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August 23, 2024
To: School Business Managers, Directors of Special Education, SEDRA Contacts
From: Division of School Finance, Special Education Funding
This is to notify you that SFY 2025 initial allocations have been loaded into the Minnesota Education Grant System (MEGS) for the Finance Codes (FIN) listed below. There has been a change to the initial allocation process after Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) received a notice from the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), whereby Under Part B Section 611, FIN 419, MDE is only able to initially award $79,562,303 prior to October 1. Therefore, this initial award is lower than the normal estimated allocation. The total flow through award for FIN 419 will be $203,081,325. MDE will recalculate a new estimate for FIN 419 in early October 2024, which will then only holdback 10 percent of the flow through, which is typical of years past. OSEP does allow the full Part B Section 619, FIN 420 to be flowed immediately and thus the amount loaded now only held back 10 percent. We will calculate and load initial awards for both Coordinated Early Intervening Services (CEIS) programs during the October recalculation along with making the deduction for State Services to the Blind (SSB). A second ListServ will go out when the updated estimates are loaded into MEGS in October.
Final allocations will be calculated and loaded into MEGS in March 2025, based on final current year child count data.
- FIN 419 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part B Section 611 Regular
- FIN 420 IDEA Part B Section 619 Preschool Incentive, Ages 3-5
LEAs are required to submit all expenditures in the Special Education Data Reporting Application (SEDRA) by funding source codes. The end of day data from each Tuesday will be edited and validated in SEDRA. Error free lines will be summed to the Uniform Financial Accounting and Reporting System (UFARS) object code levels and finance code each Wednesday morning and loaded into MEGS overnight Wednesday. The budgets will be available on Thursday morning. MDE anticipates running the first extract for SFY 2025 on September 11, 2024.
Any changes to your budgets will need to be made in SEDRA so that data edits can be applied. The budgets will automatically become funded and active in MEGS, except for those that have SEDRA or MEGS errors, i.e., budget is less than draws, budget exceeds allocation, etc.
With the new MEGS system, local educational agencies (LEAs) are required to closeout each finance code at the end of each fiscal year. This must be done prior to any carryover funds being moved to the following year. MDE is reminding LEAs who have unspent SFY 2023 funds, which were previously loaded into MEGS earlier this year, that if they will not be drawing those funds on SFY 2024 expenditures, they must be drawn against eligible costs incurred in SFY 2025 prior to September 30, 2024. Current, unspent SFY 2023 funds will not carryover to SFY 2025 until the LEA closes the applicable finance code for SFY 2024. If you know your LEA will need to carryover some of the SFY 2023 funds into SFY 2025, please do not begin making draw requests in SFY 2025, until you have closed SFY 2024 and the carryover is complete. LEAs do not have the ability to reclassify draw requests by course code within MEGS to switch which year’s funds were previously paid.
If you need additional information on how to complete the closeout report process for SFY 2024 in MEGS to balance forward unspent SFY 2023 funds to draw before the December 9, 2024, deadline, please send a request to the Special Education Funding and Data Team link below.
If you have any questions regarding the allocations for the above finance dimensions, send an email to the Special Education Funding and Data Team.
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