Iowa’s governor said the approval would result in less time spent on administrative duties, allowing educators to put more resources and time back into the classroom.

Other states have pointed to the of having flexible accountability and assessment systems that reflect local priorities, foster innovation and empower local decision-making, rather than adhering strictly to federal mandates. But some education leaders, such as the , worry that if states ultimately establish 50 distinct accountability and improvement models, students’ access to learning accommodations and opportunities will vary based on where they live and learn. Academic outcomes can depend on the availability of tutoring, advanced coursework and enrichment, special education services, assistive technology and other supports.

As states consider the opportunities that waivers present for greater flexibility in using federal funds, they should consider lessons from the recent past. The pandemic-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds were a lifeline for schools, but they also exposed critical gaps in states’ approaches to innovation and evaluation. While ESSER funds enabled rapid response and recovery, the program lacked robust provisions for evaluating which strategies worked and why. As a result, there is limited evidence about which interventions — such as summer school, tutoring or targeted supports — were the most effective. 

For the department and states, the lesson is clear: Rigorous evaluation and continuous improvement must be embedded in the waiver and experimentation process from the start. States should clearly show how their plans connect to better student outcomes, and the department should assist them in these efforts. With more flexible financial strategies in place, states could find new ways to combine funds to reach their goals and learn from one another as they develop innovative approaches. Most importantly, however, states should ensure their investments include research and evaluation components, so they know what works and what does not.

Even as it cedes some control, the department has an important role to play in ensuring the following elements are in place: 

1. Purposeful Experimentation: States should be empowered to innovate, but with the expectation that they will rigorously evaluate new approaches and share what they learn. This will help ensure that successful strategies can be replicated and adapted elsewhere. Existing investments can be used toward these goals. For example, the Regional Educational Laboratories, the Comprehensive Center Network and the Educational Innovation and Research program help schools build their data-using skills and provide guidance on evidence-based practices.
2. Capacity Building: Many states will need expert guidance to design and implement effective reforms. Federal investment should focus on making lasting improvements, not just short-term fixes. The comprehensive network, for example, is a government-funded organization of regional centers that help states design, test and strengthen new ideas and strategies, and guide policymakers, state education agencies and educators in building the skills needed to improve teaching and learning.
3. Collaboration Over Isolation: The government should continue to facilitate collaboration among states, ensuring that innovations and lessons learned are shared widely. This may be done by providing insight on how to launch and sustain new programs and develop continuous improvement strategies, or by strengthening ongoing cross-state work through grants, technical assistance, conferences and national networks that help align standards, share data and improve student outcomes.

States have always been constitutionally responsible for providing public education, though federal policy — since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was enacted in 1965 — has incentivized states to serve disadvantaged students and promoted greater consistency in educational quality nationwide. 

Now, the department is signaling a willingness to let states experiment. But to avoid repeating the missed opportunities of ESSER, federal and state leaders must prioritize evaluation, capacity building and collaboration. Only then can the flexibility presented through these waivers lead to lasting improvements in educational excellence. 

High-quality tutoring has emerged as an important post-pandemic for helping struggling students in public schools. finds that tutoring often results in substantial additional learning gains when delivered during the school day, in small groups with the same tutors and multiple times a week for at least 10 weeks. 

But this often comes with a substantial price tag — depending on the model and staffing approach, can range from $1,200 to $2,500 per student per year. During the pandemic, many districts relied on federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to launch or expand tutoring programs, but these have largely expired.

Fortunately, states and school districts have access to other funding streams, which can be combined through “blending” and “braiding” to cover the costs of tutoring when a single source is insufficient.

Federal Funding 

Though federal funding faced significant uncertainty during the Fiscal Year 2026 budget process, Congress passed a spending package that sustains many of these funding streams, at least for the coming year. 

School districts may use Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds — federal aid intended to close achievement gaps for low-income students — for schoolwide or targeted tutoring programs, depending on a school’s poverty level. ESEA funds, which support the recruitment, training and retention of effective educators, can be used to train staff as tutors and provide stipends to those who take on this additional responsibility. ESEA fund student support, academic enrichment and afterschool programs, which includes tutoring. 

Other federal funds may be used for tutoring programs that aid certain student groups. ESEA funds can be used to train and pay tutors of English learners and Native American and Alaska Native students, respectively. And the can cover the cost of tutoring, instructional materials and tutor professional development when these services are tied to a student’s Individualized Education Program.

Beyond direct funding, districts can leverage federally supported service and employment programs. AmeriCorps, a national service initiative funded primarily through federal appropriations, has long supplied tutors to low-income districts and schools through full-time programs like City Year. And the federal work-study program helps pay part-time salaries for college undergraduates and graduate students, including those who tutor in K-12 schools. 

Finally, the U.S. Department of Education has �����ٲ���, a regulatory framework for discretionary grant competitions. This emphasis aligns with the department’s Fiscal Year 2025 literacy grants, which include roughly $89 million recently awarded to seven state education agencies to scale tutoring programs.

State and Local Funding

are playing a pivotal role in sustaining and scaling tutoring programs launched with federal ESSER funds by using funding formulas, policy mandates and infrastructure supports to keep post-pandemic initiatives going. 

Many states have relied on short-term appropriations. Louisiana, for example, paired a K-5 tutoring for low-performing students with an initial appropriation in the 2024-25 school year and another $30 million in 2025-26, though future funding will depend on annual legislative approval. 

And while most state tutoring investments have been one-time commitments, stands out for embedding tutoring in its K-12 funding formula by providing an additional $500 per fourth-grader each year for literacy tutoring.  

Some states have enacted tutoring mandates without funding them. , for example, requires that students in grades 3 to 8 who failed the state assessment the previous year receive tutoring, but districts must use a combination of state, federal and local funds to pay for it. Twenty-four states offer , such as vendor lists or other procurement assistance.

A smaller number of states have statewide programs that recruit, train and place members of their tutors corps in schools. In , this operates through a nonprofit model backed by and philanthropy. The is embedded within the state education department and relies on a combination of expiring federal relief funds and funds from local foundations, nonprofits and city governments.

Districts, cities and counties sometimes offer competitive grants that can fund tutoring, and superintendents can reallocate existing dollars for tutoring through their districts’ annual budget process. In cities with strong mayoral involvement in education, tutoring dollars can be allocated directly through the city budget, as the leaders of ., and have done. 

Higher Education Partnerships

Colleges and universities represent a large, often underused source of potential low-cost tutors. In a 2023 , then-Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona encouraged cross-sector partnerships to scale tutoring and highlighted federal work-study as a key resource. The letter noted that when eligible college students tutored school-aged children, the government could cover up to 100% of their wages through federal work-study. That guidance remains in effect, and there have been no subsequent regulatory changes to the program.

Teacher-preparation programs are also well positioned to expand tutoring capacity. At for example, undergraduate education majors are required to serve as tutors in local elementary schools as part of their coursework. Although the tutors are unpaid, their work counts toward their field-placement hours for graduation, giving them more than required by the state. There is no cost for participating public schools. The model enables districts to sustain tutoring at little to no cost, while future teachers gain valuable classroom experience. 

Leveraging Philanthropic and Nonprofit Support 

School districts can also partner with philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. The , launched as a public-private partnership during the Biden administration and now operating independently, offers free and connects districts with vetted providers of staffing, training and financial assistance for tutors, helping to reduce hiring, training and program startup costs.

The upshot is that there are more sources of support for intensive tutoring in public schools than one might think. Tapping them may require education policymakers and practitioners to move money from other programs. But with a large body of research showing increased and meaningful learning gains from high-quality tutoring done during the school day, that shouldn’t be a difficult decision to make.

When Angela Dominguez took the helm of Donna Independent School District in Texas in 2021, she thought the district’s original decision to use most of its federal Elementary and Secondary School Relief (ESSER) money to pay for existing fourth- and fifth-grade teacher positions was short-sighted.

“I was like, ‘Did you guys think that we were going to just do without fourth and fifth grade after ESSER?’” she recalled.

Dominguez had a longer term vision for the remaining rounds of pandemic emergency funding: Hire teaching assistants for early elementary classrooms to help the district’s youngest learners, who were struggling with math and reading as a result of uneven exposure to school during remote learning.

“My belief about these types of funds is [they] come around one time, and the investment needed to be in things that were tangible, that would be lasting for our students, our staff and our community,” said Dominguez, who created a committee to ensure ESSER investments aligned with these goals.

Congress rolled out to states between 2020 and 2022 to help school districts address academic and social-emotional hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic on students. 

Districts generally had flexibility in how they used the money to support pandemic-related recovery on all fronts, from getting students back to in-person learning to supporting student academic and social-emotional recovery. 

Districts used ESSER funds in myriad ways and with varying outcomes. EdSurge talked to three districts — in Donna, Texas, Fulton County, Georgia and Guilford Country, North Carolina — that are seeing gains despite the emergency funds’ expiration. They made educated, data-driven bets on how to best support their students and teachers by investing in educational infrastructure and support systems, from high-dosage tutoring to teacher coaching and professional development on new, streamlined literacy and math curricula. 

Their data show their bets are paying off. What’s more, these districts have found ways to sustain these improvements despite .

Sasha Pudelski, who directs advocacy efforts for AASA, the school superintendents association, which did  about their pandemic emergency fund spending, said the approach these three districts took resonates with the survey findings and fulfilled what she called the government’s “holistic vision” of funding long-term student needs.

Superintendents saw ESSER “not just as an opportunity to meet the urgent and immediate needs of their students, but also as a chance to invest in systemic, long-term improvements that would make a lasting impact on students and educators,” she said. 

Not all districts have been able to maintain their pandemic emergency-funded initiatives and programs.

“There are high-poverty communities that have lower property tax bases and lower commercial property revenues and declining populations and higher student community needs,” Pudelski said, that prevent them from reallocating resources now that ESSER is over. Those districts “disproportionately felt the impact of the expiration of the funds.”

In-Class Assistants

Under Dominguez’ leadership, Donna, Texas, refocused its ESSER spending to support its youngest learners. Pre-pandemic assessment scores showed that more than 90 percent of third graders were not reading at grade level and 95 percent were below grade level in math. So the district used relief funds to recruit, hire and train classroom assistants for concentrated reading and math instruction in pre-kindergarten through grade 2.

That decision paid off: In two years, from 2021 to 2023, tests showed third graders reading at grade level jumped from 9 percent to 31 percent, and those achieving math proficiency went from just 5 percent to 27 percent. Dominguez called the results “remarkable.” 

These gains prompted the district to prioritize the program in its annual budget. Dominguez said Donna is using a combination of state and other federal funds to retain the assistants.

“That investment really did get us a lot of traction around students getting to some [level of] recovery,” she added. 

Focus on Literacy

Playing the long game also drove Fulton County, Georgia, schools’ ESSER spending strategy. But it was tempting to direct all the emergency funds toward immediate needs, according to Fulton’s chief academic officer Brannon Gaskins. 

“There were two schools of thought around using the ESSER funds,” Gaskins recalled. “How do we reopen schools as soon as possible? And what is the long-term plan for those funds?”

Dedicating most of its ESSER funds to supporting students’ literacy development made the most sense to the district’s leaders, Gaskins said. Recognizing the high probability of student learning declines as a result of remote learning, Fulton used the money to accelerate pre-pandemic plans to reorganize literacy instruction around scientific reading principles. 

“We knew there was a way to use these funds in an innovative way that would really impact us five, 10 years after the pandemic,” Gaskins said. 

As part of a three-year plan to help students recover from pandemic-related learning setbacks, Fulton created Every Child Reads. The initiative included training district leaders, principals, early elementary teachers and staff on the science of reading, installing a dedicated literacy coach in every elementary school, setting up high-dosage tutoring and replacing dozens of disparate reading programs across the district with high-quality instructional materials. 

Similar to Donna, Texas, Fulton dedicated a district finance director to oversee ESSER spending, which Gaskins said helped the district spend its funds efficiently. 

Later, the district evaluated Every Child Reads and found that  — a feat state assessments confirmed. The findings persuaded Fulton to eliminate or scale back programs that weren’t working or no longer needed, such as small-group tutors and high-dosage tutoring, and supplement or expand programs that showed results, such as a dedicated literacy coach in every school. 

“Although our budgets are tight, our superintendent said we will deprioritize other things in our budget to make sure we have the literacy coaches that we need,” Gaskins said. 

He added that enhancing teachers’ literacy instruction “will have generational effects.”

“When you think about a brand-new teacher or a novice teacher five years in…and they still have 25 more cohorts of students to teach [over their career], that has a huge impact on generations of students,” Gaskins said.

High-Dosage Tutoring

Even before the pandemic, education leaders in Guilford County, North Carolina, were concerned about middle grade math proficiency. That concern, coupled with an outpouring of community support for and research on the power of high-dosage tutoring, drove the district’s ESSER concentration, said chief academic officer Jusmar Maness.

The difference in Guilford’s program compared to other districts’ high-dosage tutoring, she added, is that it was “home grown.” The district established a department to oversee the program and recruited and trained tutors from the local universities it already partnered with for other programs. 

“We knew the investment needed to be at the student level,” Maness said. “But we also needed to build capacity within our district to be able to continue this work.”

At its peak, Guilford’s tutoring program supported more than 17,000 students from kindergarten through eighth grade. The district also introduced coaching and professional development aligned to new, high-quality math instructional materials to enhance teachers’ math instruction. 

“Expanded teacher capacity has been critical,” Maness said. “These efforts were designed to ensure that every single one of our teachers had the support and tools they needed to engage students in that grade-level content and accelerate learning.”

By scaling the program quickly and broadly and building teachers’ instructional capacity in math, Guilford helped its fourth-grade studentsby the 2023 school year. These students also recovered much faster .

Maness said the addition of tutors during the school day also deepened students’ feelings of connectedness in school. 

“They don’t only have the teacher, but they also have a tutor [who] is another trusted adult that they have a relationship with,” she said.

Maness added that the tutoring program and teacher development were unequivocally the right investments for their pandemic emergency funds, which the district exhausted.

“I don’t know that there’s something we would have changed,” she said. “We were able to really reach so many students and provide them what they needed.”

