The U.S. Department of Education on Friday  to superintendents’  for more time to spend pandemic relief funds on school construction projects and facility upgrades. 

As long as districts obligate the funds by Sept. 30, 2024, as the American Rescue Plan requires, “grantees may have up to 18 months beyond the end of the obligation period” to spend the money, Roberto Rodriquez, assistant secretary of planning, evaluation and policy development, said in the letter to Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. 

Supply chain delays, labor shortages and inflation have interfered with districts’ efforts to hire contractors and start projects.

As the nation’s school superintendents gathered last month for their first in-person meeting since the pandemic began, Dan Domenech, the organization’s leader, pressed U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona about an urgent issue. 

At Music City Center in Nashville, he reminded the secretary that districts were anxious about hitting a September 2024 deadline for obligating funds from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Due to the of materials, supply chain delays and labor shortages, less than half of his members were on track to meet the cut-off date, according to a taken that month by the organization, the AASA. He asked Cardona if the department would heed a from more than 30 education organizations for a two-year extension on dedicating the funds to school facility projects. 

No luck.

“He was sympathetic, but he didn’t give an answer,” said Domenech, the AASA’s executive director. Districts, Domenech said, don’t want to be “forced to spend the money and then be criticized for how they spent it.”

That’s likely to be unwelcome news for the White House, where the pandemic relief bill stands as one of President Joe Biden’s few legislative victories in a year marked by partisan wrangling over COVID, record-level inflation and the failure to pass Build Back Better, the other major piece of the administration’s domestic agenda. With few strings attached, the American Rescue Plan, signed a year ago on March 11, 2021, provided an unprecedented $122 billion for K-12 schools to reopen and rapidly respond to students’ learning and social-emotional deficits from the pandemic. Experts say that’s a key reason why the administration would likely frown on dragging out the timeline to use the money. 

Congress might not like the idea either. 

“I’m dubious that Congress would extend the deadline” for obligating the education funds, said Julia Martin, legislative director at Brustein and Manasevit, a law firm specializing in education. Members, she said, would be faced with questions over whether an extension undermines the original purpose of the legislation, which was to address an emergency. 

Marguerite Roza, executive director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, added, “No one wants to open up that law again because it was not bipartisan.” Democrats passed the relief bill using a process known as reconciliation that didn’t require any Republican votes.

Roza, who argues that addressing learning loss needs to be districts’ top priority, said that extending the deadline for construction projects would only draw attention to how officials are using the funds for non-academic reasons.

‘The great things’

Cardona, meanwhile, reiterated his expectation that districts use the money now to benefit students.

“Texas received $12 billion, with a B,” Cardona said Wednesday during a morning keynote session at SXSW EDU in Austin. “It needs to touch the classrooms now.” 

His comment came in response to high school senior Gesenia Alvarez, who described how her school’s college and career center shut down when schools reopened, leaving students without help to fill out college and financial aid forms. 

“I want to make sure as we see now masks off and things are starting to look normal,” Cardona said, “that we do not lose our sense of urgency around not only the gaps that existed before but the gaps that have been made worse” by the pandemic.

Last week, while talking with leaders of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, he pointed to a recent analysis by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, that showed how districts educating 60 percent of the nation’s children could potentially spend the funds by the 2024 deadline, directing at least $31 billion of that money to academic recovery, $25 billion to staff and $26 billion to facilities and operations.

A statement from the education department to The 74 acknowledged that officials have “heard about supply chain concerns for projects like HVAC upgrades and [are] looking at what might be possible to help alleviate those issues. We will continue to work with states and districts to make sure these funds are used swiftly and effectively to keep schools safely open for in-person instruction and address students’ needs.”

Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director of advocacy and governance at AASA, said that any deadline extension would likely come from the department, not Congress. The department, she said, could use “technical authority to address timeline flexibilities.”

She added that Republicans might use any extension to argue in the midterm elections that schools didn’t need that much funding, while Democrats might want to see it spent faster to prove that they did. Both arguments “miss the mark,” she said. 

“The law provides three years, and if schools plan a multi-year drawdown and act in a fiscally prudent manner that focuses on student learning recovery, that is what should matter,” she said.

Districts were also hoping for dedicated federal funds for school construction that never materialized. That put “reverse pressure” on districts’ relief funds, Ng said, and schools now have “one pot of funding with which to address student learning and anything they might be able to do in terms of infrastructure in the context of COVID.”

Ian Rosenblum, who recently left the Department of Education after serving as acting assistant secretary of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, also highlighted the FutureEd report, which showed that districts had plans for spending $50 billion of the $67 billion they were receiving. 

“When we speak with superintendents, we are hearing about the great things they’re doing right now to use federal pandemic recovery funds,” said Rosenblum, principal at ILO Group, a consulting firm working with districts on recovery plans. “The most urgent need is to tell those stories and to support districts in getting that work done.”

