“Everyone is very nice to me, and I feel like I belong here,” said Alan, a third grader. “I feel like I am a part of this family.”

In a city with and a school district , this scrappy elementary school stands out. 

Nearly all the kids who attend Figueroa come from poor families and many have disabilities or are learning English. 

Often kids from such backgrounds struggle in school, but the students at Figueroa Street are making progress. 

In reading, the school saw a 14% increase in students in 2024 who met state standards from the previous year. In math, Figueroa saw a 12% jump from the year before. 

Teachers and students say that’s because everybody in the school is like family. The school achieved a 92% average attendance rate so far this academic year, up from 85% the last year. 

This, while the district itself is still crawling out from under sky-high chronic absenteeism rates. 

“I think it’s getting people to love their community,” said Principal Shawn Peyatt, who has worked at Figueroa, previously as a teacher, for more than 30 years. 

“At the end of the day, school’s a way out,” said Peyatt. “School is going to make a difference.”&�Բ�����;

Teachers at Figueroa Elementary say the rise in student test scores is linked to school culture.

“People work together well here, and we look out for each other, and it’s nice – you feel supported here,” said Julie Harrington, a third grade teacher, who has been working at the school for 23 years. 

“Most of our teachers have been here for many years,” said assistant principal Frank Sanchez. “We’ve all been waiting for the right leader to come on board and just take us there.”

Prior to Peyatt’s leadership, a classroom designated for “emotionally disturbed” students often saw fights that spread to other parts of the school.

“It was a dumping ground for behavior,” said Peyatt. “Really what you were seeing was it was all Black boys, but they weren’t emotionally disturbed. They just probably had some tough times.”&�Բ�����;

After much back and forth, Figueroa Street Elementary was eventually able to get the district to end the program. Things began to look up. 

While in training to become a principal, Peyatt made attendance her top priority, instituting one program after another to keep students in school. 

“They say it takes three days to make up one day out, which means you never make-up,” said Peyatt. “Attendance is the first thing.”

During the pandemic, the previous principal, Peyatt and Sanchez viewed themselves as “essential workers,” going to students’ houses if they did not join online classes, delivering chargers, notebooks, pencils and holding fundraisers for families struggling to pay rent.

After an initial dip post-pandemic, the school received $38,000 in funding for attendance improvements and used the money to implement new programs in hopes of getting students back on track. 

Working with the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, an organization that partners with Los Angeles Unified to target high-need schools, Figueroa hired an English and math coach. 

Coaches work with teachers, providing feedback on lessons and serving as an extra teaching resource.

The Partnership was first introduced to the school 15 years ago. In addition to teacher training and curriculum development, it serves as a mediator between Figueroa and the school district. 

“They gave us the control to be able to bring in our own people, our own teachers,” said Sanchez. “That was a big turning point.”

After the pandemic, the school also created an attendance award system, hosting a pizza party for classes that achieved full attendance and providing students with points towards the school gift shop for good behavior. 

If students are absent for two or more days, administrators will go to their house to check on them. 

“This year we decided to incentivize parents,” Peyatt said. “We’re doing raffles for parents that have kids of excellent attendance.”

Instead of expecting students to ace every test, teachers look instead for their ability to improve. 

Leticia Hurtado, a third-grade teacher at Figueroa, said teachers do this by “allowing [students] to struggle, allowing them to make mistakes.”&�Բ�����;

The kids know teachers at Figueroa will help them through.

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

As of the 2023-2024 school year, LAUSD enrolled 17,245 homeless students, up 26% from the previous school year, according to data the district made public last month.  

The dramatic jump comes as the district struggles with in the enrollment of homeless students, and the that since 2020 propped up programs to aid kids experiencing homelessness.

“It is heartbreaking that mothers and children would be facing (homelessness) in our community, one of the richest cities in the world,” said LA superintendent Alberto Carvalho at a Sept. 21 press conference, calling the situation “a very unusual” scenario. 

But the increase of homeless students is also an intensification of a longstanding trend. During the 2021-2022 school year, there were 11,314 homeless students in the district, with the figure jumping nearly 21% that year to 13,656 in the 2022-23 school year.

Researchers have identified as reasons for rising homelessness in California. Los Angeles, in particular, has some of the most expensive . 

Carvalho, who has spoken publicly about a period in his life when he was homeless while growing up in Miami, said homeless kids face special challenges at school — and in life generally.

“They have many elements in common,” said Carvalho of homeless kids. “They are facing poverty, often English language limitations, immigration.”&�Բ�����;

LAUSD has also seen obstacles to boosting homeless students’ academic success. In 2022, almost 70% of homeless students in the district were considered chronically absent. Homeless students are also less likely to graduate from high school and go to college. 

Jennifer Kottke, Homeless Education Project director for Los Angeles County, said part of the increase may actually be attributed to better reporting, after state lawmakers in 2022 passed for all families. 

But Kottke also said increases in the cost of housing and food have made it more difficult for families to live comfortably in Los Angeles. 

And the district will soon lose an important source of funding for homeless services, she said. 

Federal American Rescue Plan funding provided to LAUSD and other U.S. districts during COVID-19 pandemic officially expired , although programs paid for by the relief money may continue to operate. 

Part of the money in LAUSD went to services for homeless students, where the funding paid for tutoring services, after-school programs, housing vouchers, and money for toiletries.

Now, many of those programs will be closing, Kottke said. The lack of funding will also affect temporary housing vouchers Los Angeles Unified was able to give families to help them get back up on their feet, and will also force staff cuts, she added.  

“It’s all American Rescue Plan funding,” said Kottke. “Once those materials are gone, it will be hard to refill them.”

LAUSD must find creative ways to combat rising homelessness, and do so quickly.  

And even though the district faces budgetary pressure on several fronts, Carvalho and the school board continue to push for new programs aimed at boosting outcomes for homeless kids.

Over the summer, the to help combat rising homelessness. And last month the district announced the opening of on-campus clothing boutiques meant to supply school outfits for students who need them.  

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

But room rates consume most of the $650 a week her husband earns from construction. The family depends on prepaid grocery cards from the to cover other basic needs.

“Without that, we probably wouldn’t be able to eat some days,” Menkedick said.

Gas station cards allow her to get her 17-year-old daughter to school. A T.J. Maxx gift card purchased a dress for the girl’s first dance. The district, she said, has “gone way above and beyond” to help families in such dire situations.

But those services and others like them could soon be jeopardized. The extra $800 million in federal funding districts across the country have relied on to cover emergency expenses for the nation’s homeless students runs out later this year. 

In , advocates called on lawmakers to extend the spending deadline for another year. Once those funds expire, many will be scrambling to keep serving families in crisis. 

“I don’t think a lot of people realize — especially people in Washington, D.C. — that when they were allocating these funds as a response to COVID, this was money we have actually needed for a really long time,” said Susanne Terry, coordinator of homeless education services for the San Diego County Office Education. “We don’t see it as COVID relief; it’s just relief.”

California’s ‘most vulnerable’

The money came at a critical moment. Since the pandemic, homelessness has continued to rise, with rates hitting last year. Among families with children, there was a over 2022, federal data shows.

The needs are particularly great in California, which has the highest per capita next to Washington, D.C. Last year, the state spent over $7 billion on roughly focused on reducing homelessness, but most of those efforts didn’t reach students. 

Terry’s office used some of its $960,000 from the relief program to create a new position, a specialist who helps shelter staff follow outlining services to  homeless students.

The training came at the right time for Veronica Sandoval, the first-ever education coordinator at Father Joe’s Villages, which runs homeless shelters in San Diego. She was unfamiliar with how to help families, often refugees, who were being turned away from schools because they lacked the required paperwork. The shelter also serves mothers who escaped domestic abuse.

“Their priority is surviving and making sure that their kiddos are fed,” Sandoval said.  “Sometimes education is not at the top of the list.”&�Բ�����;

With the specialist’s guidance, Sandoval learned how to help parents find transportation, overcome language barriers and navigate the bureaucracy of registering for school. Now, for the first time in the nonprofit’s 70-year history, all of its school-age children — about 180 —  are enrolled.

Sneakers and backpacks 

The pandemic aid legislation, a bipartisan amendment to the 2021 American Rescue Plan, totaled eight times the amount states typically receive from the federal government to who frequently double up with other families or live out of their cars. Many districts received dedicated funding for homeless students for the first time, according to the SchoolHouse Connection report, which was based on a national survey of over 1,400 homeless liaisons.