Focusing its ESSER funds on a program fueled by community support has meant that, with some modifications, Guilford has been able to sustain its tutoring program through local philanthropy after ESSER dried up. The district now provides high-dosage tutoring in literacy for kindergarten to grade 3 and math for grades 6 to 8, and supports high school students through out-of-school learning hubs.

“We had support from universities. We have support from the community. It’s thanks to those relationship and philanthropic partners we’ve been able to continue the work beyond ESSER,” Maness said, adding that the district continues to advocate for state and federal funding. 

Uncertain Future

But districts across the country are also bracing for other federal cuts after President Donald Trump’s .

“We would just not even be able to function if we lost federal funding,” Dominguez in Donna, Texas, said. “We would have to lay off staff across the board.”

She added that state-level priorities in Texas have shifted, making budgets tighter. Her district is rounding out this school year $8 million short.

“The state is not any better right now than the federal [funding]. School vouchers just passed, and money for public ed has been kind of held hostage,” Dominguez said. “We’re fortunate to have a very healthy fund balance, but we can’t keep dipping into savings forever and expect it to stay that way.”

Maness in Guilford hopes policymakers keep in mind the need for continued investment in public schools.

“We want the people that are making the decisions on funding to understand how critical investments like these are for our students,” she said.

Armed with $190 billion in COVID-19 recovery funds from the federal government, nearly every state spent at least some of it on tutoring, with more than half adopting standards to ensure districts and schools used high-dosage, high-quality programs. During the 2022-23 school year alone, of federal pandemic aid on tutoring, on top of an estimated spent by districts on such efforts. 

Five years after the pandemic dramatically disrupted learning, with the federal aid now spent, America’s education system is still struggling to regain lost ground. The latest reveal persistent academic gaps, underscoring the urgent need for effective interventions.

Amid all the setbacks, tutoring has broken through as one of the few recovery strategies that states and districts are strategically embedding into their budgets—expanding, refining, and solidifying programs that, in some cases, have delivered significant gains in student achievement. 

Even in these politically divisive times, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Every student deserves the opportunity to build foundational skills in reading, writing, and math that will serve them through life. With nearly $1 trillion spent on education each year, we must ensure that investment translates into real educational opportunities that lead to good jobs and meaningful lives. 

High-dosage tutoring delivered during the school day from a consistent, well-trained tutor is the . In Rapid City, South Dakota, a group of retired teachers come to Title I schools each day to work as tutors, one-on-one with predominantly indigenous students. In Harrison, Colorado, paraprofessionals tutor students — and become so inspired by the academic success that they become full-time teachers themselves through innovative educator apprenticeship models. In Springfield, Ohio, aspiring teachers tutor local elementary school students building their skills while shoring up those of their students.

Over the past two decades, our organizations have dedicated significant resources to studying, supporting, and scaling this approach. Not only are we optimistic about what we are seeing, but we are firmly convinced that school systems, policymakers, and philanthropic leaders must double down on their commitment and investment to this transformative work.

This belief is driven by significant progress and success across several key areas: continued on tutoring outcomes; from parents and teachers and schools; viable paths to affordable delivery at scale; new models that solve of time, people, and money; better understanding of policies and data systems that improve tutoring delivery; and a with the potential for significant breakthroughs.  

High-dosage tutoring is uniquely effective in helping students learn, including when implemented at scale. A by University of Virginia researcher Beth Schueler, along with Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and Grace T. Falken, analyzed 282 randomized control trials and found that large-scale tutoring programs yield months of additional student learning per year, though effectiveness diminished as programs scale beyond 1,000 students. Yet even large-scale tutoring results were stronger than educational interventions like summer school, class size reduction, and extended school days. Additionally, of continue to find , even in challenging learning conditions. 

Importantly, schools and parents want more tutoring in their schools. The most of school leaders found that high-dosage tutoring implementation increased again last year, growing from 39% of schools in 2022-23 to 46% of schools in 2023-24. This is not just a fleeting post-pandemic trend — schools are investing in tutoring even as federal relief funding winds down, because tutoring is wildly popular with parents. In Louisiana, high-dosage tutoring outperformed every other education policy polled, with an astonishing 90% approval. 

Despite our prevailing partisan politics, the push for more tutoring comes from red and blue states, from city systems and rural counties – with whether tutoring is the next big bipartisan school reform. 

Arkansas passed regulations outlining the characteristics of quality tutoring and requiring student-level reporting of delivery so that the state can manage implementation, elevate best practices, and support struggling schools. Baltimore City Public Schools is currently tutoring over 10,000 students through partnerships with external tutoring providers and a district-run program using paraprofessionals. 

Pitt County, North Carolina partnered with to provide critical tutors to multilingual learners, using technology to deliver services in students’ native languages, including even American Sign Language, in rural schools. And New Mexico is expanding virtual middle school math tutoring statewide, breaking down barriers to access for students in rural areas. 

Federal pandemic aid may be gone, but state appropriators are putting money where they’re seeing progress: Virginia added for academic recovery, with on high-dosage tutoring for its students who are furthest behind academically. Maryland stood up a $28 million middle school math tutoring program for underserved students. And in state funds last year for intensive tutoring.

Finally, we are at the very beginning of a wave of innovation fueled by emerging technologies like AI. Innovation through has helped of tutoring as well as . The months of learning from past studies will soon come from without losing the ability to personalize tutoring sessions, support tutoring quality, and maintain program effectiveness in student learning. 

Collectively, our organizations, and other like-minded organizations such as the National Student Support Accelerator and Saga Education, have supported tutoring delivery to hundreds of thousands of students, have launched and published dozens of studies on tutoring, and have infused tens of millions of dollars into the space to spur innovation and capture learning. But we still have more work to do. 

Five years after the pandemic began, students remain behind where they should be, and the gaps between Black and Latino students and their peers are . Federal relief funding that allowed districts to try new things has run out. And yet the evidence has never been clearer: High-dosage tutoring works and can help millions of students. But without action, this critical intervention risks being lost to politics, budget cuts and inertia. There is with continued investment in high-dosage tutoring. 

We must double down on evidence-based strategies, reject fatalism, and embrace the urgency of this moment. The latest NAEP scores confirm what’s at stake. States, districts, and funders must step up to ensure that every student who needs tutoring gets it. This isn’t just an investment in students – it’s an investment in our country’s future.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and The 74.

Fortunately, federal funding structures include a little-used tool for sustaining student support programs. , which provides billions in funding for schools serving low-income students, includes allowing states to set aside up to 3 percent of their allocations for direct student services, including and other high-impact interventions. This funding could be a lifeline to the all-too-recently defunded programs making the on the most . 

This provision requires no new funding yet remains largely untapped. Policymakers and education leaders have long pointed to the 3% state set-aside in Title I as a way to sustain critical interventions, but few states have taken full advantage of it. Instead, they simply add it to the money they share with districts.

But with pandemic-era funds largely depleted and budgets tightening, this overlooked mechanism offers a rare opportunity: preserving the programs that have made the greatest impact without forcing districts into painful trade-offs.

For now, Title I appears to be a stable source of federal funding, with regular increases each year. Even when the Trump administration moved to halt federal funding last month, Title I stayed online. Since 1980, allocations to districts have grown by an average of 4.2% a year. This steady rise creates a practical opportunity: A state could allocate its full 3 percent set-aside for direct student services while still increasing district funding, at least in nominal dollars.

For example, if all states had reserved the complete 3% entitled in 2023, they would have had $552 million to continue supporting direct student services and still raised allocations to districts by $639 million. And 2023 allocations weren’t an anomaly. As Figure 1 shows, growth exceeds 3% in most years, with 24 of the past 43 years surpassing this mark and 11 others showing growth below 3%.

However, even looking at the worst years for Title I growth, it is still feasible to build toward the 3% allocation over a series of years. A state could gradually build up to that level, taking 1% initially and then additional shares in two subsequent years. The transition would be helped by the fact that a districts’ Title I allocations fluctuate from year to year reflecting changes in the U.S. Census Bureau estimates of the number of eligible children in each district.

Ohio is already leveraging the set-aside allocation with its grant. The program directs funding toward high-dosage tutoring, advanced coursework, career pathways, personalized learning, and academic acceleration, aligning with local improvement plans to improve student outcomes. 

Districts have leveraged this grant funding to introduce Advanced Placement and College Credit Plus courses, expanding access to high-level curriculum that were previously out of reach. At the same time, the grant has helped establish career pathways that expose students—some as early as middle school—to high-demand industries, giving them a head start on college and career readiness. 

These investments not only accelerate learning but also work to close long-standing opportunity gaps, illustrating the potential of targeted Title I set-aside spending to drive meaningful change.

Beyond successful state examples, the Council of Chief State School Officers has published a addressing the logistics of implementing the set-aside allocations. The guide also details how, with proper planning and careful communication, states can use this money as a powerful lever for filling gaps in critical supports, like intensive tutoring and wraparound services. Done right, this is more than just financial maneuvering; it’s a blueprint for how federal education policy can be both ambitious and effective.

The expiration of the $190 billion in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding marks a natural transition, but it need not mean the end of direct student services, such as tutoring programs, that have proven valuable to mitigating pandemic-era learning loss. 

By leveraging year-over-year increases in Title I funding, states can establish a sustainable mechanism to continue these services without reducing district budgets. This approach balances our commitment to students with our responsibility to districts, ensuring that we move forward in a way that is both effective and equitable.

The end of ESSER doesn’t have to mean the end of targeted academic support. But making the most of existing resources requires political will. The question is whether states will act before students fall even further behind.

But federal pandemic relief money that helped fuel the expansion of such programs dried up in September, and recent research has sparked debates about the high-impact tutoring’s effectiveness when implemented at scale. This includes an evaluation of that reported small gains for students and a that showed challenges in maintaining . 

Still, our experience in implementing and evaluating high-impact tutoring programs shows that if states and school districts get creative with funding and focus on implementing key evidence-based practices, they can achieve the positive outcomes for students that research shows are possible. 

This summer, our organizations hosted a to help 10 geographically and demographically diverse school districts build and sustain these kinds of programs. It was inspiring to see their commitment to overcoming barriers and seeking innovative solutions. Here’s what some school districts are doing this year:

Being creative with funding and committing their own resources. Recent estimates suggest it would cost to provide intensive tutoring for 20% of students. Cutting-edge technologies, like AI-assisted tutoring, may eventually help reduce costs, but securing sustainable funding for high-impact tutoring is challenging. To fill budget holes, school districts are investing their own taxpayer dollars and exploring other federal funding streams, including for specific student populations, such as children from low-income families or with special needs; Americorps; and the. 

For example, Lincoln Parish Schools in Louisiana combined local money with Title I and — Individuals With Disabilities Education Act — funding to pilot high-impact tutoring in its schools in 2021. A state grant and federal pandemic relief funds helped continue the program. For the 2024-25 school year, it’s using a, as well as Title I and IDEA funds. 

Ector County Independent School District in Texas made significant cuts to its 2024-25 budget to close a $24 million deficit but decided to maintain funding for high-impact tutoring, based on ts positive results. During the 2022-23 school year, who had scored below grade level on the previous state assessment and received at least 20 hours of tutoring scored at grade level or higher after one year. This year, the district is using $2 million in Title I funds to pay for this service in elementary and middle schools, and state compensatory education funds for its high school programs.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education in Washington, D.C., is paying for high-impact tutoring with a , philanthropic dollars and by partnering with local colleges and universities for tutors funded through the . 

A number of states are helping with funding, including by building high-impact tutoring into broader initiatives. Oregon is using its state-funded initiative to require district grantees to use the approach to improve reading skills. Tennessee is including it in its funding formula. Districts have also found ways to incorporate it into existing school programs. For example, Baltimore City Public Schools has included it as one of the .

Investing in evidence-based programs to maximize funding. States and school districts can increase the impact of their funding by directing it toward evidence-based practices. Our organizations have developed a showing school districts how to prioritize evidence in grants and contracts. After participating in our sprint, Florida a new high-impact tutoring initiative and required providers to meet in order to qualify for state funding. The that programs funded through a $30 million state investment follow evidence-based practices and gather data on student outcomes, broken out by demographics. Another sprint team is exploring a contracting approach that focuses on the performance of its tutoring provider – . 

Making informed implementation decisions. Evidence-based high-impact tutoring that incorporates , such as one-on-one or small-group sessions held at least three times a week during school hours, can increase learning across all grade levels. But districts sometimes deviate from these principles due to local needs and resources. For example, many districts struggle to fit high-impact tutoring into the school day, opting instead to hold sessions outside regular hours, which can reduce attendance and effectiveness. Implementation choices must remain research-based to ensure strong outcomes.

Focusing on continuous improvement. Less than half of the teams participating in our summer program entered with a strong understanding of best practices for evaluating programs. Planning for data collection from the start is essential for assessing and improving program effectiveness. While can be intimidating, it is a vital part of any new learning approach. For example, based on the findings from its , Metro Nashville Public Schools improved elements of its high-impact tutoring program, including improving communications with tutors.

The funding and implementation challenges of the current moment must not become an excuse for sidelining high-impact tutoring. We encourage students to persevere in the face of challenges and to learn from feedback. The education community must do the same regarding high-impact tutoring. It will take time and hard work to get this right at scale, but with high-impact tutoring, schools can give students the support they need to thrive.

Good debt is an investment in something that will grow in value over time. For an individual, taking out a mortgage to buy a house might be a good type of debt.

But it’s risky to live beyond your means and take on debt if you don’t have a way to pay back what you borrowed.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is urging his city’s school district to take on some very bad debt. Rather than balancing this year’s budget through , Johnson is urging the district to take out . Worse, the loan would only delay those decisions until next year, when the city’s budget shortfall is projected to grow again, to .

Johnson is sticking with the idea, though, and the political fallout has come fast and furious. Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez balked, leading Johnson to call for Martinez to resign. Martinez refused, so Johnson then escalated the battle to the school board. Not only did his hand-picked board members refuse to fire Martinez, they resigned — sowing chaos just a month before the city’s .

It’s still unclear whether Johnson will get his way, but the loan is a bad idea. As district officials noted in leaked to the press, Chicago is already “the largest junk bond issuer in the United States.” Johnson’s plan would make that worse. It’s not exactly clear what terms Chicago would get on its proposed loan, but as of Oct. 14 were at 6.89%, and Johnson’s team has proposed the district take on a 20-year loan. At current rates, that works out to total payments of around $540 million. That’s before any fees, and it means Chicago would pay as much in interest over time as it would spend patching over this year’s budget deficit.

