ED Proposes New Migrant Education Program Regulations

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) recently published its proposed amendments to the Migrant Education Program (MEP) regulations in the Federal Register. The proposed changes were motivated, in large part, by the results of OIG audits and investigations of several states’ MEP programs over the past year that found significant errors in state counts of children eligible for the program. Because MEP allocations are based on state counts of eligible children relative to other states, ensuring accurate and consistent determinations of student eligibility under the program across the states is very important to ED.

The proposed regulations aim to improve accurate and consistent state counts in several ways. First, the proposed regulations clarify and expand upon the definitions governing who is a “migratory child.” For example, the proposal includes changing the definitions for “agricultural work” and “fishing work” to clarify that they do not include activities that may be related to agriculture or fishing but are not inherently agricultural or fishing work. To highlight this distinction, ED provides an example explaining why factory work processing wheat into flour would not qualify as “agricultural work.” Several similar definition clarifications are made in an attempt to better detail MEP eligibility requirements.

Second, the regulations establish a mechanism to adjust the base amounts of the MEP basic state formula grant allocations for FY 2006 and subsequent years. In addition to adjusting the base amounts for state formula grant allocations, the proposed regulations establish requirements for SEAs to develop and implement rigorous quality control procedures in order to improve the accuracy of MEP eligibility determinations and state counts of eligible migratory children. This includes a new requirement for SEAs of annual re-interviewing for improved quality control. Under the proposed regulations, states generally will be required to use a face-to-face approach to conduct these annual interviews.

Comments on the proposed regulations must be received by June 18, 2007. The proposed regulations can be found on ED’s website at http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/proprule/2007-2/050407a.html.

Author: JSM