A U.S. District Court judge in New York on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s plan to cancel more than $1 billion of previously approved pandemic-era relief funding to schools across the country.

The issued by District Judge Edgardo Ramos prevents the U.S. Department of Education and its secretary, Linda McMahon, from recovering money “during the pendency of this litigation or until further order of the Court.”

Maryland had joined 15 states and the District of Columbia in the suit against the department and McMahon last month. , filed April 10, followed a letter from McMahon that arrived in email inboxes at 5 p.m. on Friday, March 28, advising state school officials that any unspent COVID-19 federal recovery funds were being reclaimed immediately.

Most of the money in Maryland comes from the American Rescue Plan’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ARP ESSER, program. McMahon wrote that it didn’t make sense for the federal goverment to be awarding COVID-19 grants “years after the COVID pandemic ended.”

Maryland officials initially estimated that as much as $418 million could be at stake, the most of any state in the lawsuit. School officials announced last week, before the meeting, that the number is actuallly closer to $232.1 million, but the injunction was still welcome.

“COVID-19 may be over, but its impact is still being felt in schools across our State and nation, as reading and math scores remain lower than pre-pandemic levels and students continue to struggle with behavioral health issues since schools reopened,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown (D) said in a statement Tuesday.

“This ruling preserves hundreds of millions of dollars for Maryland schools, allowing our educational leaders to continue giving their students the support they need and deserve,” Brown said.

A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment Tuesday night.

The money is being used for various educational programs and school construction projects, ranging from tutoring and reading materials to the installation of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

The lawsuit highlighted several affected projects, such as Baltimore City Public Schools’ cancellation of tutoring and after-school programs. The school system hasn’t been reimbursed $48 million.

Besides D.C. and Maryland, others in the suit were Arizona, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.

As , the department told 41 states and the District of Columbia they had another year to spend down the rest of the $122 billion for schools awarded in the 2021 American Rescue Plan. Among the biggest potential losers from McMahon’s move are Texas and Pennsylvania, which have well over $200 million in unspent funds, according to a department spreadsheet shared by a source close to the department. The source asked not to be named to protect former staff members from retaliation. Several more states, including Ohio, New York and Tennessee, have over $100 million left over.

In a letter to state chiefs, Education Secretary Linda McMahon called it “unreasonable” for them to rely on those earlier decisions. She said she might reconsider if states can make a stronger case for how their projects continue to address COVID’s impact.

“We’ve seen a lot of receipts and reimbursement requests coming in that just aren’t aligned with what students need in this moment,” a senior department official told The 74. The official asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about the department’s decision. The administration wants to “make sure that funds are still being spent to fix student learning loss.”

The official cited a $1 million window replacement and an order of “glow balls” as examples, but declined to name the district that ordered the balls and offered no additional information on their price or how schools planned to use them. 

The department, however, will pay any invoices that were submitted before Friday at 5 p.m. Most of those are tied to extensions from the second COVID relief package, which included $58 billion in education spending, the official said. The deadline to spend those funds was Monday. 

In total, Congress approved about $200 billion in school relief funds. While states and districts spent the vast majority — — by the end of January, they asked for more time to deal with supply chain delays, labor shortages and the fact that student performance has largely not recovered from the pandemic. McMahon’s action, some experts say, should not have come as a complete shock given by many Republicans that districts failed to make the most of the unprecedented infusion of money. 

But the action leaves states and districts in the lurch, having spent millions of dollars of their own funds and signed contracts with vendors tied to the promise of reimbursement from the education department. 

Some leaders are pleading with McMahon to reconsider.

“This abrupt change in course will slow efforts and, in many cases, grind them to a halt,” Maryland state Superintendent Carey Wright said in a statement. Her state risks losing over $400 million in funding for K-12 schools. The funds, she said, are paying for science of reading materials, teacher training and a variety of facility upgrades. “State and local budgets will be impacted. Maryland students deserve for the federal government to uphold its agreements.” 

McMahon said the extensions offered by both the Biden and Trump administrations were merely “a matter of administrative grace,” and that the department has the authority to hold states to the original spending deadline in the law — Jan. 28. But as with other decisions the department has made to cut off funding Congress already approved, Friday’s announcement is likely to spark legal challenges.

“We are exploring all legal options at this time given the severity of this action,” Joshua Michael, president of the Maryland State Board of Education, told reporters Monday. The funding, he said, is supporting ongoing tutoring programs. “That tutor will probably not be there next week.”

‘Unpaid invoices’

Other states say the department’s decision will have an immediate impact on students. Illinois, for example, is using its remaining relief funds on transportation to school for homeless students, afterschool tutoring and technology for students with disabilities, said Jackie Matthews, spokeswoman for the Illinois State Board of Education. 

Last week, the state was still waiting on a $720,000 reimbursement from the department and had yet to submit another $8 million in expenses. 

“The unpaid invoices continue to stack up,” she said.

In Tennessee, education officials received an extension for nearly $131 million for expenditures like tutoring, nursing services and computers, according to state education department spokesman Brian Blackley. Staff members, he said, were preparing to submit a reimbursement request. 

The American Rescue Plan — the third and largest round of funding — also included $800 million earmarked for homeless students. Extensions on those funds are paying for summer learning programs, mental health services and “” who help homeless families with housing, food and transportation needs, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, which advocates for homeless students. 

An released just before former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona left office showed the program was effective at helping districts identify homeless students and reduce chronic absenteeism.

Canceling the extension, Duffield said, “pulls the rug out from underneath school district efforts to stabilize and support homeless children and youth.”

David DeSchryver, senior vice president at Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting firm, said states should not have been caught off guard by the department’s latest move, but emphasized that the “door is still open” for further extensions. 

“This is another invitation for state and local leaders to tell better stories about the impact of federal funding on their schools and communities,” he said. 

‘The people’s bank account’

Districts began asking the department for extensions back in 2022 when supply chain delays and escalating construction costs prohibited them from finishing projects on time.

To get reimbursed, the department required to submit funding requests describing how the expenditures related to the pandemic. The department didn’t ask for purchase orders or contracts, but told states to keep those on hand if needed later. 

The department tightened the process in February, states to submit detailed receipts for every purchase in order to get reimbursed. Then on March 11, McMahon fired all 16 staff members in the office responsible for processing payments.

By that point, state education leaders had grown impatient. On March 15, a Pennsylvania official emailed the department, saying “I’m reaching out again to find out the status of these approvals,” according to a copy of the message shared with The 74.

“It makes me incredibly angry,” said Laura Jimenez, a Biden administration appointee who led the relief payment office until January. “We very carefully administered $200 billion, and they’re completely destroying that with the last couple of billion.”

In a statement Friday, department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said it was “past time for the money to be returned to the people’s bank account” and referred to “numerous documented examples of misuse” of relief funds. She declined to offer examples.

The GOP has consistently criticized how districts used the money, focusing on expenditures that appeared removed from helping students recover lost learning, like . They argue that sharp declines in achievement and spending on what they dismiss as like LGBTQ-inclusive efforts and social-emotional learning offer evidence of misspent funds. 

Georgetown University school finance expert pointed to “eyebrow-raising spending decisions,” like contracts to family members, in a teachers lounge in Montana and six-figure salaries for district leaders in Stockton, California. 

But compared to other COVID aid, like the Paycheck Protection Program — which from theft — there’s been little evidence of actual fraud in school relief funds, Roza said. The department took steps to prevent it. In 2023, the found that the agency had taken “significant actions” to improve monitoring of the funds. 

Even so, researchers largely agree that despite many bright spots, districts missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prioritize academic recovery in the aftermath of the COVID emergency. Tutoring is one example. While most districts offered it — and still are — they didn’t always use methods backed by research, experts say.

Some districts initially demonstrated a lack of urgency and were slow to spend the money, according to Roza created to follow relief funds. Then they had to pick up the pace as deadlines approached. Many went on a hiring spree, quickly adding classroom aides, counselors and other support staff, but showed that those positions weren’t always targeted to schools that needed them most.

“You don’t want to force school systems to spend money more quickly than they are wanting to,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

shows that while the money contributed to significant recovery in math, students continue to lose ground in reading. But as a one-time school board member, he sympathizes with districts that pushed to spread funds out as long as possible. 

“That rush to get a lot of money out the door,” he said, “may have led to some of it not being spent very well.”

FEV Tutor, a chat-based, virtual tutoring firm with contracts in districts from California to Florida alerted staff on Saturday that efforts to raise more money or find a buyer had failed. CEO Reed Overfelt cited “worse-than-expected company performance” in his message to employees.

Some districts promptly alerted families about the interruption in services. The Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia referred parents to other tutors, including teachers, “to minimize the impact of FEV’s closure.” The Ector County Independent School District in Texas asked its other provider, Air Tutors, if it could take on the 2,000 students FEV left behind. 

“We found this all out on Sunday,” said Ector spokesman Michael Adkins. “We’ll have to work very quickly to change things over, but as of today, we are expecting we will be able to find a virtual tutor for all of our kids.”

‘Too fast, too quickly’

While districts and other tutoring providers might be able to cobble solutions together, FEV’s demise is one of the more visible early signs of what school finance experts warned would happen when nearly $190 billion in pandemic relief funds ran out. Districts have less money to spend on vendor contracts, leaving companies that were in high demand a year ago having to rethink their futures. Those that expanded at a rapid clip, like FEV Tutor, could be particularly vulnerable. 

“We saw what you would expect with large government programs — a lot of folks rushing out with various models,” said Adam Newman, founder and managing partner of Tyton Partners, a consulting firm. “A lot of those organizations grew too fast, too quickly.”

With district contracts in at least 30 states and an estimated value of over $40 million, FEV Tutor was an “early innovator in providing virtual tutoring services” through an on-demand, chat-based platform, Newman said.  With customers including the , and school districts, the company gave tutors access to an AI coach and engaged in innovative contracts in which tutors earned higher rates when students showed greater improvement. 

They were “massive players” in the industry, and when districts started spending their  relief funds , FEV was “very well-positioned to win all these district [contracts],” added John Failla, founder and CEO of Pearl, a company that helps districts manage tutoring programs. “They scaled up like crazy.”

But while its closing was unexpected, the financial reality that caused it was not. 

A year ago, one expert noted that investments in ed tech had dropped back to pre-pandemic levels. Even in late 2022, “rising inflation, interest rates, geopolitical crises and belt-tightening brought an end to the copious amounts of capital that defined the pandemic,” Tony Wan, head of platform at Reach Capital. Districts were already “preparing the chopping block for tools and services” that were nice to have but no longer necessary. 

Some districts also just prefer to manage their own tutoring programs. 

“If you look at the districts [that] have succeeded in scaling tutoring the most, all of those have owned a lot of the process internally,” said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a Georgetown University . She cited Baltimore City, Guilford County, North Carolina, and Nashville as examples. “Districts are increasingly focused on the relational part of tutoring. It can be virtual or in person, but it’s someone who has a face and a name and that the kid knows.” 

The surprise isn’t that FEV Tutor is a “casualty” of the fiscal cliff, she said. “But certainly, nobody expected them to shut down on a Saturday in the middle of the school year when they have active customers and employees.”

FEV Tutor did not respond to an email requesting comment. A red banner at the top of its home page says the company “ceased operations” on Jan. 25. 

The news clearly confused some parents. In response to an announcement on Facebook, some families in Harford County, Maryland, blamed the district and wondered if officials knew weeks ago that services would end so suddenly. Another wrote, “There’s clearly a mismanagement of money somewhere.” 

On the district’s , officials apologized for the disruption, saying they could not guarantee they would be able to “find or implement a comparable solution at this time.” 

Marguerite Roza, the director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said she hasn’t seen other pandemic-era vendors face such a dramatic end, but predicted “there will be more in the coming months.”

Return on investment

Software industry veterans Anirudh Baheti and Ryan Patenaude founded FEV Tutor in 2008, well before the pandemic. According to GovSpend, a data company, annual sales didn’t top $1 million until 2018. By 2021, as districts began spending relief funds, sales jumped to over $6.3 million. 

In 2022, Alpine Investors, a private equity firm, acquired the company, and Patenaude said in a press release that he was excited about the “next stage of FEV’s growth.” Jim Tormey, an executive with Alpine, stepped in as CEO until Overfelt took over in 2023. 

FEV’s work in Ector and Duval County, Florida, was also part of an innovative arrangement known as outcomes-based contracting. The company didn’t just deliver tutoring; it promised better results for more money, and offered to take a pay cut if students didn’t make progress. 

Such deals piqued the tutoring world’s interest in recent years as policymakers increasingly called for evidence that relief funds weren’t going to waste. Cohen, who featured FEV’s work last year in a FutureEd , wrote in a commentary that the concept could help ensure districts “get the best return on their investment and help build a culture of performance in public education.”

FEV Tutor further evolved last year when it announced a new AI-enhanced platform, Tutor CoPilot. The tool makes tutors more effective by giving them guiding questions to ask students. In a , the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University, which studies tutoring models, found that when less-experienced tutors used the AI support, student math scores increased an average of 9 percentage points. 

But that breakthrough apparently wasn’t enough to turn business around.

In his note to the company, Overfelt said he and the board of directors had “explored every possible avenue to secure FEV Tutor’s future,” but that talks with additional investors had “reached their end.”

Since FEV was on a pay-as-you-go contract, Adkins, in Ector, said the district wasn’t worried about losing money.

But FEV employees are suddenly out of a job. A customer service manager who once taught in the Las Vegas-area Clark County schools posted on LinkedIn that she was . And Jen Mendelsohn, CEO of Braintrust Tutors, said she spent Monday interviewing former FEV employees.

Many, she said, “have long-term district relationships nationwide and are looking for ways to ensure academic continuity for their students.” 

Over the last three years, Maui Waena Intermediate has invested nearly $300,000 in Covid-19 relief funds in its after-school program, hiring more staff and adding new programs to help students recover academically and socially from the pandemic.

The Valley Isle school’s extracurricular offerings have been a big draw for students, and class attendance has been steadily improving.

“They’re more connected and they want to come to school,” said Jennifer Suzuki, Maui Waena’s media teacher and after-school coordinator.

But while the increased after-school offerings may be drawing more kids to campus, the infusion of pandemic-era funding hasn’t achieved its primary goal: improving academic achievement. Only 26% of students at the school were proficient in math in the 2023-24 school year — the same as the year before, and a slight dip from the year before that.

Maui Waena’s struggles are reflective of a broader challenge in the state. Academic test scores in Hawaii have essentially flatlined for the last three years, despite an infusion of over $600 million in federal support to help schools address pandemic-era challenges, including learning loss.

Test scores released last month showed that 52% of Hawaii students were proficient in language arts last year, compared to 54% in the 2018-19 school year. Approximately 40% of students were proficient in math, down from 43% before the pandemic.

Advocates have been calling for years for the Hawaii Department of Education to provide greater detail about how schools are spending Covid relief funds. With funding ending this fall, a bigger concern is emerging over the lack of information about what the federal investment has achieved.

Principals say federal funds have supported student learning by enabling schools to purchase new curricula, hire more staff and expand access to tutoring and after-school programs. But there’s little information on what initiatives have resulted in the greatest student improvements, even though school leaders will likely need to convince lawmakers next year that the state should spend its own money to continue pandemic-era programs.

The DOE said in 2021 that it would fund a  to assess how different strategies helped middle school students recover from the pandemic, but spokesperson Nanea Ching said the initiative hasn’t been started. She did not say if the department still plans to move forward with the study.

In some cases, it’s too early to tell which federal investments drove the greatest gains in student learning during the pandemic, said Ash Dhammani, a policy data analyst at the . The long-term effects of programs from the pandemic may also depend on whether schools can use state funding to replace federal funds, he added. 

“It’s really important to highlight now, are we doing right by our students,” Dhammani said, “and did we do enough with this one-time money?” 

Covid Funds Spent On Variety Of School Needs

Hawaii schools experienced a smaller drop in student achievement during the pandemic than most states, but it’s concerning that progress has stalled in recent years, said David Sun-Miyashiro, executive director of HawaiiKidsCAN.

Improving student achievement was already a major issue in Hawaii before the pandemic. In early 2020, former superintendent Christina Kishimoto  of Hawaii students to achieve proficiency in math and reading by the end of the decade. Some educational advocates deemed her plan as overly ambitious but recognized that schools needed to progress at a faster rate.

A revised DOE plan calls for 65% of Hawaii students to achieve proficiency in reading and 50% in math by 2029.

In a Board of Education meeting last month, DOE Assistant Superintendent Elizabeth Higashi said Hawaii is following a national pattern of states seeing small to no improvements in academics. Attendance remains a challenge for some Hawaii schools, she said, which also reduces students’ learning time. Roughly a quarter of students were chronically absent from school last year.

In the final round of federal Covid relief funding, DOE received over $412 million to spend between 2021 and 2024. The DOE had to spend at least a quarter of the funds to address learning loss and support after-school and summer programs, but school leaders received a large degree of freedom on how to spend the remaining dollars.

Compared to other states, Dhammani said, Hawaii has done a good job of publishing  on the status of its federal funds, although the spending categories referenced in the monthly reports could be more detailed.

Some federal funds supported statewide initiatives, like free summer school classes, professional development for teachers and tutoring for middle school students. Complex areas also received nearly $170 million for individual school efforts to improve attendance and support academic and mental health needs.

For example, Kaneohe Elementary hired a social worker to support struggling families, while Keelikolani Middle School created an attendance arcade where students could play games before school and receive rewards for coming to class on time. 

“The funds were like a godsend,” said Keelikolani Middle School Principal Joe Passantino. Since 2021, the school has surpassed its pre-pandemic state test scores in both math and reading.

But while principals say federal funds helped students recover from the effects of online learning, it’s been harder to track which strategies were most effective, especially when statewide academic progress has slowed in recent years.

For example, Sun-Miyashiro is interested in how the department funded tutoring programs during the pandemic and if schools were able to reach students who were struggling the most.

“It would be great to have data linked with activities and then be able to show how that had a meaningful impact,” Sun-Miyashiro said.

With so many different uses for federal relief funds, it’s hard to determine which programs have resulted in the greatest success, Deputy Superintendent of Academics Heidi Armstrong said. In some cases, she added, investments in initiatives like new reading curriculum or regular screeners for students’ academics and mental health can benefit schools even after the federal funds expire.

“It’s very difficult to separate each one of those to say, this is what got us back to pre-pandemic levels, because there’s so many factors involved,” Armstrong said. “We are working very diligently to ensure that we continue on this trajectory.” 

What Happens When Pandmic Funds Run Out?

While tracking the impact of federal dollars has been difficult, school administrators say the funding has been critical in connecting students with additional staff and resources that didn’t exist before the pandemic. Some are now worried that they won’t be able to sustain vital programs unless the state steps in with additional support.

At Lanakila Elementary, math and reading scores have met or surpassed their pre-pandemic levels. Using federal relief funds, principal Kerry Higa hired five additional teachers who could provide more individualized support to students by working with them in small groups.