Some districts used the money for store and gas cards. Others paid for short-term housing, mental health services and technology like laptops and cellphones. 

More than half of the respondents said they plan to use federal Title I funds to continue some of the services, but 35% don’t plan to provide the same level of support.

Like a ‘widget maker’ 

But not all districts have been as efficient as Hacienda La Puente at spending the money. Because the funds will expire later this year, some districts prohibited departments from hiring extra staff that they’d have to let go.

Without extra personnel to purchase supplies and coordinate short-term hotel stays, finding ways to distribute the funds is often viewed “like an added thing on your plate,” said San Diego’s Terry.

Contracting and purchasing rules have also been “roadblocks to quickly and effectively spending” the money, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection. 

She received one email from a frustrated homeless liaison whose request to purchase a van to get students to school was rejected. A state official responded that “a yellow school bus” was the best way to get students to school. 

The liaison wrote to Duffield: “If we had enough drivers and yellow buses we wouldn’t be asking for a van.”

Such hurdles help explain why a quarter of the homeless liaisons worry the funds will dry up before they have a chance to spend it. Ohio districts, for example, still have not spent almost half of the $18.8 million they received, according to the state’s . And have only spent about 45% of the $9.93 million they received.

Liaisons say they need more time to spend the money. Some received it late, and others proposed ideas that were turned down. One New Hampshire district rejected requests to spend the money on eyeglasses, taxis for students and clothes, according to a liaison quoted in the report. Officials said staff first had to “exhaust all community resources.”

Those findings echo Jennifer Kottke’s experience at the Los Angeles County Office of Education, where she serves as a homeless education project director.  The county received over $3 million from the program. She asked to spend $280,000 on school and hygiene supplies — a request, she said, that should have taken about three months to approve. Instead, it took twice that long. At one point, the paperwork required 12 signatures.

Expected in October, the order arrived just last week. The red tape, she said, hampers her ability to help families in crisis and sometimes makes her feel like another “widget maker in the factory.”&�Բ�����;

In July, according to California Department of Education data, the Los Angeles office still had over $2.6 million to spend. Kottke used about $400,000 for a tutoring program that has served 500 students, but will terminate at the end of the school year. 

She said she’s not even sure how much funding is left. Some liaisons across the county’s 80 districts didn’t even know they had received relief funds specifically for homeless students. The same was true for 24% of liaisons nationally, the survey found.

“There are days where I just feel like I’m spending so much time generating paperwork, that I’m not getting to the core of what I should be doing,” she said. “We’ve got a very vulnerable population. We’re trying to change the landscape of homelessness.”

How bad could the problem get? A finds that care for nearly 3 million children could soon be disrupted. That’s one-third of all children currently in the American child care system. As that stark reality has left state leaders scrambling for answers, one potential solution could be found in enhancing the capacity and efficiency at key state agencies. 

Child care is an important , as access to high-quality, affordable early learning and child care is key to better educational, social, and economic outcomes for children — and to greater flexibility for parents aiming to participate in the workforce. Affordability, though, remains the critical missing link; according to , the average annual cost of child care is over $10,000 per year, and more than one in ten families with children have had caretakers step away from jobs to care for children as a result.

Congress’s legislative attempts to address the child care crisis were short-term efforts that failed to take into consideration two significant issues: the fractured infrastructure of state agencies and their to effectively administer additional funding to implement meaningful change across the system.

During the pandemic, state officials were allocated five to six times their original operating budget and then asked to distribute that money very quickly, all during an unprecedented global crisis. Prior to the pandemic, from 2018 to 2019, states were only given an average child care budget of $3.2 billion from the Child Care and Development Fund. Nowhere near enough to prop up a fragile child care system with an underpaid workforce and lack of high-quality programs. But suddenly amid the pandemic, that amount increased exponentially to $8.2 billion dollars, and states were given a two-year timeline to spend that money — or risk losing it.

Those able to use the funds in a timely manner allocated much of it to expand eligibility for subsidies and increase the amount of money families received. However, now that these pandemic-era subsidies are gone, many families no longer qualify for child care assistance, or will receive reduced amounts. If state agencies were given the time to improve capacity and infrastructure, the increased funding could have been managed more efficiently and invested in long-term solutions.

States are the critical intermediary in the child care process — reaching both parents and providers. They license facilities and workers, administer funding and subsidies, and receive federal government funding that in turn trickles to parents, child care providers, local governments, and beyond. But the process, at best, is fractured. Moving forward, the child care system needs to be modernized to make it more parent centric and provider-friendly, which can be achieved by first increasing capacity and support for state agencies. 

This translates to two possible paths for states: they can either find the funds to hire more state workers or find ways to increase efficiency with current personnel.

In many state agencies, there is more work than the agency has time and resources to complete. That’s what I mean when I point to a lack of capacity — and it can slow down, or bring to a standstill, licensing or zoning approvals for potential child care providers or workers. In Nevada, for instance, there is a of nearly 10,000 background check applications. If agencies gain capacity (better systems, streamlined processes, more staff), they could more efficiently process child care providers’ licensing paperwork, giving parents more available options. 

To simplify and modernize the child care system, states should also look to other successful service delivery programs — like health insurance enrollment platforms. Under the Affordable Care Act, many states have created their own custom state-based health insurance exchanges, providing residents with easy-to-shop-for insurance, while also effectively servicing health insurers. Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions have empowered this process, enabling consumers to search for and enroll in health plans, and to apply for subsidies, while creating efficiencies for agency personnel. 

By embracing technology, those same benefits could extend to other agencies, leading to more efficient and effective delivery of not only child care programs, but also Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF. 

Looking at the bigger picture, states need to assess their social infrastructure, evaluate what it should look like in the future, and consider what services can be used to increase capacity long-term. This planning is crucial given that the Child Care Stabilization Subgrant Program will in months and expanded Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funding will also need to be reauthorized by Congress in the near future. 

The tenuous nature of this funding could lead to more providers shutting their doors, and states being even further behind in solving the problem. Or states could reorient their priorities and processes towards creating a system that moves centers and providers more easily through the licensing process, helps them reopen their doors and provides parents with easier means of finding and affording care. 

It’s no small task – but it’s a first step towards confronting a looming crisis.

As Connecticut celebrates the opening of four new centers designed to meet children’s urgent behavioral health needs, some fear that a lack of recurring state funding means the program’s future is unsteady.

The four  established as part of  were launched using one-time dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act. Advocates say in order to operate long-term, the programs will need recurring money from the state.

Lawmakers plan to examine new funding mechanisms in the coming legislative session, and state agencies are working together to discern the best ways to bill Medicaid to cover the cost of running the crisis centers.

“Let’s be real about what this work takes,” said Sarah Eagan, Connecticut’s child advocate. “One is the UCCs cannot have one-time funding. There has to be a sustainable funding plan.”

In addition to long-term funding, officials are also working to get the word out to ensure that schools and emergency services know when to take a child to the crisis center rather than the emergency department.

The launch of the services, Eagan said, is still a cause for celebration. Children nationwide have reported more problems with behavioral health such as eating disorders, substance abuse, depression and anxiety in recent years, and the crisis centers are designed to help them quickly.

The urgent crisis centers are part of a law passed in 2022 as lawmakers pushed to address reports of increasing mental health problems among children during the COVID-19 pandemic. The centers are designed as walk-in outpatient clinics for kids who are having behavioral health crises such as thoughts of suicide or self-harm, depression, anxiety or out-of-control behavior, among other mental health issues.

There are four in Connecticut, at  in Hartford,  in New Haven,  in New London and  in Waterbury.

Startup and implementation of the centers cost $1.7 million in ARPA dollars, said Melanie Sparks, chief fiscal officer at the Department of Children and Families.

The two larger facilities cost about $4.2 million per year to operate, and the smaller two cost about $2.6 million per year to operate, Sparks said.

The department anticipates that ARPA funding will last through June 2024. DCF is working with the Department of Social Services to determine what new Medicaid billing codes could apply to the services offered at the centers.

Some services are already billable, Sparks said.

Three of the four centers are licensed as behavioral health outpatient clinics and can use the state’s fee system, according to an emailed statement from DSS spokesperson Giovanni Pinto. 

“That being said, we need to add a few more billing codes to align with the model. For example, in outpatient there is no nurse assessment,” Pinto said. “In the UCC, a nurse does an assessment, so we need to add a nursing assessment code.”

The change to the billing codes in Connecticut would require legislative approval.

Sparks added that the state is still conducting an analysis to see whether the billing would cover the entire cost of the crisis center’s operation.