Moreover, a short-term loan would solve none of the district’s real budget problems. There are five big ones: high salaries and ongoing contract negotiations, overinflated staffing, declining enrollment, rising pension costs and the expiration of federal emergency COVID funding.

Let’s start with salaries. In 2019, the Chicago teachers union went out on an 11-day strike. Though its educators were already the , the district agreed to what then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot called a “” contract that raised teacher salaries 16% over five years and immediately raised the pay of teaching assistants, clerks and other workers by 40%. Amid the current budget fiasco, the union is now seeking for the next four years. The district won’t be able to afford those without substantial new investments from the state. 

The next factor is staffing levels. The 2019 union contract promised every school would have certain types of employees, regardless of the school’s size or enrollment. This has proven particularly costly. The district says it has 7,000 school-based staff members since 2019:  more teachers, special education classroom assistants, nurses, counselors and social workers. 

At the same time, the district has suffered large declines in student enrollments. Despite a small  uptick last year, the city has lost 38,000 public school students over the last five years, a decline of 10.5%. And yet, the political leaders in Chicago have stated they will not even consider closing underenrolled schools until .

Budgeting decisions like these would be anathema in any other industry, where leaders normally try to match up the number of employees with customer demand. When business at a restaurant is slow, it needs fewer workers; If a hospital has fewer patients, it needs fewer doctors and nurses.

Chicago Public Schools is doing the opposite. Its latest boasts that it will, “complete its transition away from a budget model that primarily relied on enrollment” to prevent schools from going into death spirals, where fewer students leads to fewer staff which leads to further disenrollment. That may be admirable or even smart in some situations, but it’s also contributing to the current budget crisis.

Bubbling in the background is what in 2023 I dubbed “America’s Worst Teacher Pension Mess.” Chicago has two major pension problems. One is that it has to pay for its own pension costs, unlike other districts in Illinois, which are covered by the state. The district now pays more than $1 billion a year toward its teacher pension plan, and that’s still to meaningfully cover its unfunded liabilities.

But even more pressing is what to do about the pension costs for district employees who are not teachers and who are covered by a separate, municipal retirement plan. This issue has been a political football in Chicago for the last few years, with Lightfoot shifting the cost onto the district and the district now trying to shift it back. Those payments total $175 million this year.

And on top this all is the expiration of the federal ESSER funds. The district on directing 92% of the $2.8 billion it initially received toward schools and staffing. But another way to say that is that Chicago chose to invest 92% of its one-time relief funds in full-time school employees.

Now that the federal money is gone, Johnson is desperately trying to fill that gap. But taking on more loan debt won’t solve his city’s longer-term budget problems. For that, he’ll need to come to terms with the pension challenges and address the staffing imbalance in Chicago schools. 

State Superintendent Eric Mackey said Thursday that job losses could result from the loss of federal funds in the near future.

Mackey made the comments after the State Board of Education approved the department’s $6.4 billion Education Trust Fund budget request for K-12 schools for fiscal year 2026, which lawmakers will consider when the Alabama Legislature meets for the 2025 regular session in February. Lawmakers will have the final word on how much money is allocated.

Mackey said the request included a $52 million line item for “Struggling Readers Beyond Grade 3.” The superintendent, who did not give an estimate of jobs affected, told reporters that he thinks the number one use for those funds will be to hire reading interventionists.

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“And a lot of it’s actually used, being used as replacement money, because they were hiring reading interventionists with federal funds,” he said. “Federal funds have gone away, and so they now want to keep their interventionists using these funds.”

Federal funds were provided to school districts and education through the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020 and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021. The funds, known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER), to address needs arising from the pandemic and for ongoing recovery efforts afterward.

Alabama received $3.28 billion in ESSER funds. , 91.55% of the money has been expended. Recipients had until Sept. 30 to commit ESSER funds allocated under ARPA.

Lawmakers

Rep. Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, chair of the House education budget committee, said Thursday he could not comment on the budget until he spoke with Mackey about the proposal.

Garrett said that they have talked for years about ESSER funds being temporary.

“So that’s been something that’s not unexpected, and hopefully systems have planned accordingly,” he said.

A message was left with Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, chair of the Senate education budget committee.

Mackey said they have given schools money for assessments and professional development, but there’s a missing piece with the interventionists, who work with students. Certified academic language therapists (CALT) provide intervention for students with written language disorders, including dyslexia,

“There are many of those children who have reading difficulties, but they qualify for special education services, so they have another layer of service,” he said. “But if they don’t qualify for special needs, then they don’t have that extra layer, and that’s where these CALT therapists come in very handy.”

Mackey said he has spoken with several superintendents who have the money to retain their interventionists but will not replace them when they retire. Other superintendents cut all of their interventionist jobs this year, he said.

“So, we’re going to see a little bit of both, I think,” he said. “Over the next three years, what we’re going to see is that they’re going to be fewer employees, basically in the system.”

He said they will regain some number of employees back with the Numeracy Act, which aims to set similar goals for math as the Literacy Act does for reading. The superintendent was hopeful schools would get more money for middle grade reading.

“As time goes they’ll be able to move to other jobs, but there’s just no way for the state to really sustain all the money, all the federal money we’re losing,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

Now, early indicators suggest these types of programs are likely to be first on the chopping block. When asked about where districts would need to make budget cuts given the expiration of ESSER funds, said they would have to scale down or stop

out-of-school programs this year. These reductions have less to do with the benefits these programs provide and more to do with the fact that expenses outside staffing and core academic content like math and literacy whenever budgets tighten.

That’s a shame. High-quality out-of-school-time programs play an important role in children’s holistic development, extending and complementing their academic experiences in valuable ways. shows that participation in high-quality programs can improve academic outcomes — a critical benefit as school and district leaders decide what’s best for their students, and part of what made these programs such an appealing target for stimulus money. But what’s really special about them isn’t just the opportunity to improve academic skills. It’s that they are — simply put — fun. 

For example, project-based learning in clubs like and DiscoverE’s give kids the opportunity to practice self-directed learning and pursue their curiosity while building robots and designing sustainable cities of the future. Playful approaches like Learn Fresh’s encourage joyful engagement with math, specifically skills critical for algebra readiness, through friendly competition with peers that incorporates player stats from professional basketball teams. At , offered by the National Inventors Hall of Fame, youngsters work together to engineer claw machines and launch plush penguins — funny, exciting and engaging projects that require perseverance, teamwork and creativity. And in local across the country, kids pursue their interests through hands-on projects, like exploring the science behind baking, reducing food waste in the community and, yes, raising livestock animals, with the support, guidance and wisdom of adult mentors.

Out-of-school programs like these — which receive funding from Overdeck Family Foundation — do provide academic benefits. For instance, participating in 4-H programs translates to gains in self-reported academic competence and school engagement for kids. But these programs also support social and emotional development, with advantages like improved interpersonal skills and stronger peer-to-peer and peer-to-adult relationships. These benefits are especially essential now, at a time of increased mental health challenges and for far too many students. And they speak to what both parents and students see as some of the most valuable aspects of in-person learning.

A recent survey found that 84% of parents say the are what feel irreplaceable to them about in-person learning, and when asked what would make them more engaged in school, pointed to many of the characteristics out-of-school time programs are primed to deliver. These include a chance to explore topics they care about, an educator who can make the content fun and exciting, and opportunities for hands-on learning. Out-of-school programs that embody these features not only engage students, but also seem to have a positive effect on schools. Evidence finds that participation in these programs leads to increases in young people’s — and, importantly, decreases in .

In July, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy introduced the to expand national funding for summer programs, which currently reach only an estimated of K-12 students and just 38% of low-income kids. In the past year, a number of states, such as Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, have also stepped in to expand state-level funding for out-of-school time. , for example, established a dedicated funding stream for local afterschool and summer programs as part of its community safety efforts, earmarking $11.5 million during its 2024-25 budget season. It was the 25th state in the nation to do so. Now, it’s time for the other 25 to follow suit.

While the budget calculus is not easy, high-quality out-of-school programs are more than a nice-to-have. They’re an irreplaceable component for addressing the urgent challenges that America’s schools face — and exactly what kids say they want and need.

Disclosure: The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Washington school districts received over $2.6 billion in federal COVID relief funds and have spent $2.5 billion so far, according to from the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Like all other states, Washington received funds through three packages, known as ESSER I, II and III. ESSER stands for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, and the combined total for schools nationwide is nearly $200 billion.

The deadline for districts to determine how to spend the last of the money passed on Sept. 24, but districts do not have to actually spend the funds until Nov. 15. Washington is No. 1 in the country for spend-down rates, said Katy Payne, spokesperson for the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

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“While most other states are seeking extensions from the federal government to spend the funds past the deadline…we have been clear with our districts to spend their funds down in a timely manner, and they have,” Payne said in an email.

Most states working with districts to request extensions are directing money toward facility costs, which aren’t necessarily important for helping kids recover from COVID learning loss, said Marguerite Roza, who heads Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, a research center focused on education finance.

“I’m not sure that would have made a big difference either way,” Roza said.

The Washington school districts that received the most funding overall include Seattle, Spokane and Tacoma public schools. However, the districts that received the most funding when broken down by dollars per student include Tukwila, Yakima and Highline, according to a

That’s because the funds were allocated using a formula intended to prioritize those with large low-income populations. Some districts, as a result, received nothing at all. The state also received ESSER funds — about an additional $279.5 million. That money went to learning recovery, student mental health, promote student reengagement and recruitment and retention of teachers with diverse backgrounds.

Roza said that Washington could have done a better job using ESSER funds for learning recovery. Other states, she said, pushed harder to ensure funds went to math and reading recovery, whereas Washington officials directed districts to focus on sustaining current operations and backfilling budget gaps, in part to ensure school staff didn’t lose their jobs.

“You saw state ed chiefs [outside Washington] really carefully scrutinize every plan that a district submitted and send some back and say, ‘No, I’d rather see you do more for your low achievers or your English language learners,’” Roza said.

Washington districts spent the majority of their ESSER dollars on the category of “teaching,” which would include expenses like hiring teacher’s aides, extending contracts for teachers, and afterschool programming staff.

“It was a missed opportunity to not try to leverage the ESSER funds to get kids back on track in math and reading,” Roza said, adding that that states that were more aggressive on reading recovery, in particular, are “already fully recovered from their COVID losses.”

The idea behind using funding to maintain current operations, said Ben Rarick, director of finance and operations at Tumwater School District, was to keep school systems intact with the assumption that enrollment would return to pre-pandemic numbers once schools reopened.

“A lot of districts used money to maintain programs so they’d be ready for that day,” Rarick said.

Enrollment never fully rebounded for many districts. With the focus on sustaining operations, Rarick said some districts with deeper pockets may have been able to use funds to focus on academic programs, like his district, whereas others may have had to use “every last dollar of ESSER money just to keep the staff they had.”

“I think that districts made a very good faith effort to implement high value programs for kids,” Rarick said. “I don’t place the blame on OSPI, I don’t place the blame on any individual district. It was really very specific to the circumstances of every district.”

The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction said that maintaining staff and programming was part of supporting students.

“You aren’t able to eliminate a teaching position because you had four students unenroll,” Payne said in an email. “You still need the teacher, the supplies, the support staff, the principal, the school bus.”

Payne also pointed out that Washington received less money than other states, which meant the funds “simply weren’t a big game-changer like they were in southern states.”

“That’s why it’s tough to make assumptions or assertions about how districts could have spent their funds ‘better,’” Payne said.

“How is it not focusing on academic recovery and acceleration to hire more [paraeducators] (who often lead tutoring programs in schools), start new before and afterschool learning programs, extend teachers’ working hours to support more students, and more?” Payne added.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on and .

The conventional wisdom is that shuttering aging buildings with few students makes economic sense. But the economics of school closures have been thorny in Chicago, where officials closed 50 of the city’s 684 district schools in 2013. Eleven years later, savings have been less than expected, while the closings have proven disruptive to students and communities. They also carry economic consequences for the city and remain politically radioactive: The school board recently approved a until 2027. 

The Chicago experience is a cautionary tale for today’s policymakers contemplating school shutdowns.

When the 50 schools were shuttered, primarily in low-income communities serving students of color, city officials estimated the district would save $1 billion over 10 years: $560 million on building repairs and $43 million a year in salaries for principals and support staff.

But following accusations by parents, activists and local elected officials opposing the closings that the numbers were inflated, the district its savings estimates downward by 20%, to $438 million. Also that year, WBEZ, the Chicago National Public Radio affiliate, that the district was not accounting for $329 million it borrowed to prepare the schools that were to enroll the displaced students. That borrowing cost $25 million annually, starting in 2015 and continuing until 2045, for a total of $750 million.

Then, a 2023 by the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ found that the labor savings for employing fewer principals, assistant principals and school clerks amounted to about $25 million a year, $18 million less annually than projected. 

Beyond the shrinking cost savings, there’s evidence that the closures contributed to the decline of the low-income Black neighborhoods where the schools were located. The Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis looked at census data and found that Black neighborhoods that experienced a permanent school closure in 2013 subsequently lost population at three times the rate of other Chicago Black neighborhoods. Census tracts with a majority Black population that included closed schools lost 9.2% of their residents between 2013 and 2018, the news organizations found, compared with 3.2% in Black census tracts with schools that did not close.

Those statistics don’t prove that the school shutdowns accelerated declines in neighborhoods that were already depopulating. And charter schools in those communities may have encouraged some Black families to stay put, slowing the decline. But having a school near home is a draw for families, especially those with elementary school students. And in a struggling neighborhood, the closing of a school can be the last straw for families who are considering moving away. Notably, 49 of the 50 closed schools were elementary schools. 

Shuttering the schools didn’t improve academic outcomes for their students. A 2018 from the UChicago Consortium on School Research found that students from closed schools were absent and suspended at the same rates as peers in their new schools. But they had lower math scores for at least four years after transferring. And the Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis showed that they graduated from high school at slightly lower rates than students in schools with similar demographics that didn’t close. A 2023 of school closings in the San Antonio Independent School District yielded similar results: Attendance, grades and state test scores didn’t improve after students transferred to their new schools.