The additional staff positions alone can’t account for the improved scores, Higa said, but having more quality teachers on campus has gone a long way, especially as students struggled to communicate and express themselves as they returned to in-person learning.

But as federal funds expire this year, the school has been unable to keep one of its teachers on staff, Higa said. He’s worried that other statewide programs, like free summer school, could also come to an end and provide fewer opportunities for his students to learn outside of class.

DOE received just over $20 million from the Legislature to replace federal funds and  in 2025 but will need to request more money to sustain the program in the future. Over the past three years, DOE spent roughly $40 million in federal funding on summer programs.

The state may be able to fill in some funding gaps for programs like summer school and tutoring, Sun-Miyashiro said, but the department will need to make a strong case for continuing these initiatives during the 2025 legislative session.

Deborah Bond-Upson, president of Parents for Public Schools of Hawaii and interim director of the Hui for Excellence in Education, said she’s worried about what the end of federal funding could mean for students. But she’s interested in tracking how the pandemic-era investments in professional development and technology for schools will serve students in the coming years.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .

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 .

Released Tuesday, from over 7.7 million students who took the widely used MAP Growth tests from NWEA doesn’t bode well for teens entering high school this fall. Finishing 4^th grade when the pandemic hit, many students not only lost at least a year of in-person learning, but also transitioned to middle school during a chaotic period of teacher vacancies and rising absenteeism.  

The 2023-24 results reflect the last tests administered before federal COVID relief funds run out. Districts must allocate any remaining funds by the end of September — a cutoff that is expected to cause further disruption as districts eliminate staff and programs aimed at learning recovery.

Older students don’t make gains as quickly as younger kids and will have to work harder to catch up, the researchers said. At the same time, the effects of the pandemic “continue to reverberate” for children in the early elementary grades, many of whom missed out on preschool because of COVID. On average, students need at least four extra months of schooling to catch up.

“It’s not fun to continue to bring this bad news to the education community, and I certainly wish it was a brighter story to tell,” said Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships for NWEA. “It is pretty frustrating for us, and I’m sure very disheartening for folks on the ground that are still working very hard to help kids recover.”

Thus far, only two states, California and Colorado, have asked officials for extra time to spend the diminishing relief funds that remain, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That means the question for most leaders is how to keep paying for extra tutoring and staffing levels for students still learning below grade level — especially those belonging to groups that weren’t meeting expectations before the pandemic.

Relief money “made a difference, but it certainly did not eliminate the learning loss,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the . A he authored showed that recovery linked to those dollars was small, in part because the federal government gave districts few restrictions on how to spend it. 

The American Rescue Plan’s requirement that districts devote 20% of the $122 billion toward reversing learning decline was “super loosey goosey in terms of what that actually meant, how it was measured and what programs counted,” he said.

Some districts that hired teaching assistants to give students additional practice in reading and math have now lost those positions. Dothan Preparatory Academy in Alabama, a seventh- and eighth-grade school, had several staff members who gave students “a few extra lessons” throughout the day based on their MAP scores, said Charles Longshore, an assistant principal. Now those positions are gone. 

He hopes a new sixth grade academy opening next month will better prepare kids for grade-level material. Two years ago, when he joined the Dothan City Schools, just north of the Florida Panhandle, he attended a districtwide administrator meeting where every school’s data was posted on the walls.  

He remembers looking at elementary school scores with “really low” student proficiency rates of roughly 20% to 30%; teachers have been trying to fill those gaps ever since. 

“We’re trying to go backwards to go forwards,” he said. “What third, fourth and fifth grade standards did you miss that are essential for your understanding of seventh and eighth grade standards?”

The NWEA results show achievement gaps continuing to widen. For example, Asian students are showing some growth, but made fewer gains in math last year than during the pre-COVID years. White, Black and Hispanic students, however, continue to lose ground. In both elementary and middle school, Hispanic students need the most additional instruction to reach pre-COVID levels, the data shows.

In reading, the gap between pre-pandemic growth and current trends widened by an average of 36%, compared with 18% in math. It’s possible, NWEA’s Lewis added, that districts focused extra recovery efforts on math because initial data on learning loss showed those declines to be the most severe. 

But that’s left many students without the reading skills to tackle harder books and vocabulary as they move into high school, said Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, a project of the nonprofit . The organization is funding research to find which literacy strategies work with adolescents, who are easily turned off by books intended for young kids.

The pandemic, she said, only exacerbated a longstanding literacy problem for older students.

“About 30% of American high schoolers for 30 years have been proficient readers, and that really hasn’t changed,” said Kockler, a former Louisiana assistant superintendent who oversaw a redesign of the state’s reading program. “It’s always the hardest to move middle school reading results, and even some of the success we would see in fourth grade didn’t always carry up into middle school.”

School closures were especially hard on students with learning disabilities. Both of Tracy Compton’s daughters, who are entering fifth and seventh grade this fall, have dyslexia and didn’t receive services during the pandemic when they were in the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. 

“The time they were learning to read was during the school board’s shutdown of schools,” she said. Under a , the Fairfax district still pays for makeup services with a private tutor. 

But Compton also moved to a Massachusetts district where she feels her girls are getting the support they need, like access to audio books and noise-canceling headphones during tests to help them focus. “They have made progress, but [have] not fully recovered,” she said.

She said too many parents don’t know their children are behind.

“They see the report card with A’s or whatever and think all is fine,” she said. “They don’t know where else to check and how to weigh things like standardized tests.”

That’s likely because different tests often tell different stories. The MAP results, for example, are worse than what many states have reported about student performance on their own assessments, which are used for accountability. 

Several states last year noted at least partial recovery, and a few showed students had even reached or were exceeding 2019 scores. Lewis explained that state tests measure the “blunt designation between proficient or not,” while MAP tests capture the full spectrum of student achievement levels during the school year.

Districts, particularly low-income districts that received the most funding, need to contend with the latest snapshots of students’ learning as they adjust to the end of federal relief funds, Goldhaber said. 

“How districts go about dealing with the fiscal cliff is going to have pretty significant consequences, particularly for the kids that were most impacted by the pandemic,” he said. If districts have to lay off staff — and newer teachers are the first to go — they should limit the impact on the neediest students. “They’ll be shuffling teachers within districts, and that shuffle itself is harmful for student achievement.”

As more time passes since the pandemic, Lewis added that school leaders might be tempted to stop comparing their students’ performance to pre-COVID levels, when states were in closing achievement gaps. 

“What keeps me up at night is this idea that these persistent achievement gaps are inevitable, that this is just how it’s going to be,” she said. “I don’t think that’s the case, but I do think it takes innovation and creative thinking … to get us out of this mess.”

The results caused a stir among principals. By the end of April, nearly half the students did well enough on tests to skip a second year in lower-level math. 

“Some of the schools we targeted typically don’t see high performance,” said Jasmine Milner, the director of K-12 math in the district, which includes Jacksonville.

That’s what the district hoped when it entered into what is known as an outcomes-based contract with , which provides virtual, one-on-one sessions during the school day. The company stood to make more money for better results — as much as $750 per student more, over a base of $670, depending on the amount of progress. Proponents of the model, more common in the and industries, say it increases accountability for both providers and school districts.

“It ups the stakes for everybody to really pay attention to the data,” said Brittany Miller, who leads a 10-district at Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit focused on equity. 

With that far fewer students took advantage of online tutoring than districts expected, the outcomes-based model is one way to ensure districts use public funds wisely. “In education, we can pay for things a long time before we realize no children are participating in it,” Miller said.

Facing overwhelming declines in achievement as a result of remote learning and growing pressure to show a high return on federal relief funds, more districts are taking an interest in such transactions.

Because of relief funds, districts have “been able to make investments in public education like we’ve never been able to do before,” said Scott Muri, superintendent of the Ector County Independent School District in west Texas. “I could have done a small pilot, but even coming up with a million [dollars] to do the [tutoring] work would have been incredibly challenging.”

The Ector district spent $10 million in relief funds on three years of virtual tutoring, most of it going to contracts with two leading tutoring companies, FEV and Air Tutors.

But first, there was some matchmaking to do.

The district whittled down a list of 11 companies to five and set up what Lilia Nanez, the district’s associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction, called “speed dating” sessions with school principals.

FEV and Air Tutors “hit the mark because they had clear objectives for vetting and training,” Nanez said during a May conference on high-dosage tutoring at Stanford University. 

Like Duval, Ector was among the original four districts in the Southern Education Foundation’s project in 2022. The network has grown to 10 districts, but Miller said any district can use the organization’s , such as its template for contracts.

Since the 2021-22 school year, over 10,000 Ector students have received tutoring.

Itzel Espinoza credits the program with helping her graduate on time. Texas students must pass three of five end-of-course exams to earn a diploma, but she kept failing the Algebra I assessment. 

She struggled with graphing and knowing which variables to enter into her calculator. She failed four times before the district matched her with John Villamor, an Air tutor. He found that Itzel lacked some basic understanding of fractions and order of operations.

After meeting virtually twice a week, sometimes for more than an hour, the equations began to make sense. “He just knows how to explain it,” she said. By the fifth try, she said, the test was easy. “I knew I was going to pass.”

Providers say the financial incentive to boost student performance helps them prove their value to district leaders. 

Outcomes-based contracting is “a great way to get a footing into a district and make sure that the promises a provider tells in their pitch are actual deliverables,” said Hasan Ali, founder and CEO of Air Tutors.

In return, he said, districts have to “dedicate energy” to develop the contract, schedule tutoring sessions and follow up with students who don’t participate.

Not ‘the only way’

One drawback of such arrangements, however, is that they don’t allow much wiggle room if a provider needs to add students, sessions or any other specifics not nailed down in the contract. 

The model marks a significant shift from how districts have traditionally approached academic interventions, said tutoring experts. Officials who review bids from outside contractors don’t typically sit at the table with a district’s academic team. 

Some leaders might find it too daunting to get staff from different departments to work together and could give up on tutoring efforts completely, said Kathy Bendheim, managing director of the National Student Support Accelerator, which researches high-dosage tutoring and organized the Stanford conference. 

“What I don’t want is people to think [outcomes-based contracting is] the only way to do it,” she said.

On the flip side, a superintendent could say, “Let’s re-do all our contracts this way,” said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank. She’s currently researching three tutoring efforts, including one in a district using outcomes-based tutoring.

Overall, she thinks the increased attention to contracts with outside vendors is healthy. She called districts’ business deals the “least sexy and probably the most impactful way that this sausage gets made.”

A focus on attendance

In education, the practice is still relatively new, but many providers are following it with interest. 

Kate Bauer-Jones leads Future Forward, which provides in-school tutoring for struggling readers in seven states. But many of the districts using the program are in rural areas, and she doubts they have educators with the time and expertise to manage and analyze the data in the way such contracts require. 

“There are superintendents who are also running the transportation department,” she said.

Districts using the approach spend a lot of time up front discussing the outcomes they want, which students they’ll target and what assessments to use to measure progress.

Providers also want to know how their bottom line would be affected if students don’t show up.

Jessica Sliwerski, co-founder and CEO of Ignite! Reading, which provides in-school virtual tutoring, said her team works hard to recruit and train tutors and has literacy specialists who meet monthly with district leaders.

“What we cannot control is student attendance,” she said. “The attendance issues post-COVID in economically depressed areas are worse than they were prior to the pandemic. This is a significant and real pain point for schools.” 

While data from 2021-22 is not yet available, rates of doubled in several states during the 2020-21 school year. And research on pandemic recovery shows that even when students go to school, they in optional before or afterschool tutoring because of their parents’ schedules or lack of transportation.

To address those concerns, some districts — including the Denver Public Schools, Colorado Springs District 11 and the Uplift charter network in Texas — have included clauses in their contracts stating that if a student’s attendance in tutoring falls below 70%, the district still has to pay the provider the highest rate. 

Knowing when students are more likely to participate — and what incentives they’ll respond to — is part of making the arrangement work. Muri said he learned not to schedule tutoring for older students before the school day because they weren’t likely to get up any earlier for it. And some schools in Duval County purchased snow-cone and popcorn machines as an added bonus for students.

But Sliwerski said before she’d consider such a contract, she’d want to know how districts are communicating with families about the importance of coming to school every day.

The data from schools offering Ignite! Reading shows that 75% student attendance at tutoring sessions is necessary for “incredible results,” she said. “Accountability doesn’t scare me; I love accountability as long as it’s a two-way street.”

The expiration of these funds in about 14 months could be the biggest jolt to school finances that districts have ever faced. But an analysis by The 74 has found that the majority of states lack laws to protect districts from a fiscal emergency like this one — a fact that could leave school systems unprepared for the upheaval to come.

“Deficits will creep up quickly and really destabilize a district,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “In the end, the students will suffer if districts wait too long to rein in their spending.”

School systems currently face compound pressures. Declining enrollment means less state funding, and they’re paying because of a tight labor market and more for supplies because of inflation. To better withstand the strain, experts like Roza advise districts to estimate their revenues and spending a few years in advance, taking into account enrollment trends, taxes and the potential for an economic downturn.

But only six states have such requirements. Experts also recommend setting aside money for fiscal emergencies, but just 10 states mandate the practice. 

Most states view district budgets as a local matter. Officials say they can offer little more than advice as the education system heads for what Roza calls a “.”

“For these next few years, … state monitoring of finances is an absolute must,” she said. Relief funds have “distorted district finances. Many are overcommitting at a time when they should be downsizing.”

She pointed to the San Diego school district as an example. In June, the board approved for teachers to avoid a strike, at a cost of $517 million. But projections show a nearly by the 2024-25 school year.

The end of relief funds could also in some states, further impacting what programs, like tutoring and summer school, districts will be able to sustain. In addition, Congress’s recent deal to prevent the government from hitting a debt ceiling and defaulting on its financial obligations could affect how districts wean themselves off pandemic money. 

between conservative Republicans and the White House wiped out the chance for an increase in federal K-12 spending next year — money that could have cushioned the blow once COVID money dries up. Now the House is proposing a in the education budget.

“If I’m a state budget director, the debt limit deal tells me I’m on my own to try to soften the cliff landing with added revenue,” said Jonathan Travers, managing partner at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that advises districts on financial matters. “I might have been holding out hope for help from Title I, but that seems gone now.” 

Planning for Fiscal Emergencies: Three Maps

‘Grounded in the truth’

Districts have been down this road before.

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in the wake of the Great Recession, was at the time the federal government’s largest one-time investment in schools, providing districts close to $71 billion in extra funding. When those funds ran out, however, many districts were unprepared: They , imposed and increased .

A from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General examined spending decisions in 22 districts, including the Wichita Public Schools in Kansas. 

Susan Willis, the district’s payroll director at the time, remembers a “pretty ugly” seven-to-eight year period with no raises for teachers. The district eliminated its grants department and several facilities and professional development positions. Enrollment was growing, so leaders “couldn’t be looking into the classroom for reductions,” said Willis, now the district’s chief financial officer.

A decade later, Wichita’s enrollment is , and as pandemic aid expires, leaders are looking to eliminate positions they could have cut earlier, but didn’t — particularly at the elementary level. The challenge, Willis said, is how to offer salaries high enough to compete against suburban districts while continuing to fund that she thinks have back above 80%.

The 2012 report said that a funding cliff doesn’t mean that districts didn’t make good use of temporary funds or that the relief funds weren’t the “right call.” Leaders just need to be “grounded in the truth, no matter how brutal,” Travers said.

Budget reserves

Whether the fiscal cliff turns out to be a gradual slope or a precipitous drop could hinge on how much federal money a district received. A from Education Resource Strategies identified 15 states where the expiration of those funds will hit harder because they received more federal aid and have a lot of districts with high poverty rates. 

Travers said it will be easier to identify which districts “have the potential for a painful landing” later this summer when auditors review districts’ finances from the past year. It’s “critical,” he added, that states keep a close watch on districts where relief funds total more than a quarter of their annual budget. The more money districts received, the harder it could be to reduce spending once the funds disappear. That could include some of the nation’s , including New York City and Houston and those with high-poverty levels like Detroit and Philadelphia.

To prepare for lean years, Ohio, for example, requires districts  to estimate their budgets five years in advance. Washington mandates four years. But in some cases, school finance officials’ desire to plan ahead conflicts with budget timelines.  

“We can’t forecast because we never know what our state aid is going to be every year,” said Susan Young, executive director of the New Jersey Association of School Business Officials. 

The state doesn’t require districts to put aside funds for emergencies. But those that choose to could find themselves brushing up against a state cap that limits reserve funds to 2% of their budget. Young’s organization would like lawmakers to raise that limit, especially as relief funds expire. Some have already made and are asking voters to raise property taxes. 

Reserves can help school systems with a temporary shortfall, but can’t do much for a financially strapped district that has or failed to issue layoff notices in time for the next school year. Like COVID aid, reserves eventually dry up.

“There are no reserves that are going to buy you a whole school year,” said Michael Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which was created by a state law in 1991.

The California law also created an early warning system in which county education agencies must sign off on district budgets and, when a district is headed for insolvency, can wrest authority from a superintendent and school board.

Sixteen states have similar processes, some more extensive than others. , for example, grades districts on whether they pay their bills on time and post financial information. The Kentucky state board monitors any district that adopts a budget with less than 2% of its revenues set aside for reserves. 

In California, are now in serious financial trouble. Ten may not be able to meet their financial obligations in the next couple years, and three, Fine said, “are running out of cash.”

Given the pandemic windfall, he’s surprised any hit that point. But with the state’s , he expects more to find themselves on the list. 

“The news probably only gets worse for 2024-25, not better,” he said.

In southern California’s San Bernardino County, where 33 districts are spread over 20,000 square miles, Thomas Cassida, director of business advisory services, expects the majority of them — 28 — to have a budget deficit in 2024-25 or the year after.

They still have time to scale back. For example, some have spent relief funds to open health centers, but might have to cut positions for the counselors and other mental health professionals hired to run them. 

He’s most worried about districts that were in bad financial shape before the pandemic. When the relief funds are gone, they could find themselves in the same place.

“Every county has at least one district that is a problem child,” he said.

In Ventura County, it was the Ojai Unified School District, where Fine said leaders ignored multiple warnings about the need to cut roughly $3 million. About 30 minutes from the coast, Ojai is known for boutique hotels and wellness retreats. But tensions ran high at a  Feb. 21 school board meeting where Fine showed up unannounced to deliver a sobering message.

“You are beyond financial trouble, and you are in fiscal distress,” he and superintendent. “If you were a private business, you would now be out of business.”

Less than a month later, the board and . 

“Parents were extremely frustrated and upset by the news of the budget deficit,” said Sherrill Knox, an Ojai native and former assistant superintendent who took over as the district’s new chief this month. The crisis, she added, was “nestled in an ongoing, long-term issue of the need to downsize our district.”

While Ojai was an extreme case, Fine said is affecting districts statewide, and smaller school systems can quickly downgrade from financial difficulty to fiscal distress. He largely blames “inadequately trained” school board members. 

