In October 2025, Justin Moore, Assistant Superintendent at Mason County Schools in Kentucky, ran what he thought was a routine query. He was cross-referencing enrollment figures against Title I eligibility counts ahead of the district's annual federal programs review. The numbers didn't match. They were off by a lot.
What he found was $790,000 in Title I funding that Mason County had been eligible for — and had never claimed. Not for one year. For multiple years running.
The Gap Nobody Could See
Mason County Schools serves roughly 2,800 students across seven schools. Like most districts its size, it runs on a patchwork of systems: a student information system for enrollment and demographics, a separate platform for federal programs reporting, another for finance. Each system does its job. None of them share a common view of the data.
The root cause turned out to be straightforward. Enrollment data in Mason County's SIS — the system of record for which students are attending which schools — didn't match the eligibility calculations being used in their federal programs reporting. Specifically, the free and reduced-price lunch counts that drive Title I allocations were being pulled from different snapshots at different points in the year. The SIS had one number. The federal reporting tool had another. Both were technically correct within their own context. Neither reflected the full picture.
This kind of discrepancy is almost impossible to catch manually. The data lives in different systems, maintained by different staff, on different update cycles. No single person has visibility across all of it at once. So the gap compounds — quietly, year after year — until someone happens to look at the right numbers side by side.
What Changed
Mason County had recently started working with Arcline, which connects directly to a district's existing systems and normalizes the data into a single, queryable layer. When Justin ran his cross-reference, Arcline was pulling live enrollment data from the SIS and matching it against the eligibility calculations used for federal aid — something that previously would have required manual exports from two different platforms, hours of spreadsheet work, and a fair amount of guesswork about which figures were current.
The discrepancy surfaced immediately. The district's SIS showed higher enrollment in Title I-eligible categories than what had been reported in their federal applications. The gap had been growing incrementally as families moved in and out of the district, as free and reduced-price lunch applications were processed at different times, and as the two systems drifted further apart.
"Arcline found $790K in Title I funding we didn't know we were missing. It paid for itself before we finished onboarding."
— Justin Moore, Assistant Superintendent, Mason County Schools (KY)
With the discrepancy identified, Mason County's federal programs coordinator was able to file amended applications and recover the funding. The process took weeks, not months, because the underlying data was already reconciled — they just needed to submit the corrected figures.
What Mason County Did With the Money
The $790,000 went where Title I funding is supposed to go: directly to students. Mason County allocated the recovered funds to hire four additional reading intervention specialists across their elementary schools, expand after-school tutoring programs at two Title I buildings, and purchase updated diagnostic assessment materials that had been on a wishlist for three budget cycles.
These aren't abstract line items. They're the difference between a third-grader who's behind in reading getting 30 minutes of targeted support per week and getting none.
Three Questions Every District Should Ask Right Now
Mason County's situation isn't unusual. Based on our work with districts across the country, data mismatches between enrollment systems and federal programs reporting are more common than most administrators realize. Here are three questions worth asking at your next cabinet meeting:
1. Are your SIS enrollment counts matching your Title I eligibility counts?
Pull the numbers from both systems and put them side by side. If they don't match — and they probably won't — find out why. The discrepancy might be small and explainable. It might not be.
2. When was the last time someone cross-referenced free and reduced-price lunch data with federal aid applications?
In many districts, the answer is "at the beginning of the school year" or "whenever the state asks." But student eligibility changes constantly — families move, income changes, applications get processed late. A cross-reference that's six months old might as well be from a different district.
3. Do you have a single place where all your funding eligibility data lives?
If the answer involves multiple exports, a shared drive, and a spreadsheet that one person maintains, you have a structural vulnerability. It's not a question of competence — it's a question of infrastructure. One person can't be the connective tissue between five systems indefinitely.
The Larger Point
Mason County's story isn't really about $790,000, though that money matters enormously to a district of that size. It's about what happens when the data a district already collects — painstakingly, every day, by registrars and counselors and front-office staff — actually gets connected.
Every district has gaps between its systems. Every district has data that contradicts other data, counts that don't reconcile, funding that's been left on the table because the right numbers never ended up in the same room. The question isn't whether those gaps exist. It's whether you can see them.
The staff who collect this data — who enter enrollment records, process lunch applications, file federal reports — are doing hard, careful work. They deserve infrastructure that lets that work count for everything it should.
