Denver Public Schools leaders highlight how they plan to transition armed police officers back into everyday life for students and staff, among other changes, in the .

Throughout the next school year, DPS will bring armed police, known as school resource officers, back to its campuses after the district’s school board voted 4-3 on the policy earlier this year. Members who voted against the policy emphasized how having armed police in schools , which is why the board originally took SROs out of the district in 2020.

Superintendent Alex Marrero will have discretion to remove SROs who do not follow district policy, and the district plans to monitor citations and arrests to determine if marginalized individuals are disproportionately interacting with officers. Marrero where they were stationed this spring.

The new safety plan follows multiple instances of gun violence in the district this year, particularly an incident , when a student shot two administrators. The DPS Board of Education the next day held an emergency meeting. The members unanimously voted to temporarily bring back armed police officers to schools and directed Marrero to create a long-term safety plan.

Scott Pribble, a spokesperson for the district, said that over the next school year, families will see more mental health resources and support in addition to the return of school resource officers at the district’s secondary schools. Staff will also undergo additional safety training throughout the summer, and the district will conduct safety audits.

In an effort to increase accountability for SROs, the board will review data on citations and arrests quarterly and will need to approve them.

Interpreting the policy

The plan is broken down into three focus areas: personal conditions, school conditions, and system conditions. It highlights the current state of a variety of safety practices and protocols across the district and sets goals for what it hopes the future will look like for each tool used to improve safety.

Personal conditions include the mental, social, emotional, physical and behavioral health and safety of each person within the district, as the district wants to provide support that can help each student and staff member feel safe.

“DPS recognizes that addressing youth violence and student safety requires a proactive and preventative approach,” the plan says.

School conditions look at how those in each building work to create a safe and welcoming environment. Each school will also have an individual safety operational plan and a school emergency team, as well as regularly conducted safety audits.

“When creating these school conditions, DPS seeks to foster caring, consistent relationships among both individuals and groups, including students, educators and families,” the plan says. “Relationships like these promote resilience, serve to protect people, and reduce the impact of chronic or acute stress, ultimately creating school buildings where all people and the community can thrive.”

The system conditions portion of the plan looks at systems both within the school community and outside that impact school and student safety. Here the plan outlines the possibility of adding weapons detection systems, which will be decided on a school-to-school basis, youth violence prevention at the elementary school level, community hubs, and the importance of out-of-school engagement.

“The issues throughout the neighborhoods are also reverberated in the schools throughout the district,” the plan reads. “DPS takes an active role in partnering with the City of Denver, parents, students and community members to help address many of the issues; However DPS is constantly evaluating different ways we can support not only the learning environment of our students, but also the individual support systems of our students.”

The next step in implementing the plan is for Marrero to draft a “reasonal interpretation,” which the district spokesperson said is the superintendent’s understanding of how he will be evaluated by the board in carrying out the policies they approved. Then specific goals and metrics for measuring success will be developed with the board from there.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on and .

Six Colorado news outlets, including Newsline, are suing Denver Public Schools to gain access a recording of the district board’s in which board members discussed school safety plans and emerged with a new policy.

Members of the district’s Board of Education held a special meeting following a shooting last month at Denver’s East High School, which left two administrators injured. The incident was the on or near East High property in as many months, and the 17-year-old suspect was later found dead in Park County of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Board members spent the majority of the lengthy meeting behind closed doors, and upon returning to the public, voted unanimously to without any public discussion.

Under Colorado’s Open Meetings Law, elected bodies such as school boards cannot make decisions on new policies or legislation out of the public eye. There are some exceptions that allow for closed-door executive sessions, including board consultations for legal advice, discussions on personnel matters and on individual students. Topics listed for discussion at the March 23 executive session included “security arrangements or investigations” related to the March 22 shooting, and details about individual students “where public disclosure would adversely affect that person or persons involved.”

The lawsuit’s plaintiffs include Newsline, The Denver Post, Colorado Politics/The Denver Gazette, KDVR Fox 31, Chalkbeat Colorado and KUSA 9News. Each of the news outlets filed a Colorado Open Records Request for the executive session recording and were all denied.

Rachael Johnson, an attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Steve Zansberg, a First Amendment attorney and president of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, are representing the coalition of news outlets. Zansberg said of the Colorado Sunshine Law.