Nor did then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and district officials renovate and reopen the closed schools as other community assets, as they pledged to do by the end of 2014. A large-scale sale fell through, as did an effort to have local aldermen manage sales. As of May 2023, of the closed school buildings had been successfully reopened for other purposes. Many of the others have become graffiti-covered eyesores. 

By contrast, Kansas City Public Schools developed a community-focused approach to the 30 school buildings it closed in 2011. The district hired an urban planner with experience in community development, who held public meetings and tours before putting each building on the market. Each time a serious offer was made, more meetings were held. The district has sold 22 buildings, has one under contract, demolished five and is holding three for future use. 

School districts can’t ignore the inefficiencies of underenrolled schools, especially when they are faltering academically. But the aftermath of Chicago’s school closings a decade ago points to the importance of a clear-eyed approach that prioritizes public transparency and takes into account the financial, academic and community consequences of closings. It suggests the need to balance cost savings with preserving the vitality of neighborhoods and the need for resources to support struggling students wherever they attend school. 

By , ESSER had made available $40 billion to $60 billion in new government funding to education contractors by 2023, with 40% spent on vendors and the rest on personnel and labor. The amount spent by states and districts to cover COVID contracts could be much higher. Anticipating the end of their ESSER funding, districts such as have moved contracting expenses once covered by federal relief funds onto their general budgets.

With the help of a contract database called , I have been tracking national and regional patterns in what districts paid vendors to do before, during and after the pandemic.

In my forthcoming book, Private Ends, Public Means: Contemporary Dynamics in Educational Privatization, I identify several lessons from this large-scale experiment in federally subsidized education contracts.

First, ESSER-funded vendors helped school districts meet unique conditions but sometimes overlooked equitable access. At one level, vendor contracts supported public schools under emergency conditions in their mission of equal educational opportunity. One example is food service contracts that provided free lunches for pick-up when school cafeterias were closed. Contracts also arguably helped with continuity of instruction, which is another core responsibility of states and districts. Seven out of 10 traditional school districts used ESSER funds to purchase software during the pandemic and 9 out of 10 bought hardware, according to a conducted by the Office of the Inspector General.

These purchases made sense, given the quick pivot to remote learning. However, the pressure to spend quickly and with limited oversight may have contributed to redundancies (too many devices) and issues (wifi hotspots that did not function in areas without broadband or were not strong enough to provide students with stable video and audio). When the next emergency hits schools, public money will presumably once again be up for grabs, particularly for those with the fastest hands. What mistakes were made in areas of educational equity? How can the private sector do better when the next emergency hits?

Second, with physical schools closed, large urban districts spent hundreds of millions of dollars on technology such as iPads, Chromebooks, laptops and software licenses to keep classes in session. Then, they used ESSER funds for repairs, upgrades and parts to keep the devices running. The spending spiked at the outset of the pandemic but still remained higher than pre-pandemic levels once schools reopened. Post-pandemic, vendors are looking for ways to get resource-strapped districts to buy more devices, simply to maintain profit margins. It’s up to districts to exercise good management by pressing pause and reassessing.

There are at least two ways to approach this. First, districts should reassess whether vendor contracts are based on evidence of impact. During the pandemic, companies with minimal track records increased sales at record pace. For example, one small, relatively unknown business specializing in chat-based tutoring saw its annual revenues explode from less than $100,000 before COVID to nearly $3 million by March 2022. This company signed contracts in nearly half the states and showed little sign of slowing once schools resumed in-person instruction. But the strong evidence base around specifies that services must be delivered in person, not remotely. The bar should never be lowered for public school students when it comes to equal access for quality instruction. 

Third, it’s time to commit to transparency and ensure that the public has the information about and input into vendor contracts — particularly those addressing learning loss post-pandemic. That may mean reining in the use of noncompetitive bidding that state and local procurement policies allow during emergencies. In cities such as , noncompetitive bidding may have helped questionable vendors get contracts without proper vetting.

It also means requiring potential bidders to provide evidence of impact for high-needs student populations. I have been analyzing school board meetings across disparate regions of the country and found limited opportunities for public comment even on million-dollar purchases. Materials required by state or local law to help the public and school board make informed decisions, such as descriptions of how a digital product or service works, often are missing from the public record. Contracts commit taxpayer resources and are pivotal in shaping the quality of government-funded services. All stakeholders in education have the right to adequate and accurate information in all stages of contracting, from the bid to the contract to the decision on whether to renew. These are principles of to which districts across the country have committed.  

Fourth, account for the hidden costs for families of maintaining or eliminating certain types of vendor contracts. In my conversations with purchasing officers, I keep hearing that connectivity  — which districts made significant investments in during COVID — is on the chopping block. Further, there are no plans to upgrade or replace older laptops and iPads that were loaned to students. It’s the lower-income kids whose families will bear these costs. As districts assess which contracts to renew and which to ditch, they must be guided by principles of equitable access to high-quality digital content. Low-income families may not be at the table when ed tech contracts are cut, but they shouldn’t be expected to absorb costs interpreted narrowly as district savings. 

During the pandemic, districts and states contracted with vendors to meet the unique needs of this emergency. Now that the public health crisis has passed and COVID funds are largely spent, it’s time for districts to reassess how vendor contracts support public schools in their core mission and to raise the bar for ensuring that purchased services and products directly address widening educational inequalities.

Over the last three years, an influx of pandemic aid has been transformative for many schools.

Some were able to hire social workers or give every child a laptop for the first time. Others fixed up old buildings, tutored struggling students, or revamped summer school programs.

But that era is quickly drawing to a close. And this month marks an important stop on the way toward the end of COVID relief.

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Schools have to say by the end of this month how they plan to spend the last of their $123 billion from the American Rescue Plan, the third and final batch of schools’ COVID aid from the federal government. Then they have until Jan. 28, 2025 to spend the money.

The deadline at the end of September matters a lot: Schools that have any money not earmarked by then could eventually have to return the funds to the federal government. And some states have said they are concerned that schools may be at risk of not meeting that deadline.

Schools can seek an extension to spend their remaining aid until March 2026. But that won’t give them more time to officially decide how to use it — leaving some scrambling to come up with a plan before the deadline in 11 days.

“We have been in contact, in many cases multiple times, with districts and charters to remind them of their responsibility to obligate these funds,” Tom Horne, Arizona’s state superintendent, said in a news release earlier this week. “Most are showing the ability to do this, but a number of them are at great risk of reverting funds.”

Some Arizona school districts or charter schools had yet to commit any of their funds to a specific purpose, Horne said, and many others have earmarked only a fraction of their aid.

Michigan said it expected some federal aid would be returned by schools, but noted it had left less than 1% of the first two aid packages on the table.

“We do anticipate that some school districts and subgrantees will not be able to obligate funds by the end of the month and may revert funds back to the federal government,” Jeremy Meyer, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Education, told Chalkbeat in an email.

Still, federal officials told reporters on Thursday they were confident that little if any money was at risk of being returned by schools. Schools across the country have already spent and been reimbursed for 87% of their American Rescue Plan dollars, officials said. Much of the remaining money has been spent, too, but hasn’t yet shown up on spending trackers due to record-keeping lags.

Schools can’t use the aid to pay staff salaries after this month. But they can continue using it to do things like pay tutors to work with their students, finish up a construction project, or contract with a community organization to help with attendance outreach.

Federal officials have said they would look especially favorably on applications to spend the money beyond the usual timeline on , such as intensive tutoring, efforts to boost attendance, and extra instructional time.

Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Puerto Rico have already applied for and received spending extensions on behalf of some districts and schools. These extensions cover some $1.1 billion in aid, federal officials said.

Several other states, including Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., told Chalkbeat that they intended to apply for spending extensions in the coming weeks or months.

Nationwide, schools have already spent about $1.5 billion beyond original deadlines after getting extensions on their first two aid packages, federal officials said.

Schools have struggled for a number of reasons to spend down their pandemic aid, though often not for lack of need.

Construction delays held up spending in Mississippi, . Meanwhile, supply-chain issues slowed spending in Tennessee and Illinois.

In Colorado, some schools had trouble filling certain educator positions amidst national shortages, or they planned to hire a company to provide training and were still waiting for that service to come through, Meyer wrote.

In other cases, not as many students or staff showed up to certain activities like summer school or after-school programs as originally anticipated, so they ended up costing less than expected.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

School districts had to make similar calculations with the financial windfalls they received in the wake of COVID-19. Known officially as the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds — — $190 billion was disbursed by Congress to schools and districts in three installments from March 2020 to March 2021.

It was the largest one-time infusion of federal funds ever, and the money officially expires at the end of September. So what have researchers learned about ESSER, and what should it mean for future federal investments?

Any evaluation of the ESSER funding has to start by defining its purpose. Was it intended as a financial lifeline for a large and important public-service sector in the midst of a turbulent economic climate? Was it supposed to nudge schools to reopen their doors for in-person instruction? Or was it meant to help re-engage students and help them address learning loss?

Congress essentially took an “all of the above” approach. It did specify that 20% of the last round of ESSER funding be directed toward addressing learning loss, but the allowable activities were extremely broad and inclusive. Without a clear purpose or goal, districts could — and did — spend their money in wildly different ways.

The result is that no one really knows how districts spent their ESSER money. Marguerite Roza and the team at did yeoman’s work of collecting what spending data they could find from state reports, but it’s far from a comprehensive story.

When AASA, The School Superintendents Association, surveyed its members recently, it that the wide diversity of investment strategies with the ESSER money “does not illustrate or support any additional trends within specific categories.” They found that districts spent the funds on tutoring, summer and afterschool programs, facilities, professional development for teachers, supports for English learners and students with disabilities, early-childhood programs and a host of other activities. At an event marking the survey’s release, the superintendent from Umatilla, Oregon, highlighted her district’s to invest in a cadre of substitute teachers who could be deployed as needed. The superintendent of schools in Fargo, North Dakota, emphasized the large number of initiatives his district launched and that those should be evaluated one by one rather than as a group. 

Congress could have set clearer priorities and set aside funding dedicated to specific initiatives, such as tutoring. But it may have been justified in deferring to local communities. on school finance has found that, in general, additional money helps boost a variety of student outcomes, but there’s still an open debate about funds should be distributed and spent. So flexibility was probably the right bet during a period like COVID.

But without greater clarity on goals, the question of whether ESSER funding worked is hard to answer.

Did the program provide a financial lifeline to schools and districts in an uncertain economic climate? That answer is an unequivocal yes. The early rounds of funding helped districts for personal protective equipment like masks, upgrade their technology and begin to re-staff schools after COVID layoffs and hiring freezes.

Did ESSER convince districts to reopen their schools? That’s less clear. The first round of funds, which were approved in March 2020, wasn’t enough to help most schools reopen their doors to in-person learning the following fall. And the last round, approved in March 2021, probably came too late to have an effect. According to the , only 7% of districts were fully remote by the time the last round of ESSER passed, and half of all districts remained fully remote or hybrid through the end of that school year.   

Did ESSER boost student outcomes? The early answer to that question appears to be yes, it did lead to meaningful improvements. By identifying districts that happened to get more or less money, two research found that the ESSER funds helped boost outcomes by a similar amount as past financial investments did.

But did ESSER provide the right amount of money? The answer here is yes and no. The “no” side is dominated by practical realities. One-time windfalls are hard to handle, especially in an industry like education, where 85% to 90% of expenditures are tied to salaries and benefits. In a detailed on the ESSER funds, New America’s Zahava Stadler quoted a school business official as saying, “While [it was] fantastic that schools had these resources to be able to get through COVID and then try to recover … those big Title I districts got so much money in such a short amount of time. [It’s] really hard to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on one-time expenditures within that window.”

It’s also hard to ignore the fact that the expiration of the money will likely lead to a fiscal cliff as districts scale back. How bad will that be? One way to estimate it is to note that, according to data compiled by , districts had about $67 billion in ESSER funds left to spend as of one year ago. That money is now all about gone, and the states are not in a position to the gap. This is likely to lead to large program and staffing reductions, which would be destabilizing for schools and bad for kids.

But the other way to look at this question is from the student perspective. It’s fair to conclude that students would likely be far worse off in the absence of the ESSER funds, and they remain so far behind pre-COVID performance levels that researchers estimate it would take an additional $450 billion to $900 billion to get kids fully back on track.

No policymaker is seriously talking about making additional investments on anything close to this sort of scale. But focusing on student learning needs should be the ultimate goal, and that’s a discussion policymakers should be having as the ESSER funds wind down.

The Class of 2024 — students and their schools — began its high school and college experiences dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing, online learning and uprooted peer connections were markers of an unprecedented, sudden and tumultuous shift in education. In response, in 2020, Congress approved the first of three infusions of , enabling districts to invest in technology, mental health support, infrastructure improvements and greater access to tutoring and enrichment programs. Now, as that $190 billion infusion draws to a , education leaders must plan future budgets without that assistance, and must prioritize responses to voters’ priorities for dealing with new financial constraints.

What are those priorities? Though hot-button issues such as parental rights, book banning and school choice dominated education headlines during the pandemic, an online of 1,300 likely 2024 voters — including parents of school-age children — conducted by The Hunt Institute in summer 2023 found Americans now value very different things. In summarizing the survey’s findings, the institute issued a report titled to bring clarity about what voters agree are the top priorities related to public education. Among those that should guide district and school leaders’ decisions:

Safety

Nearly of voters agree that ensuring schools are free from guns and other physical violence is a top priority. Little learning takes place when students and teachers feel unsafe. Not only did gun violence in schools between 2020-21 and 2021-22, but bullying and unhealthy buildings also . When young people feel unsafe, they are to focus during class than their peers who feel safe — or may skip school altogether. Teachers and staff must be trained to identify warning signs of student disengagement and to employ intervention techniques. But with ESSER money no longer available, states and districts must find local sources of funds. For example, expanded its Behavioral Health Care Professional Matching Grant Program to cover school behavioral health services and provide access to health care for school communities. Wisconsin for school-based mental health programs in its 2019-21 state budget, aiding 120 public school districts with counseling and related services.

