School districts across the country received the biggest infusion of federal cash ever to get out of the pain of the pandemic. But now the money is running out and districts are cutting jobs, increasing class sizes and cutting programs to keep their schools afloat.
Congress designed the aid — totaling about $190 billion — as a one-time cash handout primarily to combat pandemic crises such as learning disabilities, chronic absenteeism and mental health decline. That’s more than one-fifth of US middle-aged education spending in 2022. Now, the last $122 billion will run out at the end of September.
The funding boost has helped schools make progress in the fight against the Covid case by adding intensive tutoring and after-school activities, key programs that districts are struggling to fund just as students return to school.
“When you look at the table, you have a billion dollars less, you have a billion less services,” said Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey, who praised the pandemic dollars for allowing states to test programs. which civil servants would otherwise not have been able to afford.
High-poverty schools and urban districts, which typically received larger grant money, are feeling the harshest effects of the disappearing dollars, forcing them to reduce staff and cut programs to balance their budgets. And districts that used their one-time grant dollars for ongoing expenses like pay raises, staffing and new programs — even though they knew those funds would disappear — are now facing cuts. In some states, such as Massachusetts and Washington, school districts have added thousands of workers they can no longer afford.
“A lot of districts thought that when money comes in from the federal government, it’s going to come in forever — like we just get it year after year,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, which has tracked how school districts use it. federal pandemic aid. “Districts need to be adaptive in this situation.”
Tough budget calls
A growing body of research is revealing a correlation between federal Covid-19 aid, known as the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, and improved test scores. One study shows that poor districts that received higher ESSER allocations per student achieved higher math and literacy outcomes in 2023 compared to similar districts that received fewer dollars. And preliminary research from the University of Chicago Education Lab showed that using pandemic aid for high-intensity tutoring during the school day led to gains in math and reading scores in Chicago Public Schools and schools in Fulton County, Georgia.
“It shows us that keeping high-dose tutoring at the expense of other efforts seems really important if we care about student learning,” said Monica Bhatt, senior research director at the University of Chicago’s Education Lab.
The financial challenges facing the Saddle Mountain Unified School District, a growing rural district of about 3,300 students about 50 miles outside of Phoenix, Arizona, highlight the tough choices districts face. Saddle Mountain used federal pandemic aid to buy new Chromebooks and give one-time bonuses to teachers. But it was the decision to hire a new psychologist, counselor and psychology intern with one-time federal dollars that will exacerbate existing staffing problems in the district this fall.
Superintendent Michael Winters said the additional hires were necessary to get a counselor to all five schools in the district, a staffing need for the 20 percent of students in the district who need special education services.
The district included the cost of new mental health professionals in its maintenance and operations budget when federal aid ended. But to keep the added staff — about $200,000 in annual costs — the district is not handing out raises to cover the cost. According to Winters, the lack of raises contributes to forcing out teachers.
One teacher quit a week before the start of the new school year on August 1 and got a job in a neighboring district that paid more. That fifth grade science class is now taught by a paraprofessional who stepped up but needs additional training from the district. And by the end of the first day of school, three other teachers threatened to quit, Winters said.
That underscores a larger challenge in federal pandemic aid: Schools were told to address academic recovery and the lingering effects of the pandemic — long-term problems that won’t be fixed with a one-time inspection.
“We’re really going to have to either do raises to attract and keep people in the industry or hire additional staff. If that funding isn’t what you call ongoing funding, there’s really not much you can do with it,” Winters said.
But despite that sentiment, the district knowingly spent money on added mental health professionals that had an expiration date.
“The workload without the people we had was just unbearable — you just couldn’t do it physically,” Winters said.
State legislators and district leaders across the country must make decisions like Saddle Mountain that will shape the look of classrooms for the coming school year.
In Alabama, state lawmakers are picking up the tab for statewide summer reading and math camps funded by $18 million in pandemic relief. But they remove other programs. For example, Chilton County Schools, which serves about 8,000 children, stopped its free afternoon program financed with Covid-19 money for the new year. That’s because it would have cost 30 percent of the district’s entire budget to maintain it — money it can’t spend without cutting key programs.
“It gave us one-time money to do some innovative new things that states have been talking about,” Alabama Education Superintendent Mackey said of the federal funding. “There’s never enough money to do experiments and try something new and different.”
Minneapolis leaders had to fill a $110 million funding gap for the upcoming school year, after the last $90 million in pandemic money was spent during the previous school year. The district is reducing the number of assistant teachers who provide extra help to students with math and literacy issues. In addition, open positions remain unfilled and the district’s magnet schools—special schools for subjects such as art and STEM—receive discounts.
The White House has pushed a new $8 billion grant program to continue some academic recovery efforts. The plan is unlikely to win approval on Capitol Hill. States are facing their own financial problems as other federal pandemic cash dries up and budget surpluses turn into deficits.
President Joe Biden’s education chief recently repeated a message that education department officials have been telling governors, state superintendents and district superintendents for some time: Tough financial choices are coming even as the academic recovery is underway.
“Right now, states and districts have to make very difficult decisions,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said at a May White House briefing on chronic absenteeism. “They are fed up with unfunded assignments and demand something more from others in education without more resources or support.”
Cardona told reporters in February that he won’t use the word “cliff” when describing the end of federal pandemic aid. “We’re getting the message back to the states and we want them to match the president’s urgent education funding,” he said.