Mary Elizabeth Davis, superintendent of the Henry County Schools, outside Atlanta, said her district has dedicated in relief funds toward three priorities: teaching materials and training — particularly in literacy — student well-being, and employee health and wellness. The district has also planned some facility upgrades.

Every school now has a health and wellness “facilitator” who addresses issues ranging from chronic absenteeism to food donations for families — tasks that used to be “sporadically dispersed between good-natured staff in the building,” Davis said. “We have seen so much out of that one position. It’s unbelievable.”

But she acknowledged the challenges in using the funds to modernize schools.

“All of our bids are coming in higher than estimated,” she said. “The marketplace demands that exist in the larger community — we’re not immune to that.”

But superintendents’ concerns about making best use of the funds go beyond facility-related expenses. Domenech said he’d like to see a general extension of the deadline.

John Malloy, superintendent of the San Ramon Valley Unified School District, east of Oakland, California, said districts want to use the relief funds to respond to the increased mental health demands of students — an issue Biden addressed during his State of the Union address last week. But schools were short on counselors, social workers and psychologists before the pandemic and now hiring those professionals. 

“When you try to spend too quickly,” Malloy said, “you use dollars for things that don’t move your students forward.”

Putting up ‘guardrails’

According to the law, districts have to commit to spend the dollars by the end of September, 2024, and then have another 120 days to finish spending it. Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, explained that just because districts are obligating the funds doesn’t mean they won’t struggle to fill positions or face backlogs in building materials. An earlier analysis by his center showed that rural and high-poverty districts are more likely to direct relief funds toward “long-standing deferred maintenance and capital expenditures.” 

Lining up contractors takes time, he said, adding that he doesn’t think AASA’s request for an extension is unreasonable. 

“But you want to put [up] some guardrails — that it is long-term capital projects they are deferring and not efforts to address learning loss,” he said. He urged districts struggling to find tutors, for example, to pay high school and college students to work with children in the early grades.

He said he doubts Biden would pay a “political price” for extending the deadline to spend the funds. In fact, he added, “To the extent that government spending is contributing to inflation, extending the spending timeline would be a plus.”

Supply chain delays and labor shortages aren’t the only issues interfering with districts’ plans to spend the relief funds. In some cases, the funds aren’t reaching the local level. 

In Wyoming, state lawmakers last month debated some of the relief funds from the education budget, even though districts have already planned staff bonuses using that money. And in Massachusetts, Secretary of Education James Peyser that of the $2.6 billion in relief funds available, districts have so far applied for only $400 million to $450 million.

“That leaves well over $2 billion that is still on the table for school districts to pull down,” he said.

‘In the weeds’

Julia Rafal-Baer, founder of the ILO Group, said one obstacle to liquidating the relief funds is that districts sometimes lack the accounting staff to handle such a significant new pot of money. She added that in some districts, newly elected school board members are “taking on larger roles that include getting far more into the weeds, which impacts the ability of leaders to use the money in the way the community is expecting.”

She pointed to the Akron, Ohio, school district where board members Superintendent Christine Fowler Mack’s request to use American Rescue Plan funds for additional central office positions, including a chief of extended learning.

Parent advocates, however, have little sympathy for districts seeking additional time. Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy organization, said districts have not acted with urgency.

“There is so much buck-passing,” she said. “We are going to be holding superintendents’ feet to the fire to spend this money faster.”

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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced Friday that is Florida’s share of $1.5 billion being provided to states to buy food for school meals, including $200 million to be used for cooperative agreements to buy food locally from historically underserved producers.

Most of the funding will be supplied by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service in cash payments known as Supply Chain Assistance funds for up to 100,000 schools in U.S. states and territories, including public, charter, tribal and nonprofit private schools and residential child-care institutions. The purchased food is to be unprocessed or minimally processed domestic food such as fresh fruit, mil, frozen vegetables and ground meat.

The largest allocation, at $171.5 million, is for California, followed by Texas, at $168.3 million, New York, at $88.1 million, and Florida, at $86.9 million.

The funds, authorized in an executive order by President Joe Biden, are intended to help schools and school districts make arrangements to offset disruptions in the nation’s supply chains for food and other goods and to build more resilient networks for feeding children at school.

“USDA is aware that some schools are experiencing challenges purchasing and obtaining food for their meal programs and is taking swift action to ensure that doesn’t interfere with their ability to serve meals to the children in their care,” the Food and Nutrition Service says on its website about efforts to help schools provide meals for school children regardless of supply-chain difficulties.

Providing meals for school-age children has been a source of contention this year between Gov. Ron DeSantis and Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Nikki Fried. After DeSantis opted not to sign up for $820 million in federal food aid for children for 2021-22, Fried and other Democrats protested, as . Florida was the only state then to have not applied for the available funding. Fried is a gubernatorial candidate in the 2022 election.

The DeSantis administration has since applied for the 2021-22 food aid, but Fried wrote to DeSantis demanding to know why some families still had not received all funds approved the prior year, covering the 2020-21 school year and summer 2021.