“In most cases, it’s stupid governance and leadership that got them into this spot,” he said, “and it will be good governance that gets them out.”

Evidence of the damage from a year of remote learning was inescapable: in reading and math, unaccounted for and of depression and misbehavior.

In the years that followed, the funds undoubtedly did some good. Some districts used the money to offer summer school for all of their students, provide one-on-one tutoring parents could never afford on their own and hire thousands of new teachers.

But a 10-month examination by The 74 shows that many districts haven’t used the funds with the urgency intended. Some have monies advocates say are critical for academic recovery, while others have pumped millions of dollars into major classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic. 

With just over a year left to allocate the funds, the question isn’t only if districts will hit the September 2024 deadline, but whether the unprecedented windfall will leave students better off. 

Districts have not made it easy to answer those questions. Despite the unprecedented expense, Congress said little about districts’ responsibility to keep the public informed.

“Are districts with the biggest declines in student achievement spending their money the way you hope they would?” asked Matthew Steinberg, an education professor at George Mason University. “We just don’t know.”

A recent said gaps in spending data “make it difficult for the oversight community, decision-makers, and American taxpayers to fully understand where the money went and how it was used.” 

When districts do report on their spending, the documents are often “full of jargon and gobbledygook,” complained Eileen Chollet, a parent in Virginia’s Fairfax County schools. 

And the federal government hasn’t necessarily been a model of openness. A U.S. Department of Education “” tells users how much money districts received. But its most recent is two years old and the funds are grouped into vague categories like “supplies” and “other services.”

To get a deeper look at how school systems across the U.S. have spent their funds, The 74 filed public record requests with 13 districts and two charter school networks — from large urban centers like Oakland to the small rural community of Monmouth-Roseville in western Illinois. Together they received $3.4 billion. In response, districts sent everything from neat spreadsheets to erratically formatted PDF’s and printouts of internal data portals. Some, including the Arlington Independent School District in Texas and the Granite School District in Utah, responded within weeks. Others took months to deliver the records, and one — Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic enclave in New York’s Hudson Valley — never complied. 

The documented expenditures, dating back to 2020, range from seven-figure payments to education consulting firms like Engage2Learn in Arlington to small Amazon orders under $100 for stress-relievers like aromatherapy supplies and fidget cubes delivered to Colorado Early Colleges, a charter network.

Invoices and emails shed light on the unexpected costs associated with reopening schools. Colorado Early Colleges spent about $70,000 for an exterior fence at its Aurora campus so students and staff could eat outside despite concerns about proximity to the community’s . 

Amid staggering declines in achievement, officials say it’s easy to forget the severe threat that COVID posed especially in predominantly . The cost of masks, testing and contract tracing were justified, said Cathryn Stout, communications chief for the Memphis-Shelby County Schools, one of the districts The 74 profiled.

“I’m gonna push back hard against anybody who said that that was unnecessary spending,” she said. “All of our were full.” 

But as schools emerged from those nerve-wracking early days, they faced a new pressure: Spending the federal money wisely on a relatively short timeline. Many districts tapped the temporary funds for routine expenses, like payroll and membership fees for professional organizations. 

Relief Fund Transparency in 3 Maps

The , for example, used relief funds to make a $1.6 million payment on a $100 million state loan it received in 2003, records show. Stockton Unified, also in California, spent over $2 million on high-level central office positions, like a facilities director and its head of curriculum and instruction.

And in the Granite Public Schools in Utah, roughly $86,000 in relief funds covered accommodations at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas last summer for teams from 14 schools to attend an annual conference. 

“They’ve got a conference facility that is massive, a wonderful ballroom,” said Jeff Jones, CEO of Solution Tree, the professional development company that held the event. 

The training focuses on what educators call “professional learning communities,” in which teachers review student data, discuss a book they’ve read or debrief after giving a lesson.

District spokesman Ben Horsley said state officials never questioned Granite’s use of relief funds for what he described as a “critical component of helping schools improve instruction.” And he noted that one of the district’s highest-performing schools saw even more growth in student achievement after teachers put what they learned into practice.

As districts bank accounts grew, so did the opportunity for waste, misuse and questionable business deals:

• The Detroit Public Schools Community District signed a $3 million tutoring contract with a vendor led by Superintendent Nikolai Vitti’s wife, Rachel Vitti. Leaders disclosed the relationship before bringing in the literacy nonprofit in 2021 and said they chose the provider because of its strong track record. Still, amid pushback, Rachel Vitti resigned from her role directing the nonprofit last summer.

• The Youngstown, Ohio, district in relief funds on an internet service contract with an Arizona company to offer Wi-Fi signals from city buildings and utility poles. But the project collapsed because the city didn’t own all the utility poles. The district couldn’t recover the money it spent on equipment, and the unused supplies now sit in a warehouse.

• The San Joaquin County district attorney in California launched a criminal probe into the Stockton Unified School District for spending roughly $7 million on ultraviolet air purifiers from a company linked to a former mayor with a history of legal trouble. A state audit pointed to the board’s decision to approve the contract even though district staff gave the proposal a low rating. Less than half of the 2,200 filters purchased were installed and the rest are stored in a warehouse. “This thing was streamlined and fast-tracked,” Marcus Battle, a former budget officer named in the audit, told The 74. Board members, he said, were “willing to circumvent a lawful procurement process to get this approved.”

‘Transformational for tutoring’

As auditors continue to pore over district records, more problematic expenditures are bound to surface. But the relief funds have also fueled major upgrades to and creative efforts to improve learning and school climate, initiatives many districts hope to sustain once the funds dry up. 

COVID aid brought tutoring, once a perk reserved for more affluent families, to students who previously had no access to that level of support.

The relief funds have been “transformational for tutoring,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University education researcher leading efforts to expand and .

While the response to many virtual, on-demand programs has , districts that stuck to high-dosage tutoring — generally defined as meeting in small groups, three times a week, with the same tutor — say it’s bumping struggling students and helping them pass end-of-course tests. Too few students, however, have had access to that level of support. Federal data released in February showed that 80% of schools were offering some form of tutoring, but only 1 in 10 students had access to the high-impact model experts recommend.

Districts have also spent millions to help students recover from months of isolation. on more than 7,000 districts from Burbio, which tracks COVID spending, showed over 1,400 planned to spend at least $1.5 billion collectively on mental health to respond to an escalation in violent behavior and alarming rates of depression and anxiety among students. About 500 districts planned to spend a total of almost $230 million on counselors and mentors.

Some four to five dozen Michigan districts tried to purchase dogs as therapy animals to respond to students’ mental health challenges. Kevin Walters, who supervises the Michigan Department of Education’s grants office, told The 74 that he had to instruct school leaders that while federal relief dollars allowed them to contract with companies that rent out therapy animals, they could not purchase their own.

As part of its plan to spend $19 million on mental health, the Memphis-Shelby County Schools opened 60 “reset” rooms where students can cool off when they become disruptive or seek help if they’ve been bullied. 

Tito Langston, the district’s interim chief financial officer, called it money well spent. Before White Station Elementary opened one of the special classrooms, it wasn’t unusual for Langston to get a call during the school day because of a behavior problem with his own child, who has autism. Now, his son has a place to refocus.

“He called me and said, ‘Dad, I went to the reset room. I feel better now,’ ” Langston said. 

Many districts offer evidence — in the form of higher test scores or improved behavior — to demonstrate the value of projects launched with relief funds. In Illinois’s Monmouth-Roseville, for example, students who received tutoring outpaced their peers’ growth in literacy and math in 2022.

But there are also many instances of students not getting the extra help they need. 

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to use relief funds to address teacher shortages by offering competitive stipends for substitutes. But Laurisa Schutt, former executive director of First State Educate, a Delaware nonprofit, said she hears stories of students with substitutes “watching movies all day or kids with nobody in the classroom. They’re just given worksheets, and they’re sitting there.”

‘Not in a test tube’ 

Accurately measuring if popular programs or policies have been effective at helping students recover learning lost due to school closures is not easy. 

“There’s so much money that it must have done something good,” said Kenneth Shores, an assistant education professor at the University of Delaware. But the pandemic aid offered a rare chance to quickly test which recovery efforts were most effective.

“That learning opportunity,” he said, “was totally squandered.” 

Researchers need to know which students received extra help to determine if it made a difference. But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, said Congress didn’t require districts to collect such information.

In the Wichita Public Schools, which received a total of $266 million, leaders “gave up” on trying to tie specific programs funded with relief funds to student progress, said Susan Willis, the district’s chief financial officer. Leaders are looking for improvement in the areas they always track, like graduation rates and reading scores, she said.

“A student is not in a test tube with one initiative,” she said. “Was it the tutoring? The mentoring? It probably was a combination of all those things.”

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools aimed to track the impact of its investments when it included specific targets in its for the third round of relief funds — something Goldhaber said the “overwhelming majority” of districts didn’t do. 

Schools with reset rooms, for example, were expected to see at least a 3 percentage point reduction in out-of-school suspensions. An showed the district was meeting that goal, but it hasn’t posted more recent data and board meetings have been consumed by controversy over the district’s search for a new superintendent.

‘Five clicks away’

The influx of new cash hasn’t always been met with innovative thinking about how to spend it, experts said. Many districts are less than limber about changing course when projects don’t work out. 

“I talked to one district team who admitted that their new social workers hadn’t been successful in getting attendance back up, so they thought maybe they’d invest in even more social workers,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “Rarely do we see a district question whether an investment is working and deliberate on ending it.” 

Even though districts were required to get public input on their spending plans, many haven’t followed up with reports on their progress. Of the 15 systems examined by The 74, just three devote web pages to relief funds. Only the in Georgia offers updated spending data, and a district official provides frequent reports on the use of relief funds at board meetings.

In neighboring Cobb County, however, parents say the district merely conducted a in 2021 when it received its third round of relief funds — $161 million. A outlines some of the district’s priorities, but doesn’t say how much it is spending on tutoring, summer school or other interventions for struggling students.

In an email, the district said officials spent relief funds “in a way which gave students and parents as many high-quality academic choices as possible.”

But Heather Tolley-Bauer, a Cobb parent, said there have been “zero updates” and “nonexistent” transparency. She hired a private tutor to focus on study skills her rising ninth grader missed during remote learning in sixth grade because the district only offered online tutoring. 

She co-founded a watchdog group focused on relief funds and has been critical of some expenditures. Those for and UV lights that prompted for the school board to step up spending oversight. 

“They’ve never given a wrap-up of, ‘This is how we spent the money and this is how it mattered.’ ” she said. “Shame on the federal government for not requiring that.”

Those seeking current data on how districts have spent relief funds might also have a hard time hunting it down at the state level. Even when the information is available, parents can’t easily get at it.

“On the website, it’s five clicks away. That’s a lot,” Schutt, of Delaware’s First State Educate, said of her state’s website. “It’s not like there’s a banner that says, ‘Want to know where your money’s spent? Click here.’ ”

States without a tracker don’t always appreciate watchdog groups taking on the challenge themselves. In Wisconsin, Quinton Klabon, senior research director at the right-leaning Institute for Reforming Government, grew frustrated with how the state reported districts’ use of relief funds — a collection of from all 450 districts on the education department’s website.

His organization created its own website and to identify trends. It found, for example, that districts planned to spend 28% of their funds on construction and 6.8% on mental health.

The state pushed back. “Instead of building dashboards, we are helping districts meet federal guidelines while spending dollars in ways that are meaningful to learner growth,” in a memo to superintendents about how to respond to the report. State leaders considered his analysis accurate but still decided to call it “misleading” in their memo, according to internal emails Klabon obtained through a public records request and shared with The 74.

Even the U.S. Department of Education’s — with over 13,000 lines of district-level data — is designed more for internal purposes, like audits and monitoring, than helping parents, according to a spokesperson.

“We know they have the data, but what are they doing with it?” asked Phyllis Jordan, associate director of FutureEd, which produces frequent updates on trends in spending. 

The stakes are high, Goldhaber said.

The dearth of reliable data has consequences not just for the students that districts currently serve, but for the public education system itself, which has seen students exiting in droves as school choice options boom. 

“My guess is that in the [coming] years,” he said, “we’ll see lots of people say, ‘You know, schools got $200 billion and we don’t have anything to show for it.’ ”

But anyone interested in learning how the district spent that hefty sum might be left scratching their heads.

Until a few weeks ago, a devoted to the district’s management of the historic windfall contained a link purporting to offer a detailed breakdown of how it used the funds. But clicking it took users to an error page with an illustration of a smiling aviator in a red prop plane, with text reading, “I’m afraid you’ve found a page that doesn’t exist.”

In December, a district spokeswoman said the page wasn’t updated properly and that staff were “working to get everything going smoothly.” But nothing happened until June 11, when the district after a 74 reporter asked an official about it. 

The scenario offers a fitting metaphor for the district’s unwieldy approach to the federal aid amid a season of scandal and other miststeps.

last year after an investigation showed he had affairs with at least two women he supervised. A for a new chief — described by one observer as a “game of thrones,” with the interim and deputy chief vying for the job — has dominated school board meetings. Other distractions, notably a move to from board meetings, has eroded trust between leaders and families, and hindered transparency about the biggest pot of federal money the majority Black district has ever received.

“They are going through a lot right now,” said Krista Johnson, founder and executive director of ALLMemphis, a nonprofit that provides literacy training and coaching to teachers. She described her interactions with the district as “swimming upstream”: Emails to officials aren’t returned for weeks, and communication with principals is poor. 

Johnson said the problems hit home recently when she learned that her first grader in the district is a year behind in reading — despite getting A’s on weekly tests and making the principal’s list. As an educator, Johnson understands that it’s harder for a student to do well on a standardized test than a weekly spelling quiz. But she thinks the district could do a better job of explaining these issues to families.

“Nothing works well without strong leadership, and we just don’t have strong leadership now,” she said. “It’s just not an emergency to anyone, and that is shameful.”

With the attention on crisis management, oversight of relief funds has suffered. 

last year showed the district overspent relief funds on HVAC systems — sometimes six times as much — in a rush to beat other districts competing for the same vendors. Prior to the federal windfall, the average HVAC project cost $1 million; afterwards, it jumped to $6 million. 

The district fired its last July after an internal probe showed he approved purchases from a business in exchange for that firm doing work with his own company. 

After a January found “significant deficiency” in the district’s handling of contracts, officials hired FORVIS, an outside accounting firm, to examine its use of relief funds. Both the district and a FORVIS spokesman declined to comment on the status of the audit.

Sheleah Harris, who abruptly resigned from the school board earlier this month, has cast further doubt on how the district has handled the money. In an email to reporters, she alleged that board members and administrators “have directly benefited from certain contracts.” While she didn’t offer specifics, she accused Board Chair Althea Greene of “mishandling” funds. 

The district, which has in relief funds yet to spend, pointed to the audit and its own “” as proof of efforts to prevent impropriety. Greene denied the accusations and said she carries her “responsibility with the utmost integrity.” 

‘Skin in the game’

The litany of flare-ups has tried the patience of parents eager to see results from the federal investment. “We need to know where this money is going,” said Sarah Carpenter, executive director of Memphis Lift, a leading advocacy group. “The board isn’t talking about it.”

On a weeknight, she gathered with parents at the organization’s headquarters — a one-story white bungalow with orange trim in north Memphis, a predominantly Black community. The converted house serves as a gathering spot for families to discuss pressing issues, like a new curriculum or school choice options.

That evening, as children played in another room, at least a dozen parents and grandparents sat around a long table, shared dinner and voiced frustrations about classrooms without certified teachers and student data portals with no grades.

They described themselves as only vaguely aware of how much money the district received in relief funds and how officials were using it. 

“The district has not been very informative,” said Charles Lampkin, a pastor with six children in the Memphis-Shelby schools, from 3 to 13. “I’ve got a lot of skin in the game.”

The communication breakdown is notable given the school system’s place among urban districts nationally, where it experienced some of the in reading and math on last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. Math scores fell 12 points in fourth grade and 14 points in eighth grade. In reading, there was an eight-point drop in fourth and a six-point decline in eighth.

Considering the dismal results, Carpenter wonders whether leaders have made the best use of the money. “When we look up and the money’s gone, will our kids be in the same shape?” she asked. “I’m afraid so.” 

Before the NAEP scores were released, former state education Commissioner Penny Schwinn met with Williams, the interim superintendent, and other leaders in downtown Memphis to brace them for the results.

Memphis-Shelby, she said later, hadn’t “rigorously” communicated with families of students at risk of repeating third grade this fall due to a new state law requiring proficiency in reading. 

The showed that 42% of third graders scored below expectations — the same as last year. 

“Our concern is we will have thousands of kids, predominantly Black children in Memphis, who will be retained — not because they had to be, but literally because there isn’t a structure,” Schwinn said. Officials “are wanting to do all the right things. The implementation is where there’s a lot of struggle.” 

She said district leaders could have spent relief funds to hire a public relations firm to explain the options for students who didn’t reach proficiency. “Outsource it. It’s allowable,” Schwinn said. 

The district held a series of Facebook live sessions on the results, but declined to comment to The 74 on steps teachers took to inform parents of their children’s performance. shows 95% of those eligible to retake the test in late May did, but of those, just 8% became proficient.

‘When the storm comes’

Meanwhile, Greene, the board chair, pushed back on the idea that district scandals have caused relief efforts to falter.

“We didn’t get off track. We had and we stuck to it,” she said in an interview. She thinks the board earned the community’s respect when it put former superintendent Ray on leave and ultimately negotiated his resignation. “We didn’t have a manual to say this is what you do when the storm comes.”

Far from fumbling its message, she insisted the district “over-communicates” about relief funds.

“We have a website,” she said in December. As evidence, she pointed a 74 reporter to the site with the error message and bouncing airplane. Contacted again on June 11, she said the site had been updated. The change, it appears, was to remove the link altogether, leaving the public without a breakdown of how the district has spent the funds. The rest of the site remains stuck in the earlier days of relief fund implementation: It features a video with former superintendent Ray and its most recent spending report is from February 2022.

In June, a spokesperson said the website isn’t the primary vehicle to communicate to families about relief-funded programs. She pointed to a , but a review of several issues shows it’s a roundup of calendar items, awards and other updates without any mention of how the district is using the money.

Several parents and community leaders said they were unaware of recent efforts to communicate how the funds have been spent. Terence Patterson, president and CEO of the Memphis Education Fund, voiced concerns that the district was allocating too much — over $400 million — on facility upgrades and deferred maintenance and not enough on academic recovery. Records show the district has spent almost $127 million on “building improvements” and architects. In addition to new HVAC systems, include painting, renovating athletic fields and stadiums, and installing water filling stations and new fire alarms. 

Williams, the interim superintendent, defended those actions. 

“We are a district that’s been around for quite some time. We have over 200 facilities and those facilities are really aging,” she said. “This was a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Tutoring efforts

The ongoing turmoil has tended to obscure what leaders say are important milestones toward getting more students on grade level. 