Zansberg said the first issue the complaint addresses is the lack of proper notice regarding what board members would discuss behind closed doors. He said Colorado law says that when a public body fails to adequately announce its topic of discussion, the meeting is considered an “unlawfully closed public meeting,” not an executive session.

“They just went behind closed doors and discussed public business,” Zansberg said.

Even if the board properly announced the topics of discussion for a lawful executive session, Zansberg said the fact that board members left the five-hour discussion with a policy change and no public discussion is a blatant vilation of Colorado’s Open Meetings Law.

If there is probable cause to believe that a publicly elected board made a decision in an executive session, a judge will review the recording of the session and determine if this was the case, Zansberg said. Public bodies in Colorado are prohibited from adopting not just new policies, but any position on an issue behind closed doors.

“It was what the case law says was ‘a rubber stamping’ of a decision that had already been made behind closed doors, and that too violates the Open Meetings Law,” Zansberg said.

A ‘tremendous amount of public interest’

Jeff Roberts, executive director of CFOIC, said there was an expectation that board members would have a public discussion following the private meeting where they discussed a high-profile situation with consequences for the entire district. He said there has been a “tremendous amount of public interest” in school safety plans and changes around school resource officers.

“Both the open meetings law, and there’s a separate statute about school board meetings, both of them say policy decisions are not permitted in executive sessions,” Roberts said. “For executive sessions, there are certain authorized topics that they can discuss behind closed doors, but when they’re talking about changing a policy, which is what they did here, that’s something that needs to be done in a public setting. That’s the intent and the spirit of these laws.”

The only time an executive session is not to be recorded is when an elected body receives specific legal advice from an attorney. DPS’s general counsel, Aaron Thompson, was present in the executive session, but it’s unclear what role he played in the board’s discussion and if there is a recording of the private portion of the meeting.

The minutes from the executive session also on how long board members discussed each topic, another requirement of state law.

The district has the right to release the recording of the meeting at any time, and Zansberg said this would be the best thing the district can do to save taxpayers “the cost of having to defend this indefensible position.” If that happens, there’s no reason left for the plaintiffs in the complaint to continue litigating.

“I would again urge the Board of Education to exercise its discretion and release this recording,” Zansberg said.

Depending on how the district decides to respond to the suit, Zansberg said it can take a few months for the courts to issue a decision.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on and .

Despite a dramatic decline in suspensions as students moved to remote learning during the pandemic, Black children and those in special education were disciplined far more often than white students and those in general education, according to a recent New York University .

The report also indicates students’ this past academic year, echoing news accounts of as a result of and of 850 school leaders where roughly 1 in 3 reported an increase in student fights or physical attacks.

And, it notes, some schools have turned away from restorative justice programs that grew out of the Obama era to more punitive tactics, including out-of-school suspensions, which are particularly damaging to students: shows they and can foreshadow .

The Department of Education is in the process of revising its own disciplinary recommendations with a focus on these same student groups. 

“This is perhaps one of the most urgent civil rights and social justice issues in education,” said Richard O. Welsh, assistant professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and the study’s author. “It is incredibly important in our effort to create a more equal and just society that we look at the school system and consider opportunities to learn and grow.”

Welsh cites two sources in his June 10 report: a 13,000-student district in the Atlanta metro area that allowed him to scrutinize its disciplinary records from 2014 to 2022 and news reports on student discipline culled from around the country. 

He found that while suspensions plummeted at the Georgia district during the pandemic, Black students were still more likely to face punishment as compared to white and Hispanic students. from .

Welsh learned that while the Georgia district’s office discipline referrals — such as a teacher sending a child to the principal’s office during in-person learning — declined in the 2020-21 school year, 82% of those referrals involved Black children, who made up only 48% of the student body.

Special education students accounted for 15% of the district’s overall population, but were 42% of the referrals that year. That number was not only disproportionate, it marked a significant spike from pre-pandemic years, when special needs students represented 29% of discipline referrals. Welsh found, too, Black children continued to be singled out in this category: Between 2015 and 2019, 23% of students referred for office discipline were Black students enrolled in special education. The figure jumped to 37% in 2020-21. 

Disproportionality is a longstanding problem when it comes to school discipline. 

American children lost of instruction in the 2017-18 academic year because of out-of-school suspensions, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education. 