“It’s really hard to analyze that before the programs are operational,” Sparks said. “This is a new service model to the state of Connecticut.”

The Village in Hartford had its . The programs are accepting patients. The Village has treated about nine children, officials said in an interview Wednesday.

Rep. Tammy Exum, D-West Hartford, said in an interview that she’s working with other lawmakers to determine potential sources of funding for the centers. She hopes to have a sustainable system of mental health care that offers community-based support for kids.

She said she doesn’t want it to be “reactive” and hopes lawmakers can create policy to support a system that’s ready for anything — another pandemic, for example. She and Sen. Ceci Maher, D-Wilton, co-chair the newly formed together.

“They’re rolling out,” Exum said. “We’re excited to be able to roll them out, but we need to be able to fund them.”&�Բ�����;

Maher said children’s mental health continues to be a priority for the legislature. Maher is co-chair of the Committee on Children.

“Obviously it is really important to make sure that this isn’t just a one-time fund, so we’re certainly going to be working with the chairs of appropriations,” Maher said. “It’s just getting everyone on board.”

Hector Glynn, chief operating officer at The Village, said he thinks lawmakers are supportive and his staff are working to get the word out to show that the program is being utilized.

“I think [House Speaker Matthew] Ritter iterated that there’s still a lot of work to be done to ensure that the funding is stable for these programs beyond this fiscal year,” Glynn said.

Mental health service providers are giving the state certain data on the centers’ operations — who is coming into the clinics, barriers to access to service and what kinds of problems people come in with, among other measures, said Frank Gregory, administrator of children’s behavioral health community service system at DCF.

DCF has also partnered with the Department of Public Health to get the word out to emergency services about the urgent crisis centers.

“Kids come to the emergency department primarily in ambulances,” Eagan said. “Yes, from school or home, but they’re coming to hospitals by ambulance.”

In 2021, physicians reported that children with mental health needs were . The kids often had to wait hours for care.

The public health agency is working to revise its protocols so that ambulances can take children to the crisis centers rather than emergency rooms, although some providers are already working with local emergency services to put those protocols in place, Gregory said.

DCF is also working to ensure schools know about the urgent crisis centers by communicating with the state Department of Education and , Gregory said.

The Village is working with local mental health providers and schools to ensure community members know about their services, said Amy Samela, vice president of residential programs at The Village.

She added that local partnerships also help ensure that kids are able to get care in the community after their visits to an urgent crisis center.

Community care was another of Eagan’s concerns, as many families have reported difficulty accessing local care or being stuck on waiting lists for mental health treatment in recent years.

“It’s good, but we have a lot of work to do,” Eagan said.

The Village is also opening a subacute crisis stabilization unit with 10 beds in the fall. They’re aiming to open next month. The new unit will be another place that kids who visit the urgent crisis center can go if they need to stay longer to get the treatment they need, Samela said.

The Village also plans to call families every day after a visit to the urgent crisis center to see how they’re doing until they’re settled in with the next level of services, Samela added.

“We really want to keep kids in the community, out of facilities, out of hospitals,” Samela said. “Kids are in crisis. There’s no doubt about it.”

This story was originally published on 

For schools, the longest period in history with a 50-50 U.S. Senate will likely be remembered for one thing — Democrats’ passage of a massive COVID-relief bill that provided $122 billion in federal funds for K-12.

On March 4, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris cast a key tie-breaking vote from the Senate dais that allowed the $1.9 trillion pandemic recovery passage to move forward.

“Nobody can use scarcity as an excuse,” said Charles Barone, vice president of K-12 policy with Democrats for Education Reform, a think tank, and a former Democratic staffer in the Senate. “There won’t be any other packages like that for at least another decade.”

With new senators expected to be sworn in Tuesday, the Senate reaches the end of an era. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s in Georgia concluded only the fourth time in history that the Senate was evenly split between the two parties. And even though Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has officially to become an independent, the way she votes isn’t expected to change much. That shifts the balance to 51-49 for the Democrats. By many accounts, the Senate make-up has worked in . He scored wins with the American Rescue Plan and a key known as the Inflation Reduction Act. He’s also seated than any president since John Kennedy. 

But for those who latched onto ��������’s broad education agenda, the past two years have been bittersweet. Despite delivering an unprecedented windfall for pandemic recovery, Democrats had to sacrifice other education proposals, like two years of preschool and funds to rebuild aging school buildings.

At first, having Democrats in control of Congress and the White House “gave people enough hope that they aimed high and tried to shoot the moon,” Barone said.  

But it wasn’t long before Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a fiscally conservative Democrat, put up roadblocks that forced Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and the rest of the party to scale back their ambitions. 

With a 50-50 Senate, there’s “no room for error,” said Bethany Little, principal at EducationCounsel, a consulting firm.  

“The slightest change in the wind can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” she said. There was momentum for the party after ��������’s election, but once that sense of urgency waned, “you couldn’t get some really big agenda items that Democrats have wanted for a long time.”

Those included major increases in funding for child care and pre-K, two years of free community college and the extension of a higher child tax credit that data shows by almost 30%. Little called those proposals “generational shifts that were all on the table at once.”

After nearly a year of negotiations with Manchin and multiple rewrites, ��������’s so-called Build Back Better plan emerged as the Inflation Reduction Act, a shadow of the original package. It passed 51-50 on Aug. 7, with Harris breaking another tie.

The vice president was also called on to tip the balance in favor of Catherine Lhamon to lead the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Republicans opposed her confirmation because of positions on issues such as school discipline and transgender students’ rights they see as examples of government overreach.

‘The holy grail’

Advocates for federal spending on school construction were especially disappointed when dedicated funding to repair and rebuild schools was dropped from spending bills in an effort to win Manchin’s blessing.

“This country would absolutely have gotten help for its aged school buildings if we had had a Congress able to deliver good policy,” said Mary Filardo,  executive director of the 21^st Century School Fund, which focuses on modernizing the nation’s schools.

��������’s original included $100 billion for school construction and repairs. When Democrats cut that provision, Filardo and education groups hoped it would resurface in Build Back Better. That didn’t happen. 

“School Infrastructure is like the holy grail,” Barone said. “It always seems within grasp, and then it isn’t.”&�Բ�����;

The loss of a dedicated funding bill means many districts are now using American Rescue Plan funds for major facility upgrades.

Ironically, the Education Department frowns on those decisions, issuing last month that “strongly discourages” districts from using the money that way.

‘The future of public policy making’

Even though Manchin helped rein in progressives on a few of their big-ticket priorities, that didn’t stop the GOP from portraying Democrats as a party on a spending spree.

“What the Democrats have done is extraordinarily harmful to the future of public policy making,” said David Cleary, Republican staff director for the Senate education committee.

Both the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act were the result of budget reconciliation, a process that allows the party in charge to pass legislation without any votes from across the aisle. Those multi-billion-dollar packages “ruined the opportunity to come together,” Cleary said.

The Biden administration, he said, has taken the same approach in pursuing policies and actions bound to annoy Republicans.

The Education Department’s effort to undo what Cleary called former Secretary Betsy DeVos’s “chef’s kiss perfect” Title IX regulation is one example. ��������’s proposed rule would extend protections against sexual discrimination and harassment to transgender students and, Cleary argues, roll back due process rights for those accused of sexual misconduct.

He also called ��������’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt per borrower “an abomination” that further divides Republicans and Democrats and sends the message that “no one ever has to pay for education.” The U.S. Supreme Court the fate of the plan next month.

Even though Democrats still control the Senate, the Republican majority in the House will change the dynamic when both chambers get to work this winter. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, for example, could find himself facing increased scrutiny from the House education committee over issues such as districts’ spending of COVID relief funds.

“They won’t be able to ignore [Republicans’] letters and hearing requests,” Cleary said.

Legislatively, is expected to make much progress on their agendas. But that also means Sinema’s knack for — on issues such as infrastructure, and — could become more valuable if members want to get anything done. 

Following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, she used her relationships with Republicans to help Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy and Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina on gun control. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed by a vote of 65 to 33 and provides roughly $2 billion for safety improvements, school climate initiatives and student mental health services.

“She’s deeply committed to the Senate as an institution,” Cleary said. 

Like his former boss, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Cleary said Sinema is willing to chip away at her “big vision” with smaller victories. That sets her apart from members such as Vermont progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and conservative Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

Their style, he said, is more like: “I want what I want. You can’t have anything, and why am I not winning?”

Correction: An earlier version of this story contained an incorrect figure for the size of a federal pandemic recovery package.

That’s why some school finance experts are urging districts to redirect some of their plans for federal relief funds toward learning recovery before that money is actually spent. 

“From our perspective, a pivot does seem warranted,” Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said last week . While it’s normal for districts to get assessment results after they’ve finalized their budgets, this year, she added, the achievement gaps are “more glaring.”

Her team’s analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress data, released last month, showed that almost 2 million middle and high school students — who would have scored in the proficient range if the pandemic hadn’t occurred — are now below proficient. 

And about 700,000 students “fell out of advanced level in math,” said Chad Aldeman, policy director at Edunomics. “This means 700,000 fewer future scientists, engineers, data and medical experts … that are now not in our pipeline.”&�Բ�����;

While district budgets include costs that are already “locked in,” such as salaries and signed contracts, Roza noted that districts still have some “wiggle room” to redirect funds toward more academic interventions if positions haven’t been filled. And when they’re negotiating contracts with afterschool providers they can require staff to spend time on math — or other areas where students have fallen far behind. Her comments followed a from McKinsey & Company showing that districts have yet to spend $130 billion of the $190 billion in federal relief funds they received.

Amending an approved budget is not part of a district’s normal cycle, Roza said. But superintendents and school board members can request it. State education agencies can also require districts to report what they’re doing to address specific content areas, which might prompt a budget revision. 

And while state lawmakers can’t tell districts how to spend relief funds, they can districts to offer certain types of programs, like tutoring or summer school. Based on recent state test score trends, Austin Reid, senior legislative director for federal education policy at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said he expects to see similar actions when legislatures reconvene next year. 

“I also think we may see more legislatures engaging in more oversight activities on [relief funds], which may include strong encouragement of certain strategies,” he said.

Chris Neale, assistant commissioner for federal relief programs at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said he’s seen several districts reopen their budgets after they’re finalized. While he doesn’t know the exact reasons, he said it’s “plausible” that assessment data is prompting the revisions. Other factors are likely, including “emergent needs for mental health services,” he said.

The ‘constraints’ on spending

Using available financial data, Roza highlighted districts — including Baltimore County, Dallas and Miami — that are prioritizing math instruction.

A lot of districts are spending the one-time funds on teacher training — more than 80 of the top 100 districts, according to . In Oregon, for example, lawmakers and advocates to spend the funds on training teachers on elementary reading instruction, with the argument that it would have a long-term payoff. But Roza said professional development wouldn’t necessarily offer an immediate benefit to students.

The McKinsey report estimated that about $20 billion in relief funds might go unspent because of “administrative hurdles,” staff shortages and the inability of leaders to “orchestrate spending.”

Districts, meanwhile, are still waiting on the U.S. Department of Education to answer two questions: Will they have more time beyond the September 2024 deadline to fully obligate the billions of dollars in relief funds remaining from the American Rescue Plan? And are there additional “allowable uses” for relief funds that the department has yet to clarify?

“I have a lot of empathy for states and districts that are figuring out the best way to spend [relief funds] within the constraints they have,” said Sheara Kvaric, co-founder of Federal Education Group, a law firm specializing in federal education policy. “I think states and districts have innovative ideas, but it’s hard to commit to them without the assurance the spending is ok.”

Congress has joined education organizations in asking the department to allow districts to keep spending the money through the end of 2026, instead of January 2025. In , six House Democrats asked the department to issue guidance “given the crucial need to meet the immediate needs of students and to address the long-term impacts of the pandemic on academic growth and student mental health.”

Last week, the department also responded to a July letter from the AASA, The School Superintendents Association, with the same request. James Lane, senior adviser to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, reminded the organization that 96% of the first round of relief funds from 2020 has been spent and that future extensions would be considered “under extraordinary, case-by-case circumstances.” He said an updated document on allowable uses would be coming soon.

Sasha Pudelski, AASA’s director of advocacy, said the letter wasn’t much of a response.

“It’s the same as before,” she said, “no answers, no process, no helpful information for districts and states.”

The puzzling finding comes from figures released Friday by education researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Their new resource, the , compiles test scores from roughly 4,000 schools that serve some in third through eighth grades across 29 states and the District of Columbia. Their work presents the first school system-level analysis of student learning through the pandemic.

Students in urban and suburban schools were 65% and 54% of a school year behind in math, respectively, according to the Scorecard; yet young people at rural schools were buffered somewhat, losing half a year. Meanwhile in reading, where drops were less dramatic overall, rural students fell behind by a third of a school year while urban and suburban students were just 29% and 24% of a year back.

Focusing on math scores, where COVID losses were more stark, Harvard education professor Thomas Kane said his findings are relatively good news for rural schools.

“The average rural district fared better than the average urban district,” he said in an email.

The reasons explaining the trend still remain something of a mystery, added his research partner, Stanford education professor Sean Reardon.

“We haven’t had a chance yet to dig into possible explanations for why we see some difference between rural and urban districts,” he said. 

The Scorecard’s analysis also includes town school districts, which are typically less remote and more populated than rural districts, but further from city centers than suburban districts. Town school systems had drops in math similar to their suburban counterparts and losses in reading slightly less severe than rural districts.

Alex Baum works as director of advocacy and research at the , which supports several rural counties in Iowa and runs a regional . He has not yet seen “clear and convincing data” explaining the differences between rural and urban schools through the pandemic, he said. (Iowa is not yet included in the Scorecard.) But he believes part of the reason for relatively larger drops in reading scores among students who live in more remote locations may be their limited access to outside-of-school learning opportunities.

“With fewer literacy programs, summer learning options [and] libraries, … rural students didn’t have the additional support that urban students had, leading to a larger decline in reading proficiency scores,” Baum said. 

Nancy Mondragon, a classroom aide in Arkansas’s Waldron School District, said the children’s struggles reflected the parents’ economic woes.

“In rural communities like ours, parents were juggling a lot in trying to make a living, and children spent more time on devices,” she said. “The reading loss definitely shows.”

Mondragon is training to become a lead teacher through Reach University, a program working to combat teacher shortages in rural districts. Reach Dean of Undergraduate Studies Kimberly Eckert believes those persistent staffing issues may also be a factor behind literacy losses.

“For reading, where different learner needs demand different interventions, the teacher shortage may be more of the issue here,” she said. “Access to reading specialists in rural communities may have been impacted by COVID, even if schools remained open.”

The length of school closures has been a commonly cited factor in the conversation around missed learning, particularly in math. Schools play an especially large role in teaching students arithmetic, and sparsely populated areas were less likely to shutter their campuses during the pandemic. 

It’s “plausible” that the difference between rural and urban districts’ scores could have hinged significantly on rural systems reopening sooner, said Reardon. But vastly different virtual learning programs from one district to the next and with young people juggling traumatic life-changing events like the death of a caregiver, he stressed that other factors also certainly played in.

“There was a lot happening in communities that shaped the magnitude of learning losses in addition to when schools were open or remote,” he said.

Overall, the Harvard and Stanford research suggests that school closures were not the primary element explaining achievement losses. Though setbacks tended to be higher where schools remained closed longer, there was wide variation in the results. Districts that remained virtual for equal amounts of time often had vastly different learning outcomes, and states and school systems that underwent extended closures in many cases outperformed those that opened sooner for in-person learning.

The Scorecard relies on state test scores for its analysis, but because many states use different exams, the researchers used results from the Oct. 24 National Assessment of Educational Progress to normalize the data so they could make apples-to-apples comparisons. States that have not yet released their test scores are not included in the analysis, including several with large drop-offs in achievement and high rates of school closures during COVID, such as Maryland, New Jersey and New Mexico.

Beyond differences between rural, urban and suburban schools, their research reveals several other key findings on pandemic learning:

• Losses were most pronounced in high-poverty districts compared to more affluent ones. The wealthiest quarter of districts in the sample maintained an extra 21% of a year’s worth of learning in math and 6% of a year’s worth of learning in reading over the most economically disadvantaged quarter. 

“We’ve seen the greatest increase in inequity in our lifetimes over the last few years,” Kane. “Unless we act over the next couple of years, these losses could become permanent and could have long-term consequences for social mobility.”

• Math setbacks exceeded a full year’s worth of learning in the school districts of over a half million students, some 5% of those represented in the analysis. On average, students were behind about a half grade level in math and about a quarter grade level in reading. A small minority attended districts that made gains in math, 2.5%, or reading, 15%, from 2019 to 2022.

• Recovering missed learning will be expensive. In nearly two-thirds of districts included in the analysis, catching students up will likely require investments exceeding the total cash delivered to schools via the American Rescue Plan. (The researchers reached that conclusion by assuming the cost of additional recovered learning will be equivalent to the typical cost of learning during the school year. In other words, catching students up on 25% of a year’s worth of learning will require 25% of a district’s annual operating budget.)

Tequilla Brownie, CEO of TNTP, she sees the new data as a “call to action.”

“It is clear that the problems pre-date the pandemic and, therefore, we should not confine ourselves to solutions that present a path back to pre-pandemic levels of proficiency,” she said.

Mental health services for Ohio’s children have consistently needed improvements, according to experts.

Areas across the state are still hurting for access, they say, and need help getting kids what they need to react to mental health issues, and prevent them before they happen.

“Ohio has an opportunity to invest in children, so that we’re promoting their well-being and preventing some of these (mental health issues) from happening,” said Kim Eckhart, research manager for the Children’s Defense Fund of Ohio.

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Research done by the CDF-Ohio showed that Ohio lacks a uniform system of care for behavioral health, despite the fact that “20% of a child’s well-being can be impacted by clinical intervention,” according to a 2021 report by the CDF and the Mental Health & Addiction Advocacy Coalition.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are part of the risks that can impact children and create mental health issues in need of intervention. ACEs, according to the CDF-Ohio, are “strongly linked to the development of a wide range of health problems,” and can include exposure to family dysfunction, violence, and financial hardship within the family.

In 2021, Ohio ranked 46th in the nation for children having three or more ACEs, with minorities at higher risk.

While Medicaid funds access to mental health services for children, transportation, and a lack of providers can create barriers to care.

Robin Harris, executive director of the Alcohol, Drugs, and Mental Health Board of Gallia, Jackson, and Meigs counties, said all but four Appalachian counties in the state are designated as “mental health professional shortage areas.” Only one “crisis stabilization facility” exists in Appalachia, in Gallia County.

“Bringing that facility to fruition was an example of good old fashioned Appalachian determination,” said Harris, speaking to the bipartisan Ohio Legislative Children’s Caucus.

Still, children typically have to travel two hours or more to get to a mental health facility, with 14% of Appalachian families reporting they have no vehicle to do so.

Stephanie Starcher, superintendent of Fort Frye Local School District, not only recognizes the struggles of mental health within her students, but also within her own family.

Starcher’s daughter suffers from severe mental health issues, and her family has had to travel two hours to get to Cincinnati or Columbus for the proper care. Starcher said she, her daughter, and her husband have waited three days in a local emergency room awaiting transport to a facility.

She and her husband have missed work and her daughter has missed school to travel to get care when telehealth services aren’t appropriate.

“I keep thinking to myself constantly,” Starcher said. “If I as an educator…are having to do this to get our child the kind of services that they need because (the services are) not in Appalachia, then what about the families that don’t have the education to jump through the hoops that I have?”

Fort Frye has contracted with local behavioral health providers to staff social workers and counselors, who work with students after receiving parental permission.

“I kept hearing from the agencies that we worked with that it was very hard to recruit workers to the area,” Starcher said. “Even though we have the funds…to support clinical settings at schools, getting the workers here is a huge challenge.”

Appalachia has its share of issues, but Eckhart said the problem isn’t exclusive to Appalachia.

“Across the state in those rural counties, you can have 20 providers in the entire county,” Eckhart said.

Advocates want to see regional investment focused on behavioral health improvements, including funding from the American Rescue Plan to get resources off the ground.

Randy Leite, executive director of the Appalachian Children Coalition said the organization is conducting “needs assessments” in all 32 Appalachian counties.

But use of federal ARPA funds to invest in mental health throughout the state, and promotion of the student wellness and success funds at schools for social and emotional learning — something parents have said should be a priority in education — are “extremely important,” according to Eckhart.

In May of this year, Gov. Mike DeWine announced a “pediatric behavioral health initiative,” allocating $84 million in federal ARPA funds “to increase access to care and expand capacity across the state so kids and their families can get services and supports for their behavioral health needs in or near their communities,” according to an announcement about the initiative.

The funding was approved by the General Assembly in House Bill 168. $25 million of the funds went to Dayton Children’s Hospital, $17 million went to ProMedica Russell J. Ebeid Children’s Hospital in Toledo, $15 million to University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s, $10 million to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and $7 million to Akron Children’s Hospital.

The Appalachian Children’s Coalition’s Integrated Services for Behavioral Health was designated $6.45 million, and the coalition’s Hopewell Health Centers received $3.55 million in allocations.

Leite argued for multiple funding sources to cement the resources in the state. He estimated $20 million to $30 million would be needed in one-time funds to get the services truly up in the air.

“Because of the complexity, I think there’s really a need to think about all the funding sources available,” Leite said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

The average increase was 10.8% from 2020-21 to 2021-22 and 16.5% from 2020-21 to 2022-23, according to a late August of 118 large school system budgets published by Burbio, which has tracked K-12 policy through the pandemic.

Nearly 1 in 5 district budgets within that group had grown by more than 25% since 2021.

In many cases, those investments translate to direct benefits for students, said Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. School systems have invested in tutoring programs and summer learning experiences to catch students up after many experienced significant delays in their learning due to COVID disruptions such as virtual learning and quarantines. Other districts have used the cash to make long-needed infrastructure improvements such as upgrading ventilation with or .

But with American Rescue Plan money set to expire in 2024, and with U.S. student enrollment projected to drop by due to slowed birth rates nationwide, the Georgetown K-12 finance expert warns that schools for a period of “bloodletting” by 2024-25 when budgets must adjust back down.

“You don’t have to look too far out to see pain coming,” Aldeman said. “That could look like flat or stagnant salaries, that can look like layoffs, that could look like closing schools. The federal money has deferred some of those tough choices or even made it so people can ignore them for a little bit. But they will come and it’s just a matter of when and how hard they hit.”

In Los Angeles, where enrollment has been , the school system released projections for total spending to drop nearly 20% from 2022-23 to 2024-25 — from roughly $11 billion to about $9 billion. Much of the difference represents the ending of stimulus funds.

L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has described that impending fiscal cliff, conjoined with enrollment drops, as a quickly approaching “Armageddon.”&�Բ�����;

Most school leaders have worked to avoid a 2024-25 economic catastrophe in their stimulus spending, said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

“Many superintendents have been careful, anticipating the fiscal cliff, not to use the dollars in ways that would create a problem for them down the line. For example, teacher salaries or the hiring of significant staff that then will have to be let go.”

For 20 years, Domenech worked as school superintendent in Long Island, New York over a period when the region lost 40% of its students.

“For all those years, I never built a school,” he said. “All I did was close schools.”

That’s a difficult task, the school leader acknowledged, because while families understand in the abstract the district must consolidate to prevent taxes from soaring, they usually want to see other schools close rather than their own. But cutting through the noise, school leaders can also understand the process of what Domenech calls “right-sizing” schools as an opportunity to “balance” student populations, he said, desegregating schools racially and socioeconomically.

Aldeman advises superintendents looking at enrollment declines not to kick the consolidation can down the road. Though school closings will inevitably cause disruptions, he said, policymakers can ease the pain with investments like more guidance counselors or improved transportation.

“Now would be a good time to start thinking about [consolidating],” Alderman said. “If we delay it, then the money will run out.”

When COVID struck in 2020, the then-eighth grader’s Upper Valley, New Hampshire middle school campus shut down for several weeks to pivot to virtual learning, like most others across the country. Paige knew then that her daughter Amy — whose name has been changed in this piece for the student’s privacy — was at risk of falling behind even further. Once online school started, live instruction was only on a “part-time basis,” Paige said.

“There was lost learning time,” she said. “Sometimes there weren’t teachers because the teachers were sick.”

Although Paige didn’t know it yet, Amy had dyslexia. For years, the now-17-year-old’s condition went undiagnosed. Meanwhile, it complicated the teen’s part-time job at a clothing store, because she struggled to type in email addresses at the cash register.

In a last-ditch effort to help her daughter, Paige connected with a tutor specializing in phonics-based literacy, who she now works with via a relatively new state program. After beginning tutoring, Amy showed quick improvement on spelling and reading tests administered by her high school, Paige said. Amy’s literacy coach recognized signs of dyslexia and pointed the family toward screening for the disability, which led to her diagnosis and extra services at school.

“I’ve seen progress,” Paige said. “The way [her tutor] works with her is not a way … a teacher would have the time to work with her in a classroom situation.”

That sort of individualized, intensive coaching is a key solution the Granite State has bet on to help students like Amy get back on track after the pandemic. The state is entering its second year offering the scholarship, which uses a digital wallet to provide $1,000 for private tutoring to any young person whose education was negatively impacted by the pandemic. The scholarship is available to all students, regardless of need, and can be applied toward tutoring from state-approved educators.

“When I explain the program to [parents], they become very excited, like, ‘Oh, this is great,’” New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut said. “In some cases, they’re almost like, ‘It’s too good to be true. How can this possibly be?’”

But families in New Hampshire have tapped into less than a third of the available scholarship funds. So far this academic year, 724 young people have received scholarships — accounting for just $724,000 out of a $2.5 million total funded by federal COVID relief cash. Upon inception, the state granted scholarship eligibility only to students from low-income families, but with signups lagging and substantial funds remaining, they made access universal.

State testing in 2022 revealed that more than half of New Hampshire students were not proficient in math and over 40% were behind in English, though scores have rebounded slightly since 2021, according to data provided by the state. Research shows sustained individual or small-group tutoring can be one of the best ways to help children catch up.

“One student might be struggling with functions. Another is struggling with algebraic equations,” Edelblut said. “Those are the kinds of things that in a one-on-one tutoring session with a teacher that can be drawn out, they can be addressed, they can be targeted, and we can fill in those gaps.”

Soon after the Paige family began tutoring, they saw a post on social media about the YES! grant and realized they qualified. Though they’re still working out the logistics of the digital wallet, the funds will cover more than two months of intensive lessons, which will be “definitely helpful, without a doubt,” Paige said.

The program has also served its purpose for student Sylas Marrotte. The scholarship gave him access to a trained special education teacher for twice-a-week math and reading tutoring, grandmother Sherry Newman said.

“My grandson, who already had learning disabilities, was falling way behind [during COVID],” Newman wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. “The tutor was very flexible and supportive.”

The program could help to “democratize” the private tutoring market, which often is available only to wealthier families, said Matthew Kraft, associate professor of education at Brown University. 

But in his eyes, the slow uptake among low-income families is a damning indicator, signaling either poor advertising to the neediest parents or failure to alleviate other barriers such as transportation costs. 

It’s possible many families “just never learned about the program or couldn’t figure out how to sign up or didn’t think that they could make it work,” Kraft said. “I don’t think … they’ve met the demand in that group of students.”

Nationwide, parental interest in learning recovery options has been lower than policymakers would have hoped, according to recent from the Brookings Institute. Despite significant gaps in learning for millions of students across the country, less than a third of families said they wanted their kids to participate in tutoring and less than a quarter said they were interested in district-run summer camps.

Even if all the New Hampshire tutoring funds get disbursed, Kraft observed, it will still only serve 2,500 learners — a drop in the bucket compared to the state’s over 185,000 students, including roughly 50,000 who are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy indicator for the number of students living in poverty.

The New Hampshire Department of Education does not “at this time” know the share of low-income students who have taken advantage of the tutoring scholarship money compared to wealthier youth, Edelblut said. Students could opt for virtual sessions in cases where transportation presented a barrier, he noted.

The YES! scholarship is one of three state-funded tutoring options available to New Hampshire families. The state announced this month that it had that will give more than 100,000 students access to the site’s 24/7 digital tutoring services. Since early in the pandemic, the state has also partnered with Khan Academy founder Sal Khan’s initiative, providing the state’s students with free access to the site’s learning resources. That site has seen about 4,300 New Hampshire visitors, said Kimberly Houghton, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Education, although she did not have figures on how many tutoring sessions students have actually participated in.

Among the 74 individuals and organizations registered by the state as , including specialists in math, literacy, speech and executive functioning, a handful said over email that none or just one student had reached out for tutoring sessions.

But Krista Martin, who runs the Sylvan Learning centers in Portsmouth and Salem, has worked with six students who have used YES! scholarship money to pay for sessions. Two of those families were already paying for Sylvan tutoring services before the grant and now use the funds to offset costs, but the other four enrolled once they received the scholarship, Martin said. 

For the most part, families come in hopes that the sessions will help their kids recover from the pandemic, Martin wrote in an email.

“​​For many of our students, the breakdowns started during the COVID years,” Martin said. “Since the pandemic, we have heard from many families that they want their children to enjoy school again and show interest in what they are learning like they did before COVID.”

For the Paige family, Amy’s struggles began earlier, but YES! has helped — at least a little — along the way. On an August evening in northern New Hampshire, tutor Lynne Howard sat at her dining table and helped the teen break down words into their individual sound components. Howard was a longtime reading specialist in the local schools and now runs a tutoring company called Summit Literacy.

“Say hush,” Howard said.

“Hush,” Amy responded.

“Now say hush but change ‘shh’ to ‘mm,’ ” Howard added on.

“Hum,” Amy answered.

Word by word, sound by sound, Howard and Amy made out ways to fill the student’s learning gaps. They identified prefixes, suffixes, root words, closed and open vowels — steadily making progress to improve her spelling. And their time together ended with praise that, for many years before tutoring, Paige was concerned she’d never hear about her daughter’s literacy.

“And that’s it, you worked hard today,” Howard said at the end of an hour. “Excellent job.”

“It’s actually a little surreal” seeing the rich slate of offerings, said Brodrick Clarke, vice president of the .��

He’s worked at summer learning organizations for over a quarter century, making what used to be a difficult case to school administrators: That districts should offer camp-style July programs to all students rather than enrolling only those who flunked classes during the academic year.

Suddenly, his job has become much easier. 

A growing consensus has elevated summer learning programs to top priority after three consecutive school years disrupted by the pandemic. Several studies, including a 2018 , show camps blending fun and academics give students a leg up in key subject areas. So with millions of students nationwide lagging behind grade level in math and reading, and with schools sitting on billions of dollars in COVID relief cash, summer learning programs have become a go-to solution. 

So far, schools nationwide have poured $3.1 billion in American Rescue Plan dollars into summer and afterschool initiatives, according to an from Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Summer learning has emerged as districts’ “number one priority” for academic recovery spending, said Phyllis Jordan, the organization’s associate director.

“We’re actually investing in programs that we know work and have had results. We just get to do them at a much larger scale because there’s finally funding for it,” U.S. Deputy Education Secretary Cindy Marten told ����Ӱ��. 

“If you put enriching, engaging experiences together for kids and give them a chance to be together, they can learn.”

However, the picture remains murky on just how much progress states, districts and community organizations have actually made toward catching up students before the school year re-starts.

“We do not have data on the number of summer programs this year compared to years past,” said Jen Rinehart, senior vice president of strategy and programs at the Afterschool Alliance. “Similarly, we do not have data on the number of students enrolled this year.”

Marten acknowledged she was not aware of any federal effort to track how many youth are engaging in summer learning programs this year and did not clarify when the results of these programs will come into focus.

To fill the gap, ����Ӱ�� obtained exclusive datasets from , a data service that tracks school policy, and the research-based auditing publicly shared information about districts’ summer offerings. Burbio’s figures include the 200 largest U.S. school systems and CRPE’s cover 100 major metropolitan districts, many of which overlap. Though there are roughly 13,800 districts in the country, the 200 largest account for over a quarter of the nation’s students.

The analysis comes after the Department of Education announced the Engage Every Student Initiative in July to expand access to summer and afterschool offerings. Accompanying the launch, First Lady Jill Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured programs in Connecticut, Michigan and Georgia.

The Burbio and CRPE numbers reveal that the vast majority of school systems did indeed provide opportunities for students to catch up on learning and most offered their summer programs at no cost to families. Specifically:

• 93% of districts, according to Burbio, and 87%, according to CRPE, offered summer learning programs this year

• 79% of school systems that had programs provided them at no cost to families

• The average program length was 154 hours, just under four weeks and roughly equivalent to 12% of the academic school year. However, some offerings only covered about 30 hours, while others made up nearly 350 total hours

Additionally, most districts offered programs that went beyond rote academics — including activities such as theater, debate and robotics — and about 2 in 5 worked with community organizations to flesh out their camps. Nearly all programs included breakfast, lunch or both:

• Of the districts that offered summer learning opportunities, at least 83% included credit recovery options, 80% mixed academics with enrichment activities such as sports, arts or social-emotional learning, 48% offered programs for students with learning disabilities and 39% had dedicated options for English learners

• 96% of programs provided meals to children and 74% offered free transportation

• At least 39% of districts partnered with community organizations on summer offerings

The data align with recent figures reported by the , which surveyed a representative sample of 859 public schools in June. The figures are not an apples-to-apples comparison with the Burbio and CRPE data because they focus on individual schools rather than districts, but also point to extensive programming nationwide. NCES found:

• Three-quarters of schools offered learning and enrichment programs this summer

• School leaders estimated that 18-20% of their students enrolled, compared to 13-16% during a typical year

• 49% of education leaders said they partnered with an outside organization, 14% offered internship programs and 13% offered summer jobs or work-based learning programs

“When we talk about academic recovery … you can’t do it just within the regular school day,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “You need to make sure acceleration is extra time. The summer has become that time.”

A question of equity

Maritza Guridy, who has five children in Philadelphia public schools and also works as deputy director of parent voice with the , said some families in her network were able to find programs that met their needs while others were not.

“For those that [registered] early, they were able to get in there. For those that waited, it’s unfortunate,” she told ����Ӱ��.

She enrolled her kids in a local chapter of the nationally acclaimed program and also for a shorter stint at an organization called . Among her considerations were aspects like program cost, learning opportunities and emotional supports, but also factors like fun, clear communication from leadership and a building with central air.

In addition to academics, her children have practiced yoga and went for twice-a-week swim lessons at the local YMCA. One day, they came home with a gleeful announcement: “Mommy, I jumped into the deep side of the pool today — and I wasn’t scared!”

It thrilled Guridy, but she knew other families have missed out on similar joys because of barriers such as lack of transportation or no translated information about the opportunity. Guridy wants officials who plan programs to consider accessibility.

“Is [messaging] being offered in different languages?,” she prompts them. “How are parents supposed to enroll their children if they don’t even understand the application?”

It’s an equity issue, said Clarke, the National Summer Learning Association VP.  Youth who don’t have access to summer programs can see academic gains evaporate between June and September, a well-documented concept known as “summer slide.” Now the issue is particularly pressing, because students living in poverty have the starkest pandemic learning deficits.

“Families with access and privilege go into their bank accounts and provide great opportunities for their kids during the summertime,” he said. “The 26 million young people that are on free and reduced lunch … don’t have that luxury to do so. But they certainly need, want and deserve to have those opportunities.”

‘Explosion’ or ‘afterthought?’

With the stakes at an all-time high as schools reel from the pandemic’s impacts, experts have mixed views on whether summer offerings have actually scaled up this year.

“We’re seeing an explosion of programs,” said Ron Ottinger, executive director of , an organization connected to a network of thousands of providers across the country.

Meanwhile, Christine Pitts, who has done her own summer learning analysis as CRPE’s director of impact and communications, has a more pessimistic view.

In 2022, “[districts] were offering less than they were last year. So it’s almost like summer slipped back into that characterization of being an afterthought again,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Her team found that school systems provided fewer offerings for English learners and fewer programs with social-emotional supports this summer compared to last.

“It’s hard to speculate at a national level, why that might have dropped off,” said Marten, the deputy secretary. Some districts may have decided their 2021 summer programs had done enough to catch learners up and that they could scale back this year, she said. However, if leaders wanted to maintain programs but were facing a lack of funds, she encouraged them to tap resources from the new initiative.

Contrasting the data Pitts saw, Nicholas Munyan-Penney spoke to officials in over 30 states about their summer learning programs while researching for a report with . The narrative he heard was of continued growth.

“Anecdotally, they’ve said that there’s definitely been an increase in enrollment this summer,” the researcher told ����Ӱ��.

Rinehart also cites data that indicate an upward trend. In the spring of 2022, her organization and 90% said they were planning to offer summer programs, compared to 79% at the same time a year earlier. Respondents also indicated they expected upticks in enrollment, with an increased share expressing concern they wouldn’t be able to meet families’ demand for programs.

In one of the only direct comparisons between this year and last, the recently released NCES data found no change between 2021 and 2022, with the share of schools saying they offered summer learning programs holding steady at 75%.

‘How are we going to fill the staff?’

One factor often hindering summer learning expansion has been a staff, only the latest symptom of wider shortages that have affected K-12 schools for much of the past year.

“Officials are finding it very hard to find teachers,” said Domenech. “In many cases, the problem has been that where the district has large numbers of kids sign up for the summer programs, they wind up wanting to cut back because they just don’t have the staff to cover it.”

In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, administrators had to from their summer offerings, about 1 in 6 students who had signed up, because of “unanticipated staffing challenges.”

Gia Maxwell works as a site director at summer learning provider . Throughout the spring, she joined monthly calls with leaders from across the Breakthrough network, which operates in 26 cities. Her colleagues were continually worried about finding enough instructors.

“Everyone was talking about, ‘How are we going to fill the staff? How are we going to fill the staff,’” she told ����Ӱ��.

Her Miami program usually finds all 130 youth and 30 adult staff for its summer teaching corps by May, she said. But this year, it took until halfway through teacher training in mid-June to recruit everyone, and they had to hire more teenage candidates than usual. 

The Providence, Rhode Island Breakthrough location was forced to this summer altogether, explaining “we have struggled to recruit students and teachers this year.”

To combat shortages, Arkansas brought in tutors from its to staff summer programs, said Munyan-Penney. In West Virginia, program leaders pulled from teacher training programs in the state to fill out their summer learning staff ranks. And Arizona boosted teachers’ wages 20% for the summer months to entice instructors.

They’re among the states “​​thinking about the staffing issue and being proactive about it,” said the Education Reform Now researcher.

‘Math, Reading and a Little Stampeding’

Several states shared provisional data with ����Ӱ�� on their summer offerings, though many said they won’t have finalized enrollment or academic impact numbers for months.  

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey launched the which state leaders estimate has served about 100,000 campers — 10% of the state’s 1 million students — across 680 sites, including at least one in every county. 

Arizona officials went to great lengths to spread the word about the program. The state ran a including ads on television, radio, social media and in magazines, and direct texts to parents in both English and Spanish informing them of the free programs.

“We targeted lower-income families, as the goal of free summer camp was to see the highest number of campers from families that may not have been able to afford an adventure-style summer camp in prior years,” Kaitlin Harrier, the governor’s senior policy advisor, wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. 

The governor’s office opted for a “summer camp” approach rather than a “summer school” model, describing the opportunities as “Math, Reading, and a Little Stampeding,” said Harrier.

“It is no secret that when kids are having fun, it sets up a great foundation for learning,” she added.

In Connecticut, the state also rolled out a grant program to help providers beef up their summer offerings and defray program costs for low-income youth. The state disbursed roughly $8 million in grants last summer and increased that sum to $12 million for 2022, said Eric Scoville, communications director for the State Department of Education.

Enrollment across a sample of 121 locations nearly doubled, from 17,000 to 32,000, between 2020 and 2021, according to an spearheaded by University of Connecticut researchers. However, it’s too early to tell how many students the state reached this summer, said Scoville.

In North Carolina, all 115 school districts offered one or more summer learning programs this year funded by COVID relief money, each attended by 30 to 200 students, said Todd Silberman, a public information officer at the state’s Department of Public Instruction. The enrollment figures will not be finalized for several weeks, he said, but he expects the total will be lower than 2021, when the state legislature required math, science, English and enrichment summer learning programs.

At the city level, Baltimore City Public Schools has scaled up its programming sharply thanks to COVID relief dollars. The maximum number of youth the 77,800-student district had served between June and August previous to the pandemic had been 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. But in 2021, they reached 15,000 and have served at least that many again in 2022.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told ����Ӱ��.

Tulsa, for its part, has also cultivated a thriving summer learning culture, part of a wider “City of Learning” initiative that has been in the works for several years. That infrastructure has made the district into a poster child for community partnership, with over 40 youth-serving organizations contributing to the district’s programming this summer — including clubs for debating, biking and rowing.

“The summer is the time that kids get to experience those things they otherwise would not have the opportunity to do, especially during the school year,” said Jackie DuPont, executive director of the , which orchestrates the connections between the nonprofits and the district.

However, the district has not been able to maintain its high summer learning enrollment. Last summer, about a third of its 33,000 students participated in summer learning — an unusually large share. This year, a total of 7,000 youth engaged in the school system’s initiative, Director of Expanded Learning Jessica Goodman estimated. 

“​​Last summer was really an immediate response to not having kids in our school buildings … so some families just needed that time more than they did this summer,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Despite enrollment fluctuations, Marten believes the proliferation of new summer learning programs nationwide will outlast the influx of federal funding.