The district has spent over $40 million on tutoring this school year, reaching 13,300 students, officials said. Only a few schools had waitlists and the majority of parents who requested tutoring received it. Attendance at tutoring sessions averaged 89% and students who participated in at least half were more likely to meet the district’s growth goal each quarter, officials said.

“There are folks who keep the ball rolling,” said Cortney Robinson, CEO of the Peer Power Foundation, a nonprofit that has received almost $3.9 million in relief funds to train high school students as tutors. He called Deputy Superintendent Angela Whitelaw and Shawn Page, chief of academic operations, “heroes” who haven’t let the tensions interfere with academic recovery.

Another $89 million is paying for 750 “specialized classroom assistants” in K-2. They lead small groups of students for practice on specific skills, monitor students’ work while teachers are leading lessons and provide backup in the early grades. 

Jessica Rodriguez, who has a first grader at Willow Oaks Elementary, took the position because she worried about the pandemic’s effect on her son’s learning. 

“I just really wanted to be a support,” she said. “I have a better connection [to the school] than I had before.” 

Williams told The 74 the district will evaluate its tutoring and K-2 initiatives to determine if it wants to continue them when relief funds expire. 

“You do not sustain $776 million overnight,” she said. “You have to be more strategic in your thinking on what is really working for students.”

But during a May 9 meeting, Whitelaw, the district’s deputy chief, said the district can’t yet determine whether hiring the classroom assistants was a wise use of relief funds. Some of the assistants led classrooms on their own this past school year because of staff shortages and haven’t been used to “their fullest potential,” she said.

At the same meeting, Harris thumbed through the district’s spending plan. She bluntly called the district “top, top, top heavy, heavy, heavy” and said it was unclear whether the 1,163 positions hired with relief funds supported academic goals. Experts warned districts against using the money to hire staff because after next year, they’ll either have to let them go or find another way to pay them.

She said district officials ought to tell parents in “community-friendly language” where the relief funds are going. Harris thinks that message, three years after the pandemic began, should answer a fundamental question: “Does this tie into making sure our children can read on grade level or above?”

Not only did its creation spark a lengthy court battle over church-state separation that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, investigators have cited the district three times for conflicts of interest and other questionable financial practices.

Founded in order to uphold centuries-old, ultra-Orthodox traditions, the tiny district in New York’s Hudson Valley caters exclusively to families in the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews who have children with disabilities. It remains largely closed to public scrutiny.

Most recently, school officials refused to address how the system of less than 500 students is spending nearly $94 million in federal pandemic aid designed to curb learning loss and other effects of one of the worst disruptions to education in American history.

To put that amount in perspective, in the last round of funding alone, the Kiryas Joel Village Union Free School District received over $95,000 per student — nearly 40 times the and what New York schools spend on special education students. 

Its use of those funds could raise eyebrows. Documents The 74 obtained from the state reveal the district is investing over $12 million in upgrades to facilities owned by organizations affiliated with the religious group’s leadership.

The pandemic’s exceptional windfall calls out for a high level of transparency and accountability from a school system with little to no separation from a ruling religious community that has openly — and successfully — . 

But the district has avoided repeated requests from The 74 to address how it used the money. Since October, Kiryas Joel officials have ignored a public records request filed under the state Freedom of Information Law, and Superintendent Joel Petlin declined to answer questions by email, phone and on social media. 

The district also advised others not to talk to reporters about its COVID spending. A contractor who made relief-funded improvements to a district-leased building provided some information to The 74, only to text a reporter the next day asking not to use any of it because “the school simply asked that we not share anything.”

School systems in New York and nationwide are to publicly post their stimulus spending plans online, but Kiryas Joel never has. It doesn’t even have a website.

“[The district] is always an outlier in dollars received and in some of the way they do things,” said Brian Cechnicki, executive director of the Association of School Business Officials of New York and the former director of education finance at the New York State Education Department. “It’s a tough nut to crack.”

When The New York Times raised issues about the district’s relief spending in , Petlin called it a “false narrative.”

“The public would have been better served by a story that helps it understand this unique and truly special school district and community and celebrates the remarkable work being done here,” he said in . 

Petlin argued that the district’s use of federal funds was approved by the state education department, but oversight could be less than rigorous. Cechnicki, who left the department in 2020, said “There is a high volume of these types of reports that have to be approved, and the department perennially doesn’t have the capacity to do fine-grained reviews of all 700ish districts.”

Nonetheless, the state selected Kiryas Joel as one of about 16% of districts to receive its highest level of , requiring a full-day, on-site examination of documents and staff interviews. The state has between January 2023 and June 2024 to complete the on-site visits; it’s unclear when Kiryas Joel’s will happen.

The results of that investigation — like nearly all information on local relief fund spending — won’t be easy for the public to access. New York requires anyone seeking such data to submit open records requests. That makes it tough to track how districts used the money to address even broad areas such as hiring staff or addressing learning loss. 

New York’s approach contrasts with states like and , which provide online portals where the public can keep up with how much districts have spent and in what categories. New York’s lack of transparency has kept parents largely in the dark about whether the historic expenditure is having an impact, advocates say.

“There’s no sharing of best practices. There’s nothing around evaluation. It’s a missed opportunity,” said Jeff Smink, deputy director at . “There needs to be more urgency around this.” 

Private school bonus

One reason for the state’s heightened scrutiny of Kiryas Joel might be the sheer amount of federal relief money it received — so much that Deputy Superintendent Josh Kamensky told the Times that it was “really hard to spend.”

—for a district with less than 500 students, including preschoolers — was 12 times what the Ellenville Central School District to its north received for a district of over 12,000 students and more than five times what the 2,700-student nearby Monticello district received.

The mismatch in Kiryas Joel’s favor is rooted in the arcane machinery of federal spending, which is weighted to support those living in poverty.

In the first wave of pandemic funding, the district, with an 86% poverty rate, received almost $7.6 million. That law followed the traditional Title I formula that requires the district to provide “equitable services” for low-income children, even though the vast majority of those students in Kiryas Joel attend private schools. The bulk of the money, $5.4 million, went to over 5,500 students in 21 yeshivas, private Hasidic schools that strongly prioritize religious study over academics.

In his statement on the Times article, Petlin noted the district’s responsibility to provide those services. “We have no discretion to keep this money for our public school students and every federal dollar spent is approved by the NY State Education Department,” he wrote.

But the second and third pandemic relief packages had no such requirement for private school students. Nonetheless, the funding formula continued to factor in the in the greater community, including those students who don’t attend public schools. That left more than $86 million for a district with few students.

One of the nation’s foremost experts in school finance suggested federal officials should have adjusted the formula for the latter waves of funding to avoid an outcome some might view as perverse.

“In a weird way, the district benefits from having the kids in the private schools and no longer has to share it,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

Conflicts of interest

Another reason for investigators’ increased focus on Kiryas Joel might be that it has run afoul of them before:

• In 2009, a state showed that the district violated conflict of interest law when two board members failed to disclose that they are also on the board of United Talmudical Academy of Kiryas Joel, which runs a network of yeshivas. The Kiryas Joel board members voted in favor of a lucrative to rent a building owned by UTA of KJ.
• In 2011, the national education department’s found that the district put $276,443 in Title I funds toward the cost of the lease for the school and a second lease for another UTA of KJ building used for afterschool programs for yeshiva students. “Because decisions surrounding both lease agreements were influenced by the board members with evident conflicts of interest, there is no assurance that the decisions made were in the best interest of the students of Kiryas Joel,” the audit found. The district had to .
• The same report showed the district could not account for over $191,000 in “significant overtime” pay charged to Title I. Timesheets for those receiving the extra money didn’t identify the program they were working on. 
• Finally, in 2017, the state comptroller issued that found the district reimbursed three employees a total $15,000 for commuting to work even though it  wasn’t part of their employment agreement. Petlin responded that it was an oral agreement, but said it would be documented in the future. Another employee was reimbursed over $4,700 for child care expenses despite being ineligible for that benefit.

The Times — in a on education at the yeshivas — raised new questions about the propriety of payments made to UTA of KJ with relief funds, including $1.3 million in lease payments and another $288,000 to rent the organization’s swimming pool. 

Two sons of school district board member Harry Polatsek — also on the board of UTA of KJ — have connections to the district, the Times found. One runs a bus company that received a $656,000 contract paid for with relief funds. And the other is on staff as a teacher’s aide, emergency medical technician and parent liaison. Documents obtained from the state education department show the district is spending $1.1 million in relief funds on parent liaisons, but don’t list employees’ names. 

The relationship between the district and its landlord demonstrates “a habit of interpreting the law on their own terms and for their own benefit,” said Beatrice Weber, executive director of Young Advocates for Fair Education, a nonprofit seeking to improve secular education in New York’s Hasidic schools.

Many of the district’s big-ticket expenditures are upgrades to buildings it leases from UTA of KJ and its affiliates. In his statement, Petlin said any improvements “benefit our students, and not our landlord.”

But The 74 has found the district is spending over $12 million in improvements to the building it rents — re-doing the flooring, replacing the HVAC systems, re-paving a parking lot, adding a classroom audio system, installing an outdoor playground and building a temperature-controlled “bus shelter.” 

Nearly $3 million went to , which specializes in classroom furnishings for students with disabilities. The company is installing “sensory” features — such as a wall with flowing water and bubbles lit up by LED lights — at the school. 

“The sound of the water with the lights and the bubbles in the wall are instantly relaxing,” said Shevy Schlesinger, director of business at Playlearn. Many of the purchases include furniture and equipment that could be removed like swings or climbing walls, she noted. But she acknowledged also making improvements to permanent structures like the floors and ceilings.

Kiryas Joel is not alone in renting, instead of owning, a school building. Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century Schools Fund, a nonprofit focused on modernizing schools, cited a 2021 example in which the in New Jersey signed a 20-year, $160 million lease with private developers to renovate a former hospital into a high school.

“It’s a classic real estate transaction. There’s nothing unusual about leasing a building and making improvements that you pay for,” she said. But since it’s public money, she added, “The duty to make it transparent is really high. Even if there’s a little bit of abuse, it poisons the well.”

The district is also spending a total of over $34 million in relief funds on salaries for administrators, specialists and support staff, according to documents filed with the state. While districts across the country have spent relief money this way, warn that using temporary funds to pay employees raises questions about a district’s ability to afford those costs when the money runs out.

Another $5.6 million was allocated for employee “retention stipends” of $4,500 a year for three years. The district has “around 500 staff,” according to J.P. O’Hare, spokesman for the state education department. He cited federal guidance allowing retention bonuses as a way to reopen schools and provide stability for students and staff.

But the state put the brakes on at least one planned expenditure. It rejected the district’s initial plan to use relief funds to build a wellness center, according to the Times Herald-Record, which covers New York City’s northwest suburbs.

The department declined to answer questions about any of the district’s purchases or whether it had concerns about potential conflicts of interest, but said Kiryas Joel was selected for more aggressive monitoring based on risk. 

Kristina Naplatarski, a spokeswoman for the state comptroller’s office, which conducted the 2017 audit and issued in March noting the urgency of spending COVID relief money to address learning loss, declined to comment on the issue because they had not “recently audited the school district.”

The district did spend $3,000 to hire a well-known Washington, D.C., law firm that specializes in federal compliance and audit preparation as part of its COVID relief spending. Bonnie Graham, a partner at Brustein and Manasevit, would not answer questions about the specific work the firm did for Kiryas Joel.

‘Fiscal stress’

The 74’s reporting on Kiryas Joel is part of an ongoing effort to track how districts around the nation are spending $3.4 billion in COVID funds. On Nov. 1, a member of the district’s staff confirmed that Petlin, the superintendent, received The 74’s original open records request. But he and Kamensky, the deputy superintendent who prepared forms for the state related to the funds, never followed up, despite repeated attempts to reach them.

This isn’t the first time Petlin failed to comply with the . In 2008, the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a conservative think tank, sued the district after it didn’t turn over employee contracts as part of a public records request.

This also isn’t the first time Kiryas Joel received a disproportionately large influx of federal cash. In 2010, the district got $1.6 million in the federal competition — more than the majority of New York districts. But when the funds ran out three years later, the state comptroller found the district to be in “significant fiscal stress.” , Petlin noted that the district’s financial condition had improved between 2013 and 2016 because it was maintaining adequate reserves.

Early in the pandemic, however, the state again listed the district as largely for its reliance on cash to pay monthly expenses and short-term debt.  

The focus on the district’s relief spending comes amid renewed attention to the poor academic performance of students who attend private schools in the village and other ultra-Orthodox communities in New York state. A found that students who attend yeshivas — many of whom also attend district public schools for remedial services — are failing to gain the foundations of a secular education, with little ability to spell or do basic math.

Weber, with Young Advocates for Fair Education, said she knows parents in Kiryas Joel who worry that their children who attend yeshivas are not learning the skills necessary to be employed and function as adults.

“I have parents calling me from there crying and begging, ‘What are you going to do about this?’” she said.

‘This educational experiment’

The creation of this most unusual school district just an hour north of New York City grew out of tensions with its neighbors.

Before Kiryas Joel created its own school system, students who needed special education attended public schools in the neighboring Monroe-Woodbury Central School District. 

But conflicts arose when schools didn’t accommodate the Hasidic families’ religious practices — like wanting women bus drivers for girls and men for the boys. A new school system, leaders argued, would support its traditions and shelter students from ridicule. 

New York Gov. Mario Cuomo signed legislation creating the district in 1989. , then-executive director of the state’s school board’s association, sued on the grounds that it violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

The Supreme Court agreed. In a 6-3 decision, former Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: “There is more than a fine line between the voluntary association that leads to a political community comprised of people who share a common religious faith, and the forced separation that occurs when the government draws explicit political boundaries on the basis of peoples’ faith. In creating the district in question, New York crossed that line.”

But the political fight waged on. Because their residents vote as a bloc at the direction of their most senior religious leaders, Kiryas Joel and other ultra-Orthodox communities have traditionally over New York politicians. The Hasidic sects can both block legislation they deem unfavorable and cement support for causes they want championed.

After the Supreme Court defeat and subsequent legal battles, New York lawmakers went through several rounds of legislation before they finally adopted a law that allowed Kiryas Joel’s one-of-a-kind school district to survive subsequent legal challenges. 

Today, the relationship between Kiryas Joel and Monroe-Woodbury is more “collegial,” according to Superintendent Elsie Rodriguez. In fact, the two districts now have a reverse arrangement in which Monroe-Woodbury pays Kiryas Joel to serve 23 of its special education students.

Petlin, meanwhile, remains Kiryas Joel’s most outspoken advocate. In on the school district’s 30th anniversary in 2020, he wrote: “We have proven that this educational experiment works, contrary to the naysayers of yesterday and today.”

As an elementary school teacher in Fulton County, Amy Long was used to scarcity. When she prepared reading lessons, she often found herself scrounging through a closet for workbooks only to find there weren’t enough for every student. She compiled websites where she and her colleagues could download because the school lacked a complete curriculum.

“It’s really frustrating when you have something, but you don’t have all of it,” said Long, who taught for eight years at Renaissance Elementary — a predominantly Black, high-poverty school at the south end of the Atlanta-area district. Long, now a literacy coach at another South Fulton school, kept snacks on hand for students who hadn’t eaten breakfast and saw her class roster change regularly as families moved from one rental home to another. 

Schools in largely white, well-off North Fulton offered a stark contrast.

Backed by active PTAs and strong community support, many schools stocked full sets of chapter books and computer programs that provided students with extra practice on early literacy skills. 

“It was 100% inequitable,” said Long, who has worked in the Fulton County Schools for 12 years. Students didn’t get “the same learning experience as their peers in a more affluent area, simply due to the location of their school.” 

Now, officials in Georgia’s fourth-largest district are hoping an infusion of federal relief funds will change all that. Fulton has allocated roughly a third of its $262 million in pandemic aid to replace a patchy and uneven approach to reading with a solid, phonics-based curriculum. , which includes training teachers and administrators in how children learn to read and adding K-2 literacy coaches in all 60 elementary schools, is an attempt to give students an equal shot at staying on grade level, regardless of where they live. 

“The equity issue will always be there,” said Franchesca Warren, a school board member who represents 16 schools in South Fulton. In 2016, she helped launch an advocacy group to better educate parents about the district and pushed for a stronger emphasis on literacy at her own children’s school. “This is literally a marathon. We are changing the opinions and viewpoints of South Fulton schools one parent at a time.”

 ‘Ask’ instead of ‘aks’

On a rainy Monday, first-grade teacher Sheila Brown read from a lesson handbook as she looked over her students’ shoulders at Stonewall Tell Elementary in College Park. They sorted words with short and long vowel sounds into columns in their workbooks. Shifting their attention to the white board at the front of the room, they pointed two fingers toward the vowels in “make.” 

“Remember when you see the silent ‘e’ what happens with the vowel,” Brown reminded them. She asked the name for a word with a short vowel sound that ends with a consonant, like “can” or “mad.” 

“Closed syllable!” they responded enthusiastically.

Brown, a former middle school teacher in the Atlanta district, said she’s never taught this way. Before the new program, she wanted to get students reading, but didn’t spend as much time on “the phonetic part of it,” she said. Now she understands, “Just knowing sight words is not teaching our kids.”

Since last year, the 90,000-student district has spent more than $3.5 million on two contracts with Lexia Learning to deliver its intensive to more than 3,000 teachers, principals and central office administrators. In addition to the new program, each school’s “governance council” — comprised of teachers, parents and community members — has a say in how it spends a pot of money on extra materials, as long as the purchases support the district’s major objectives, like literacy.

At Stonewall Tell, some of that $46,000 was spent on plastic that amplify students’ voices so they can hear how they’re sounding out words and cards that show how the mouth should look when making those sounds.

A small triumph: Brown said she now hears more students saying “ask” instead of “aks.”

Reforming the district’s reading program began by weeding out in many classrooms. Some schools had been using the Units of Study series from Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins. Reading experts say the program lacks a on phonics.

Over time, literacy instruction in the district had grown to be “a bit of a Wild West,” said Ken Zeff, who served as interim superintendent from 2015 to 2016 and now leads an education nonprofit in the metro region. How a student learned to read and write depended on what schools could afford and was left to local discretion. Long said teachers struggled to share ideas with colleagues across the county because everyone used different materials.

Some parents are beginning to notice a shift — and adjusting their expectations. Courtney Martin said her daughter, a kindergartner at Mountain Park Elementary in the North Fulton city of Roswell, doesn’t recognize as many common words as she thought she would. But she understands that the goal isn’t memorization. The teacher is “building new foundational skills rather than rushing through everything,” she said.

Martin serves on her school’s governance council and helps the literacy coach create classroom “sound walls,” which display the letter sounds in words. The coach, she said, is “taking more off teachers’ plates so they don’t have to worry about that.”

North and south

District leaders are counting on the investment to pay off for years to come. But in a county with one of the largest in the nation, the temporary windfall can only go so far. 

