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DECAL requests $100,000 for summer meal startup grants; seeks $7.4 million for pre-K teacher pay parity
Summary
Commissioner Jacobs of the Division of Early Care and Learning told the Education Budget Subcommittee the agency seeks $100,000 for startup grants to recruit nonprofit summer meal sponsors under the Happy Helpings program, $7.4 million to complete salary parity for Georgia pre-K teachers, and permission to use lottery funds to finish a new pre-K management system.
Commissioner Jacobs, representing the Division of Early Care and Learning (DECAL), told the Education Budget Subcommittee the agency's amended-budget requests include $100,000 for startup grants to recruit nonprofit sponsors for the summer meal program "Happy Helpings," $7.4 million to complete salary parity for Georgia pre-K teachers, and authority to use lottery funds to finish a new pre-K management system.
On the summer meals program, Jacobs said the one-time $100,000 would provide startup grants ‘‘about, a maximum of 10000 in grants to individual nonprofits, to sign on to serve meals throughout the summer to school aged children.’’ She said the DECAL allocation last year produced over 100,000 additional meals in 12 counties that previously had not been served and that the program targets counties without existing sponsors. Jacobs said the department may work with churches and community organizations but ‘‘we will target directly nonprofits. So we're only allowed to work with nonprofits… we will focus this directly on those counties that do not have any food service with non profits in those areas.’’
On pre-K teacher pay, Jacobs said the request is a true-up to move pre-K teachers onto the state Board of Education T&E K-12 salary schedule. "We do need an additional 7400000.0 to fully move all of our teachers from a quasi, scale that we've used for years to the official T and E scale," she said, describing the amount as a correction to an earlier calculation.
Jacobs also said the governor allowed the agency to use lottery dollars to pay remaining costs of a new pre-K management system that replaced a 20-year-old platform. DECAL previously used one-time federal COVID dollars to pay almost $9,000,000 of that system's cost and now seeks lottery funds to complete development.
Committee members asked whether the Happy Helpings grants would overlap with other federal summer meal programs. Jacobs said the federal Seamless Summer option administered by the Department of Education serves more meals nationally but involves different sponsors and therefore would not overlap with DECAL's effort. A member asked how agencies would be selected; Jacobs said DECAL will vet nonprofits for federal administrative requirements and focus on counties without existing sponsors. No formal motions or votes were recorded in the excerpt.
DECAL said it will begin outreach once the governor signs the amended budget; specific grant recipients and county lists were not provided in the transcript.