While Black students made up , they accounted for nearly 42% of the suspensions: were 13.75% of and more than 24% of suspensions.

Too much punishment, or too little

Many school systems around the country have not yet compiled their disciplinary data for this past school year. But Welsh said interviews with staff at the Georgia district plus information gleaned from local news reports “points to an uptick in disciplinary infractions and consequences” in 2021-22. 

In step with his findings, Rohini Singh, assistant director at the School Justice Project for Advocates for Children of New York, said some schools are ratcheting up the punishments for incidents that would have been handled differently prior to the pandemic. 

This is particularly true of on-campus fights, she said: A scuffle between two children that drew a crowd of onlookers might not have resulted in an out-of-school suspension in the past, but has stark consequences today — and not only for the students at the heart of the tussle. Onlookers are also being targeted, she said, charged with an infraction called “group violence,” a punishment previously doled out only to those who planned an attack in advance.

“The school is seeking a [lengthy] suspension for all of these students instead of looking at the individual circumstances, understanding what happened, the context,” Singh said. 

New York City Department of Education Press Secretary Nathaniel Styer said he could not comment on specific discipline cases without knowing the names of the students involved. In 2019, the DOE moved to to 20 days, restrict student arrests and train educators in alternative disciplinary practices.

At least reports some NYC teachers and parents believe children are not being punished enough and that serious student misbehavior is often ignored. DOE data does show, from 14,502 for the first four months of the 2017-18 school year to 8,369 for the same time period four years later.

The city school system has committed millions to restorative justice programs that focus on reconciliation over punishment to address long-standing racial disparities. are mixed but a 2021 showed children with the highest levels of exposure to restorative practices experienced Black–white discipline disparities five times smaller than those with the lowest levels of exposure.

Dana Ashley oversees a joint program between the United Federation of Teachers and the DOE aimed at changing the culture and climate in dozens of schools, moving them away from after-the-fact disciplinary tactics. She said teachers who have had continuous training on how to handle student meltdowns feel less discontented than those who have not. 

“Teachers are frustrated when they are told they are supposed to know something, but are not given the resources to know it and do it well,” she said.

Elsewhere in the country, Chicago Public Schools saw a 16% increase in out-of-school suspensions for high school students in the first semester of the 2021-22 school year compared to the same time period two years earlier. 

But, said Jadine Chou, head of safety and security at the 341,000-student district, it could have been far worse: CPS saw a 38% reduction in police notifications and a 50% drop in expulsions at its high schools during this same time period, which Chou attributes to the district’s long-standing commitment to restorative justice. 

“We are very grateful to our school staff that they have signed on to this mindset,” she said, calling it, “the right thing to do.”

Pandemic-related trauma

In the current climate, Andrew R. Hairston, director of the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, said schools must factor in pandemic-related trauma when evaluating student behavior: Educators must remember many of these children lost loved ones, survived food and housing insecurity and endured unprecedented levels of isolation — and, in some cases, abuse — prior to returning to the classroom. 

Their re-entry was botched, he said: Children needed greater flexibility and compassion. 

“There is some lip service to social-emotional learning, but the investments don’t meet the needs,” he said. 

Anell Eccleston, director of care and sustainability at the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, said his organization’s helpline received nearly 300 calls this past school year from families concerned with disciplinary issues — up from roughly 150 prior to the pandemic. 

“The majority of calls are from students who qualify for free or reduced lunch and single-parent homes, where their parent or guardian has also been impacted harshly by the pandemic,” he said. “Some schools are reimplementing zero tolerance practices and pushing out students at high rates.”

Out West, Paradise Valley Schools, which serves some 30,000 students in Phoenix and Scottsdale, also saw a jump in out-of-school suspensions, from 1,223 in 2018-19 to 1,356 last school year. In-school-suspensions dropped from 1,135 to 1,091 in that same time period. 

School should have given younger students more time to play and older kids a greater opportunity to manage their emotions, perhaps allowing them to leave the classroom to cool off, said Meenal McNary, a co-collaborator with the Round Rock Black Parents Association in Texas. But a “return-to-normal” mindset won out, she said.

McNary pulled her three children, ages 5, 10 and 12, from her local public school district last year in favor of a small charter with a far higher percentage of Black and Hispanic children. 