Fulton is geographically split — with the urban Atlanta system sandwiched in between. During the pandemic, long-standing achievement gaps between north and south schools only . 

Last year’s English language arts scores offered a sobering reminder of that gulf.

At one end of the spectrum, just 15% of students scored proficient or higher at Heritage Elementary in College Park, which sits off a main road in the shadow of America’s busiest airport — an area marked by low-income housing, fast food joints and . 

Over 40 miles away at Crabapple Crossing Elementary in Milton, a North Fulton town where two-acre spreads border horse farms and country clubs, the proficiency rate was five times higher. 

showed that South Fulton students experienced more learning loss and took longer to bounce back than their peers in the north. The decline leveled off during the 2021-22 school year as the district implemented such as high-dosage tutoring and summer school. 

Ericka Thompson, a Black South Fulton mom, understands those disparate realities. In the 1990s, she bussed to a North Fulton high school under a “minority-to-majority” program, which the district phased out about a decade ago. Her two sons attend Westlake High School on the southside, where over 90% of the students are Black and some parents work 70-hour weeks.

The district, she said, did its best to diagnose students’ needs after schools reopened, but “it’s almost like who needs stitches and who needs a Band-Aid,” she said. 

Grace Love sees the district’s use of relief funds in her dual roles as parent and district employee. Two years ago, she moved her second-grade daughter from a private school into Stonewall Tell and watched “test scores skyrocket.”

But as a behavior specialist for the district in South Fulton, Love wishes the budget had included more support for grandparents raising children and parents who work two jobs and struggle to help their kids with school. District data shows graduation rates are sometimes 10 percentage points lower than in North Fulton while suspension rates are roughly four to five times higher. Earlier this year, community leaders held a town hall on curbing . 

“The dynamics between the north and south are very different when it comes to parental support,” Love said. “There needs to be more attention to the neediest areas if we want to make it equitable.” 

But such efforts are complicated by over the past 30 years. The region’s has more than doubled, and many Black residents have migrated from the city limits to the suburbs. That means some of the district’s highest-need schools are in neighborhoods once viewed as more well-off.

“We have parents that live in million dollar houses, and we have children that are homeless,” said Irene Schweiger, executive director of Sandy Springs Education Force, a nonprofit in one of the in the nation. The organization runs afterschool and mentoring programs, and stocks school “mini libraries” with books students can borrow or keep. 

Similarly, Warren’s district in South Fulton includes schools where a 100% of students live in poverty as well as subdivisions of stately brick mansions. The route from Atlanta to those neighborhoods takes commuters past , named for the once-homeless filmmaker turned megastar — a reminder of this into a movie industry hub. 

The challenge for leaders has been how to spend the relief money in a way that touches all schools teaching students to read while still targeting those communities with the lowest-performing schools and most complex needs.

Early in the pandemic, the district paid $800,000 to nonprofit to offer vision screenings and glasses in Title I schools. At Holcomb Bridge School in Alpharetta, for example, over 200 of the school’s 1,000 students needed glasses.

“If a child can’t see, they can’t read,” said Gyimah Whitaker, the district’s deputy chief academic officer, recently tapped to become superintendent in neighboring Decatur. “It’s going to be difficult for them to be able to distinguish a B from a D if it’s blurry.”

They’re also spending about $13.1 million on dropout prevention efforts, which includes the costs of running three — two in South Fulton and one in Sandy Springs. The centers offer families free groceries, donated clothes and hygiene items, counseling and referrals to housing assistance. 

And the district opened in-school “academies” at the five South Fulton high schools. The smaller, more-sheltered environment — which combines online classes with in-person instruction and counseling — has put graduation back within reach for students thrown far off track by the pandemic.

“I didn’t pass a single math class in all of high school,” said Darryn Williams, who attends Creekside High. “My 10th grade year, we went virtual. That messed me up, completely.”

He spent more time that year helping his five younger siblings get through remote learning than on his own schoolwork. By December of this school year, however, he had earned enough credits in the academy to be a senior and will graduate on time next month. 

When the academy opened last fall, teachers began posting small certificates on a bulletin board each time a student passed a course. They soon ran out of space. Now, a dozen rows of the celebratory signs plaster the hallway. 

But the district’s biggest bet is on improving literacy, a growing concern as federal money dries up next year. With some educators on staff now certified to offer the course, the district will continue to train future teachers in the science of reading. Whether elementary schools will be able to keep their literacy coaches remains undecided.

Long, one of those coaches, spends part of her days at Stonewall Tell helping teachers connect the scientific theory they absorbed through hours of training to their more immediate push to get 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds to master phonics and spelling. 

She also works directly with small groups of students who were “super, super affected” by the pandemic. Last fall, some second graders, she said, were still learning how to form letters. 

South Fulton students who transfer to schools in the north often struggle to keep up with new classmates who are further ahead, Long said. She hopes the new reading program will keep them from getting lost.

“We know better now, so we can do better,” she said. “We need equity for all students, no matter what side of the county they’re on.”

TOPEKA — A new form of the long-debated Kansas voucher program for private schools would fund the program with federal COVID-19 dollars and provide $1,000 for public school students.

Sen. Molly Baumgardner, a Louisburg Republican, said the revised legislation was meant to shore up public education and help families fund educational needs for their children.

“This is going to allow families that are lower income to make sure their kids have access to opportunities,” Baumgardner said.

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The amended legislation, which will be further revised as the week continues, does away with the instead establishing the “education enrichment program.” The proposal would use a portion of the state’s $50 million in federal COVID-19 recovery funds to provide the awards and grants.

Public school student would get $1,000 through the program. Students not attending public schools would get the equivalent of 95% of base state aid, which is about $5,000. The money could be used for things like academic camps, music classes and tutoring services.

Rep. Valendia Winn, a Kansas City Democrat, commented on the $4,000 difference in funding between private and public schools students. Winn said taking the word “equity” out of the proposal title was a good move.

“You took the word ‘equity’ out,” Winn said. “Good thinking.”

The legislation still appropriates $592.7 million for special education programs in fiscal year 2024, which begins in July, and creates a special education task force. An amendment proposed Tuesday afternoon would partly fund special education through American Rescue Plan Act dollars. An estimated $47 million in funding would be shifted from the Kansas Education Enrichment Program along with $25 million from the legislature employment security fund to make up this $72 million in ARPA funding.

“It’s taking federal money to backfill what the federal government isn’t providing in special education,” Baumgardner said.

The changes were proposed over the course of several meetings on Tuesday among four Republicans and two Democrats from House and Senate education committees.

Rep. Kristey Williams, an Augusta Republican and House K-12 Education Budget Committee chair, approved the changes on behalf of the House committee lawmakers.

“That’s a big stretch for the House but I think that that is a good response and the House will accept,” Williams said.

The original bill was heavily criticized by of the public because it would use state money to fund unregulated private schools starting in the 2023-2024 school year. Each eligible student could draw a maximum of $5,000 annually from the state treasury to attend private school.

Any nonpublic preschool, elementary or high school that teaches reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science would be eligible to benefit financially from the proposed law. The schools wouldn’t be subject to governmental oversight, and religious objects, such as bibles, could be bought with state dollars.

Williams, the driving force behind the private school voucher plan, said it would help Kansas children who need religion.

“There are some kids that do need Jesus first, before they care about science and math,” Williams said during a March 20 forum on the topic.

The amended legislation still specifies that the private schools aren’t subject to government oversight and state dollars can be used to buy religious objects.

Baumgardner defended the provision.

“If a parent is making a different choice, the state is not saying what that choice needs to be,” Baumgardner said.

Leah Fliter, Kansas Association of School Boards assistant executive director of advocacy, said the organization was still following all the changes to the program.

“Hopefully we’ll get some closure here soon,” Fliter said. “We’re going to continue to oppose vouchers in whatever form they present themselves. We don’t support taking public money for private schools.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

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.

Stockton Unified school officials could face criminal charges and be forced to repay millions of dollars in relief funds to the federal government after released Tuesday found “sufficient evidence” of fraud.

The audit by an independent California agency largely focused on a questionable $7.3 million contract paid for with pandemic relief funds. In 2021, former officials appeared to ram through the purchase of 2,200 ultraviolet air filters designed to kill COVID despite multiple warnings that they weren’t following laws and procedures, the report said.

In new details described by the auditors, two district employees — a purchasing manager and Stockton’s chief business officer — eventually quit rather than help the board approve a proposal from a company that seemed to be trying to “manipulate” the bidding process. 

Auditors who conducted the review on behalf of the San Joaquin County Office of Education said the school board, former Interim Superintendent John Ramirez Jr. and former Chief Business Official Marcus Battle “failed to perform their fiduciary duty.”

Reached Wednesday afternoon, Battle strongly denied that he was at fault and said Ramirez faced “extreme pressure” from the board to move the contract forward. 

“This district was a disaster before I walked through the door,” Battle said. “We wanted to right a ship that had been going in the wrong direction for a long time.” 

The next step could be criminal charges.

“I look forward to thoroughly reviewing the independent auditor’s report,” San Joaquin County District Attorney Ron Freitas said in a statement. “Make no mistake, any attempt to commit fraud on the backs of our children will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

The release of the long-awaited report — presented to the board Tuesday night — was the latest rebuke of a Central Valley district that has been mired in controversy throughout the pandemic and faces a next year. A civil released last summer and reporting this week by The 74 point to sloppy business practices, petty board disputes and expenditures that gave the appearance of a conflict of interest. Now, a new board majority is promising to root out corruption and offer transparency on how the district is spending $241 million in pandemic aid.

“We could not in good conscience sit by and do nothing,” Troy Brown, county superintendent of schools, told the board, as members of the audience gasped and applauded. The county office has oversight of districts’ finances. 

Some attendees directed shouts of “Resign” at the three members still on the board who voted for the contract — Alicia Rico, Ray Zulueta Jr. and Cecilia Mendez. The county gave leaders of the 36,000-student district until March 1 to respond to a list of recommendations, including revising purchase policies, completing required paperwork and ensuring ethics training for board members.

Board President AngelAnn Flores told attendees that the findings didn’t surprise her. 

“I promise you that everybody involved in this will be held accountable,” she said. “I am just really upset [and] disappointed that we got here.” 

The 74 previously reported that a former board trustee, Scot McBrian, initially recommended that the company, Alliance Building Solutions, make a presentation on the filters to the board, which the grand jury said was “unusual” and could be “perceived as a conflict of interest.” McBrian said he heard about the filters from former Stockton mayor Anthony Silva, who has had a since 2012. 

The audit added further details. Silva hosted a holiday party where Alliance representatives initially briefed McBrian and others about the filters. Zachary Avelar, a colleague of Silva’s who was later appointed to the school board in July 2021, was also at the gathering. At the time, Avelar was also on the board of the Stockton Kids Club, where Silva was CEO.

Avelar and Silva did not respond to requests for comment. In a previous interview, Avelar said, “I’m nobody’s puppet,” and that it’s “BS” to say he was “voting a certain way for someone else.”

Avelar joined the board 7 months after Silva’s party. Less than two weeks after he took office, the board voted 6-1 to approve the contract with IAQ Distribution, a subsidiary of Alliance, even though district staff rated the company’s proposal the lowest in quality out of five. Flores was the lone dissenter. 

The board chose IAQ despite the fact that it was not a licensed contractor in California and had been the subject of complaints the district received about labor violations.

In January 2021, a representative from Alliance wrote interim Superintendent Brian Biedermann and referenced “working with your team” to develop the proposal. The wording, the auditors said, suggested the company was trying to evade the normal bidding process.

Susanne Montoya, then-chief business officer, expressed concerns about the bid to Ramirez. But in an email included in the report, which the auditors described as “intimidating,” Ramirez insisted there was no conflict of interest with the bid and suggested the only problem was that staff had “defied a directive” to include Alliance in the pool of potential vendors. 

Montoya later resigned, as did Nick LaMattina, a purchasing manager who wrote a memo to Montoya and Ramirez about the “appearance of impropriety.” That’s when Battle became chief business officer.

Battle said he was only in the district for a month when the proposal first went before the board in July 2021 and that he opposed it. 

Department directors, he said, reported receiving visits from Mendez and other board members “who often utilized threats, intimidation and their board power to get what they wanted.”

Mendez declined to comment and referred The 74 to a district spokesperson. During the Tuesday meeting she pledged to “move forward and get the training that we need.”

Battle added that the county also bears some responsibility for allowing the district to reach this point.

Ultimately, only 800 of the filters were installed in classrooms. The remainder sit unused in a district warehouse.

According to the audit, “The district and board ignored their own policies, procedures and past practice in order to award the contract to their preferred vendor.” 

Legal services 

At Tuesday’s meeting, Zulueta turned criticism back on the county and argued that it had approved previous budgets, regardless of a deficit. He blamed the decline in revenue on the district’s past approval of charter schools.

He previously told The 74 in an email that he believes the board “took every measure to ensure that all decisions were vetted through appropriate legal counsel when recommendations were made by staff.” 

But the audit team also found fault with the district’s hiring of the attorney who provided that advice. The board didn’t follow its proposal process when it hired attorney Jack Lipton in February 2020, the audit said. The report includes notes from Flores and a former board member, who said they didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the decision to hire him.

And Mendez, board president at the time, drove Lipton to the meeting, raising questions about the attorney advising board members even before he was hired, investigators found. The contract to hire him, they said, was also written by his law firm, not the district.

“It is of concern that the board set a policy and then ignored it,” the auditors said. “Even more irregular and of equal concern is that the board would contract for services from a legal firm that would not advise their prospective client to follow their own policies.”

In January, at the first board meeting to feature the new majority, members . 

In an interview, Ramirez said he was alarmed by the district’s fiscal condition when he became interim superintendent in early 2021. That’s why he called in the auditing team to look at the district’s finances. An initial in 2022 warned that the district was paying for “essential” positions with COVID relief funds and failing to plan for the future when that money dries up. 

The district provided The 74 with records showing that relief funds have paid the salaries of 21 current and former central office employees, including 14 making over $100,000. That includes Motecúzoma Sanchez, the district’s family resource center director, who also runs a tabloid-style website that targets political opponents in the district.

Ramirez, who signed a non-disparagement agreement when he resigned last June, said he couldn’t comment on the findings of the new audit, but added, “I have no concerns about what I’ve been involved in.”

He said he hoped the county superintendent would move quickly to bring closure to the community.

“I don’t feel that the challenges [in Stockton] are unique,” he said. “I think they’re a lot more extreme maybe, but I don’t think they’re unique.”

Nearly 80% of students in the Central Valley district live in poverty. High COVID infection rates were packing plants where many of their parents work, and when schools reopened, more than a third of students were chronically absent. 

But almost three years after began flowing to school districts, Stockton has spent only a fourth of the $241 million it received, overcome by and deep mistrust among board members. The money it did spend has come under fire from two civil grand juries, who criticized the school board for approving at least two projects it later abandoned. And Tuesday, an independent auditor hired by the San Joaquin County Office of Education is expected to release the results of a long-awaited into the district’s finances.

Based on the grand jury reports — as well as documents The 74 obtained from public records requests and numerous interviews — several questionable expenditures have emerged, including: 

• $7.3 million in air filters designed to kill COVID from a firm that was not licensed at the time to do business in California — the bulk of which remain unused in a district warehouse.
• Over $2 million to cover the six-figure salaries of 14 district executives. One of them also runs a popular that regularly targets political enemies, including student activists and teachers. 
• $150,000 in startup costs to a program designed to help students make up for months of instruction lost during the pandemic. After five months of planning, the district pulled the plug after deciding it would cost too much. 

“Stockton is a worst-case scenario,” said Jeffrey Henig, a political science and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who studies school boards. The Biden administration, he said, distributed the relief funds as quickly as possible with “an expectation that districts would understand their needs and be able to use it intelligently.”

Instead, with seven superintendents in as many years — and the board of trustees now — the district’s recovery has stalled. It faces a $30 million deficit and risks losing control of its affairs to the county education office.

Losing patience, the community is demanding that leaders address how they plan to use the funds to benefit students.

“I hoped that class sizes would be smaller, that teachers would have some extra time to step back and help their students that are struggling,” said Michelle Munoz, who left her job in Stockton as an instructional coach last fall. She wanted the district to hire staff to find students who didn’t show up for online learning, but that didn’t happen.

Despite the relief funds, she said one school she worked at couldn’t get a carpet and other furnishings to open a “calming room” for students with behavior and trauma issues. At her most recent school, Wilson Elementary, she heard a secretary on the phone asking to buy rolls of laminate for classroom posters on credit because the board had yet to approve the district budget.

“I know it’s always been a problem, teachers having to buy their own supplies,” she said. “But now you have millions of dollars.”

A ‘crisis of self-image’

The district’s financial turmoil didn’t occur in isolation.

In 2012, Stockton became the largest city in the nation at the time to . During the housing boom, the city increased retirement benefits for its employees and financed new sports venues downtown along the San Joaquin River. But when the bubble burst, it was unable to pay its bills.

“Stockton has had — and this is reflected in the schools — really dicey economic times,” said Robert Benedetti, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of the Pacific, which has a campus in Stockton.

On top of that, he said, the city suffers from a “crisis of self-image” — labeled more than once by as America’s worst and “most miserable” city because of high unemployment and violent crime. 

And it’s not just the city that has been singled out for such harsh critiques. “I think Stockton Unified might be the worst system in the country,” was the recent assessment of a prominent California school reformer, whose nonprofit issued decrying the district’s “inept governance.”

Even strong districts with stable leaders have struggled to spend their relief funds in the face of staff shortages and supply chain delays. By the time the money came Stockton’s way, however, the district had been beset by years of interpersonal feuding and economic malaise. Since 2017, enrollment has declined from about 44,000 to 36,000 students, contributing to anxiety in a community where over 3,000 people work for the district.

“People’s livelihoods are affected when programs shrink,” said John Ramirez Jr., who resigned as superintendent last June after just 13 months. “Of course there is going to be concern.”

‘What’s he trying to sell?’ 

The pandemic was to the region’s economy. Then, just as schools were trying to recover, separate grand juries in and issued scathing reports that didn’t inspire confidence in the district’s ability to manage a huge federal windfall. 

California impanels civil grand juries to serve as government watchdogs. In Stockton, the panels pointed to a district in disorder and a “vicious cycle” of superintendent turnover: Promising projects started under one leader would be abandoned when the next one took over.

Frequently, students paid the price.

The district contracted with Educational Consulting Services Inc. of Huntington Beach to provide a Saturday program for students to make up for missed instruction — a sorely needed service in a district where are chronically absent, 79% are not proficient in grade-level math and 73% are not proficient in grade-level reading.

But after paying $150,000 in federal relief funds for start-up costs and signing in January 2022 with the teachers union to provide instruction, efforts to launch the program ceased, according to the grand jury. 

Marcus Battle, then the district’s chief business official, called the program “a noble idea” that fell victim to poor planning. The district, he said, initially sought to roll out the program to less than 20 schools. But when leaders decided to expand it to serve thousands of students at a potential cost of “tens of millions” of dollars, he worried it would “spiral out of control” and withdrew his support.

A district spokesperson declined to discuss the episode.

Another relief-fund project that started only to be quickly abandoned was a $7.3 million investment in ultraviolet air filters designed to kill COVID. The firm hired to provide and install the filters, IAQ Distribution of San Diego, was not licensed at the time to do business in California, the grand jury found.

In part of a pattern the panel identified, the board approved the contract even though district staff rated IAQ’s proposal the lowest-quality bid out of five submitted. 

The district would not elaborate on why the work was left unfinished. Newly installed board President AngelAnn Flores, the lone member to vote against the contract in August of 2021, is pushing for an investigation into what she deems “misspent money.” She called the deal “bogus” and said the district is planning to sue IAQ to recoup $6.6 million.

Neither IAQ nor its parent company, Alliance Building Solutions Inc., responded to calls or emails seeking comment.

Ultimately, only the district paid for were installed. The rest are sitting in a district warehouse.

The example is one of several cited by the grand jury in which the board of trustees that oversees the school system made “crucial decisions with minimal data, knowledge and consideration.”

In the case of IAQ, lifelong connection between a former board member and Anthony Silva, a former Stockton mayor with a long list of legal troubles.

“I heard about it through Anthony Silva,” Scot McBrian, a trustee at the time, told The 74. “My first thought was, ‘What’s he trying to sell?’ I asked him if he had any financial interest in it and he said no.”

McBrian said he’s known the former mayor since they played chess when Silva was a teenager. Aside from the tip from an old friend, the filters reminded him of an air purifier he used to sell in Texas and later installed in his home. After recommending give a presentation on the devices, McBrian told the board that IAQ should be considered a potential vendor.

Without elaborating, the grand jury said, “The practice of a trustee recommending a vendor is unusual and may be considered or perceived as a conflict of interest.”

Oprah’s candidate vs. the ‘underdog’

Silva — and his successor as mayor, Michael Tubbs — play an outsize role in the psychic landscape of the city. Once a school board member who called himself the “people’s mayor,” Silva, a Republican, is a Stockton native who worked to rebuild the city’s police force and provide as it emerged from bankruptcy. He frequently warned of “outside forces” he said were trying to influence the city’s agenda. 

“People see him as an underdog and he always seems to be advocating for the underdog. I think that sometimes resonates with this town,” said Jose Rodriguez, executive director of El Concilio, a nonprofit that runs preschool programs in district schools and opened a charter this school year. 

A Stanford graduate, Tubbs leapt to national prominence when Oprah Winfrey to boost his early political career. He sought support from outside donors, including those that embraced charter schools, and backed reformer John Deasy, who served as superintendent of the before running Stockton Unified from 2018 to 2020. Tubbs is best known for launching a to help the city’s poorest residents and Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“He was talking about programs that were of national interest,” said Benedetti, the University of the Pacific professor. “He was not seen as a local in any way, and there was nobody to tout him as one.”

Silva’s star dimmed following a series of arrests. In 2016, he pled guilty to a of providing alcohol to a minor in connection to a strip poker game at a camp he ran for low-income youth. The following year, he to felony conflict of interest. Prosecutors said he transferred $5,000 from a mayor’s fund to the Stockton Kids Club, where he served as CEO, and used club donations for personal expenses, including trips and online dating.

In 2022, Silva, who now runs a family entertainment business called Indoor Adventures, to have the conflict of interest charge reduced to a misdemeanor and got the conviction expunged from his record. Multiple attempts to reach him by phone and Facebook, and through two attorneys, were unsuccessful.

Though 2020 was the last time either man occupied City Hall, support for them remains a kind of district shorthand: Silva’s backers see themselves as defending the traditional school system from privatization, while Tubbs’s supporters say they want alternatives to a punishing status quo. 

But if Silva disappeared from public life, it’s often hard to notice.

In 2021, three members of the board of trustees , the current board president, in part because she accused them of being Silva’s associates. She countersued on First Amendment grounds, and even though the trio later dropped the case, a county that they need to pay Flores over $19,000 in attorneys fees. Silva also sued her for defamation over comments she made at a March 2021 meeting regarding his conviction for serving alcohol to a minor. A hearing on that case is scheduled for March 21.

“I’m seen as controversial and uncontrollable,” Flores said.

In recent years, shouts of “Out of order!” have dominated board meetings. The the board for its frequent use of complaints and censures against trustees in its voting minority, which at the time included Flores.

‘Reform politics’ 

The tensions in Stockton often arise from a sense of hopelessness in a city where achievement was stagnant even before the pandemic.

“Folks have not had results for a long time. If I’m a parent, I’m going to be concerned about that,” said Ramirez, the former superintendent. With “second-, third- and fourth-generation students in poverty, we’re not going to make a change in our community until they have an opportunity to succeed.”

Ramirez sidestepped questions about district controversies during his tenure, citing the terms of his , which continued his $285,000 salary for an additional year. But he did note that the persistent toxicity tends to overshadow even legitimate accomplishments.

A successful online — now in more than 40 districts nationally — got its start in Stockton, and the graduation rate, he said, has increased from 79% to 83% since 2018. The district also at least $9 million in relief funds to upgrade science labs and career education programs.

But many families aren’t waiting for the district to improve. More affluent parents among Stockton’s 320,000 residents tend to put their children in private schools or move to the neighboring Lincoln Unified district, which has a lower poverty rate and higher-performing schools. Roughly 6,000 Stockton students attend .

Trustee Ray Zulueta Jr. sees the grand jury and fraud investigations as proxy attacks by community members affiliated with “multiple groups donating millions of dollars to education reform politics in Stockton.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, awarded in 2020 to the Community Foundation of San Joaquin to expand an “early college” model that allows students to earn college credit in high school. And the City Fund, which supports nonprofit organizations opening charters, donated $1.2 million last year to San Joaquin A+, led by Don Shalvey, the California charter school pioneer who released the damning report on Stockton schools and founded Aspire Public Schools. Shalvey spent 11 years at the Gates Foundation, and the Aspire network now has 10 sites in Stockton. (Both the Gates Foundation and City Fund provide financial support to The 74; donors play no role in newsroom editorial decisions.)

To Zulueta, these are “liberal institutions … working hand in hand with big business entrepreneurs to control localities through takeovers of public education systems.” Campaign donations from local reformers, he said, have favored Democrats on the board who support “political movements like [Black Lives Matter] and defund [the] police.”

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In most districts riven by reform fights, the most formidable enemies of school choice are typically teachers unions.

But in Stockton, the two groups have found common cause. They mutually endorsed four members for school board, all of whom won in November. Along with Flores, who took over as president, they now hold the majority on the seven-member board.

Silvia Cantu, a sixth-grade teacher at Washington Elementary and a member of the Stockton Teachers Association, said she supported the candidates because she didn’t like the direction the district was going under the previous board. 

“I did not want [Stockton Unified] taken over” by the county, she said. The former trustees, she added, “mostly spent millions of dollars on administration. [The money] won’t trickle down to the classroom.”

The success of these strange bedfellows put both groups in the crosshairs of Motecúzoma Sanchez. In a city full of brash personalities, there is perhaps none so aggressive as Sanchez, founder of the named for the region’s area code. 

The characterizes the candidates who now lead the board as pawns controlled by and “” set on luring Black and Hispanic families into charter schools. The site posts unflattering-as-possible photos of board members, teachers and even students who raise concerns about the district’s finances and portrays them as part of a larger plot to expand charters.

The seven-year-old site has grown as the lost readers, from 20 years ago to about 33,000 today.

“I destroyed them and took over as the dominant media source for the region,” Sanchez boasted in an email to The 74. 

During the 2022 election, the 209 Times accused teachers in the union, by name, of trying to “fool unsuspecting parents” into voting for the four candidates. In a typical example, it mocked a former Stockton Unified student — now 26 and a member of the advocacy group FixSUSD — by posting her photo next to Fiona’s, the ogre princess from the movie Shrek, with the caption, “Who wore it better?”

Out of fear of being shamed by the site, several district employees contacted by The 74 asked to remain anonymous. The irony is not lost on them that the source of their fears is a colleague — one who serves as the face of the district’s efforts to welcome families and help those in crisis.

Since 2021, Sanchez has been director of the district’s . During his tenure at Stockton Unified, federal relief funds have been paying his yearly salary, now at $141,000. 

Sanchez didn’t respond to questions about his salary or his treatment of political opponents. But in another email, he accused a 74 reporter of being “a paid shill” for charter developer Shalvey and “the national charter school movement.”

“Nothing you can do will save these devils,” he wrote. “I have big plans for all of you.”

According to the district, Sanchez is just one of 21 current and former high-ranking central office employees who have been paid with relief funds.

Another is Armando Orozco, who earns $150,000 a year as director of facilities. In September, the district placed him on paid leave after he sent an email to current Interim Superintendent Traci Miller demanding $800,000 to stay silent about “corrupt and erroneous actions” in the .

Orozco could not be reached for comment, and the district declined to make Miller available for an interview. 

The head of the agency conducting the fraud investigation has already indicated that paying department directors out of relief funds is a sign of financial distress.

“If you’re going to have them in the central office, the implication is that they are there to stay,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, “Why would you be using one-time funds?”

‘Personalities and vision’ 

After running on promises of greater transparency, the new board is under pressure to produce results.

On top of the projected budget shortfall, a fraud investigation and a long list of grand jury recommendations it has yet to implement, the district has just a year and a half to show it can responsibly spend its remaining $180 million before hitting a congressional deadline to obligate the funds.

“We didn’t get here overnight,” explained board president Flores, a 45-year-old substitute teacher and former afterschool program leader.

In one of its first official acts, the board in January devoted an entire meeting to informing the public on how relief funds have been spent. Staff, teachers and community members packed the board room of the district’s modern administration building, about a block from the waterfront. 

Flores, who asked many of the questions, seemed underwhelmed by a series of PowerPoint slides the district provided displaying lump sums for items like transportation, instruction and maintenance. 

“I was expecting a little more detail,” she said, drawing applause from several observers. She later referenced “illegal” facility contracts, but offered no specifics.

Cecilia Mendez, the former board president — and among those who sued Flores — waved off any suggestions of financial mismanagement.

“This board has done nothing wrong,” she said.

Before the trustees took their seats, a district employee placed a small bamboo plant and a copy of The Giving Tree next to each name plate. She reminded them of the adage about money not growing on trees, stressing that the relief funds require “monitoring and care.” In the book, the tree gives everything to its ungrateful owner until there is nothing left but its stump.

For about a year and a half, Zachary Avelar sat in one of those seats. Despite losing in November, he does not seem sad to have left it all behind.

 “I did not enjoy local politics,” said Avelar, who was just 22 when he joined the board. “Everyone says they’re about helping children, but we both know that’s not true. People here fight over personalities and vision.” 

There’s one hitch: According to , districts are already spending, or planning to spend, almost a quarter of funds from the American Rescue Plan on facilities and operations.

“Getting clarifications and new restrictions this late in the game is tough on [districts],” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “What happens if money is already approved and spent before these recent” guidelines were released?

The department was especially pointed about using federal dollars to build and upgrade sports facilities. The school district, for example, paid for new athletic fields and the in Alabama renovated weight rooms

Such expenses would not be allowed unless districts can connect the project to COVID preparedness and response, the document said. “It is unclear, for example, how constructing a swimming pool is related to the pandemic,” according to the department.

The Milwaukee district declined to comment on its use of funds for athletics-related projects, while the Wisconsin Department of Education said it is still reviewing the guidance to “determine next steps.” Alabama officials did not respond to requests for comment.

With billions in COVID relief funds for schools still unspent, school finance experts say the guidance could confuse district leaders who have been waiting for the guidance for months. But with it dropping before the holidays, it could be well into January before states offer webinars or other opportunities to explain it to districts.

The document is not law, but says leaders should be prepared to justify how their projects relate to the pandemic. The has picked up this fall, according to Roza’s tracking of expenditures. A recent survey from , however, showed that over 40% of those responding said they were struggling to navigate compliance standards related to spending the funds. 

In March, the department schools Superintendent Richard Woods that it was OK for districts to use the money to cover rising fuel costs. The new guidance doesn’t specifically address that scenario and only gives expenses “related to improving indoor air quality” as an “acceptable” example. 

Department officials told The 74 that the newest information is consistent with past guidance and that they have always “urged caution around long-term facilities and capital expenditures.” They said whether an expense is allowable is still up to state officials. 

“It really isn’t our role to ensure that states are looking at every single situation in the exact same way because … the context matters,” the official said.

Still, Elleka Yost, director of advocacy for the Association of School Business Officials International, said the “tone” of the document bothers her.

“The quality of school facilities impacts student health, well-being, attendance, engagement and learning,” she said. “Investing funds in facility improvements should be seen as part of a district’s strategy to recover from the pandemic and improve student learning rather than as something contradictory or unessential to achieving those goals.”

Some district leaders have made the case for spending relief funds on athletic facilities by saying they .

Sasha Pudelski, advocacy director for AASA, the School Superintendents Association, that instead of providing flexibility for districts with classroom additions going up or extensive renovations already underway, the department chose to “criticize these decisions and chastise districts for these expenditures.”

The department provided no more details in response to the requests for extensions on spending the funds that came from AASA and , but said it will lay out a process “at a later date.”

Districts worried about obligating the money by the 2024 deadline could pay ahead for services delivered over multiple years; the document lists a software license as an example. But it also warns that this practice is “not good stewardship” of federal funds.

Teachers and parents

Since the American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021, experts like Roza have also cautioned districts against using the funds for teacher and staff pay raises because it would be hard to continue covering those higher costs when the money runs out. 

But the guidance notes that the funds can be used for “permanent salary increases.” Austin Reid, senior legislative director for federal education policy at the National Conference of State Legislatures, finds that advice puzzling, given talk of a .

“Funding full roles or permanent salary increases can still be a risky bet by local districts, especially given the uncertainty in the economy,” he said.

Paying parents incentives to ensure their children go to school, on the other hand, is off the table, according to the department, which called attendance a “mandatory activity.”

“This one frustrated me, in part because we have a massive problem with chronic absenteeism,” Roza said. “Seems like we shouldn’t be invoking the notion that school is mandatory so soon after school became un-mandatory when it shut down for a year.”

That’s why some school finance experts are urging districts to redirect some of their plans for federal relief funds toward learning recovery before that money is actually spent. 

“From our perspective, a pivot does seem warranted,” Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said last week . While it’s normal for districts to get assessment results after they’ve finalized their budgets, this year, she added, the achievement gaps are “more glaring.”

Her team’s analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress data, released last month, showed that almost 2 million middle and high school students — who would have scored in the proficient range if the pandemic hadn’t occurred — are now below proficient. 

And about 700,000 students “fell out of advanced level in math,” said Chad Aldeman, policy director at Edunomics. “This means 700,000 fewer future scientists, engineers, data and medical experts … that are now not in our pipeline.” 

While district budgets include costs that are already “locked in,” such as salaries and signed contracts, Roza noted that districts still have some “wiggle room” to redirect funds toward more academic interventions if positions haven’t been filled. And when they’re negotiating contracts with afterschool providers they can require staff to spend time on math — or other areas where students have fallen far behind. Her comments followed a from McKinsey & Company showing that districts have yet to spend $130 billion of the $190 billion in federal relief funds they received.

Amending an approved budget is not part of a district’s normal cycle, Roza said. But superintendents and school board members can request it. State education agencies can also require districts to report what they’re doing to address specific content areas, which might prompt a budget revision. 

And while state lawmakers can’t tell districts how to spend relief funds, they can districts to offer certain types of programs, like tutoring or summer school. Based on recent state test score trends, Austin Reid, senior legislative director for federal education policy at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said he expects to see similar actions when legislatures reconvene next year. 

“I also think we may see more legislatures engaging in more oversight activities on [relief funds], which may include strong encouragement of certain strategies,” he said.

Chris Neale, assistant commissioner for federal relief programs at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said he’s seen several districts reopen their budgets after they’re finalized. While he doesn’t know the exact reasons, he said it’s “plausible” that assessment data is prompting the revisions. Other factors are likely, including “emergent needs for mental health services,” he said.

The ‘constraints’ on spending

Using available financial data, Roza highlighted districts — including Baltimore County, Dallas and Miami — that are prioritizing math instruction.

A lot of districts are spending the one-time funds on teacher training — more than 80 of the top 100 districts, according to . In Oregon, for example, lawmakers and advocates to spend the funds on training teachers on elementary reading instruction, with the argument that it would have a long-term payoff. But Roza said professional development wouldn’t necessarily offer an immediate benefit to students.

The McKinsey report estimated that about $20 billion in relief funds might go unspent because of “administrative hurdles,” staff shortages and the inability of leaders to “orchestrate spending.”

Districts, meanwhile, are still waiting on the U.S. Department of Education to answer two questions: Will they have more time beyond the September 2024 deadline to fully obligate the billions of dollars in relief funds remaining from the American Rescue Plan? And are there additional “allowable uses” for relief funds that the department has yet to clarify?

“I have a lot of empathy for states and districts that are figuring out the best way to spend [relief funds] within the constraints they have,” said Sheara Kvaric, co-founder of Federal Education Group, a law firm specializing in federal education policy. “I think states and districts have innovative ideas, but it’s hard to commit to them without the assurance the spending is ok.”

Congress has joined education organizations in asking the department to allow districts to keep spending the money through the end of 2026, instead of January 2025. In , six House Democrats asked the department to issue guidance “given the crucial need to meet the immediate needs of students and to address the long-term impacts of the pandemic on academic growth and student mental health.”

Last week, the department also responded to a July letter from the AASA, The School Superintendents Association, with the same request. James Lane, senior adviser to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, reminded the organization that 96% of the first round of relief funds from 2020 has been spent and that future extensions would be considered “under extraordinary, case-by-case circumstances.” He said an updated document on allowable uses would be coming soon.

Sasha Pudelski, AASA’s director of advocacy, said the letter wasn’t much of a response.

“It’s the same as before,” she said, “no answers, no process, no helpful information for districts and states.”

And the way the government has distributed the funds — through a formula that targets high-poverty schools — left some communities hit hard by the pandemic with insufficient funding to offset learning declines, wrote Kenneth Shores of the University of Delaware and Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University in Virginia in by the American Educational Research Association.

The researchers push for greater accountability, calling a lack of reporting on how districts are using the funds a “policy failure.” When officials learned which districts participated in remote learning longer, they could have made adjustments, Steinberg said.

“There weren’t efforts in real time … to update the distribution of this aid in ways that would try to maximize its reach to the students and communities that would need it the most,” he said.

In order to build public trust, they recommend that the U.S. Department of Education at least collect data on how a representative sample of districts is allocating the funds. 

