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For Immediate Release
September 15, 2005
Illinois takes lead role nationally as first state to
develop financial reporting model for tutoring providers
Illinois State Board of Education reports
financial information for State’s approved tutoring
providers under No Child Left Behind
Springfield, Ill. –The Illinois State Board of Education
(ISBE) has put in place the nation’s first financial
reporting requirements for tutoring providers under the
No Child Left Behind Act. ISBE led the nation in putting
the new reporting requirements in place to be sure that
Illinois school districts have the information they need
to choose the best tutoring providers for their students.
Districts need to choose providers that can give great
results at the lowest possible cost. Because school districts
have a set amount of Federal funds to spend on tutoring
services, they need to stretch those funds to serve the
greatest number of kids.
“To maximize the benefit of these services for children
throughout Illinois, we need to look at each provider’s
results in the classroom and examine their costs for those
services.” said Randy Dunn, State Superintendent
of Education. “We have to be sure that we’re
helping as many students as possible and stretching our
resources to get the maximum benefit of tutoring services.
Our new reporting system will help us look at all aspects
of every provider carefully to be sure we’re doing
the best we can for our students.”
ISBE has released the results of its financial reporting
requirements for all approved Supplemental Education Services
(SES) providers in Illinois. The reports detail each provider’s
financial information, including program and staff costs,
building expenses, curriculum and training expenditures,
overhead for administrative staff and materials, and profits
for shareholders.
Rules adopted by the Illinois State Board of Education
in June 2005 require SES providers to report and establish
their actual cost of services. Under the rules, costs
must be reported in the following categories:
- Direct Program Expenses
- Occupancy Expenses
- Curriculum and Training Expenses
- Administrative and General Expenses
Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), school
districts are responsible for funding SES, which includes
tutoring and other academic instruction for low income
families attending schools that do not make Adequate Yearly
Progress for three consecutive years. Federal law limits
the per-child amount an SES provider can charge to the
lesser of the district’s per-child allocation under
Part A of Title I of NCLB or the actual cost of the services.
Approved providers in Illinois were required to report
their actual cost of services for the 2004-05 school year,
and provide a reasonable estimate of their actual cost
of services for the 2005-06 school year. The graphs prepared
by ISBE detail the percentages spent by each provider
in the four categories of expenses, and provide a comparison
of the provider’s per-pupil costs to that of other
providers.
The information obtained through ISBE’s financial
reporting requirements serves a number of critical functions:
- Informs parents: Many of the program descriptions
offered by providers look similar on paper. Distributing
financial information to parents gives them an accurate
sense of the amount of resources dedicated to the classroom,
and the amount used for administrative expenses not
directly related to tutoring.
- Lowers costs to serve more students: The reporting
system forces providers to publicly justify the costs
charged to school districts. In many cases, the maximum
rate a provider can justify is less than the district’s
per-child allocation under Part A of Title I of NCLB.
School districts have a limited amount of funds to spend
on SES. By ensuring that the amounts providers charge
to districts reflect the actual cost of services, more
students will be served.
- Provides financial accountability: Virtually
every other publicly-funded program has a system to
provide for transparency and accountability for the
expenditure of government resources. Prior to the enactment
of ISBE’s rules, no such system existed for SES.
The financial information for each approved SES provider
in Illinois is available in Adobe Acrobat format at:
http://www.isbe.net/nclb/htmls/sesp_isbe_resources.htm.
An overview of ISBE’s SES financial reporting requirements
is available at: http://www.isbe.net/nclb/htmls/sesp.htm.
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