High-quality instruction

An overwhelming majority of voters prioritize ensuring that all students have access to well-trained and highly qualified educators and can read at grade level. Some of survey respondents said hiring high-quality teachers is very important, while stressed training and support for educators in the classroom. At a time when nearly of schools had vacancies that went unfilled or were hard to fill in the 2020-21 school year, promising solutions — some started with ESSER funds — are underway. and the District of Columbia are implementing or supporting teacher residencies with promising results. Similarly, Arizona and North Dakota governors issued executive orders creating task forces aimed at identifying promising practices, including data-informed retention programs.

Literacy

Achieving grade-level reading is essential for learning recovery. Though of voters in the survey prioritized literacy, fourth-grade reading scores on the continue to decline. After third grade, students must transition from learning to read to reading to learn, which is crucial for academic success. Fourth-grade reading proficiency correlates to lifetime employment and earning potential — making literacy a priority not only for voters, but for the nation’s economic development.

Research indicates that adults with higher literacy skills are to have better job opportunities and earn higher wages than their less literate peers.

States have aligned legislation with research-based literacy practices. In 2023, implemented policies focused on the science of reading, particularly in teacher training. Research-based literacy instruction benefits not only reading but also math, as the same areas of the brain are for skills in both. For example, high-quality literacy instruction can help students because, as University of Buffalo researcher Christopher McNorgan , the brain’s wiring for reading significantly impacts how it functions in relation to math.

Though federal ESSER funds must be allocated by September, the benefits and new practices that they paid for must continue. The U.S. Department of Education should consider compiling and sharing promising practices begun with ESSER investments, including teaching support, high-dosage tutoring, school safety, mental health and social services integrated with schools, so local policymakers can consider these examples and build on them.  

Education leaders would benefit from using this opportunity to align long-term goals with voter values, ensuring students have access to quality teachers in a safe learning environment so they can gain the skills they will need long after graduation. 

• Title 1: Of all the federal Education Department’s funding streams, Title 1 is the best-known, the largest and the most appropriate for tutoring (although the others are also useful places to look). It was designed to target extra resources to high-need schools, specifically for math and reading. The good news is that a tutor is not needed for every student for every subject, so only a portion of Title 1 dollars is necessary. Tutoring is most important for students struggling with their coursework, including those who are not on track for proficiency in reading by the end of third grade or for by the end of ninth. Students who meet these benchmarks are four times more likely to graduate from high school as those who don’t. Districts should look hard at how they are spending Title 1 dollars to help students reach these two goals, redirecting staff positions or funds to tutoring programs with demonstrable return on investment.
  
• Multi-Tiered Systems of Support: Districts across the nation use Multi-Tiered Systems of Support to target appropriate interventions for students with learning, social, emotional, or behavioral difficulties. Many districts could improve these offerings by using a high-impact tutoring approach, making sure their interventions build relationships between students and educators that motivate, engage and target students’ growth areas using data and high-quality instructional materials. Schools can integrate high-impact tutoring with the funds already being used for MTSS by reallocating resources to more effective approaches.
  
• AmeriCorps: One of the priorities of this 30-year-old program is to support effective tutoring for high-need students. awards tens of millions of dollars in grant funding for tutoring and mentorship in early learning and K-12 schools. Districts can apply directly for federal funds through their State AmeriCorps commissions. These three-year grants can largely cover the costs of tutors and supervisory staff. Districts can also seek vendors that are AmeriCorps partners to provide tutoring, which brings a subsidy from the vendor directly into the district.

•  Work-study: This 60-year-old program enables lower-income students to work their way through college. Of the 20 million undergraduates in the U.S., about 600,000 receive work-study as part of their financial aid packages. This allows colleges to use federal funds to subsidize work by their students. Recent guidance has called on colleges and universities to spend at least 15% of those funds on community-based jobs, and tutoring is among the roles prioritized. With a district as a community partner, a college can .
  
• U.S. Department of Education teacher preparation funds: The 60-year-old is designed to increase the number of well-prepared teachers from diverse backgrounds. The focus is on the various aspects of the teacher preparation pipeline, including the recruitment, support and placement in underresourced schools with underserved students. This fund goes directly to higher ed; districts should partner with local colleges to design a tutor-to-teacher pathway.
  
• U.S. Department of Labor apprenticeship funds: These can support for future teachers. State departments of education can help districts address teacher shortages by strengthening the pathway to the classroom through the real-world experience of tutoring in schools. , for example, has just become a federal apprenticeship provider.

Since school districts often lack the capacity to seek grants or manage compliance requirements, leaders could ask local philanthropies for help. They could also rethink some of their current procedures to save money in the short and long term.

For example, some contracts pay providers based on student hours, not tutor hours. In other words, instead of paying a vendor $25 an hour for a tutor’s time (and overhead), some districts paid $75 for an hour in which that tutor worked with three students. Districts should renegotiate those contracts to pay for tutor time, regardless of how many students were assigned. They should also monitor tutoring implementation and effectiveness in order to make adjustments, maximizing impact; outcomes-based contracts with vendors can help.

And, they can reevaluate the timing of their tutoring programs. 

Offering high-quality tutoring during the school day makes it easier to connect to the kids and teachers, as they’re already in the building, than providing services outside of regular class time; helps cultivate a pipeline of talent entering the education system; and may help stem and reduce dropout rates.

Investing in third-grade literacy and Algebra 1 tutoring specifically makes sound long-term financial sense. Holding onto more kids is not only the right thing to do morally and educationally, but it provides a financial benefit. Allocating $500 to $1,000 per student for high-impact tutoring in grade 9 can yield an average of $15,000 in annual state per-pupil funding for each student who remains in high school for the next three years, until graduation. It is essentially an insurance policy that potentially preserves up to $45,000 in future funding per student, which can sustain tutoring initiatives and support other school needs. 

It is clear that districts have options for sustaining high-impact tutoring programs. Some may require challenging choices and changes, while others will require schools to form partnerships, which takes time and coordination. But if schools are to help students recover from the effects of COVID-related learning interruptions, they will need to focus on the strategies that can provide the strongest outcomes. Schools that make high-impact tutoring a funding priority now will enable their students to succeed for years to come.

The results come from a that polled 1,506 parents of K-12 public school students conducted by the National Parents Union between Feb. 6-8.

For the past four years, the organization has surveyed parents leading up to the State of the Union address, “because we want parents to be able to give their own State of the Union,” said founding president and 74 contributor Keri Rodrigues. All questions are written by parents who serve on the group’s Family Advisory Council, composed of delegates across the country that represent different intersections of American families.

While some results were unsurprising — like parents welcoming more financial support — they are still important, according to Rodrigues, because they serve as an essential message to policymakers about what parents care about. “We have these little, ‘We told you so moments.’ I think this is yet another one.”

Rodrigues said that voters are repeatedly and inaccurately told that parents are angriest about hot-button, culture war issues.

“We have consistently said to people, ‘Please, listen. Look at the data …’ It is clear,” she said.
“Parents are struggling with economic issues … Inflation, the cost of living, people living on the edge. Parents and families are scared and they’re hurting.” 

“We are obviously focused on education justice but economic justice for families is equally important to us,” Rodrigues added later, “because we really deal with the intersectional issues … we just don’t think you can separate those things.”

Overall, surveyed parents ranked K-12 education as the third most important issue for the president and Congress to address, behind the economy and immigration.

“In education, we think we’re the center of the universe, and we’re not,” Rodrigues said. “We’re a piece of the puzzle. It’s relevant, it’s in the mix, it’s definitely a concern. But we have to understand the intersectionality of the larger political context and where we fall in it and how it competes with other issues for the average voter and for the average American family.”

According to another released by the organization in November 2023, voters trust Democrats slightly more on education and Republicans by a small margin on the economy. The majority of parents reported wanting policymakers to work together to find bipartisan education policy solutions, even if it means compromising with people they disagree with.

“It just makes me crazy that our elected officials don’t listen,” Rodrigues said. “There are really big, important things that American families want us to do,” including the child tax credit, which during last week’s State of the Union, and stronger, evidence-based reading and literacy programs. 

“We can do big things,” she continued. “We can have unity … The majority of us can agree on some big, important things.”

Of parents surveyed in February, 87% were in favor of expanding the child tax credit and 85% were in favor of expanding subsidies to reduce health insurance costs. The vast majority were also in favor of providing funding directly to families of K-12 public school students to help them pay for supplemental resources such as tutoring. 

The survey did not include questions about more controversial vouchers, which let parents use taxpayer money to send their kids to private schools. The National Parents Union is known for both its criticism of traditional public schools, including teachers unions, that is sometimes seen as aligning with pro-school choice education reform forces and for elevating the voices of parents, especially lower-income parents of color.

Over 80% of surveyed families want the federal government to support all K-12 public schools via counseling and mental health services, free school lunch, free, high-quality preschool programs and increased funding for schools in low-income communities.

Among the 484 parents who responded to demographic questions, 27% consider themselves to be conservative, 24% liberal and 43% moderate. They were also socioeconomically and geographically diverse. About half of respondents were white, 15% Black, 24% Hispanic or Latino and 3% Asian. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

While the vast majority of school districts across the country have received additional federal funding to address COVID-related challenges, only 27% of parents reported having seen or heard anything about how these ESSER dollars were being used in their kids’ schools.

Just over 70% of parents, though, did report that their child’s public school had provided laptops or tablets for students since 2021 and about 45% said schools were offering additional tutoring or counseling services, which could have been supported by pandemic relief funds.

The ESSER funding results, Rodriguez said, reveal that parents did not get the voice they were promised in how that money was spent and that “a lot of things that we actually wanted — like additional mental health support — were not realized.” 

“Are we whipping laptops and chromebooks at kids? Hell yes we are. Is that necessarily a good thing? I mean a lot of parents would argue that that’s not actually getting us to the outcome.” 

Pro cell phones, wary of social media use 

To help inform the survey’s focus, Rodrigues said the National Parents Union presented data to their Family Advisory Council around student use of social media and its impact on mental health. 

A new understanding emerged from these discussions: Parents view cell phones and social media as separate issues, yet the two have become convoluted. This reframing was a lesson for her, she said, both as president of the organization and as a mother.

This same distinction was borne out in the survey results, she said: Parents want their kids to have access to their phones during the school day so that they can stay in touch with them, but they also recognize the dangers of social media and its negative impact on their children.

The top reasons kids use their phone, according to surveyed parents, is to contact family members, play games, contact friends, listen to music and take videos. A majority of parents (65%) also reported that their children used their phones for social media and 83% said there should be a minimum age limit on when kids are allowed to have their own social media accounts, with the largest share (20%) citing age 13. Just under 30% of parents said their children spend somewhere between four and five hours a day on their phone. 

Despite social media concerns, nearly half of parents said their child’s cell phone use had a positive impact on them and an additional 42% said phones have about an equally positive and negative impact. 

Parents listed a number of reasons they want their kids to take phones to school, with about 80% saying it was so they could use it in case of an emergency. About half of parents said it was an important tool for coordinating transportation to and from school, and 40% said they want their kids to be able to communicate with them about their mental health or other needs throughout the day. 

Just over half of parents believe that kids should sometimes be allowed to use their cell phones in school, while about a third believe students should be banned from using phones unless they’re needed for a medical condition or disability. There was very little parent support for locking up students’ cell phones in secure pouches or containers. 

“I think it goes back to something that we have been talking about since the beginning of the pandemic and the Great Parent Awakening,” Rodrigues said, “which is that the implicit trust that parents have in schools— that they’re going to tell us what’s going on and the communication — a lot of that has eroded. And that’s not toothpaste you can put back in the tube.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to the National Parents Union and to The 74.

During the height of the pandemic, states received nearly $122 billion in Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER III) funds to address student academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs. North Carolina received $3.6 billion, on top of previous federal Covid relief dollars.

Now, districts must spend those funds by Sept. 30 — a deadline coming to be known as “the funding cliff.” On Monday, officials from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) presented a to state lawmakers at a House education reform meeting.

The toolkit seeks to help districts with “data-driven financial decision making for post-ESSER spending,” per DPI’s presentation.

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“The toolkit is built to really support leaders in public schools as they think about the end of ESSER funding,” said Dr. Michael Maher, DPI’s deputy state superintendent. “The idea is we want districts to be able to have the toolkit to have really good conversations about how they spent their money, and whether those funds were effective or not.”

States received during the pandemic. The first round — roughly $13.2 billion — largely went toward personal protective equipment and devices for students to safely reopen schools. The second and third rounds — nearly $123 billion — were a little more flexible, but were intended to support academic and mental health at schools as they recovered from Covid.

DPI’s toolkit is specifically designed to help discussions between district leaders like the superintendent (or charter school leader), chief financial officer, and administrators with budgetary responsibilities. DPI presented the toolkit to superintendents across the state last month, Maher said, and is also hosting in February.

Districts should not include any one-time expenditures in their ROI discussions, per the presentation. Interventions that might be discussed in this process include high-dosage tutoring, summer learning initiatives, and robotics programs.

“The expectation is that the district now really has to make a decision about whether or not to continue an intervention,” Maher said. “In essence, this is what we’re trying to do, is give them the best available data that we can to help them drive themselves to the right decision for their given school, for their given context.”

Here are a few strategies the presentation identified for continuing initiatives currently funded through federal relief funds:

• Apply for specific grant funding, from private or federal sources.
• Request an increase in local funding from county commissioners.
• Use an innovative approach of “braiding” or overlapping federal funds.
• Identify funding from within current budget.

You can view DPI’s full presentation , and its full toolkit . Check out DPI’s dashboard’s for ESSER spending by school district .

More on remaining funds, cliff

In March 2021, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt created the Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration to help find and make evidence-based decisions regarding recovery from lost instructional time during the start of the pandemic — with a large focus on how to spend ESSER funds well.

The state received roughly $6 billion total in federal Covid funds for K-12 education, Maher told lawmakers. Approximately $1.3 billion of North Carolina’s ESSER III funds remained to be allocated as of Oct. 31, according to

DPI’s toolkit includes a starting point for districts of last December through the end of this month. During this time, the presentation says, districts should convene a team to focus on evaluating ESSER spending. The toolkit presentation includes the following questions:

• What is the PSU’s risk for a dramatic fiscal cliff post-ESSER?
• What initiatives/programs/expenditures will different groups of stakeholders be most interested in sustaining post-ESSER?
• What are the PSU’s top 2-3 priorities and which expenditures most support those priorities?