National test scores set for release later this month are expected to further drive home the impact of school closures on students’ academic progress and spark more debate about whether districts are making wise choices with the unprecedented windfall. The AERA report echoes growing demands from parents and policymakers for greater transparency from districts. have asked the department for “insight into how schools are using federal dollars to help America’s students catch up,” and parent groups are seeking training in school finance to track the money. The researchers recommend that officials add incentives to get districts to prioritize academic interventions over projects “such as athletic fields.”

The most recent round of funding, the American Rescue Plan, requires districts to spend a minimum of 20% of their funds to address learning loss.

“But nobody had to stop there,” said Heather Tolley-Bauer, co-founder of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a parent-led group monitoring spending in the Cobb County School District, north of Atlanta. The organization is among those that have received from the National Parents Union to track the funds. “When we look at the things they could have spent the money on and the things they did spend the money on, it’s frustrating.”

Her leading example is the $9.7 million the district spent on “Iggy” hand-rinsing machines that dispense a mixture of water and ozone. The company’s points to studies that say the machines kill COVID, but disagree and others say there’s . But even if the technology is effective at killing the virus, the devices at some schools are inaccessible, with plastic over the openings, Tolley-Bauer said. (A spokesperson for 30e Scientific, the company that makes the machines, explained that some of them have experienced “vandalism by unknown individuals.”) 

She understands the district was “in a hot hurry” to address the crisis, but said parents feel excluded from funding decisions. 

“I’m not surprised that the federal government didn’t put a lot of parameters around [the money],” she said. “It would help if the schools would …make very strategic decisions that would impact students positively for years to come.”

Some districts have participated in “halftime reviews” to assess spending patterns, said Jonathan Travers, managing partner at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts resolve budget challenges. In some cases, districts are waiting two to three months for approval of any changes to their spending plans. Districts were able to spend the money quicker on bulk purchases and HVAC upgrades, while tutoring and other student services have taken longer to implement, he said.

Phyllis Jordan, associate director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank that has been tracking the spending, argued that the department has held districts accountable by requiring them to submit plans for the third round of funds. 

“There is a level of oversight that you haven’t had before,” she said. “You at least have to articulate how you plan to spend it.”

And the department recently proposed that all states participate in a that previously was optional. While it won’t focus just on COVID funds, that spending will be included. 

Impact on Black students 

To reach the $700 billion estimate, researchers drew from multiple data sources and existing studies. One was a that used assessment data to pinpoint how much of a district’s budget would need to be replaced to make up for missed instruction. In high-poverty districts that were in remote learning for much of the 2020-21 school year, it would be over 40% of their budget.

The researchers on the earlier study, led by Dan Goldhaber of the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and Thomas Kane of Harvard University, concluded districts would need to spend all of their relief funds to address learning loss, not just 20%. 

But Shores and Steinberg think that estimate could be too low because it might not account for learning loss among students that weren’t tested and it doesn’t reflect how families and other “non-school inputs” contribute to student achievement. , Steinberg said, shows that student performance depends considerably on what is “happening outside of school.”

Their estimates range from a low of $325 billion to make up for missed instruction to a high of $930 billion, with $700 billion roughly in the middle.

Goldhaber said their estimates could be too high, but he noted that either way, the education system has never faced a challenge like this.

“We’re trying to do across the country what has only been done at a small scale,” he said. 

Shores and Steinberg also draw attention to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black and Hispanic students, regardless of whether they come from low-income families. 

The Education Department’s survey of schools, for example, showed that while the vast majority were open by the end of the 2020-21 school year, the rate of Black and Hispanic students attending full, in-person learning still fell at least 20 percentage points below that of white students. Asian students were the least likely to attend in-person.

Additionally, released last year from researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the racial unrest that broke out during the first summer of the pandemic contributed to higher levels of trauma among Black students and families and that schools were “ill-equipped” to support them.

Distributing the funds through the existing Title I formula, which some argue is across the country, resulted in less funding for districts where the disruption to learning may still have been extensive, Shores and Steinberg wrote. 

But Goldhaber cautioned that “it’s easy to be critical retrospectively. When you’re trying to get money out the door quickly, it’s reasonable to use existing vehicles.”

Shores and Steinberg compare COVID relief packages with the federal stimulus package passed to combat the effects of the Great Recession. There’s “not a single study,” they wrote, that demonstrates the impact of that 2009 stimulus package on student learning.

Shores said he’s been disappointed by the “lack of creativity” in directing COVID relief funds. But it’s not too late to change course, particularly when it comes to spending money from the American Rescue Plan, they said.

With roughly a quarter of the funds spent, Steinberg said there’s still time to redirect the money toward tutoring or other interventions that “seem to have potentially positive returns.”

But as school districts have decided how to spend billions in federal Covid-relief aid, there has been more convergence on priorities—and even a few surprises, according to a FutureEd analysis of 5,000 school districts and charter organizations’ plans for spending some $75 billion in federal aid, a sample compiled by the data-services firm Burbio and representing three-quarters of the nation’s public-school students from every state.

Nearly the same percentage of local education agencies in red and blue states have earmarked Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds (ESSER III) for social-emotional learning, a hot-button issue for many conservative politicians. And both have made hiring and rewarding teachers their top priority and plan to spend at similar rates on tutoring, teacher training and new school infrastructure.

What’s more, red states are actually more likely than blue states to earmark funds for teacher bonuses and student assessments—counterintuitive findings given many conservatives’ opposition to testing in recent years and their fraught relationship with the teaching profession.

To identify red and blue states, we used FiveThirtyEight’s  of how states voted relative to the rest of the country in a mix of recent elections. The “partisan lean score” rates Wyoming as the reddest state, since GOP candidates scored nearly 50 points higher there than in the rest of the country. In deep blue Washington, D.C., Democrats outperformed the national average by 68 points. We put every state with the slightest tinge of pink into the red category, giving us 31 red states and 20 blue states. To test our results, we ran a second analysis, pulling out about 10 “purple” states in the center of the list where Republican or Democratic advantages were minimal, but there was little change in the trends.

Mental and Physical Health

Some of the most highly charged state and local education debates since the onset of the pandemic have involved mask mandates, vaccinations and other health issues. But the controversy isn’t reflected in states’ local ESSER III spending plans.

About 15 percent of districts and charters in blue states report plans, for example, to invest in public-health protocols—including testing, contact tracing, and vaccines—compared to 13 percent in red states. Likewise, 31 percent of blue-state districts and charters include social-emotional learning (SEL) programs, materials, and training for staff members in their plans, compared to 28 percent in red states. The analysis shows that districts in red and blue states expect to spend about the same amount per student on this priority: $80 per pupil in blue state districts compared to $87 in red states.

The Salt Lake City school district in bright red Utah plans to spend more than $3 million of its $40 million allotment to introduce social-emotional learning and a behavioral support system. Fontana Unified School District in blue California plans to spend $7.8 million of its $96 million allotment on social-emotional learning curriculum and programming for students as well as training for staff members.

Some red-state districts may have reduced their commitments in these areas since they filed their plans last fall, as GOP leaders ramped up campaign to tie SEL to lessons on racial history they considered offensive. In Florida, for instance, the State Board of Education’s decision to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” prompted some districts to drop their SEL plans.

Surprisingly, about a quarter of districts in red states have pledged Covid-relief funds for behavioral and mental health services and for family engagement, higher than the rates in blue states. In contrast, local education agencies in blue states have made larger commitments to bringing psychologists and social workers into schools (41 percent of agencies compared to 31 percent in red states). Syracuse City School District in New York, for instance, is devoting nearly $13 million of its $108 million allotment to expand its Student Support Services Department, which employs psychologists, counselors and social workers.

The spending on mental health professionals dovetails with what we found when we compared . Rural schools often have less access to mental health professionals, and our analysis of the Burbio sample shows a higher proportion of rural districts in red states than blue states. The recent mass murders by 18-year-olds may spur local education leaders nationwide to increase their ESSER investments in behavior and mental health.

Staffing

Notwithstanding blue-state districts’ greater commitment to mental health professionals, staffing priorities are similar across the board. About 60 percent of districts in both sets of states are planning to spend a portion of their ESSER III funds on hiring or rewarding teachers, counselors or academic interventionists, making such spending the No. 1 priority in both groups of states. And more than 40 percent of districts in both red and blue states plan to invest in professional development opportunities for teachers and staff members. Districts in red and blue states also plan to spend on nurses and physical health specialists at relatively even rates.

Where they diverge is on staff retention and benefits. Red state districts and charters plan to fund employee benefits and assistance programs at a rate nearly three times that of districts in blue states (35 percent compared to 13 percent), the largest difference of any category we analyze. This may reflect acute staff shortages in more-rural red states, or the fact that some states ask districts to break out benefit costs in their ESSER III spending plans, while others lump benefits with salaries. Districts in red states are also more than twice as likely to project ESSER III spending for recruitment and retention efforts compared to districts in blue states (25 percent versus 12 percent).

Wayne County Public Schools in North Carolina, for example, plans to spend $8.5 million of its $55 million ESSER III allotment on teacher retention efforts that will allow the district to maintain small class sizes. In addition to hiring teachers and assistant principals to maintain staffing levels, the district also plans to award bonuses to teachers who sign or resign with the district.
Per-pupil spending in these categories varies only moderately, with blue state districts devoting an average of $201 per pupil to employee benefits, compared to $238 in red state districts. For teacher retention compensation, districts in blue states are planning to spend $336 per pupil versus $362 per pupil in red states.

Academic Recovery

The biggest differences in red- and blue-state spending priorities involve academic recovery, although the choices don’t seem to be based in politics. American Rescue Plan aid comes with a requirement that K-12 schools spend at least 20 percent of the federal money on evidence-based strategies to address learning loss and boost academic achievement. Local education agencies in blue states are much more likely to pursue afterschool and summer learning as their primary strategies, while districts in red states are more likely to invest in curriculum, instructional materials and assessments.

More than half of districts in blue states intend to spend on summer learning programs, making it their top learning-loss strategy and their No. 3 priority overall. By contrast, 38 percent of districts in red states plan to spend on summer learning, and it ranks No. 6 on their list of priorities. Spending on afterschool programs is also more common in blue states than their more conservative counterparts.

Districts in a handful of states report summer learning and afterschool as a single category, skewing these results somewhat. But even when we combine all planned summer and afterschool spending, blue states are still more likely to embrace extended-time interventions. Lowell Public Schools in Massachusetts plans to spend $1.7 million of its $40 million ESSER allotment expanding afterschool programs and $1.3 million on summer learning for all 27 schools in the district, allowing every student to receive extra support.

Roughly 40 percent of districts in red states plan to purchase instructional materials, software and curriculum. This compares to about 30 percent of blue-state districts. Tutoring has been equally popular in blue- and red-state districts, with about a quarter of districts in both red and blue states allocating funds. Districts in red states, though, plan to spend almost twice as much per student as districts in blue states ($167 vs. $89).

 Facilities and Operations

Although a slightly larger percentage of districts in blue states plan to spend on HVAC systems—53 percent versus 47 percent—it is the No. 2 priority in both blue and red states, with very similar levels of investment on a per-pupil basis ($392 in red states, $398 in blue states). Similarly, nearly the same proportion of blue and red states have prioritized building repairs, which includes such things as lead abatement and bathroom upgrades, in their ESSER III spending plans—32 percent in red states versus 29 percent in blue states. Transportation is a bigger priority among localities in red states with a third of the districts planning to invest, compared to a fifth of blue state districts. This may also reflect the rural nature of many red state districts.

There are many factors that can influence how a local education agency decides to divvy up its allotment of federal Covid-relief funds, and just as many reasons for districts and charters to change their plans over the past year. But the key priorities–hiring and keeping good staff members, supporting students academically and emotionally, and upgrading facilities–remain remarkably consistent regardless of political persuasion.

FutureEd research associate Gunjan Maheshwari contributed to this analysis.

The ESSER money lacks a North Star. 

Metaphorically speaking, a North Star is the mission statement. It’s a fixed destination to aim for even as the world changes.

The murkiness dates to when the American Rescue Plan was signed nearly a year ago. Language reads like a laundry list of 18 broad categories of allowable activities. Taken literally, anything a district would normally spend money on is fair game. 

For many districts, ESSER funds were more than they could spend on COVID-related needs. In the early weeks after its passage, the Biden administration emphasized . But by last fall, the nation’s schools had reopened for in-person learning, with 98 percent of the money still unspent. That left districts with over $120 billion in highly flexible ESSER funding and no focused mission to guide spending decisions.

Eventually, the Department of Education’s suggestions went beyond its initial “to prevent, prepare for and respond to COVID.” Federal FAQs coaxed leaders to spend more broadly, “.” And to . And fix leaky .

It’s become hard to see a forest for the trees.

Not surprisingly, analysts and journalists started checking on what was looking more and more like an : What happens when the feds give historic sums to districts with few restrictions and no clear ask in return? 

With nothing else to measure, the focus landed on measuring what districts bought with the money. Early reports surfaced , eyebrow-raising expenditures on and , and the occasional plan that offered that students had accrued during the pandemic.

Then came calls for more accountability. At a November congressional hearing, concerns about how districts were using these funds came from both sides of the aisle. Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott wanted evidence that districts were “using this funding responsibly” and “holding up their end of the bargain.”

But there never had been much of a “bargain.” At the hearing, Deputy Secretary of Education Cindy Marten explained that districts were tracking spending, but, “the kinds of things that they need are decided school by school, state by state.” 

This has all been confusing for state education agencies whose job it is to monitor compliance. Some have resorted to advising districts that what matters is not what was purchased, but why. Districts have been told that outdoor playground equipment is “allowable” , making leaders craft creative (if eyeroll-worthy) justifications. 

But “allowability” is a distraction. Districts need to focus on student learning. It is indisputable that students have during the pandemic. While outcomes are , there are learning gaps in all student demographic groups. 

A well-designed North Star could put every leader on a mission to remedy those gaps.

Shifting the focus from what districts are purchasing to what progress students are making would be a game changer. First and foremost, it’s a shift that requires school systems to start tracking and regularly checking whether they’re making headway, and for which students.

There’s no need to wait for federal leaders to establish the North Star. A state leader could outline goals and create mechanisms for districts to track progress. A district leader could do the same for its schools. A principal for the school. 

Imagine a North Star that established the following four priorities related to student learning:

1. Reading, grades K-5

2. Math, all grades

3. High schoolers on track to graduate

4. Student attendance and engagement 

Then imagine that states and districts started measuring progress month by month. 

Surfacing baseline figures would be painful at first. Kids are behind and have a long way to go. But soon after, we would start to see progress, learning what’s working and where plans need to shift.

With a North Star, financial flexibility isn’t a problem; it’s an asset. It means worrying less about spending specifications (even that 20 percent of the funds are earmarked for learning loss) and more about whether students are learning. Districts need flexibility to try things that can work. And they need the flexibility to pivot when labor shortages or Omicron changes everything. We’ll know what’s working when we look at the numbers.

Narrowing our goals doesn’t mean abandoning efforts to address mental health, ventilation or other priorities, but rather that they’re all connected to the big (measurable) mission of getting students up to speed on their learning. Yes, make buildings safe so students are present and learning. Yes, help students regain their emotional balance, while ensuring that corresponds to increases in attendance, homework completion and active participation in school. Having that North Star clearly communicates to everybody, from the superintendent to the classroom teacher and counselor, what they should pay attention to; what matters. 

None of this would need to work as a gotcha. Measuring and tracking outcomes doesn’t just let districts pivot when things aren’t working as intended — it gives staff and students alike a much-needed chance to celebrate progress, even if they’re still way behind where they want to be. This is the way to learn what works. This is how we learn from each other. And this is how to ensure that the money helps kids. It tells them: We’re here for you. We’ll figure this out.

Dr. Marguerite Roza is and director of the , a research center exploring and modeling complex education finance decisions to inform policy and practice. She leads the McCourt School of Public Policy’s , which equips participants with practical skills in strategic fiscal management, policy analysis, and leadership. 

How well that’s going is “decidedly mixed,” according to a new by the group , which is part of a coalition of organizations advocating for the money to be spent on effective strategies to help the most disadvantaged kids. The group has created a dashboard rating states’ plans for spending their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief — known as ESSER III funds, since it is the third round of federal COVID-19 relief money.

State education agencies receive only a sliver of the recovery funds but bear responsibility for making sure schools and districts make good use of the money. Yet Education Reform Now’s report details concerns that states are “essentially abdicating their role in ensuring equity and evidence-driven effectiveness in the learning recovery process,” noting that few have said how they will track implementation. 

The will be the topic of a to be held online Wednesday, Jan. 26, at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. Education Reform Now’s Nicholas Munyan-Penney, who has closely tracked the spending plans, will be joined by New Jersey state Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz, the Education Trust’s Terra Wallin, Education Reform Now’s Washington state Director Shirline Wilson and Christine Pitts, resident policy fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. is open now.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Education Department gave final approval to all 50 state ESSER III plans, as well as Washington, D.C.’s. But since districts have through 2024 to use the funds, there is time for states to take additional steps to ensure resources are being directed to the students and schools most in need and being spent on strategies backed by research, the new report explains. 

A nonpartisan think tank affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform Now (ERN) was among nine advocacy organizations that in May for how states could fulfill their obligations, as districts began creating the local plans that education departments were responsible for reviewing.

Seven states — Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Utah — earned ERN’s top “green” rating. According to the organization’s review, most states have failed to make sure funds are targeted to high-needs schools. Only half of state plans reflect “robust” efforts to solicit required input from community groups. And just six describe how officials will determine whether interventions paid for with recovery dollars are backed by evidence of effectiveness. 

The third and largest relief fund approved by Congress since the start of the pandemic, the American Recovery Plan Act directs states to send 90 percent of their respective share of the money directly to school districts and public charter schools, which must spend at least 20 percent to address student learning losses and unmet social-emotional needs. 

States are responsible for distributing the funds to schools and students most in need and to make sure schools use them for effective interventions. At least 5 percent of each state’s share of the money must also be used to address learning losses. According to ERN, 12 states are simply passing most or all of their share of the funds on to districts.

When Congress approved the first two rounds of COVID relief funding for K-12 education, school finance experts cautioned that districts would be tempted to spend the money on staving off layoffs in what was then presumed would be a devastating recession, plugging pre-existing budget deficits, giving staff raises and other things that would prove unsustainable once the money ran out.

As the pandemic stretched into a second academic year, it became clear that up to 3 million students were no longer attending public schools, which translated to a decline in state tuition dollars. States, the finance experts again warned, should be mindful of spending the infusion of federal cash in ways that create so-called fiscal cliffs — situations in which pushing a funding shortfall out into future years would worsen it. 

At the same time, as researchers analyzed data on students’ flagging academic performance, a number of organizations made recommendations about interventions that would help students make up for lost learning quickly. Because the most profound gaps disproportionately affected historically disadvantaged children, the organizations — including the National Urban League, The Education Trust and the National Center for Learning Disabilities — said educators should take pains to see that to support those hardest hit.

