Poverty Data Overview

The SCDE will accept the following data source(s) for private schools to use when calculating the number of students enrolled in a non-public school in school year 2019-2020 who are from low-income families.


Allowable data sources that the SCDE will accept include:

• free or reduced-price lunch data,
• scholarship or financial assistance data,
• E-Rate data, or
• Other relevant data, such as data that the non-public school has provided to the State for purposes of State or local programs.
• data imputing the number of students from low-income families based on the American Community Survey (ACS) or the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program by the U.S. Census Bureau, or
• proportionality data: the number of students enrolled in a non-public school who reside in a Title I school attendance area multiplied by the percentage of public school students in that same attendance area who are from low-income families. If the non-public school has students who reside in more than one Title I school attendance area, multiple calculations would be necessary.

Census Data

If using ACS Census data, the SCDE requests that the non-public school determine the number of enrolled students in the 2019-2020 school year that resided in particular Census tracts. Information about identifying the Census tract of a particular address is available as a PDF. Applicant EANS private schools may apply the ACS data about the poverty rate in each of those Census tracts to estimate the number of students from low-income families enrolled in the school. This method will work best when most students at a non-public school live in a small number of Census tracts. If using this approach, the private school will be asked to provide the following data on its application: