From the Office of Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández
Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández released the following statement after she voted for and Congress passed S. 2959 the Supplemental Impact Aid Flexibility Act.
“I proudly voted for the Supplemental Impact Aid Flexibility Act. Having passed both the House and Senate, this legislation will allow school districts who apply for Impact Aid to reuse data submitted for their FY2021 application in their FY2023 application.
Impact Aid brings assistance to school districts across the country who serve children residing on Indian land, military bases, low-rent housing properties, or other federal properties. This ensures that eligible districts can easily apply for this much-needed funding and is an important step in doing right by the school districts who serve Native and military families.
Impact Aid funding is especially important to this district. In 2019, New Mexico received $91 million from Impact Aid, almost 90 percent of which went to schools in the third district.
I am glad that this funding will go directly to the students who are entitled to receive the federal funding. We must do right by our children, especially those who have been put at a disadvantage by inequitable funding levels. The Supplemental Impact Aid Flexibility Act helps districts access funding to do just that.”
This bipartisan legislation allows local school districts to use last year’s data on student-count and federal property-valuation or this year’s data when submitting their FY 2023 applications for Impact Aid funding.
Many school districts are concerned that due to the spread of the omicron variant, using this year’s data will significantly undercount the number of students a school district will be responsible for educating throughout FY 2023. This could cause school districts to lose substantial funding that they need to educate all of their students in FY 2023.
The Bipartisan Supplemental Impact Aid Flexibility Act will prevent school districts from losing urgently needed funding by giving them more flexibility to use pre-pandemic data for calculating funding needs.