Districts should obligate all their funds by April or May of 2024, Maher said. This is to ensure no funds get reverted back to the federal government after the September deadline.

An  issued in March 2023 identified 15 states facing the most complex challenges with the cliff. North Carolina was one of them.

However, a recent FutureEd  found that North Carolina school districts — especially in rural regions — generally spent more of their ESSER funds on short-term staffing fixes than long-term personnel commitments. “This decision could potentially ease their fiscal pain when the funds run out,”

On Monday, , asked Maher about how DPI is approaching planning for the replacement of technologies funded in the last few years through ESSER dollars.

“The technology, after two or three years, it’s just outdated. And that’s my big concern with the direction we’re headed in right now,” Biggs said. “If we can’t keep up with our students and our parents, they’re gonna find somewhere where they can keep up.”

Last month, DPI also gave  to the education reform committee That report showed that 114 of 115 school districts currently have one device per student. This allows students to take devices home with them to help with studying and homework.

However, 89 of 115 districts have reported they do not currently have sufficient resources “to sustain their refresh cycles for student devices beyond ESSER funding.” That’s more than 77% of districts.

Maher said that “a large chunk” of ESSER funds have gone toward HVAC systems, technology hardware and infrastructure, and access to broadband. He said DPI is still discussing how districts can “replenish technology as it becomes, in essence, out of date.”

, said good data will be key to good decisions moving forward.

“We’re going into post-Covid and those monies are running out,” Torbett said. “Hopefully, we have worked procedures out to help those agencies that used that money. For one time purposes should be okay, but there were some that have used the money for recurring expenses that we’ll be probably be hearing about in the days and weeks to come.”

If you have additional questions about DPI’s toolkit, email Rachel Wright-Junio, director of the Office of Learning Recovery & Acceleration, or Dr. Andrew Smith, the assistant state superintendent of DPI’s Office of Innovation.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Of the $3.6 billion the state received in the third and final round of federal relief, about $2.3 billion had been spent or earmarked as of Oct. 31, including $1.2 billion on staffing. 

Stressing the Short Term

Notably, given warnings of looming post-ESSER teacher layoffs, the largest share of North Carolina’s staffing investments — and the single largest last-round expenditure of any sort — went to one-time expenditures.

About 55% of North Carolina’s local education agencies spent some of their third-round ESSER dollars on staff bonuses. That translated to $445 million, or 20% of the final federal installment spent so far. Most of these expenditures occurred in fiscal year 2022, likely reflecting pandemic-related challenges in recruiting and retaining staff.  

North Carolina’s state-level data do not show whether bonuses were distributed across the board to thank teachers for their efforts during COVID or targeted to hiring and retention in hard-to-fill areas. But an earlier of the nation’s 100 largest school districts’ third-round ESSER plans found that nearly half the districts considering bonuses intended to target them toward specific hard-to-fill positions, hard-to-staff schools or effective teachers. FutureEd’s of ESSER spending in selected North Carolina school districts revealed that several are using bonuses strategically to hire and keep staff in hard-to-fill jobs. has found targeted bonuses to be more effective than across-the-board stipends in attracting and retaining teachers.

Statewide, staff bonuses were most likely in rural areas. “A lot of the more rural districts already face competition [for teachers], especially if they’re bordering a county or a district that is urban and can offer a larger [salary] supplement,” said Rachel Wright-Junio, director of North Carolina’s office of learning recovery and acceleration. “So, I would understand why they would take advantage of awarding bonuses to try to attract and retain teachers.”

Though our analysis suggests that bonuses may have been a wise use of one-time funds, especially when targeted to fill hard-to-staff positions, with North Carolina district leaders suggest that they have also forced some districts to compete for teachers, as some were able to offer higher bonuses than others. Wright-Junio expressed concern that rural districts may see worse teacher and bus driver shortages when the bonus funds run out.

Spending May Not Equal New Hires

North Carolina districts and charter schools have spent nearly $369.3 million of their final round of ESSER funding on staff salaries, with about one-third of the money going to classroom teachers. An additional $50.2 million went for recurring extra payments to attract and retain highly effective educators. These salary supplements are typically set at the local level and paid for with local funds. Though bonuses represent North Carolina’s largest ESSER expenditure, teacher salaries emerged among the top spending priorities in two-thirds of local education agencies.

We found that the number of North Carolina teachers supported by federal funds rose by 23% between 2018-19 and 2022-23 — an increase of 1,300. But the total number of teachers statewide has declined slightly, by 720, from pre-pandemic levels. This suggests that at least some ESSER money has funded existing educators, not new personnel. 

While some districts might be paying existing staff with ESSER dollars to free up other funds, our analysis indicates the statewide student-teacher ratio has declined, from 15.1 in 2018-19 to 14.7 in 2022-23. Pandemic funds may have made it possible for school districts to keep teachers they might otherwise have had to let go due to student enrollment declines.

This doesn’t necessarily mean all these positions will automatically disappear when the ESSER money runs out. “You don’t know the counterfactual, which might be that the district would have hired for that new position anyway and used other spending for it,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research and a FutureEd research adviser. “I think it probably indicates that some of those teachers are, in fact, going to go when ESSER disappears. But you don’t know that for sure.”

Looking Forward

The North Carolina Department of Education has developed several tools to help local education agencies assess which of their investments are most important to sustain. For example, it created a framework for sustainability, called an investment grid, to help districts use performance data to gauge the value of their investments. State education officials are also helping school districts and charters find additional funding for summer learning, tutoring and other priorities. They developed a strategy for districts to align their ESSER investments with existing federal funding programs so they can potentially transition to other federal funding.

Ultimately, North Carolina’s local education agencies are going to face staffing choices as the deadline for spending the state’s remaining $1.2 billion in federal COVID school aid approaches. Their education leaders have spent the largest share of their last round of ESSER monies on bonuses and other short-term investments may make the task a little easier.

Hanushek is right about this: Teachers already working in schools are the key to addressing COVID losses. He would know, because he in this area. However, his suggested remedy would reach far too few students to get the impact needed, and dismissing struggling teachers is premature in light of shortages.

Nearly 15 years ago, we drew on Hanushek’s research to create innovative school staffing designs, now known as the national initiative. After a decade of helping schools implement many variations of these designs and teaching roles, data from thousands of teachers — and this year, about 170,000 students in over 800 schools in 12 states — shows that it is possible to deliver excellent teaching to large numbers of kids by engaging many educators, not just the elite.

Schools using Opportunity Culture designs create small teaching teams led by educators with a record of producing high-growth student learning. In addition to teaching for part of the day, leaders observe, coach, model instruction and plan with their team members. They earn more and are accountable for the results of all the team’s students.

Team teachers may directly work with more students than usual, also for higher pay, but most use rotating small groups so children can receive individualized attention. Some schools reallocate funds from staff vacancies or interventions that aren’t showing results to hire paraprofessionals and create year-long teacher residencies to provide small-group tutoring. Pay supplements are about 20% extra, on average, for the team leaders, up to 12% for teachers and up to 10% for paraprofessionals. These are funded through reallocations of funds in regular school budgets, by repurposing salaries from vacant staff positions and sometimes by using sources such as Title I. Reallocating regular funds means schools can sustain these roles permanently, not just while ESSER or other grant money lasts.

Two third-party using teacher-level data show that with these teams, on average, student learning increases about an extra half-year annually and participating teachers move from the 50th to the 77th percentile in producing student growth in both reading and math. And annual, anonymous surveys show that teachers like this structure.

Critically, schools need fewer long-term subs to fill vacancies when they have these teams in place, and teacher shortages may decline when educators are offered better career opportunities. Providing team leadership, guidance and collaboration — and including more teachers, not just the “most effective,” as Hanushek recommends, in higher-paid roles — correlates in our data with greater odds of schoolwide high-growth learning.

Instead of spending on short-term, small results, states and districts should use temporary ESSER funds to create roles like the ones we describe here, which can reach far more students.

Every district committed to reaching all students with excellent teaching can run with it, leveraging the new roles to achieve student gains. Using of translating student learning gains into impact on economic growth, it would add $6 billion to $10 billion to an average state’s economy over the next 16 years if three-fourths of schools made the transition rapidly.

Nearly all districts could give students access to excellent teaching and high-growth learning while paying teachers more. There really isn’t any reason to ask students and communities to wait longer, or to accept small, temporary solutions.

Four of 10 seats on a new finance advisory committee will be filled by community members, starting in a few weeks — the first time the public has been given a formal role in fiscal oversight. In an effort to recruit new voices, priority will be given to people who have not previously volunteered with district governance but have ties to schools and some knowledge of finance. Three school board members and three district executives, including Superintendent Joe Gothard, will round out the committee. 

Over the summer, as the school board considered the current $1 billion budget, community opposition to some cuts convinced district leaders that as public as had been, even more outside participation was needed. 

St. Paul Public Schools is one of the most diverse in Minnesota, serving one-fourth of the state’s English learners, with concentrations of Southeast Asian and East African students. Less familiar populations, including Karen, Burmese and Bhutanese families, are also expected to grow. When the district first started planning to address the pandemic’s learning losses, leaders knew that the demographics meant schools would need numerous strategies. To identify them, they tapped dozens of community organizations.

When the federal aid started flowing, trying to both incorporate feedback from so many groups and speed up the hidebound bureaucracy that keeps money moving seemed impossibly daunting, says Stacey Gray Akyea, the district’s executive chief of equity, strategy and innovation.

But finding time for community input is already yielding dividends in making the system more nimble and assuring that limited funds are spent on students’ most pressing issues. Instead of waiting for multi-year evaluations, looking at early evidence can help leaders decide whether to put more energy or money into an initiative.  

“We’ve got to continue to coalesce around student learning needs,” Akyea says. “Everything else really needs to be able to shift according to what we need to be able to do to do what is best for our students.”

To this end, a year ago district leaders created a series of dashboards tracking, in real time, key information about each of the dozens of strategies initially adopted. As they began using the data to make decisions much more quickly than usual, they shared them publicly. They hoped to help the public understand, by sharing evidence of where change is needed, why some programs got boosts while others were cut. 

The effort drew national and local attention from the U.S. Department of Education, which invited district leaders to present their work at a webinar for other districts; from the Council of Great City Schools; and, most recently, from the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, in naming Gothard the newest superintendent of the year.

Whatever ultimately ends up in the budget to be approved next June, school board members will have to justify their choices to the public. Better, say district leaders, to start those conversations now. 

Case in point: The relief aid allowed the district to test new strategies for closing longstanding racial and socioeconomic academic gaps. Funding those that turned out to be seems like an obvious priority. Yet new concerns have surfaced in the years since in-person schools were shuttered. 

Chronic absenteeism and student safety are much bigger community concerns now, for example, than they were in 2020. After schools reopened for in-person instruction, it became clear that giving older students passes for public transit, now plagued by rising crime, wasn’t as likely to get them to school as it had been. So St. Paul used some of the aid to raise driver pay so it could reinstitute school bus routes.

“We did some student surveys last spring after a lot of tragic incidents in and around our schools,” says Innovation Office Director Leah Corey, one of the district leaders who created the dashboards tracking how well pandemic interventions have worked. “Yellow buses came up a lot as something that students and parents missed. They thought they would be safer and be more on time and more accountable to get to and from school if they had a yellow bus.”

Khulia Pringle, the National Parents Union’s Minnesota state director, has applied to join the committee. If she is chosen, she says, she will also raise safety issues. The parents she works with want more orderly schools, she says, but believe that would better be accomplished by increasing the number of community groups with a presence in schools than by reviving contracts with local police.

As painful as these choices sound, St. Paul may hit fewer speedbumps navigating them than other large school systems.

Right now, administrators everywhere are taking their first painful steps toward creating budgets for the 2024-25 academic year. For many, this means finally confronting the so-called fiscal cliff, a precipice that education finance experts warned of three years ago when Congress approved $190 billion in recovery aid. Now, with federal funds , these districts are figuring out who to manage with dramatically reduced funding. 

Lawmakers and finance experts had hoped much of the aid would be used to from pandemic learning losses, but many school systems instead used it to plug pre-existing budget gaps. Frequently, the mounting deficits were caused by years of falling enrollment driven by declining birth rates. 

Compounding the crisis, a record number of families moved their children out of district schools during COVID, accelerating the need for painful structural changes. Instead of helping their remaining students rebound, lots of districts spent relief funds staving off unpopular decisions such as closing schools and laying off staff.

Between the start of the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years, St. Paul Public Schools lost 10% of its students, accelerating a trend decades in the making and projected to continue. Operating a large number of drastically underenrolled schools, in fall 2021 the board decided to close several and consolidate others.

The move allowed the district to spend most of its $319 million share of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund on strategies tied directly to meeting students’ needs. With an aim of pushing the system to respond more nimbly to internal data showing what’s working and what isn’t, district leaders created a public dashboard for each expenditure outlining its goal and tracking progress. 

That information should help the new committee be strategic in considering what recommendations to prioritize in 2024-25.

For example, the panel will likely be asked to consider continuing a program that put 105 literacy specialists in elementary and middle schools to work with small groups of struggling students. In addition to allowing the district to retain highly effective educators even as it closed buildings, the effort — known as What I Need Now — quickly started to boost reading rates. 

Test data show that the more than 4,000 kids in the program are learning to read more quickly than their peers. The district is nowhere near catching everyone up, however. After an initial dip at the start of the pandemic, reading proficiency rates on annual state exams have stabilized — around 35%.

District leaders are working to extend the program, which will cost an estimated $12 million during the current school year, from elementary to middle grades. They have also instituted a parallel effort in math, training teachers to use data and higher quality instruction in schools where students are struggling.

The district has also had success addressing labor shortages. St. Paul spent $4.6 million in pandemic money creating a team to recruit and retain teachers, administrators and paraprofessionals of color and in areas where job openings are particularly hard to fill. Among many strategies, the new staff has traveled to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, made on-the-spot offers at job fairs and — a rarity in Minnesota — used hiring bonuses to help fill vacancies. 

The investment appears to be paying off. Over the summer, as neighboring districts struggled to retain educators of students with disabilities, St. Paul offered $10,000 signing bonuses to special education teachers, filling 70 vacancies in short order. Of the nearly 750 staff hired during that time, half were teachers.

