
During the annual consultation with your school district, your school can identify which measure would be best for your school based on what data you have available. The poverty measures are explained below:
Comparable poverty data from a survey. The private school may survey families and use such data to determine the number of students in families experiencing poverty. The survey must have a comparable threshold of poverty to the poverty measurement tool used by the LEA. The LEA may extrapolate the survey results if data is not available for all students residing in the LEA’s boundaries.
Example: The LEA may create a survey to be administered by the private school. Upon collecting the survey results, the LEA can then review the data to determine the number of low-income students.
Comparable poverty data from a different source. The LEA may use poverty data for private school students from a source that is different from the measurement tool used by the LEA. The data source must use a comparable threshold of poverty to the measurement tool used by the LEA.
Example: The private school has a tuition assistance program and the income threshold for the program has the same income threshold used to count public school students.
Proportionality. An LEA may apply the low-income percentage of each participating Title I public school attendance area to the number of private school children who reside in that attendance area.
Example: The LEA calculates the percent of poverty of a public school attendance area to be 60 percent. The LEA then applies that poverty percentage to the number of private school children that reside within that specific public school attendance area.
If the number of private school children residing within that public school attendance area is 20, the LEA would apply the same proportional poverty percentage to those 20 students. So in this case 60% of the 20 students would mean that 12 children would be considered low-income.
Equated Measure. The LEA may use an equated measure of low-income by correlating sources of data — that is, determining the proportional relationship between two sources of data on public school children and applying that same ratio to a known source of data on private school children.
Example: The LEA uses free and reduced-price lunch data, but that source of data is not available for the private school students. If Wisconsin Works (W-2) data is available, the LEA could determine an equated measure of low-income students based on free and reduced-price lunch data by correlating the two sets of data as follows: public school W-2 data is to free and reduced price-lunch data as private school W-2 data is to “X”.
