School districts across the country received the largest infusion of federal money ever to pull themselves out of the grip of the pandemic. But now that money is about to expire, and districts are cutting jobs, expanding class sizes and slashing programs to keep their schools afloat.
Congress designed the aid — totaling about $190 billion — as a one-time distribution of money, largely to address pandemic crises such as learning loss, chronic absenteeism and declining mental health. That’s more than a fifth of total U.S. spending on K-12 education in 2022. Now the last $122 billion ran out at the end of September.
The funding boost allowed schools to make strides in addressing the impact of COVID-19 by adding intensive tutoring and after-school activities, critical programs that districts have struggled to fund as students return to classes.
“If you look at the count, you’re going to have a billion dollars less in services,” said Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey, who praised the pandemic dollars for giving states the chance to test programs that officials otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford.
High-poverty schools and urban districts, which generally received larger amounts of emergency relief money, will feel the brunt of the disappearing dollars, forcing them to cut staff and cut programs to balance their budgets. And districts that spent their one-time emergency relief money on ongoing expenses like pay raises, staffing increases and new programs — even though they knew those funds would disappear — are now having to make cuts. In some states, like Massachusetts and Washington, school districts have added thousands of employees they can no longer afford.
“A lot of districts thought that once money comes from the federal government, it’s going to keep coming forever — like we’re going to get it year after year after year,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, which has tracked how school districts have used federal pandemic aid. “Districts are going to have to be more adaptive in this situation.”
Tough budget decisions
A growing body of research shows 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 high-poverty districts that received larger per-pupil ESSER allocations saw larger gains in math and reading scores in 2023, compared with similar districts that received fewer dollars. And preliminary research from the University of Chicago Education Lab found that using pandemic aid for intensive tutoring during the school day resulted in bumps in math and reading scores in Chicago public schools and schools in Fulton County, Georgia.
“It gives us a signal that maintaining high-dose tutoring, even at the expense of other kinds of effort, really does seem important if we care about student achievement,” said Monica Bhatt, senior research director at the University of Chicago Education Lab.
The financial challenges facing Saddle Mountain Unified School District, a growing rural district of about 3,300 students about 50 miles outside Phoenix, Arizona, underscore the tough choices districts face. Saddle Mountain used its federal pandemic relief to buy new Chromebooks and give teachers one-time bonuses. But it was the decision to hire a new psychologist, a counselor and a psychology intern with the one-time federal dollars this fall that is exacerbating the district’s existing staffing problems.
According to Principal Michael Winters, the additional hires were needed to have a mentor at all five schools in the district, a need for the 20 percent of the district’s students who require special education.
The district has included the cost of the new mental health professionals in its maintenance and operations budget with the end of federal aid. But to retain the extra staff — an annual expense of about $200,000 — the district will not provide raises to cover the costs. That lack of raises is contributing to an exodus of teachers, Winters said.
One teacher quit a week before the new school year began on Aug. 1 and took a job in a neighboring district that paid better. That fifth-grade science class is now taught by a paraprofessional who has stepped up but needs additional training from the district. And by the end of the first day of school, three more teachers were threatening to quit, Winters said.
That underscores a larger challenge with federal pandemic aid: Schools have been told to focus on rebuilding academics and dealing with the lingering effects of the pandemic. Those are long-term problems that can’t be solved with a one-time check.
“What we really need to do is give people raises to attract and retain people in the profession or hire additional staff. If that funding is not what you call revolving funding, there’s not much you can do with it,” Winters said.
But despite that sentiment, the district has knowingly spent money with an expiration date on the additional mental health professionals.
“The workload without those people, the people we had, was just unbearable. You just couldn’t physically handle it,” Winters said.
State legislators and district leaders across the country are facing decisions like Saddle Mountain’s, reimagining classroom layouts for the upcoming school year.
In Alabama, state lawmakers are footing the bill for statewide summer reading and math camps that were funded with $18 million in pandemic relief. But they’re cutting other programs. Chilton County Schools, which serves about 8,000 children, for example, ended its free after-school program funded 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 — money it can’t spend without cutting essential programs.
“It gave us one-time money to do some of the innovative new things that states have been talking about,” Mackey, Alabama’s education chief, said of the federal funding. “There’s never any money to actually run experiments and try something new and different.”
Minneapolis leaders had to close a $110 million funding gap for the upcoming school year with the last $90 million in pandemic relief money spent last school year. The district is scaling back the number of teaching assistants, who provide extra help to students with math and reading difficulties. It is also leaving vacancies unfilled and cutting funding for the district’s magnet schools — specialized schools for subjects like the arts and STEM.
The White House has pushed for a new $8 billion grant program to keep some academic recovery efforts going, a plan unlikely to win approval on Capitol Hill. States are grappling with their own financial woes as other buckets of federal pandemic relief money dry up and budget surpluses turn into deficits.
President Joe Biden’s education chief recently reiterated a message that Department of Education officials have long been telling governors, state education leaders and district leaders: Tough financial choices lie ahead, even as the recovery of college education is underway.
“States and districts are having to make some very difficult decisions right now,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said during a May meeting on the White House complex about chronic absenteeism. “They are tired of unfunded mandates and being asked by others to do yet another thing in education without more resources or support.”
Cardona told a group of reporters in February that he doesn’t use the word cliff when describing the end of federal pandemic aid. “We’re giving the baton back to the states, and we want them to match the president’s urgency on education funding,” he said.
