Conference Call RE: Update on Recovery (ARRA) Funds

INFORMATIONAL LETTER: 87
POLICY CODE: DBE

TO: Superintendents of Schools
FROM: Susan A. Gendron, Commissioner
DATE: April 8, 2009
RE: Conference Call RE: Update on Recovery (ARRA) Funds

On April 1, the U.S. Department of Education posted additional guidance on the use of Recovery funds in all key areas – Title I, IDEA, Stabilization, and others. I will be hosting another in my series of conference calls for superintendents on education funding under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 11:00 am, and I urge you to join me.

In addition to offering further guidance on ARRA education funds, I will also update you and answer questions regarding the expansion of the laptop program into high schools.

The call-in number can be found in the email version of this Informational Letter, sent to superintendents today.

You can find links to all of the U.S. Department of Education guidance on our Ed Recovery website: http://maine.gov/education/recovery . In addition, we will post a podcast of Tuesday’s conference call by the end of the day so that those who are unable to participate can listen to it later.

If you have not already done so, I encourage you to sign up for our electronic newsletter, Recovery & Reinvestment Report, which we are sending out as we gather new information. We will continue to inform you directly of important announcements, but the Report will include more frequent updates as we gather information or post new items to our website. You can sign up on our Ed Recovery website: http://maine.gov/education/recovery

Finally, please note that the guidance we received last week from the U.S. Department of Education gave us the information we need to make final calculations for Title I and IDEA by school administrative unit (SAU) for the 09-10 school year. We anticipate providing you with those spreadsheets later this week.