In ERN’s survey, only five states — Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi and Missouri — said in their plans that districts would be required to specify how they would allocate funds to their neediest schools. Because of this, education agencies will have a hard time holding districts accountable for prioritizing resources for low-income students, children of color, English learners and students with disabilities, the report notes.

Ten states will use a portion of the 10 percent of funds not going directly to districts to boost funding for school systems that do not enroll enough disadvantaged children to qualify for the main pot of ESSER III dollars. 

There are bright spots, say ERN analysts. Nebraska and West Virginia have provided districts with roadmaps for the equitable distribution of funds, including using data on academic performance among different demographic groups to make sure they have identified the biggest needs.

And at least 20 states plan to invest in a kind of tutoring program that research has shown to be one of the most effective ways to boost student achievement. Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C., have approved or are creating statewide tutoring programs. 

As evidence that the plans can be used to pressure school systems to rethink local plans, the ERN report notes that many states revised their descriptions how they have engaged their communities as a result of the U.S. Education Department approval process. While nearly all states ultimately said they complied with the requirement that they consult with an array of organizations representing families and other populations rarely consulted during budgeting, it’s unclear how meaningful this engagement was.

On the positive end of the spectrum, the report singles out Colorado for hiring a consultant to host focus groups and survey community members. By contrast, Illinois insisted the consultation of stakeholders during the 2019 creation of a strategic plan counted, while Kansas pointed to early-pandemic task forces on distance learning and school reopening.

In the South and Northeast, summer learning tops the list of how school districts and charter schools plan to spend their federal COVID relief money. In the West, it’s upgrades to ventilation, heating and air conditioning systems. In the Midwest, hiring and paying teachers and other academic staff emerge as top priorities. And while the internet is rife with stories about school districts using federal relief aid for athletic facilities and other seemingly extraneous expenses, the problem appears to be less prevalent than recent headlines would suggest.

These are among the findings of a FutureEd analysis of the COVID relief spending plans of nearly 2,100 local education agencies in 48 states serving some 40 percent of the nation’s public school students. (Tennessee local plans include funding from an earlier round of Covid-relief aid and South Carolina uses a unique set of spending categories. When possible, we include data from the two states in the FutureEd analysis. Georgia asked local agencies to combine spending on afterschool and summer learning into a single category, and many of the districts invested heavily in these priorities. Hence, when we calculated the average per-pupil spending on afterschool and summer programs combined, it jumped to $436, more than twice the average for afterschool and summer learning separately. ) The analysis covers districts and charter schools receiving $46 billion of the $122 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER III) under the federal American Rescue Plan as of Dec. 23 and offers the most comprehensive picture to date of local and regional COVID response spending. The information company Burbio gathered the local spending plans from a range of public sources and sorted the proposed spending into more than 100 categories. 

The ESSER funding was distributed via the federal Title I aid formula, which supports low-income students. As a result, some districts serving impoverished communities have received more than $10,000 per student in COVID relief aid and others have little or no funding. 

Local school agencies have wide latitude in using the funds, as long as the spending is geared toward reopening schools safely and helping students recover from the pandemic. States must monitor local spending, and the federal government can audit district and charter school spending as well.  

FutureEd identified national spending trends and patterns in the four U.S. Census Bureau , since the demographics and educational profiles of the regions vary. 

The national trends that emerged from the analysis include: 

Staffing

More than half of the school districts and charter organizations in the Burbio sample plan to spend COVID relief funds on hiring or rewarding teachers, academic specialists and guidance counselors, making this the top or second-highest priority in each region of the country. Despite concerns about how to sustain such spending when the federal aid runs out in 2024, districts and charters expect to invest an average $345 per pupil on teachers and other instructional staff. 

A total of 268 local education agencies plan to provide staff bonuses or incentive pay, about 12 percent of the sample. And 883 localities plan to pay for training for existing staff members, averaging $92 a student. Bridgeport, Connecticut, is using $16 million of its $100 million in relief aid to hire new teachers, assistant principals, instructional supervisors and aides, but also for a “teacher leader” stipend for experienced instructors who can guide others. Mission Achievement and Success, a charter school in Albuquerque, is spending more than half of its $6.6 million allotment on its teachers, including hiring additional special education instructors and math and reading interventionists.

Climate Systems

Among the most expensive priorities is improving ventilation and upgrading heating and air conditioning systems. About half the education agencies, 1,090, expect to spend money on school climate systems, and it’s a top-three priority in every region. The spending averages about $384 per student across agencies choosing this option. The plans range from thousand-dollar investments in filters that block the spread of COVID to multi-million-dollar plans for replacing entire heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, has budgeted $50 million of its $2.5 billion in ESSER III funding to provide 55,000 portable, commercial-grade air scrubbers for every classroom and common room. St. Joseph’s School District in Missouri is budgeting its entire $25 million toward HVAC upgrades.

Extending Learning Time

Summer learning and afterschool programs emerge as the top strategies for helping students recover academically from the pandemic’s impacts. More than half the districts and charter schools in the sample, 1,125, plan to spend COVID relief money on summer programs, and 733 plan to fund afterschool learning opportunities. Another 356 include summer and afterschool in a combined listing, and 183 are extending the school year or adding weekend classes. 

Among the districts and charter schools that include spending figures, the average was $168 per student for summer learning and $130 for afterschool programming. In Washington, D.C., the KIPP charter school network has earmarked $1.7 million for a summer-learning initiative for its 6,800 students. Georgia school districts, in particular, are budgeting significant amounts toward extended-day programs. For example, Gwinnett County Public Schools is proposing to spend $127 million, nearly half its allotment, on afterschool and summer programs, and Fulton County Schools is budgeting $98 million, or 58 percent of ESSER III money, for summer learning. (Georgia asked local agencies to combine spending on afterschool and summer learning into a single category, and many of the districts invested heavily in these priorities. Hence, when we calculated the average per-pupil spending on afterschool and summer programs combined, it jumped to $436, more than twice the average for afterschool and summer learning separately.)

The investments fit with the American Rescue Plan’s requirement that at least 20 percent of district-level ESSER III funds go toward reducing student learning loss. And state education agencies are required to spend at least 1 percent of their ESSER III funds on summer learning and 1 percent on afterschool programs. A somewhat smaller number of local school agencies, 313, plan to increase spending on attendance, enrollment and engagement activities to get more students to participate in the regular school day and year. 

Tutoring and Assessments

Tutoring is another popular approach to giving students more time on task and helping them recover from lost learning opportunities during the pandemic; at least 654 localities are earmarking funds for a strategy that research has found to produce a substantial return on investment if implemented effectively. In Tennessee, where the state legislature last January established a statewide ALL Corps tutoring initiative, 65 of the 81 local COVID spending plans submitted to the state include funding for tutors. Chicago Public Schools is spending $25 million of its $1.8 billion ESSER allotment to train 850 literacy tutors. The Houston Independent School District, roughly half the size of the Chicago district, is making a bigger bet, budgeting $113 million for tutoring, roughly 14 percent of its relief funding. One small district in Arkansas, Parkers Chapel, is dedicating its entire $630,000 ESSER allotment to tutoring. Average spending for tutoring among the 654 local agencies in the Burbio sample providing funding figures is $136 per student. 

Another 442 local education agencies are funding math and English coaching, while 784 are spending on instructional materials and 826 on software for instruction and other purposes. The Granite School District in South Salt Lake City, for instance, plans to spend $7.5 million of its $97 million allotment on expanding online learning opportunities for students at different skill levels. And Richmond Public Schools in Virginia is devoting $65 million, more than half of its ESSER III total, for a literacy push that includes hiring new staff members, training existing teachers, tapping extended-day partners and purchasing new instructional materials, software and books.

Despite efforts by testing critics to reduce the volume of student assessments in schools, just over a quarter of the local education agencies in the FutureEd analysis plan to invest in developing or administering student academic assessments, as they work to understand the extent of students’ pandemic learning loss.

Mental Health

Helping students recover from the isolation and trauma of the pandemic emerges as a priority in many local plans. About a third of those in the Burbio sample, 715, list social-emotional learning in their spending plans, including monies for curricula, classroom materials and training, at an average cost per student of $102. Social-emotional instruction often focuses on helping students manage their emotions, relate to other students effectively and develop strong organizational and study habits.

Additionally, 701 localities, a third of the sample, are hiring psychologists or mental health professionals, at an average cost of $110 per student. The priority emerges in other spending as well: 537 districts and charters plan to invest in behavioral and mental health initiatives, and 323 in counseling and mentoring. Many districts are pursuing a combination of strategies: the Syracuse, New York, school district, for instance, expects to spend more than $1 million on social-emotional learning curricula, $3.5 million on intensive support for students and nearly $13 million on hiring psychologists, counselors and social workers. 

Remote Learning 

Remote instruction and technology remain key priorities despite the widespread return to in-person school. A third of the districts and charters in the Burbio sample plan to use American Rescue Plan funds on student mobile devices, spending an estimated $201 per student, and 605 plan to pay for “technology that supports learning and enables students to learn anywhere.” 

Another 502 plan to invest in improving internet connectivity, and 371 are spending on virtual models, online schooling or distance learning. Average spending on technology ranges from $79 per student for connectivity to $201 for mobile devices. The McAllen Independent School District in Texas is spending $16 million on mobile devices for its 22,000 students, and Milwaukee is spending $20 million for its 74,000 students. 

With many school districts experiencing security problems when they transitioned to online learning during the pandemic, some are proposing to use federal aid to buttress their digital defenses, as allowed under Education Department guidance. The Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida, for instance, plans to spend $30 million, or $86 per student, on cybersecurity.

Regional Trends

The FutureEd analysis found both similarities and differences in local spending plans across the four Census Bureau regions. The Burbio sample, which captures about 10 percent of districts and charter schools nationwide, includes about a quarter of the local education agencies in the South, 10 percent in the West and about 5 percent in the Northeast and Midwest.

Local education agencies in the Northeast and South had the same top spending priority, with two-thirds of local education agencies in the former and nearly three-fifths in the latter pursuing summer learning. Funding and supporting teachers, counselors and academic staff emerged as the No. 2 priority in both regions, with spending planned in 60 percent of Northeast localities and 52 percent of those in the South. HVAC spending was No. 3 for both. But after that, the regions took markedly different approaches. 

Half of the Northeast districts and charters planned to invest in afterschool programs and about 40 percent supported spending on psychologists, social-emotional learning and staff professional development. In contrast, nearly half the Southern localities planned to spend on software and instructional materials, with about 40 percent investing in further efforts to recruit, train and retain teaching staff. 

In the West, HVAC upgrades led the list of priorities, with 62 percent of districts and charters planning to invest in such projects. Spending on teachers and academic staff was listed in 58 percent of the local agencies, professional development in 52 percent, and psychologists in 47 percent. 

The top priorities are reversed in the Midwest, with two-thirds of localities spending on teachers and academic staff and nearly 60 percent on HVAC. Summer learning came as the No. 4 priority in the West — with half the district pursuing it — but doesn’t appear on the Midwest list. Instead, about 40 percent of school districts and charters there are spending on instructional materials and professional development, and about a third are investing in other facility repairs, personal protective equipment and technology.

The FutureEd analysis found some instances of local spending priorities that seem only marginally, if at all, related to pandemic recovery. The Texarkana, Texas, school district is planning to spend $171,000 on band instruments. The school board in Burlington, Wisconsin, approved $100,000 to buy a 3D cadaver table for a high school’s anatomy course, allowing students to dissect virtual corpses via touch screen. Natchez, Mississippi, is hoping to break off $3 million of its federal aid for a of a high school and middle school. 

But as a percentage of proposed COVID response spending in the Burbio sample, such expenditures do not seem substantial. While spending on athletic facilities has garnered substantial news coverage, for example, only 27 local education agencies in the 2,100-agency Burbio sample — barely 1 percent — are proposing to spend relief funds on athletics.

Importantly, much of the $46 billion covered by the FutureEd analysis has not been spent, the U.S. Education Department . Local agencies have until September 2024 to obligate the American Rescue Plan money that Congress approved in March 2021. School districts may change their spending priorities between now and then, and local leaders will undoubtedly face substantial pressure from advocacy groups and commercial entities to direct ESSER funding in their direction. Already, a North Carolina school district that had planned to spend $10 million on ventilation upgrades shifted the money to personnel bonuses in fall 2021 amid severe staff shortages. In Texas, COVID relief funding has been from two districts until they remove books from their libraries that some have found offensive. There’s an important role in the months ahead for state and federal regulators and local media to ensure that spending stays focused on helping students rebound from the pandemic. And, ultimately, the effectiveness with which plans on local drawing boards are executed matters most. 

Still, at this early juncture, the spending plans of districts and charter school organizations educating 40 percent of the nation’s public school students provide valuable insights into the pandemic response priorities of the nation’s local education leaders, and they provide a reason to be optimistic about local leaders’ commitment to spending ESSER monies in ways that make a difference for students. As Burbio adds what it hopes to be thousands of local education agencies to its spending database in the coming weeks and months, FutureEd will publish additional analyses detailing how local education agencies are deploying an unprecedented infusion of federal funding for COVID recovery. 

Phyllis W. Jordan is editorial director of FutureEd, an independent, nonpartisan think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She is the author of , released by FutureEd and Attendance Works. Bella DiMarco is a policy analyst at FutureEd.

With three children in Arizona’s Mesa Public Schools, Krista Puruhito has a vested interest in how the district plans to spend its $160 million in federal relief funds. When the district held a series of community budget meetings in May, she was among the more than 300 participants who voiced requests ranging from water bottle filling stations to more teaching assistants in the classroom.

Puruhito also wants to see expanded arts integration and afterschool enrichment programs — especially in communities where families can’t afford such extras.

“They shouldn’t be directing this to all the high-income schools that already have $100,000 in their PTOs,” she said.

Mesa, like every other district across the country, is required to undertake what the American Rescue Plan calls “meaningful consultation” with community members over how to spend $122 billion for K-12 before October 2024. Some districts are taking extensive steps to reach out to their communities, providing translation during virtual meetings and posting updates on how the money will be used. But leaders say it’s challenging to balance competing interests and some parents feel districts have taken shortcuts.

A from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, to be released Wednesday, shows that just over a third of districts have posted details about how they’re involving the public in designing their plans.

“This is surprising given this is a mandated expectation for receiving funds,” said Bree Dusseault, a practitioner-in-residence at the center.

With remote learning giving parents a stronger role in their children’s education over the past year, advocacy groups across the country have pressed for broad participation from diverse groups of parents, and for multiple opportunities to inform decisions about how the money is spent.

“We have been really pushing back against the idea that surveys are enough to check the box. It’s just not enough,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. “Where we have parent power on the ground, our expectation is that we have a seat at the table.”

But will they be OK with the limits on that power? “A lot of people can’t tell the difference between engagement and decision making,” said Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. “Listening to you and doing what you want are two very different things.”

The law initially gave districts three months to collect input and submit plans to their states, but AASA and the 19-member Large Countywide and Suburban District Consortium the U.S. Department of Education for more flexibility. The that districts could take longer to submit their plans as long as they were completed within a reasonable amount of time.

Owning ‘the final product’

The Center’s review highlights a few examples of what researchers call more “robust” examples of community engagement. The Baltimore City Public Schools the results of surveys and input sessions online, and the Boston Public Schools, which is making plans to spend $400 million in relief funds, created a separate commission to lead the process.

“When you have a lot of money, it’s often harder to spend,” Boston Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said in an interview, adding that she’s drawing on 10 years of experience as Minnesota’s education commissioner to give the public an opportunity to “own the final product.”

Over the course of six meetings — translated into at least eight languages — over 1,200 community members participated. The district released of its plan last week and will continue to collect feedback.

“It’s forced us to think about what investments pay dividends over time,” said Chris Smith, executive director of Boston After School and Beyond and a member of the commission.

Some of the funding will be spent on facility improvements to “show to the city what’s been missing for so long and what needs to continue,” Cassellius said. “We have schools without cafeterias, science labs, libraries.”

But another priority was getting funds to local schools as quickly as possible. The commission agreed to allocate the money to schools based on how many low-income students, English learners and students with disabilities they serve.

In Virginia, meanwhile, a June public hearing held by Fairfax County Public Schools provided a glimpse into how challenging it might be for district leaders to balance requests from different parties. Kimberly Adams, president of the local teachers union, argued for raises and bonuses for those who taught in person last school year.

“We’ve continued to lose ground in recruitment and retention,” she said. The district for hundreds of students with disabilities because of a shortage of teachers and the district in last year’s budget.

But Eileen Chollet, the parent of a student with special needs, said the district should be reimbursing families who spent money on therapists and private tutoring because their children missed out on services during remote learning.

“My daughter, like all the other children in this county, needs help now,” she said.

‘Time and input’

In Minnesota, parent advocate Khulia Pringle helped organize a virtual town hall for the Minneapolis Public Schools and wanted to do the same in neighboring St. Paul. Leaders were already in the midst of holding community forums, but added another with Pringle as a co-moderator.

“I let everyone know that this was rushed, and I didn’t like the process,” Pringle said.

Stacey Gray Akyea, the district’s director of research, evaluation and assessment, agreed the timeline for getting community input was short — from June 17-28. But she said there will be more opportunities for parents to provide feedback. While most TItle I schools are experienced at gathering parent input, Akyea said this level of engagement may be new for some districts.

“As a researcher, I feel strongly that we [shouldn’t] ask people to give their time and input without using it,” she said, adding that she told Pringle she would ensure parents would have additional opportunities to be heard. The district is now translating its report based on community input into four languages.

Typically, parents who are already plugged into district issues are more likely to be aware of opportunities to make recommendations on major initiatives.

“You work your way up the ladder,” said Puruhito, who took part in forums when the Mesa district was searching for a new superintendent. “If you participated in one, you get invited to more.”

But planning to spend what leaders have called a once-in-generation influx of federal dollars on K-12 schools is being held on a national scale and with specific expectations that districts will reach students, parents, unions, administrators, civil rights groups and others.

“Parents want school to look different and be more engaging,” Holly Williams, Mesa’s associate superintendent, said of the district’s meetings with parents. Surprisingly, she said she didn’t hear a lot of concerns about learning loss. “They weren’t worried that their kids didn’t know algebra. They were worried their kids didn’t have connections.”

Academic recovery is one of the ways districts are required to spend a large chunk — 20 percent — of their funds. Summer school, extending the school day and one-on-one tutoring are among the approaches districts are using. But community feedback in Atlanta shows that even a pandemic is not enough of a reason to mess with school start times.

The Atlanta Public Schools proposed extending elementary students’ day by 30 minutes this fall to address learning loss. But to make bus routes work, they would have needed to set an earlier start time for high school students.

That’s when the district ran into stiff from parents and students. The district later backed off and added 15 minutes at both ends of the elementary schedule.

It’s challenging to find a balance between additional learning time and “just burning out kids,” said Lisa Bracken, chief financial officer for the district. “You can only bring them out so many extra days and add so many minutes to the day before you hit a tipping point.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They can do better’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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