But even that didn’t spare them from what she believes is outsized punishment for minor infractions, like their failure to sit still and listen: When one of her kids was talking to another student in class while his teacher was delivering a lesson, the educator took away his Chromebook for a week as punishment, she said.

“They use that to learn,” she said. “How does that make any sense? Why can’t we do something different? OK, he’s bored, so what else can we do?”

Add high-stakes tests, pandemic-related stress for all and the constant threat of gun violence and both teachers and students are flailing, she said.

The roughest year of my life 

Some states, recognizing the long-term damage of strict punishment, have tried to dramatically curb heavy-handed measures: Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2015 signed legislation aimed at making suspensions a last resort in an attempt to disrupt the . , including Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Louisiana and Nevada, have limited the grade levels in which out-of-school suspensions and expulsions can be used. 

Denver Public Schools, which served 86,600 students last school year, started implementing restorative justice practices in 2005. A 2017 grant grew the program exponentially, prompting a 64% decrease in out-of-school suspensions overall, with a 77% decline for Black students and a 79% drop for children with disabilities, said Jay Grimm, the district’s director of student equity and opportunity. 

But this past school year brought new challenges. The district saw a marked increase in what the state of Colorado dubs “detrimental behavior,” including student fights and bullying. In 2018-19, such behavior resulted in 1,155 out-of-school suspensions. Last year, the figure jumped to 1,754. 

The district shrunk by roughly 4,000 students in that same time period.

Grimm said the school system remains committed to alternative forms of managing student misbehavior. There was a 41.5% reduction in expulsions this past school year compared to 2018-19, partly because the district changed the way teachers report classroom insubordination, which, he said, “could be subjective or have some bias.”

Nearly everyone who returned to the classroom last school year was at a disadvantage, administrators said. Teachers started the year burned out and those who were new to the profession, who joined the field when school was remote, had trouble managing their students. 

Melissa Laurel, an educator for 21 years, said her South Texas charter school saw a four-fold increase in disciplinary referrals this past academic year. While fights remained relatively uncommon at her 6th- through 12th-grade campus, vandalism skyrocketed as children answered TikTok challenges that left her school’s bathrooms damaged. 

Worse yet, she said, parents, who used to be allies in helping teachers manage their children at school, were suddenly unsupportive. A high-ranking administrator on the road to becoming principal, Laurel left the post to work at the charter’s regional office in part because of poor student behavior.

“It was the roughest year of my life,” said Laurel, who starts her new position in July. “The kids were just more aggressive.” 

David Combs, former assistant principal at a Knoxville, Tennessee high school, said staff observed an increase in racial slurs among students and more vandalism than he had ever seen in his 23 years in education — combined.

Combs, who will start a new position at a different district in the fall, attributes the change to too much time at home and on the internet. 

“It was as if they missed a stage in development and maturity,” he said. “But, toward the end of the year, that was starting to decline.” 

McNary, the Round Rock parent leader, is empathetic to teachers, saying they had to manage an entirely new, fraught landscape: Not only did they have unruly students but they also had to abide by new Texas state laws restricting discussions of systemic racism and LGBTQ issues.

“Teachers not only have to make sure their kids are OK, but also to not say anything wrong,” she said. “When are they supposed to get to know the children?”

But now, with chicken and beef prices up, a worldwide shortage of packaging materials and a dearth of long-haul truckers, she’s not as sure what she’ll be serving the district’s 18,000 students this fall. And she won’t be surprised if distributors start adding transportation surcharges “to stop the bleeding on their end” — something she hasn’t seen since the Great Recession.

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“It’s a domino effect,” she said. “We’re at the point now where we don’t even know what’s going to come in the back door.”

Food services are just one aspect of school operations affected by inflation, which is experiencing a 13-year high. Wages are climbing because districts can’t find enough employees to drive buses or provide students additional academic support. Price hikes on materials are causing some districts to hit pause on construction projects and districts are for teachers to help students catch up.

At a time when the American Rescue Plan is flooding school districts with more federal money than they’ve ever had, educators are slowly awakening to the reality that those funds might not go as far as expected and that inflation may have a lasting impact on their regular budgets as well .

“School districts are like little cities. You’ve got food service. You’ve got transportation. You’ve got maintenance. Inflation across the sectors will impact all those areas,” said Charles Carpenter, chief financial officer for the Denver Public Schools.