At issue in the dispute is the Pandemic-Electronic Benefits Transfer program, which provided funding to feed children who were out of school because of COVID and would otherwise have been eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

On Tuesdays, three Little Caesars stores across Oakland County, Michigan, make 273 pizzas in the morning even before they open for business. On Wednesdays, another 320 pies are out the door before noon.

But their customers aren’t sports fans ditching work to watch a day game. They’re students in the Huron Valley Schools in Highland, Michigan, northwest of Detroit. 

“Our little kids cheer when the pizzas come. It’s one thing our kids can count on,” said Sara Simmerman, food and nutrition supervisor for the 8,600-student district.

Like most districts across the country, Huron Valley is facing unprecedented food and labor shortages caused by what say is nearing a “global transport systems collapse.” Experts say as the economy reopened following lockdowns, multiple industries — including those involved in delivering food and supplies to schools — have faced increased demand they can’t meet.

Many predict the could extend throughout the rest of the school year. Forced to adapt their meal programs to a grab-and-go system last year when schools shut down for remote learning, school nutrition departments are now scrambling to find menu items and enlisting front office staff and school administrators to serve meals.

“We’ve been told it may even get worse before it gets better,” Simmerman said. The district’s partnership with MAC Foods Group, which owns the Little Caesars stores, began before the pandemic, and has become a rare source of stability as the district increasingly improvises its in-house menus. 

The unpredictability of deliveries adds to the frustration. A satellite kitchen that serves the district’s elementary schools recently received only 35 of  400 cases of food ordered. A few days later, 700 cases arrived at once.

“You never know what you’re going to get,” Simmerman said. “It’s amazing how many kids want to eat salad when you don’t have lettuce.”

A nationwide is one piece of the complex puzzle that determines whether Los Angeles students get applesauce or schools across Michigan’s Oakland County offer chocolate milk. 

“Deliveries of goods and foods are extremely delayed. It now takes an average of eight weeks to receive an item that previously showed up in two to three weeks,” said Lieling Hwang, assistant director of nutrition services for the Long Beach Unified School District in California. “Typically, these deliveries are coming in short, as well.”

That means middle and high school students aren’t getting their favorite “spicy cheese crunchers,” and the whole wheat croissants that were used to make breakfast sandwiches have been discontinued, Hwang said.

‘Don’t have the luxury’

Some school nutrition directors are scheduling deliveries after hours or directing distributors to central warehouses and then using district staff to get food to local schools, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced in assistance to help school nutrition departments keep up with rising costs. The funds will provide schools with fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy products. This would free up other funds to offer hiring bonuses to address staffing shortages. But Pratt-Heaver noted that agricultural commodities usually account for only 15 to 20 percent of what districts serve, and they still have to rely on vendors and distributors for other food and supplies. 

The lack of paper products, for example, is almost as bad as the shortage of food, said Sharon Glosson, executive director of the North East Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas. 

“There really isn’t an alternative to a plate,” she said, adding that in the past, staff would use multiple plates or containers because some children like to keep their food separated. “We don’t have the luxury to do that anymore.” Elementary schools in the district, meanwhile, use plastic trays with compartments, but washing them takes labor, and the district still has almost 150 unfilled positions.

Labor shortages are also a challenge for MAC Foods Group.When stores are short-staffed, Simmerman and administrative assistant Colleen Armstrong pitch in. 

“We go and deliver the pizzas ourselves if we have to,” Simmerman said. 

Costs are ‘soaring’

Nutrition directors say that while students might not get their favorite entrees, they’re keeping children fed. Parents don’t have to pay for school meals because Congress made them free for all students this year. But it’s the shortages students face when they go home that Hwang and others worry most about. 

“These issues do affect students outside of school as the cost of foods [and] supplies is soaring,” Hwang said. “Scarcity and unaffordability … makes food insecurity even more pronounced now.”

Congress created the Pandemic EBT — electronic benefit transfer — program to cover the cost of food for students while schools were closed. The American Rescue Plan, the relief package passed in March, continued the program through the summer and this school year. But the program is only meant to serve students who are learning remotely.

An increase in the benefits low-income families receive through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program took effect , providing about $36 more a month per person. But the supply chain bottlenecks are causing at the grocery store, and are experiencing some of the same shortages as schools. 

Affected by labor shortages, wildfires and the pandemic, the Oregon Food Bank, for one, has seen a drop in food donations as well as higher prices at a time when demand for services has doubled. The disruption means less fresh produce and affects supplies at school food pantries that low-income families depend on for weekend meals, said spokeswoman Ashley Mumm. The food bank provided funds to the school pantry programs so they could stock up at grocery outlets and big box stores like Costco.

“More and more barriers are placed in front of families,” said Lucy Coady, director of No Kid Hungry, a national campaign of the nonprofit Share Our Strength. “This is affecting every aspect of how hungry kids are fed across the country.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Can’t find the people’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Calm the markets’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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