The new finance committee is expected to meet four to six times a year.

So it was a huge help to the family, she said, that their school district used COVID relief funds to facilitate a tutoring program out of their church. There’s a “strong and united” community of people who share their Chin ethnic group identity in the small town, said Far, who left her home in Burma, now known as Myanmar, 16 years ago. And the church is a key shared space.

In the early days of the pandemic, the mother would bring her two older kids, who were in kindergarten and sixth grade at the time, to the Monmouth Chin Christian Church for in-person tutoring after their Zoom classes finished. Two paid instructors, both recent high school graduates and members of the local Chin community themselves, would coach them.

“That was really nice. I liked that,” Far said. She thinks the sessions prevented her kids from losing as much ground during the pandemic as they may have otherwise, and she appreciated the district having met the family where they were by coordinating lessons at their place of worship.

The program was but one example of the creative, no-holds-barred approach to tackling COVID learning loss deployed in Monmouth-Roseville schools.

Education experts worry that, nationwide, most academic recovery efforts have been too anemic to fully counter the damages wrought by the pandemic, but this tiny rural district appears to be beating the trend. Across the school system, students and families have gotten a boost from robust summer programming, new curriculums and no less than four different opportunities for tutoring.

Monmouth-Roseville students receiving tutoring outpaced their peers’ growth in literacy and math in 2022, according to standardized tests. And low-income students in the district made faster progress than comparable students statewide, an shows.

Roughly halfway between Chicago and Kansas City, and more than three hours by car from any major metropolitan area, the Monmouth-Roseville school system serves about 1,600 students, nearly a third of whom speak a language other than English at home. Many parents work grueling industrial jobs: In addition to Smithfield Foods — whose South Dakota facility early in the pandemic — Wells Pet Food and Cloverleaf Cold Storage also have plants in the area.

The school system landed $5.3 million in federal stimulus money, its slice of the $190 billion distributed nationwide to help schools recover from the pandemic. While roughly half that sum has gone to improving the HVAC systems in two buildings, leaders have invested practically every leftover dollar into academic recovery, according to spending records obtained by The 74 from the district.

“It doesn’t make sense [to use relief money] to pave a parking lot if we have students struggling and behind grade level,” Superintendent Edward Fletcher said.

Tutoring, four ways

In addition to the effort at the Chin church, teachers and community members spearheaded two separate tutoring initiatives during the school day — the time window when researchers say programs have the best chance of reaching students who need them most. 

A Monmouth College education professor began bringing a cohort of pre-service teachers into the elementary school, allowing classes to break out into small-group instruction and “hone in on some of those [learning] deficits,” said Katy Morrison, principal of Harding Primary School.

And a teacher in the district launched a science of reading-based literacy effort that has grown into a partnership with the national tutoring program . The initiative each year matches 100 pre-K and elementary schoolers who are behind in reading with individual tutors for intensive instruction.

“We wanted to target those kids … to see if we can get them to bump up,” said teacher Trisha Olendzki, who coordinates the program.

Outside the school day, the district has invested in tutoring at the nearby Jamieson Community Center, devoting $120,000 for three years’ worth of instruction for 20 high-needs primary school students.

Far’s daughter, who’s now in second grade, worked with tutors there this year. Thanks to the extra help, the young girl has mastered material more complex than her brother had at that age, Far said.

In the classroom, the district put more than half-a-million stimulus dollars into curriculum upgrades to make sure teachers have access to “top-notch” reading and math materials, said Amy Freitag, Monmouth-Roseville’s director of grants. Leaders devoted another $150,000 to train teachers in the new approaches.

Outside the school year, district leaders carved off about $73,000 in COVID funds to run four weeks of summer learning and enrichment for three consecutive years in 2022, 2023 and 2024. The figure budgets for 11 teacher salaries each summer and a modest stipend for supplies.

“We still have to teach grade-level curriculum, but we also have to bring kids up to speed,” Freitag said. “That’s where these supplemental programs come in.”

And through it all, district leaders have made sure to cater the interventions directly to the students and families most in need of support. Some 96% of students are low-income, 20% are English learners, 58% are white, 28% are Hispanic, 4% are Black and 4% are Asian.

Tin Tial, now a sophomore at Monmouth College, was one of the recent high school grads hired to spearhead the tutoring at the Chin church in spring of 2020. 

“The students definitely needed the help,” she said, explaining many parents had struggled with virtual learning due to language barriers

To advertise the program, the church sent out an email blast and handed out fliers to every family, she said, which she thinks was an effective approach because “basically all of us go to church.”

Parents in the community knew “they could rely on us,” Tin said, because she and the other tutor shared their culture and language. The young instructor distributed her phone number to families, who would text back and forth with her regularly.

The Chin community in Monmouth formed about a decade ago, she said, and now consists of roughly 50 families. Many, including Far’s, were drawn by jobs at the Smithfield plant, she said. The community immediately established the church and have used it as a gathering point ever since.

To Freitag, who brought the church-based program to life by greenlighting grant money to pay the tutors, the effort was one piece of a wider puzzle to help families recover from the pandemic. 

She’s proud that Monmouth-Roseville parents seeking to catch their kids up have numerous high-quality choices.

“The options are endless,” Freitag said.

Even before COVID, 9 in 10 middle schoolers in the shrinking city were below proficient in math and reading, many school buildings were structurally unsound and gaping budget deficits had landed the school system under the fiscal control of the state for the better part of the last two decades.

When relief funds began flowing, the challenges were great — a year of school closures and high absence rates had set students even further behind — but so were the means. The district scored nearly , over $23,000, as any other large system nationwide, thanks to a funding formula weighted for students living in poverty. Detroit has a median household income of $34,762, according to , and a childhood poverty rate roughly three times higher than the national average.

It was a test of the full power of federal relief dollars: Could $1.3 billion help get one of the nation’s most embattled school systems back on track?

Fast-forward two years and experts question whether the influx has delivered the needed boost to students. With more than half the money already out the door, has gone toward bringing students back to classrooms, according to officials, despite two-thirds of the district’s 53,400 students last year missing school at a threshold researchers say puts them academically at risk. And the superintendent in March announced to come in June.

Meanwhile, the district is using $700 million of the relief cash on expenditures it normally pays for through its general fund, stockpiling money in its reserves for district-wide facilities upgrades over the next five or more years — a creative way to skirt the September 2024 deadline on the use-it-or-lose-it federal funds.

It would be “impossible” to complete the more than one thousand facility projects the district has planned in just a few years, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told The 74 in an email. “Our students deserve to have roofs that do not leak or schools that do not close because outdated boilers break down.”

Taken together, the Detroit spending decisions paint a picture of both the promise and the pitfalls of schools’ handling of stimulus money. And they serve as a sobering reminder of what researchers have emphasized for over a year: relief cash alone likely will not be enough to offset the damage wrought by the pandemic.

Nearly a year behind 

The scale of recovery efforts in Detroit and elsewhere falls short of the magnitude of learning losses, worries Harvard University education professor Thomas Kane, who researches COVID’s impact on education.

Comparing 2019 test scores to those in 2022, he calculates that students in Detroit fell nearly a year behind where they were previously. But he estimates the district’s key interventions — summer school for roughly 9,000 students and high-impact tutoring for about the same number — are only enough to spur about a fifth of the needed gains to get youth back on track.

“This is common in districts around the country,” the education economist said. “They can list the interventions that they’re fielding … but they’re not doing the math on the effect sizes that they should be expecting from those things.”

He suggests a quick sanity check: If students are a year back in their learning, catching them up will cost, at minimum, a district’s typical yearly operating budget. In Detroit, that would mean devoting roughly two-thirds of all relief dollars to academic recovery — a level the district is far from approaching.

District spokesperson Chrystal Wilson pointed out that the district is continuing to scale up small-group and one-on-one literacy and math help for struggling students. COVID money helped expand the effort initially, but now it’s built into the district budget so the support doesn’t disappear when relief funds dry up, the superintendent said. 

As a result, a higher share of Detroit’s lowest-scoring students are on track to make a year’s worth of growth in reading and math this year than pre-pandemic, Wilson said.

Stacey Young is a Detroit mother of six, including three youngsters at Davison Elementary-Middle School. Last year, the school advertised tutoring and all three children attended, but the program enrolled more than a dozen students per teacher, she said, and her kids’ grades, which had suffered on the heels of virtual learning, did not improve. This year, her youngest son continues to struggle in math.

“On his report card, they said, ‘You need to seek some support,’” Young said. But the school had “nothing to offer” in terms of additional learning options, she said.

Superintendent Vitti recognizes the problem, but explained hiring staff for afterschool programming has posed a challenge.

“Our teachers are burnt out after the school day,” he said.

The students who remain the furthest behind in their learning also tend to be the ones who have had continued attendance challenges, he added, meaning the learning recovery efforts laid out by the district often miss the students who need them most.

“The issue here is not funding. The issues here are student access, quality human capital and the ability to scale human capital,” Vitti said.

Bernita Bradley, a parent advocate in Detroit with the National Parents Union, is frustrated that the district has also cut back on summer enrichment programs. After opening summer learning to all interested students in 2022, the school system will offer programming this summer.

“There’s so much that’s needed for our children to catch up,” Bradley said. “This is the time for families to be getting more support … as opposed to canceling something.”

Fixing neglected facilities

It’s a delicate balance between shorter- and longer-term stimulus investments, because Detroiters — Young and Bradley included — acknowledge campuses across the city are sorely in need of repairs. The scale of efforts like tutoring or summer school are constrained in part because upgrades to buildings represent the single-biggest line item in Detroit’s COVID relief spending plan.

Capital improvements have long been on hold in the district because for most of the last two decades a state-appointed emergency manager controlled its purse, making budget cuts to close a longstanding deficit, explained Sarah Reckhow, associate professor at Michigan State University.

“An easy way to cut was simply to not spend money maintaining buildings,” she said.

It created a backlog of roughly a in needed upgrades to fix issues like leaky roofs and moldy buildings, Vitti told NBC in 2019. Michigan is among the bottom five states nationwide for equitable school funding, according to a from The Education Trust-Midwest, meaning the challenged district would have had to increase taxes on Detroiters to make facilities upgrades.

When the $1.3 billion COVID windfall hit, the district carved off $700 million to finally address conditions that many deemed shameful.

It’s a tactic common across high-poverty districts, which are more likely to have unmet infrastructure needs. School systems serving mostly low-income students have been far more likely than affluent districts to spend emergency relief dollars on facilities or transportation, a February found — meaning less cash leftover for academic support.

But from a fiscal perspective, it’s a prudent choice, said Elizabeth Moje, professor of education at the University of Michigan. Detroit’s schools need “massive renovations,” she said, and because the expenses don’t recur, the investment won’t contribute to future budgetary issues when federal funds dry up.

Still, doing so requires creative accounting as the construction projects will extend years beyond the deadline for spending relief money, said Phyllis Jordan, associate director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Detroit is using COVID stimulus money to cover $700 million worth of expenses it typically pays for with its general fund, leaving the saved cash in its reserves with no spending deadline. The size of its general fund has swollen over 500% since stimulus funds began flowing and will be drawn down over the next five years, the district said.

“There’s a lot of that budget jiu-jitsu going on,” Jordan said.

Some 21 states, including Michigan, place no limit on the amount of money districts can keep in their reserves, allowing them to stockpile extra funds past the federal deadline so long as they first substitute COVID money for allowable expenses typically paid out of their general fund. 

Meanwhile, a recently announced round of layoffs in Detroit was an even more bitter pill knowing so much cash is waiting unspent, educators said.

Daniella Borum is a college transition advisor at the Detroit School of Arts who was told in early April that her position, which she’s held since 2019, would be terminated. Now she wonders who will help the high schoolers on her campus through the stressors not only of preparing for higher education, but of navigating daily life.

“It doesn’t have to be Ms. Borum here as a college advisor, but the kids need [someone],” she said. “They need support services, period.” 

Re-engaging students

A key component of COVID catch-up, in Detroit and nationwide, has been luring students back to classrooms. Student attendance took a major hit in the pandemic’s wake and chronic absenteeism, which researchers typically define as missing at least 10% of school days, reached unprecedented levels across the country’s largest districts — 69% last year in Detroit.

The district deployed staff to knock on the doors of families whose children were absent, seeing if there were ways they could help get those students to class.

“Families wanted their children coming back,” said Gwendolyn Jachim, a Detroit elementary school teacher who signed up to knock on doors in the summer of 2021. Still the conversations were difficult, and many parents remained unconvinced. She recalls virus-wary parents who, after the nearby Flint, Michigan, water crisis left , said they didn’t trust the government on public health matters.

For its youngest students, the district also ran summer boot camps to help children prepare for the transition into kindergarten. Detroit educator Kristy Kitchen co-led a cohort of a dozen youngsters in six weeks of programming, including weekly field trips. While the program’s past iterations had sometimes required teachers to purchase supplies themselves, educators last summer were flush with markers, science experiments and backpacks for students, she said.

“It was a very good opportunity for the kids,” Kitchen said. “They’ve had kindergarten boot camp prior to that year, but they didn’t have all those resources that we had.”

The two campaigns, door knocking and kindergarten boot camp, together amounted to roughly $1.8 million, according to figures provided by the district — less than 1% of its total stimulus allotment.

This year’s chronic absenteeism rates have dipped slightly to 60%, which the district attributes to its efforts. Still, 6 in 10 youth are missing class at a level that researchers say puts their education in peril. 

Using stimulus funds, the district also invested in several fan-favorite activities aimed at boosting morale and engagement. The city paid thousands to vendors like Chuck E. Cheese, Top Golf, Video Game Mobile, Dave & Buster’s and Zap Zone Extreme, according to spending records obtained by The 74 through a Freedom of Information request. Some $47,000 went to field trips to Blake’s Orchard & Cider Mill, which Detroit Federation of Teachers President Lakia Wilson said is an annual tradition.

“These are city kids, so it’s good that they get to go out … picking their own apples, seeing pumpkins grow in a patch,” Wilson said. “You can’t live in Michigan and not go to the apple orchard.”

Contracts come under scrutiny

In a district with a past history of , Detroit’s emergency relief spending has not been without its share of expenses some saw as questionable.