The economic indicators are clear. This summer, the Consumer Price Index — which measures changes in what people typically pay for goods and services — saw its largest one-month and 12-month increases since 2008, according to the government’s .

Experts attribute in inflation in part to the rollback of pandemic restrictions: Consumers are traveling, eating out and shopping more, which is driving up prices. But there’s not enough supply to meet the demand.

The debate is over how much to worry about it. Some that President Joe Biden’s policies — the partisan relief bill that passed in March and his big-ticket infrastructure packages — will hurt the economy, while others argue this period of inflation and won’t spiral out of control.

Either way, Carpenter is closely monitoring costs of raw materials like lumber and copper as the district moves forward with building new schools and adding air-conditioning to 24 sites over the next three years.

Contractors “are bidding on our projects knowing that they’ll see price increases,” he said. “Do you try and push forward now and lock in a price or wait and it could be worse?”

Some districts are discussing whether to to lower prices and others have decided to pause projects because contractors can’t provide solid cost estimates. The St. Clair R-III School District, southwest of St. Louis, decided in June to delay construction on a performing arts center and a bus facility until costs stabilize. “It has become much more difficult to obtain competitive, cost-effective bids for construction projects,” Superintendent Kyle Kruse said in his report to the board.

‘Can’t find the people’

While districts might be able to defer construction or renovation, they can’t put off addressing students’ academic needs — especially given the extreme learning loss that often accompanied more than a year of remote learning.

“We’ve got this short-term demand for services to mitigate instructional loss and a shortage of labor willing to put in that time,” said Jonathan Travers, who leads consulting services for Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts leverage resources to improve student learning.

That’s why in addition to price hikes on materials, districts are seeing higher labor costs. Some have offered bonuses and even to attract summer school teachers. The danger for districts, he said, is that unions might expect to maintain those higher wages when they return to the bargaining table to negotiate future contracts.

In Plymouth-Canton, Hennessey still has 20 positions to fill before fall. She said entry-level school nutrition employees earn about $11 per hour, but that doesn’t come close to the $15 they can earn at McDonald’s. And districts nationally are struggling to find even with higher pay.

“It’s great to have all this money,” said Uri Monson, chief financial officer with the Philadelphia schools. “But if you can’t find the people to do the work — even if you’re going to pay them — that’s a problem.”

Districts aren’t the only ones feeling the pinch. from the accounting firm KPMGshowed parents estimate they’ll spend an average of $20 more on school supplies this fall. Parents of young children, many of whom delayed enrollment last year, anticipate spending $156 per child — a 32 percent increase over last school year.

What’s eating up much of their back-to-school spending? — a necessity some may have skipped last fall when many districts opened remotely.

One relief for families is that the increased costs come at the same time the majority of households with school-age children are receiving monthly of $250 to $300, approved as part of the relief bill.

‘Calm the markets’

Some districts plan budgets to allow them to ride out periods like this. The Philadelphia district signs fixed contracts for expenses such as fuel, food services — and, of course, labor.

“We occasionally get criticized when we do long-term guaranteed pricing contracts,” Monson said. “No one is going to complain right now. This is exactly why we do it.”

But he acknowledged that the soaring prices are hitting contractors hard as well as those waiting for supplies. “The cost of wood and basic materials has been out of control,” Monson said. And with shipping delays, he’s urging departments to allow longer lead times for deliveries. “It’s really hard to order something on Friday and expect it to be there on Monday.”

That’s because the most Americans experienced at the beginning of the pandemic haven’t really gone away.

“There are shipments from Asia that have been stuck at the Los Angeles port since October” — mostly because of labor shortages, said Charlie Andrews, a senior cost manager with Rider Levett Bucknall, which advises school districts on construction costs and provides project management services.

When contractors face unforeseen costs, such as tariffs, they often pass those on to school systems.

Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund — which advocates for modernizing school facilities — said cost fluctuations help make the case for Biden’s $100 school construction plan, a combination of direct grants and bonds. The proposal didn’t make it in the with Republicans, but is expected to re-emerge in the details of a Democrats have proposed.

“Districts need long money,” Filardo said. “It will calm the markets somewhat and give them more leverage as they plan and implement projects.”

