Federal money to improve school services for Hawai'i's poorest children is going up this year by $4.2 million, a 9.8 percent increase. That means 201 schools — five more than a year ago — will be eligible for funding to help them provide services to disadvantaged children.

It's also an indicator that more children in Hawai'i are living in poverty than a year ago. Department of Education officials are still tallying those numbers, along with exact dollar figures that each of the targeted schools will receive.

Federal Title I money allocated to serve the state's lowest-income children will rise from $43.29 million for the most recent school year to $47. 54 million this coming year, according to Lavern Adaniya, Title I specialist for the DOE.

Title I funding is part of the No Child Left Behind Act and targeted at school districts that serve the highest percentages of low-income families. Schools that receive the funding must have at least 35 percent of their students receiving free or reduced-price lunches subsidized by the federal government.

But the Center on Education Policy, a national independent advocacy group for public education, says that while the funding nationally has increased by 3 percent, it isn't keeping pace with the number of children in poverty, which has grown by 6 percent over the past year.

In a comprehensive review of the new allocations, the center notes that two-thirds of the school districts that participate and nine states will receive less money than they did a year ago.

Hawai'i is one of the top 10 states seeing their percentages of federal dollars increase to meet the demands of disadvantaged children.

But before the funds are allocated, Adaniya said schools eligible for the funding need to submit plans for how they will use the money.

The plan offers a blueprint for how the schools will use their funds, Adaniya said, and they will vary according to the needs of the particular schools.

"The vast majority have schoolwide programs," she said. "You're trying to improve your entire school, with particular attention to under performers. The ways they use their money is up to the school."

She said a lot of the schools are putting their funding into the comprehensive school reform model initiated under the No Child Left Behind Act. "That looks at the entire school to see where important changes can occur," she said.

Some of those changes could include extra support for under achievers, after-school or before-school tutoring, summer programs such as tutoring, or even a language-arts program implemented universally.

"It all depends on what their needs are and what they think is best."

Schools that receive these funds are required to spend 1 percent on parent involvement activities and another 10 percent on professional development for teachers and administrators if the schools haven't reached achievement goals for two years in a row.