For its tutoring contract worth over $3 million, the district chose a vendor led by Superintendent Vitti’s wife, Rachel Vitti, ex-director of the literacy nonprofit . Leaders disclosed the relationship when they discussed the contract in 2021 and said the provider was chosen because of its strong track record. Still, amid pushback, Rachel Vitti last summer from her role leading the nonprofit.

And the district’s $68 million COVID testing contract received scrutiny for a price tag twice as high as the nearby University of Michigan’s, which used the same provider and served a comparable number of students.

The contracts “cannot be compared apples to apples,” Rebecca Throop, a spokesperson for testing provider LynxDX Inc., said in an email. Detroit schools requested a higher number of tests and the university hired staff independently to assist collecting samples, she said.

LynxDX Inc. is now a to the Detroit Public Schools Community District, listed as providing support at the $20,000 to $99,999 level.

“As a company, we recognize the importance of giving back to the communities we serve and where our employees live,” Throop said.

But zooming out beyond individual contracts, Reckhow, at Michigan State, sees the Detroit school district’s position as inherently difficult. The $1.3 billion is a lot of money, she acknowledges, but doesn’t think the time-limited boost can erase all the problems of the last decades.

“There’s the assumption that you get a one-time infusion of money and you recover,” she said. “But when you’re talking about a district where the needs are as high (as Detroit’s) and where the pre-existing issues of inequality were already enormously pronounced, the timeframe of these relief dollars is just not really up to the task.”

It’s 3:45 p.m., an hour since the final bell rang at Ella Risk Elementary School, but Patricia Montalvo’s classroom is still full.

She points to the white board, prompting the class of third and fourth graders — many of whom immigrated to the country within the last year — to read a word that’s broken down by syllable: ex | er | cise.

Hands shoot into the air and Montalvo cues them to read together. Voices echo through the classroom, but most pronounce the last syllable with a short vowel, “siz” instead of “size.” The teacher, who herself grew up in nearby Providence after moving from Bolivia when she was 3, reminds her students that the last letter is a “bossy E” that makes the “i” say its name.

“E����-cise.” She exaggerates the last syllable and lets the class repeat her pronunciation. “What’s exercise?”

“When you work out,” a student offers.

“Ejercicio,” another calls out, providing the Spanish translation.

“In Spanish it’s ‘ejercicio,’ ” Montalvo nods. “Did you guys do exercises today?” Her class had just come from their recreation period. “What did you do?”

“Play with balloons,” a young boy responds. “It was taking a lot of energy,” he adds, smiling as he manages to incorporate another piece of vocabulary, “energy,” from the whiteboard.

This lesson is exactly the sort of English-learning opportunity Central Falls parents have been requesting for years. Now, thanks to pandemic stimulus funding, the district has finally been able to deliver — and leaders hope the programs can close long-standing achievement gaps between English learners and native speakers.

More than a third of the city’s residents were born in another country and some 45% of the school system’s 2,900 students are classified as multilingual learners. 

There’s a “clear discrepancy,” Superintendent Stephanie Toledo said, between the testing outcomes of students who are proficient in English versus those who are not, and English learners perennially lag behind.

But in the pandemic’s aftermath, Central Falls has gotten the chance to reimagine its programming with $23 million in federal grant money — its share of the unprecedented $190 billion nationwide for K-12 education delivered through three COVID stimulus packages.

For decades, state officials have considered Central Falls among Rhode Island’s most challenged school systems. The per capita income of the one-square-mile, 22,500-person city is Rhode Island’s lowest, below $18,000 a year, and financial control of the district has been in the state’s hands since the 1990s. In 2010, the district made national headlines when its leadership as part of a federal push to turn around low-performing schools.

With the infusion of COVID funds, leaders recognized the unique opportunity to uplift the school system. They crunched academic data to identify what student investments might deliver the highest impact. About 600 multilingual learners, they found, remained below the minimum English proficiency level to succeed in English-only classes, and many had languished there for years. 

Boosting these long-neglected students could address a “root cause” of the district’s years of underperformance, Toledo believed.

“We wanted to focus in on kids who have been with us but are not yet developing in English,” she said.

Afterschool language learning academies like the one where Montalvo teaches have become a key component of that new strategy. Research shows longer school days can improve students’ , and . Since October, some $308,000 has funded programs across all five of the district’s K-12 campuses, according to spending records the district provided to The 74, with $1.4 million devoted to their continuation.

Though the programs are voluntary, more than 225 students have already enrolled, the district said, adding two hours of English learning to their daily schedules. The elementary school offerings are at capacity and have lengthy waitlists. The high school program, where some students work jobs or play sports after school, still has open seats. At full scale, the district says it will be able to serve all 600 English learners that the intervention targets.

It’s the right approach, believes Jannet Sanchez, who works as a guidance counselor for multilingual learners at the high school and coordinates the extended day program there.

“The amount of hours in the day that students get for English acquisition isn’t enough,” she said. The “biggest request” she gets from students and parents is for more language learning opportunities, she said.

Compiled over the course of the year, the afterschool sessions will add roughly 50 extra school-days’ worth of instruction, more than doubling the English-learning time students would likely get otherwise.

“Two extra hours a day is a lot,” said Buddy Comet, principal of Ella Risk. He had long advocated for a program like the one they now run and is thrilled the new funding makes it possible. “It allowed us to do something I already wanted to do,” he said.

Montalvo, who teaches multilingual learners both during the school day and in the afterschool program, recognizes what makes the afterschool sessions special. In her experience, youth who are still picking up English typically have a “silent stage” while absorbing the language. But in the extended day program, with 10 or fewer students per teacher, youngsters have a safe environment to develop their speaking skills. 

The context conveys to students, “Here we’re practicing. Make those mistakes. We’ll practice, we’ll learn and we’ll learn from each other,” Montalvo said.

That’s exactly what’s happened for Maribel Gregorio’s son David, who is 5. Speaking through a translator, she told The 74 she enrolled him because he was shy, but the elementary schooler has already “loosened up” and is now “more expressive” in English.

Once when she picked him up early from the program, he cried because he didn’t want to leave, she said.

An investment in equity

The afterschool program consists of three 40-minute blocks: one for speaking, one for reading and one for recreation. Every month or so, the leaders coordinate a field trip. In November, they brought students to watch Lyle Lyle Crocodile. For many, it was their first time ever going to a movie theater. So many friends and family wanted to come that the school had to upgrade to a bigger theater. Students were glued to the film and parents pitched in by forming a spontaneous popcorn-passing brigade, Principal Comet said.

To finance the operation, the district has so far spent roughly $8,000 on field trips, $17,000 on staff professional development, $71,000 on contracts with vendors and $212,000 on employee salaries, according to its expenditure records. Teachers who work at the afterschool program earn $40 per hour plus a stipend to compensate their lesson-planning time. Other afterschool staff such as paraprofessionals can earn $35 or more per hour thanks to overtime pay, Toledo said.

Receiving some $1,000 more in her monthly take-home pay is like “the extra whipped cream on top” for Montalvo. The work in itself is meaningful, she said, but as a teacher who already works long hours, she’s glad for the additional compensation.

Simultaneously, she knows the time also gives a reprieve to working families. “It’s a time for parents to have their kids here until 4:30,” the teacher said. “They can work a little longer.”

The afterschool lessons work in tandem with another new program for English learners — called a “newcomer academy” — which operates during school hours. Recently arrived immigrant children learning English alternate between bilingual classes and general education classes, meaning they get the chance to both learn in their native language and also be integrated with their English-speaking classmates. 

Now in its second year, the results have been immediate and dramatic. At Ella Risk, where the newcomer academy operates, multilingual learners outperformed their native English-speaking peers on the most recent state exams and had proficiency rates five times the state average for that group, Superintendent Toledo said, adding that the results “thrilled” her.

It’s too soon for quantitative outcomes from the extended day program, which launched just months ago. But Principal Comet already sees students’ growth. One of his main goals is to build students’ speaking abilities, an area where his multilingual learners have struggled on tests, historically. Classroom by classroom, the school leader sees students’ newfound confidence. 

As Comet walks into a new classroom where youngsters are playing with blocks, the principal is met with calls of, “Look!” as kids motion for him to see their block structures.

On his way over, a student pulls the principal aside to deliver a message and grins to reveal a gap in his smile.

“My tooth go out.”

Bumpy progress

The scene is more tempered at the high school, where about two dozen students stay for afterschool lessons one late November afternoon. 

In one classroom, students take turns reading aloud from a graphic novel. Most mumble, and several scroll on their phone or whisper among themselves while the teacher’s attention is elsewhere. When it’s time for a written reflection, the instructor resorts to begging.

“It’s no stress, write.” She walks from table to table pointing at the students’ worksheets, which sit mostly empty. “Even if it’s one sentence. One word.”

Next door in Jessica Olarte’s classroom, the vibe is more upbeat. She teaches multilingual learners during the school day and now leads a dozen students in a game of , quizzing them on English vocabulary and grammar. Students are unable to contain themselves and yell out when they know the answer. One names his avatar “The Best” and Olarte puts the nickname in ironic air quotes every time she reads the leaderboard. She appreciates the casualness of her time in the afterschool program.

“It’s not too strict. Like if they want to check with their Snapchat or their Instagram, go ahead. It’s not school.” It helps teachers “connect a little more” with their students, she said.

But the energy level is not the only difference between her classroom and the one next door. Olarte is the only instructor at the high school program whose racial and linguistic identities match the majority of her students. She is Hispanic and grew up in Pawtucket, the city that borders Central Falls. Meanwhile, the other teachers are white and monolingual. 

Research shows that educators of color and those who speak multiple languages improve outcomes for all students, but provide a particular boost to students who share the same identity. Central Falls has invested in helping its teaching assistants, who are predominantly Hispanic, earn their bachelor’s degrees and teaching licenses, but the process takes several years.

Teacher diversity — or lack thereof — is “something I wish would change over time,” said Montalvo, who, aside from several paraprofessionals, was also the only Spanish-speaking teacher at the Ella Risk extended day program. 

“When you have that background of, you’re undocumented, you’re from the same culture, you understand the social cues.”

Even for the handful of youth who speak Portuguese, not Spanish, Olarte makes an effort to learn some of their language as well as teach them English.

Stacy Lopes is one such student. The high school senior moved to Central Falls four months ago from the Cape Verde islands off the west coast of Africa. She’s clear why she spends the two extra hours after school each day.

“I want to learn English because I’m going to college and I will need it,” she said, looking up from a game of tic tac toe during recreation period.

Marvin Hernandez Trinidad shares her motivation. The 12th grader moved from Mexico a year ago and intends to go to college for engineering. He is “happy” during the afterschool lessons because he learns new English words, he said.

Montalvo, who works with the elementary schoolers, reminds young people of any age to take pride in their native tongue as they hone their skills in new one.

“Being bilingual is their superpower,” she said.

Congress gave school districts roughly four years to spend a monumental $190 billion in federal ESSER relief aid. Most districts underspent at the front end, leaving the bulk of the cash for the final two years of the aid term that expires in September 2024.

Now, with 20 months remaining, our analysis shows that , with monthly spending double what it was a year ago.

The in some quarters? Mission accomplished: Districts have finally reached a pace that will spend down the funds by the deadline.

But that response misses the fundamental concerns that emerged in the early months of slow relief fund spending — concerns that are still at issue for students and school systems today.

There was never a worry that the money wouldn’t get spent down

The pace of spending matters — but not for the reason many seem to think it does. Those who closely watch school finance know that districts would never leave this flexible money unspent. When faced with a hard spending deadline, it is common for districts to shift expenses normally charged to one fund account over to the one expiring. In the end, even without the budget juggling, this money is so flexible that a district could simply cut checks to its staff in the name of a retention bonus. Voila, money spent.

Rather, the concern with slower spending up front was, and has always been: First, is the money being deployed in a way that gets students back on track? And second, are leaders planning ahead so the district isn’t derailed by a fiscal cliff in 2024?

Those financial pressures still exist. In fact, they’re even more intense. Slow spending early on means districts are now deploying over $5 billion per month in what amounts to a gusher of relief funds. Meanwhile, students are still far behind where they should be, especially in math, and chronic absenteeism is making it hard to catch them up.

Kids need the system to work smarter, nimbler and faster

Recovery work over the next 20 months will be both harder to pull off and higher-stakes. Districts have left themselves little time for onboarding new hires, tweaking programs to ensure they’re working and changing course when they aren’t. And if the chosen interventions don’t do enough to help students, there’s precious little time for a do-over.

This means asking districts to work differently, adapt to their current circumstances and quickly meet the needs of their students. We know it’s possible because some, in fact, have.

San Antonio used pandemic relief aid to launch programs for students nearly two years ago. Similarly, Atlanta moved at warp speed to By summer 2021, Hawaii’s statewide district was offering a to adapt to school after missing preschool and many social interactions. In contrast, in many other districts, students were left for systems to roll out help.

Sure, those districts where spending got a slower start weren’t violating any rules by backloading spending. But as the aid clock runs down, we need to focus not on what is allowed, but on what investments are showing progress for students. District and school leaders must tap , and , and to switch gears if an investment isn’t impacting learning.

Districts need to plan now to manage the fiscal cliff and protect students

That higher spending in the final months makes for a deeper spending cut come the 2024-25 school year. Typically, when districts make cuts this big in a single year, kids pay the price.

Districts need to so students don’t face chaos at the start of the 2024 school year with classrooms and teachers shuffled, programs abruptly dropped, staff demoralized and leaders focusing on nothing but budget woes. Past experience tells us that .

First and foremost, districts must forecast their finances without federal relief aid. about the financial implications coming their way.

And they must scour budgets now for any opportunity to lower ongoing costs, like right-sizing the budget for (fewer students equals less revenue), reining in escalating benefits costs or phasing out ineffective programs. Where new investments are being made, that means structuring them as non-recurring commitments (e.g., using one-time bonuses or contract labor).

No margin for error as the aid clock ticks

The bigger goal was always to convert the relief funds into real value for students. We need our systems to roll up their sleeves and adopt a now-or-never mindset to meet the needs of kids sitting in classrooms today.

The stakes are high for future students, too. If lawmakers in Congress and statehouses don’t see clear benefit from the historic $190 billion in federal pandemic spending, getting more money for education going forward could be a tough sell.