By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Recent analysis of the impact of the federal sequestration on the nation’s K-12 schools reveals not much of an impact at all, despite dire predictions from teachers union officials and public school advocates.

Alyson Klein of EdWeek.org reports sequestration cuts put in place by Congress in 2011 have had an uneven impact on public schools nationally, and most district officials can’t quantify or illustrate how the cuts have made a difference in school operations.

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“I thought by now we’d start to hear feedback from school districts and states,” Michael Griffith, a school finance consultant who travels the country discussing financial issues with schools, told Education Week.

He told the news site he hadn’t heard a peep from school leaders about sequestration cuts during his travels this summer.

“At no point did (state and district) officials ever bring up the issue. If I brought up the issue, I got met with a shrug, basically. It was a surprise to me,” Griffith said.

That’s likely because many schools are better off financially this year than they had been in the past, Griffith opined to Edweek. Many schools received an increase in funding from their respective states as the economy rebounded, and others “were able to soften the blow by using federal funding flexibility to shift funds from previous years to help cover the shortfall,” EdWeek reports.

“People tend to look at the bottom line for all education spending and most states had a decent budget year. … They increased education spending and that might cover up the sequestration cuts,” Griffith said.

Federal sequestration cut about 5 percent of overall federal funding for K-12 schools. Title 1 program funding was cut by $725 million and special education state grants by $600 million, EdWeek reports.

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Yet most schools the news site contacted haven’t laid off workers as a direct result of sequestration, including districts like Cincinnati, which lost $4 million because of the cuts but simply shifted priorities and delayed technology upgrades and trimmed professional development expenses to make up the losses.

In smaller districts that are more reliant on federal funding, the sequestration cuts may have resulted in fewer teachers, but school officials were unsure because their overall loss of funding had multiple contributing factors like declines in student enrollment, or local or state funding cuts.

“What we know is that we have less teachers employed,” Kathy Murphy, superintendent of Alabama’s Monroe County schools, told EdWeek. “How much of this we can put at the feet of sequestration and how much can be put at the feet of declining enrollment because of the floundering economy? It’s hard to parcel out which is which.”

What does seem clear is sequestration hasn’t exactly been as devastating as many teachers union officials and public school advocates initially feared. The lack of a crisis simply proves most public schools receive more than enough money to get by.

EdWeek notes that sequestration cuts are only now hitting many schools, as Congress begins another battle over federal funding. Democrats and their supporters want to go back to funding levels in place before sequestration, while Republicans seem to want to make the cuts permanent.

It will be interesting to see how Democrats, union officials and other education organizations justify their cries to increase funding when the reductions through sequestration have had such little impact.