Balanced journalism and School Funding whining

This has nothing to do with my personal life, for a change, though I am still very interested in the local education system. When we moved out here, I had to decide which school district to put Amy in, choosing Hallsville over Longview despite the magnet program available. And now I know why.

In this morning’s Longview News Journal, there was an article on the Magnet School, and how it lost out on an opportunity for a grant, at most totalling $4 million a school year for up to the next three years. Why did it lose the opportunity? The application was rejected for being two minutes late. You know me – I want to see the whole story, not just what the small town newspaper chose to print. So I went a’googling, and came up with this. I can understand if you don’t want to muddle through it all, so I’ll break it down for you.

Jennifer Scott, assistant superintendent of administrative and pupil services at LISD claims she attempted three times on the deadline date to submit the application electronically, and that “you don’t know what other information the government may ask for” until the submit button is clicked and another page comes up. However, in my research, these applications were available to download March 9th, seven weeks before the deadline. And from the pdf document linked above, there’s also this warning:

“The amount of time it can take to upload an application will vary depending on a variety of factors including the size of the application and the speed of your Internet connection. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you do not wait until the application deadline date to begin the submission process through Grants.gov.” But according to Ms Scott, the mean old internets stoled up to $12 million dollars of education funding.

Maybe we should remember what we were told in class: not to wait until the last minute to finish your homework.