The California Department of Education has been working to strengthen education for some time. In recent years, the State has been working to reduce the cost of education for student loans, and by increasing the flexibility of school options for students who cannot afford them.
The Department of Education’s grantmaking program is a bit different from most, because it is funded directly by the State and does not necessarily receive public funds. Rather, the Department of Education is supposed to be guided by its mission to “educate, train, and equip California’s children for success in a 21st century economy.” But that mission has been met with massive budget deficits, which means that it’s hard to know exactly what the Department is supposed to do.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the Department of Education is actually spending over $1.8 billion annually to support these grants. With no public dollars, they aren’t spending the money to train this year’s kids (they got hired by the Department of Education for a couple years and then were not given a budget). And then you have the State that is supposed to be funding these grants.
The State is supposed to be funding these grants, but the State Department is actually spending over 3.5 billion dollars for these grants. The State Department does not have a clue what the Department is supposed to do.
This is a big step up from the first big step up, which was the hiring of these school-funding grants. We’re saying that they’re going to give the State a second chance. I’m not going to be honest but the State Department will never give them a second chance.
So if you want to go into details about this, you’ve already got to go into the next step up. This is our second shot at getting the State Department into a position to give these grants to these school-funding recipients, and this one is a big step up for those of us who want to get into this game.
I guess we’re going to have to change the name of that grant to the second phase grant because we’re going to be asking for more than just a lot of money to help these schools get funding. Instead, we’re going to ask for a second chance to get that grant in the first place. This is going to be pretty big. We’ve already been to the State Department and they say there is no second chance for these grants.
I have to say, this is a pretty big step up. Before, if you were an accredited school and you wanted to apply for the grant, you had to do all of the paperwork, interview all of the other schools, and go through the interview process. Now we can apply directly to the State Department and we will have a chance to get the second phase grant, instead of waiting for the school to get approved.
As you can imagine, this move is huge. In the past, if you were a school that was not approved for the grant in the first place, you would have to go through a whole process to get it approved. This process would often take a year before you would see your grant money, and it would cost you thousands of dollars.
A little bit of this stuff happens at the beginning of the program. When you get the first of the two programs approved, you can walk into the next school and get in a program where they apply, and get your first grant. It’s a lot of work, but when you get a whole new school approved, you can do it all day by day, and they can get the second program approved on time.