States have until Monday to distribute $81 billion in federal relief funds to districts — two-thirds of the total for K-12 schools in the American Rescue Plan. And while the law requires districts to put aside 20 percent of their funding to address learning loss, an early review of spending plans shows most aren’t adding tutoring programs, extending the school year or adopting other programs expected to help students catch up.

Instead, they are largely using the money to fill budget gaps, hire staff and issue “thank you” bonuses to teachers, Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said during a Tuesday webinar. Her team has consulted with district finance officials and reviewed school board documents and media reports.

“That surprised us because tutoring is sort of the darling … for how to spend federal funds,” Roza said Tuesday, referring to multiple studies in recent months about the effectiveness of “high-dosage” tutoring programs.

Chad Aldeman, policy director at Edunomics Lab, added there’s little evidence so far of efforts to focus on the needs of the most vulnerable students. “The pandemic has affected different students differently, and we’re seeing a lot of one-size-fits-all,” he said. Facility improvements, he added, might be a smart use of one-time funds, but they don’t really help students most impacted by the pandemic.

The relief bill, passed in March, represents the largest-ever, one-time influx of federal funds for K-12, setting up a “fast and furious” planning process for districts over the next few months, Roza said. According to the law, districts have to submit spending plans to their states in August and provide updates or revisions every six months. They have until the end of September 2023 to spend the money. Meanwhile, leaders are facing heightened scrutiny from parents and advocacy groups looking to hold leaders accountable for helping students recover from months of remote learning. District spending plans must demonstrate that officials made extensive efforts to involve parents, educators and students.

“That means districts can’t go into a dark, smoke-filled room and make a plan,” she said, urging officials to be more transparent than usual about hiring staff, launching new programs and issuing contracts for services. Some superintendents, she said, are still operating under emergency powers, allowing them to sign off on expenditures without school board approval.

‘They can do better’

The National Center for Youth Law, a nonprofit law firm based in Oakland, California, is among those closely tracking whether districts are spending the funds on students with the greatest need. On Tuesday, the organization joined with three other California groups to release of how 48 districts in the state planned to use relief funds from last year.

While there were some bright spots, the analysis showed plans often lacked detail, especially on how schools intended to respond to students with limited internet access, seek parent and community input, and target support to English learners, students in foster care and others likely to face the most earning disruption.

Vague descriptions of goals make it “hard for folks to follow up, so at the end of the school year, they can ask, ‘How did it go?’” said Atasi Uppal, an attorney focusing on juvenile justice and education at the firm. “We want to give some grace to districts that were planning last September, but we also just think they can do better.”

As districts in the state begin to develop plans for a combined $55 billion in state and one-time federal funds, the groups are calling for greater input from the public and offer a list of questions parents and others can use to seek details on programs and expenditures.

Roza and other school finance experts warn districts against using time-limited funds on raises, new staff and other recurring costs. But Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, one of the other California groups, added that schools in the state already have such large shortages of school counselors and nurses that it might be wise to increase staff. “There is a need for a lot of extra support now,” he said.

However, districts planning to hire may struggle to find enough qualified applicants, Aldeman said, based on labor market data showing districts have more job openings than they’re able to fill.

In Colorado, the Denver Public Schools tried to get a jump on the planning process by meeting with a budget advisory committee in December, even before the Biden administration took office and the relief bill passed. Those meetings — involving students, parents and union representatives — inspired a new $3 million to provide on-site mental health professionals at schools.

Chuck Carpenter, the district’s chief financial officer, said schools want to have “the most welcoming and ready environments” when students return in the fall. But the challenge is to avoid committing to new programs they won’t be able to sustain financially in the future. “It’s a grant and you have to treat it like that,” he said. “There will be a time when it’s not there.”

Meanwhile, not all states will meet the deadline to allocate funds to the local level. One possible complication is that they are holding onto the money at the state level as part of their annual budget process. And in some states, the legislature doesn’t approve the budget until the end of June. “If that’s the case, then generally those funds can’t leave the state treasury to be liquidated … until the state’s budget has been enacted,” explained Austin Reid, education committee director at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, some states have alerted the department that they will miss Monday’s deadline as well as the June 7 deadline to submit a state plan for using relief funds. A department spokesperson did not offer specifics, but said, “states are providing updates on a regular basis.”