(WASHINGTON) — The White House is touting its American Rescue Plan (ARP) COVID emergency funding program as a win for public education with nearly 90% of its funds exhausted by Monday’s deadline, according to senior Department of Education officials.
The final $122 billion phase of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund (ESSER), a part of the ARP law signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, was distributed to state and local education agencies to reopen schools and promote physical health, safety and mental health and well-being.
In total, that funding and two prior installments of ESSER during the 2020 pandemic is roughly $190 billion. It has been obligated or used on school recovery projects that are wrapped up. Senior Department of Education officials said about 12% of ARP projects that are still underway are expected to be finished by the end of a January, 2025, liquidation extension window.
The ESSER package that was doled out to states as discretionary funding sparked controversy over how the funds were being spent. Many conservatives speculated whether it was being utilized at all, blaming the federal Education Department for a lack of academic recovery and low test scores on national assessments coming out of the pandemic.
Education finance expert Jess Gartner, who has been tracking school spending projects, told ABC News that school districts had planned for the window closing on ESSER funding.
“The reality is, the vast majority of school districts turned the page on Fiscal Year 25 on July 1: that means budgets for the year are done and dusted. They were approved in May or June,” Gartner said, adding, “It’s not like September 30 is going to catch CFOs by surprise. You know, they’ve been planning for this deadline for three, four years, and they have a budget for the whole year that’s already in motion and fully approved.”
What is ESSER?
ESSER was granted by the Department of Education’s Education Stabilization Fund. It was meant to meet the challenges of the pandemic and academic recovery, according to the COVID relief data website.
In ESSER I, Congress allotted about $13 billion through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act when the pandemic first closed schools for in-person learning in March 2020.
In ESSER II, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act provided an additional $54 billion in December 2020.
The final installment of nearly $122 billion, or ESSER III, came under the American Rescue Plan Act — the fund enabled states to reopen schools and for students to recover from the pandemic. ARP provided additional FY 2021 funding for the Department of Education to assist states with addressing the impacts of COVID-19 on elementary and secondary schools.
ESSER III brought the total to about $190 billion in emergency funding for state and local education departments.
How is ESSER III being used?
That $122 billion was tacked onto the roughly $68 billion in money in ESSER I and ESSER II the previous year. As discretionary funding, states could distribute the allotment however they chose. In the last 3 1/2 years, school districts have used it on infrastructure projects, school enrichment and summer programs, and staff positions where needed.
Baltimore City Superintendent Dr. Sonja Santelises said her district’s large projects — critical in supporting an urban school population — included building bathrooms, expanding summer programs and providing tutoring sessions.
“We didn’t want to leave money on the table,” Santelises said. “There was an intentional decision [in some urban school districts] to invest one-time money in building back what was already an under-resourced infrastructure in the school district — these are the districts that are least likely to have the funding to do the capital projects,” she added.
Despite critics ridiculing the spending practices in some states — leading to tense debates about learning loss — education experts told ABC News the summer programming and high-impact tutoring proved to be vital in academic recovery. Students who were socially isolated and fell behind used robust tutoring programs to not only catch up, but to also return to school if they were showing attendance issues, according to FutureEd Director Thomas Toch.
“Tutoring creates connections between students and adults and one of the things that we’ve learned in the wake of the pandemic is that kids are feeling more alienated, more isolated, than ever,” he said. “An important sort of antidote to these high levels of chronic absenteeism is connecting kids to adults more fully than they have in the past.”
A recent Pew Research Center survey of public K-12 teachers found more than 90% of teachers said their students are chronically absent. Of the teachers surveyed, about half of them said in five years the American education system will be worse than it is now.
Despite gains from the academic recovery programs ESSER provided during the pandemic, Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research Faculty Director Tom Kane said students are potentially facing permanent damage from the closures if learning loss ceases to improve.
What happens to ESSER now?
The obligation deadline for the last portion of ESSER funding is today — Sept. 30 — more than four years after the start of the pandemic and three years after ARP became law.
New emergency funding will not be granted to aid in the effort to help school communities recover from COVID. As U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona fights attacks on public education writ-large, he told ABC News “the recovery dollars were intended to prevent further exacerbation.”
Jess Gartner believes school districts, by and large, handled the lump sum money well. With FY 2025’s budget already in the books, school district leaders shouldn’t panic and should be prepared to rely on the funds they would have typically received before COVID, Gartner said.
“These budgets are planned years in advance,” Garner told ABC News. “It’s kind of like if you were planning to buy a house, right? You don’t show up at the closing, like, ‘Oh man, how am I gonna pay for this?'” she quipped.
Now school districts have to make due with the chunk of funding they annually receive from the federal government, which is on average about 10%. Similar to before the pandemic, they will be supported by state and local governments, which make up roughly 90% of public school funding.
But the COVID-19 emergency exposed infrastructure and workforce problems that public schools were dealing with before the pandemic and were exacerbated on a large scale during it, education experts said.
Some leaders like Santelises are calling for more help as the pandemic’s impact on students continues.
“It’s the federal government’s responsibility to champion looking at the long term impact and to not take the posture that somehow three years you wave a wand and all the kids are back, ” Santelises said. “The kids are not all back.”
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