How Schools Spent the $190 Billion in COVID Relief Funds

Conservative News DailyAugust 18, 2022

Schools have raked in roughly $190 billion in
COVID-19
relief funds that
education
advocates argued were desperately needed to help the system recover from the pandemic.

But more than two years into the recovery, some schools have
not yet spent
piles of cash Congress handed them through three separate stimulus bills.

And in places where the spending is underway, COVID-19 relief dollars have sometimes funded projects that have seemingly little to do with the stated aim of returning public schools to normal.

“The good news is the federal money helped, and it made a difference,” Ralph Martire, executive director at the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, told the Washington Examiner. “The bad news is, the reporting requirements are lax enough so that we’re not going to fully understand exactly how much it helped and where the money went to determine whether or not the money went to generate better outcomes.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have that kind of accountability,” he added.

Schools received aid from the federal government in
three batches
over the course of the pandemic. The first tranche of relief funding came from the CARES Act that President Donald Trump signed in March 2020. That bill provided $13.2 billion to schools.

Trump signed another stimulus bill in December 2020 that included $54.3 billion for schools.

But by far, the largest infusion of funding for education recovery came in the American Rescue Plan that President Joe Biden signed in March last year. That plan dumped another $122 billion into schools.

The highest priority for many districts spending their COVID-19 stimulus funds is personnel: hiring more teachers and specialists and offering bonuses to those who have stayed, according to a
FutureEd analysis
of thousands of public and charter school spending plans.

Boosting staff levels

Roughly 60% of the districts
analyzed
planned to put their stimulus funds largely or entirely toward teachers, including retraining them and giving some pay raises to increase retention.

That has raised concerns about how the schools will adjust when the last of the stimulus funding runs out in 2024. Public schools are hemorrhaging students as parents abandon districts that remained closed for too long or that are promoting liberal curricula, creating enrollment shortages that are likely to fuel budget cuts.

Public school funding is tied to enrollment levels.

And many schools are caught between their immediate needs — education professionals report needing more mental health specialists, for example — and the reality that their stimulus funds will dry up in two years and potentially
require layoffs
.

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Staffing shortages have exacerbated the dilemma. A
survey
of California school superintendents by the California School Boards Association found that “70 percent of respondents expressed concern about using one-time funding to hire staff that they may not be able to keep on the payroll once funding runs out.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, one school board member voted in October against a proposed
spending plan
for COVID-19 funds because it budgeted for 1,400 new school jobs in a district that already had 2,500 openings it couldn’t fill.

The push to spend COVID-19 relief funds on teacher salaries and bonuses has come in part from
teachers unions
, which played an outsize role in keeping many schools closed to in-person instruction long enough to create learning loss for students.

Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow for the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, said available data suggest only a third of new staff positions funded by the stimulus have gone to people providing education directly to students. The rest, she said, are mostly administrative positions.

“If you beef up the bureaucracy around schools … it’s difficult to take that away,” Greszler told the Washington Examiner. “I know that the schools are facing shortages in terms of teachers, and that should be the No. 1 priority, but I think too many of the positions are allocated to the administrative side of things.”

COVID-19 culture wars

Some spending choices have fallen squarely at the intersection of COVID-19 responses and classroom culture wars.

A number of states and districts have chosen to invest their stimulus money into deepening a left-wing ideology in schools.

For example, in North Dakota, some education stimulus funds were
spent
on an “equity audit.”

The state spent COVID-19 funding on a
partnership
with an outside group created to investigate whether the policies in four of its school districts “either erase or exacerbate inequity.”

Schools in California spent $1.5 billion on teacher
training
that included “implicit bias training.”

New York pledged to center its COVID-19 relief spending decisions on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Two goals of the state’s COVID-19
spending plan
for schools involved “providing staff development on topics such as culturally responsive sustaining instruction and student support practices, privilege, implicit bias” and “helping students learn about themselves and various aspects of their identities.”

Money to keep children out of the classroom

A significant portion of the federal funding was
earmarked
for online learning software or mobile devices to support remote learning, even though the concept of additional school relief funding was sold on Capitol Hill as a way to put remote learning in the past.

“The greatest priority we have here at the agency and my greatest priority right now is the quick reopening of schools across the country,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona
said
in March 2021, as Congress passed the last of the three pandemic relief packages that included funding for schools.

It took months for some of the schools that received a second influx of relief funds — this time, with the stated goal of using those funds for reopening — to bring students back into the classroom full time.

For example, Washington, D.C., public schools
received
$87 million in the second round of relief funding that Trump signed in December 2020.

But D.C. public schools did not reopen for full-time, in-person learning for the rest of that academic year. In fact, the district did not end its hybrid, remote-learning model until the fall of 2021, despite having taken in, by that point, more than $300 million in extra federal funding.

Luxury projects

Other stimulus-funded school projects have had even less to do with COVID-19 recovery.

A number of schools have built lavish new sports facilities, such as football stadiums or workout rooms, that their normal budgets couldn’t cover.

In Whitewater, Wisconsin, for example, one school district used the $2 million in federal stimulus funding it received in 2021 to cover the normal operating expenses in its budget. District officials then used the money that had been freed up to build synthetic turf football, baseball, and softball fields at schools, the Associated Press
reported
.

However, in some cases, schools simply haven’t had the
time or ability
to spend all of the money they have received.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Reporting on where the money is going often lags behind when the actual expenditures are made, complicating efforts to track how much money is left for districts to spend.

“I think that speaks to the fact that far too much money was given to the schools, to begin with,” Greszler said.

Martire said the lack of strings attached to how schools could invest their relief funding has contributed, in some cases, to money going places unrelated to COVID-19 recovery, even though many schools invested the money directly into helping students catch up in the classroom.

“This is a system, K-12 education, that is actually under-resourced, so when a pot of money becomes available to an under-resourced system, some of it will get used in ways that absolutely weren’t intended, of course,” he said. “The money is being spent by people.”