The TLCF grants are a federally funded initiative, authorized by 20 USC sections 6841 ? 6847. State education agencies, such as the Iowa Department of Education, which have been granted these funds are to award grants to local education agencies on a competitive basis to enable the LEAs to carry out the activities described in 20 USC section 6844. That section of federal law describes six areas of activities, all of which are focused on increasing student and local community access to technology for the purpose of enhancing the instructional program.

A state education agency awarded TLCG funds has wide discretion to implement the competitive process used by the SEA to make grants to LEAs. The Iowa Department of Education set up a process whereby a total of 150 points could be given by the team of grant readers, and an additional 60 points based on objective demographic factors, for a total of 210 points. Given the total funds to be awarded, the grant administrator determined that all applications scoring a total of 137 or more points would be funded. No applications were funded fully; all were funded at the same percentage. Of the 282 applications received, 94 received a grant.

There is no indication that Team C treated the Des Moines Public School applications unfairly. It was tough on all applications it read, but consistently so. All readers signed a pledge that they would not read or score an application if they had a conflict of interest. None of the members of this Team were from AEA 11; accordingly, all applications assigned to it came from AEA 11. It is just a coincidence that, because applications were assigned by alphabetical order within an AEA, many of the Des Moines Public School buildings are close together alphabetically, resulting in Team C reading seven (of its 11) applications from Des Moines Public Schools.

The federal statute and regulations do not direct an SEA as to how much weight to give to poverty. The overall concept of "need" was addressed by the Iowa Department of Education through percentage of free/reduced hot lunch, present ratio of computers to students, and connectivity, with the most emphasis among these three factors going to free/reduced hot lunch. This was a straight-forward demographic awarding of points, with no bias involved.

That the Iowa Department of Education denies theappeal of DMPS.