SELMA -- In the coming year, most students at Selma Elementary will have the chance to receive tutoring paid for with federal dollars.

But while parents and school officials might celebrate that opportunity, the requirement to provide tutoring is a costly punishment for failing to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Selma Elementary is one of four Title I schools in Johnston County facing sanctions for the upcoming school year. Title I is a federal program that funnels dollars to schools with high numbers of students who live in poverty.

“This will be our first experience with having to offer this service,” said Elizabeth Tanner, director of Title I and No Child Left Behind for Johnston County schools.

While any student at Selma Elementary will be eligible to receive tutoring, Tanner said priority would go to the 85 percent of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches. The reason is that there is a cap on the amount of money available, said Associate Superintendent Keith Beamon, who oversees curriculum and instruction for Johnston schools.

Of the $476,897 Selma Elementary receives in Title I money, roughly half is earmarked for what Tanner called “school improvement services.” In years past, those services have included providing transportation for students whose parents choose to transfer their children to other schools. Tutoring will now be added to the list of services paid for with those dollars, Tanner said.

“The first option is school choice, so we have to fund that first,” she said. “After that, we will prioritize students for tutoring based on low income followed by those most at-risk.”

Tutors serving Selma’s students could come from among 16 vendors, including at least one from Johnston County, Tanner said. She said parents would choose which vendor they wanted to work with their children. Regardless of the service, Tanner said, no individual tutor would be allowed to work with more than six students at a time.

Elsewhere in Johnston, three other Title I schools — Cooper, Meadow and West Smithfield Elementary — will now have to offer parents the choice to send their child to another school. Selma, because of poor test scores, has been offering parents that option for the past two school years.

Options available to parents of Cooper students will be Polenta and Wilson’s Mills Elementary. Parents of students at Meadow, a K-8 school, can choose among Benson Elementary, Benson Middle, Four Oaks Elementary and Four Oaks Middle. Students transferring from West Smithfield would be sent to either Polenta or Micro-Pine Level.

School choice and tutoring services are sanctions levied only against Title I schools that failed to meet federal standards for student achievement, Beamon said. Other schools that fail to meet federal standards for at least two consecutive years are required to rewrite their school-improvement plans on a yearly basis until conditions improve.

But Beamon said Johnston County requires its schools to rewrite improvement plans on a yearly basis anyway.

News of the sanctions at all four schools followed the release of the state’s yearly progress reports, which show how students across the county perform on end-of-grade tests. Test results released last week covered only math scores for elementary and middle schools in Johnston. The results included both math and reading scores for the county’s high schools.

Overall, 50 percent of Johnston schools met federal standards for No Child Left Behind in the 2007-08 school year. To meet those standards, at least 77.2 percent of students in elementary or middle schools had to pass their math exams. That’s up from 68.5 percent the year before.

Those numbers still could change this fall, when the state releases scores for reading exams in elementary and middle schools.