Now it appears Regional School Unit 24’s size will cost the district hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding over several years.

The district is now too large to be eligible for rural small schools grants and grants for after-school programs, according to RSU 24 and Union 96 Superintendent Bill Webster.

“We will end up in a better place, but it is frustrating to find there are some things that weren’t either clearly thought through or weren’t clearly communicated to people,” he said.

The RSU is made up of Eastbrook, Ellsworth, Franklin, Gouldsboro, Hancock, Lamoine, Mariaville, Sorrento, Steuben, Sullivan, Waltham and Winter Harbor.

Webster said he first became aware of the possible loss of funding to the district about a month and a half ago. He was not certain of the local effect until meeting with Department of Education representatives in recent weeks.

He addressed his concerns in a March 19 letter to Maine Education Commissioner Susan Gendron.

The letter stated that, due to its size, RSU 24 is ineligible for any new 21st Century Community Learning grants. The grants were established by Congress as part of the No Child Left Behind Act in order to promote academic enrichment during non-school hours.

The school districts in RSU 24 now receive four of the grants, which fund after-school programs.

An existing Ellsworth grant for $600,000 over five years expires at the end of this school year. The grant funds the ASPIRE program for high school and middle school students. The School Department will not be eligible to reapply for those funds.

Other 21st Century grants fund Ellsworth’s K-5 ASPIRE program and similar programs in unions 92 and 96. Those communities will enter the second year of five-year grants this fall. When those grants dry up, the loss to the RSU will amount to approximately $100,000 annually.

The 21st Century program involves a competitive grant process. There is no guarantee schools that win grants will receive subsequent grants. However, the grants have been renewed in the past.

Webster wrote that the loss of grant eligibility was not communicated during the public deliberations on consolidation.

“One of the hallmarks of this successful effort was the transparency of process and information that made enough people believe that the new unit would be successful and save money despite the claims of others,” Webster wrote in his letter to the commissioner.

He said he was “chagrined” to discover the unexpected negative financial impact.

In addition to losing grants for after school programs, RSU 24 no longer is eligible for rural small school grants and will lose approximately $64,000 of those grants in the coming school year. Another $60,000 would be lost should the district’s population exceed 20,000.

More than $100,000 of federal Title 1 funding, which is used to supplement education costs, also would be threatened if the population should boom.

Ellsworth Interim Superintendent and RSU 24 Assistant Superintendent Katrina Kane said the funding requirements do not take into account how far apart schools are in the new district.

“They’re not thinking in geographic terms, they’re using census data,” she explained.

Census figures originally placed the total combined population in the 12 communities at around 25,000 people.

School officials worked with the state to correct some double counting. The population count now stands around 19,000.

Webster said voters might not have approved the consolidation plan had they known about the effect on grant funding.

“This has been an ongoing complication of reorganization,” said Jim Rier, director of finance and operations for the Department of Education.

He said some districts were aware of the potential effect on grants early in the process, while others have just learned of complications in recent months.

He said that, in many communities, the loss in rural small school grants is very small compared to the overall RSU budget.

Money the state has saved from imposing subsidy cuts as penalties on school districts that did not vote to consolidate could help offset the losses, he said. The state is supposed to redistribute that money to communities that did consolidate. Federal stimulus money could also help.

Stimulus money will only be available for two years, according to Webster.

He said he hopes to maintain all existing school programming in the coming year. Doing so will allow RSU officials to evaluate programs and find ways to make them equitable throughout the district.

In spite of the reduced grant funding, Webster said he expects consolidation will generate savings in the long run.

“As we go down this road of school district reorganization, there are going to be roadblocks and surprises along the way,” he said. “This is certainly one of them.”

The RSU board will start examining the joint school budget in a few weeks, he said.

An added hiccup in the budgeting process is the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), which will provide laptop computers to all Maine high school students and replace laptops being used by middle school students.

School districts are to pay for the computers over four years with money from targeted technology funds. Those funds are already used elsewhere, mainly for salaries for technology personnel.

Schools could opt out of the program, but would have to return computers already in use by high school teachers.

“I’m disappointed with the way the state rolled this out,” Webster said.