USVI: Use it or lose it

The clock is ticking on $3.3 million in federal funds from Fiscal Year 2002 that the V.I. Education Department has not yet spent.

The local government must move quickly to obligate the leftover money - not necessarily spend it, but legally earmark it toward a specific expense - within the next 2Â months.

In pushing up against a looming deadline, the Virgin Islands is not alone. All the states, the District of Columbia and seven other territories also have high cash balances that will expire by the end of the summer.

Chief state school officers throughout the nation were notified last month of their remaining account balances in a letter from Jack Martin, chief financial officer of the U.S. Education Department.

Martin urged the states to make plans quickly to use the $2.1 billion remaining in grant money - or lose it. The money will revert to the U.S. Treasury Department if a spending plan is not submitted by Sept. 30, 2004, he said.

Yet Democrats wail, weep, and moan that the Bush administration is under-funding schools which have so much money that they don't know what to do with it!