North Greene sees Maintenance of Effort funding reduced

By Editor | July 6, 2026 |

By Carmen Ensinger

Superintendent Jacky Kuchy informed the school board at the June 24 meeting that the district Maintenance of Effort (MOE) in transportation funding for next year would be reduced to 55 percent.
Maintenance of Effort is a federal fiscal rule requiring school districts to spend at least the same amount of state and local funds on education – often specifically for special education or Title I programs, from one year to the next. It prevents districts from using federal grants to replace local funding.
The core purpose of MOE is to ensure that federal funds act as a supplement rather than a replacement for existing educational services. It protects critical services, like special education, from district budget cuts that try to use new federal grants to balance the books.
While MOE general applies to a district’s overall budget to maintain Title I eligibility, it is most strictly enforced in special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA.)
For special education, MOE is typically evaluated in two ways:
■ Eligibility Standard: Before receiving IDEA funds, a district’s upcoming budget must show it intends to spend the same or greater amount of local and state funds on students with disabilities compared to previous years.
■ Compliance Standards: After the fiscal year closes, the district must prove through actual expenditures that it spent at least the same aggregate or per-capita amount as the year prior.
Kuchy said she has the overall issue of the MOE resolved and it is due to a late reimbursement.
“We had a late reimbursement that came in 2025, but should have come in 2024,” she said. “So that has been resolved. However, I do have to do the transportation claim still and that’s usually done in July and the worst case news is that the reimbursement for special education transportation is only going to be 55 percent.”
There is a bit of good news on the horizon, however. Regarding the teacher vacancy grant.
“We are thinking that potentially there may be just a little bit of money that trickles down our way in the budget that the governor approved,” she said. “There was an allocation for a significant reduction of funds, but maybe we will get something when we were assuming we were getting nothing. Waiting to see where that is at.”
Kuchy said she finished up a grant application to the Tracy Family Foundation for the curriculum and instruction position.
“We will find out in August if we are going to get that,” she said. “Our contact there was pretty confident we would get it because she said we haven’t really asked for something like that before and it aligns with the Tracy Family’s goals. So hopefully we will get that.”
The district saw a very minor increase in it’s insurance premiums for next year.
“We are getting a five percent increase, which, honestly, is pretty good,” Kuchy said. “We came in at Tier 2 and Tier 1 is getting a four percent increase. There are a few districts that actually performed really well and they are actually getting a rebate of like one or two percent, but, overall, the tiers were much more reasonable.”
The district is a member of Egyptian Trust and Kuchy said the Trust is in a much better financial state than it has been in the past. Several years ago, the district was looking to get out of the trust, but the buy out was too expensive on the district and they were forced to stay.
“They have some new districts coming into the Trust as well and they had some that left, but it sounds like the ones that left, but it sounds like the ones that left were the ones were the ones who were potentially pulling down the Trust,” she said. “They were the ones who would have gotten the like 30 percent premium increase.”
Last year the district saw a 13.4 percent increase.