“Communities will fall in love with these programs,” she said. “They will say, ‘We’re never going to let this stop. We’re not just doing this because there was a pandemic. We’re doing this because this is what’s good for kids. Let’s keep doing it.’”

The course is “Cloudy With a Chance of Science,” and James Ramirez places his hand-fashioned tin foil boat into a bin of water, squealing with excitement as he discovers it floats. The first grader and his classmates are learning about density by testing how many pebbles each students’ contraption will hold before it sinks.

Ramirez tosses in every stone from his first handful — quickly surpassing the class record of five pebbles — and rushes back for more as his boat remains above water. The child, who is reserved and hasn’t spoken yet this period, keeps adding weight, laughing and wriggling his shoulders with each successful placement.

“…27, 28, 29…” 

He has the attention of the class now and his peers count with him.

“…42, 43, 44…”

With each pebble, Ramirez is doing more than proving he crafted a sturdy ship. He is accomplishing something educators across the country are anxiously hoping he and millions of students like him can do: accelerate their learning to get back on track after COVID.

The first grader is one of 481 youngsters enrolled in Baltimore’s Emerging Scholars program this summer and one of over 15,000 students participating in no-cost summer learning opportunities through Baltimore City Schools. Thanks to COVID relief funds, the 77,800-student district is serving more than twice as many young people as its pre-pandemic max of 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. 

Among the offerings are typical summer school options like credit recovery and career exploration, but also more specialized programs like debate, farm and forest camp, robotics and “Freedom Schools” focused on Black history. The Emerging Scholars program stands out as a camp providing accelerated academic instruction, but with none of the cost or admission requirements typical of gifted programming.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told ����Ӱ��. “We wanted students to not only make progress academically, focusing on math and [English], but also the social-emotional aspect as well as enrichment.”

Young people in and nationwide continue to score far below pre-pandemic levels in reading and math tests, with more severe deficits for high-poverty schools. Experts estimate it may take a half-decade to fully recover. Meanwhile, many officials pin their hopes on summer learning efforts like those in Baltimore to make up lost ground.

“Especially because of COVID, the kids are a little behind,” said Claudia Wiseman, a second-grade summer science instructor with Baltimore Emerging Scholars. During the school year, she’s an elementary special educator and said months of Zoom school have meant many young learners still lack basic skills like how to hold a pencil. The students she’s teaching now will be “a little better prepared for second grade,” she hopes.

It’s afternoon pickup time at the Emerging Scholars’ John Ruhrah Elementary School campus, and Ramirez’s mother Christy Miranda arrives. Staff tell her about her son’s latest feat: 63 pebbles.

Miranda beams. The program is helping the family recognize their son’s potential, unlocking academic capacities she didn’t realize he possessed.

“He’s learning a lot,” she told ����Ӱ��. “I didn’t know he had the ability to do so.”

During the year, her son has few opportunities for rigorous coursework, she said, explaining that his school is “very defunded.”

But this summer is different. Baltimore Emerging Scholars is a six-week gifted and talented program. In collaboration with , a global leader in gifted education, the camp provides high-level content in science, math and literacy to rising 1st  through 6th graders. 

“During the regular year, [school] is just teachers rambling on about stuff I already know about … but this is new material,” said rising fifth grader Basil Coleman. “I’m just having a great time here.”

Unlike most other gifted programs, the camp doesn’t rely solely on test scores for eligibility but rather welcomes virtually any student who is up for the challenge. As a result, the cohort of students is more diverse than the group of students identified for gifted lessons during the academic year. Some 68% of summer students are Black, 14% are Hispanic, 9% are white and 3% are Asian — figures that closely resemble district-wide demographic averages.

Rae Lymer, who manages the program and reviews every student application, explained that anytime a student has a recorded assessment at or above grade level, it automatically qualifies the youngster for the program. If such a metric does not exist, the administrator calls families directly, looking for an alternative qualification such as if the applicant likes to ask lots of questions or thinks outside the box.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, what I hear is, ‘My kid is completely under-challenged and they’re not motivated by school and so that’s why you’re not seeing scores,’” Lymer told ����Ӱ��, explaining that the program almost never turns away motivated students. 

Youth who choose to participate usually rise to the occasion, the data suggest. While the summer program does not yet have numbers on its academic impact, Emerging Scholars also runs afterschool offerings during the fall and spring. In 2020-21, the most recent data available, the share of participants testing at or above grade level increased 18 percentage points in reading and 39 percentage points in math over the course of the year.

“We’re learning advanced stuff and we’re able to get ahead,” said 11-year-old Ama Amoateng, between stints on the playground during recess. “It makes me feel smarter.”

After engaging in the summer program, “many of these kids will become identified [as gifted],” anticipates Stacey Johnson, spokesperson for Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. “It’s reaching kids we wouldn’t otherwise reach.”

Indeed, parent Torrey Parker said his daughter Skylar got “bumped up” in reading and science last school year, which he believes was “absolutely” because of the work she did in the program.

The rapid growth attests to what education scholars have long posited: That academic talent is equally distributed across all students without regard to race, class or gender — but that access to advanced learning opportunities are not. 

“We firmly believe that if opportunities are provided, students will flourish,” said Lymer.

In one reading course focused on mystery novels, rising fifth graders are already 12 chapters into their third book in as many weeks and engaging in what their instructor called “detective work” to predict the ending. In another classroom, second graders concoct oobleck, a water and cornstarch mixture that has both solid and liquid properties, to learn about states of matter and “non-Newtonian fluids.” Down the hall in “Toyology,” first graders study inertia and momentum by unleashing metal and plastic slinkies down a set of stairs.

A classroom of fifth graders peer down the lenses of microscopes at magazine cutouts of the letter “e,” diagramming what they see at various magnification levels. It’s several students’ first time using a microscope and they’re surprised to find what one describes as “static on a TV.”

“They were playing, but they were also learning,” said Toyology instructor Tamika Robinson.

Even the students admit it’s a good time.

“Because it’s called summer school, most of us thought it would be like school … but instead it’s a lot of activities and really engaging,” said Brooke Bennett, 12.

Propelled, perhaps, by rave reviews, the camp has grown nearly three-fold since its 2019 launch and added about 35% new seats this year while transitioning back to in-person programming for the first time since COVID. Staffing challenges, which have of numerous summer programs across the country, haven’t posed a barrier for Emerging Scholars. In fact, two teachers rather than one work in each classroom under its co-teaching model.

“Many of our teachers come back from year to year because they really respect and value their time with our program,” said Lymer.

As the day winds down, a dozen rising first graders arrive at their last class, Social-Emotional Learning. Shoulders slouch and one student’s head is on his desk. They’ve just watched a on how to keep a growth mindset and their instructor Brother Modlin wakes them up with some call-and-response. 

“It’s not ‘I can’t do it,’ is it class?” He asks the question by trailing off. “It’s ‘I can’t do it…’”

“YET,” they exclaim, picking up their heads and once again regaining attention.

Modlin works as a school counselor during the year, but was previously a therapist at a juvenile detention center in the city. 

“My whole thing as a counselor is about growth mindset,” he told ����Ӱ��. “We’re going to have bad situations, especially in Baltimore. … If I give them a growth mindset, they can rise out of any situation without depending on anyone but themselves.”

The lessons are having an impact for 10-year-old Akorede Adekola.

“I feel really confident and relief [after SEL class],” he said. “I get to show my feelings and get it all out.”

The program’s approach, coupling rigorous academic work with emotional supports, could be a promising model, believes fourth-grade instructor Michelle Brown-Christian. She scoffs at the idea that the curricula, fashioned for gifted children, should be reserved for only a select few.

“This could work for any child that wants to learn,” she said.

That background is exactly what Brenda Dowdy was looking for. Dowdy, who oversees homeless education services for California’s San Bernardino County, wanted to reconnect with the 6,000 students who stopped receiving homeless services when schools first went virtual in the early days of the pandemic. Now, Lee visits schools throughout the county’s 34 school districts to share his story and let students know there are educators who can help. 

“We wanted to get people who could truly relate to them and understand what they’re going through,” she said. “The kids are like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s me.’”

Lee’s hiring as a “peer support advocate” is one example of how educators are using the $800 million provided by the American Rescue Plan a year ago to help districts identify and support homeless students.  The funding has more than tripled the number of districts receiving dedicated funding for that population, according to a forthcoming report from nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection, based on responses from 37 states. 

Homeless students have a right to immediate enrollment in school, even without academic and residency documents, and to remain there no matter where they move. But the relief funds have expanded ways districts can respond to emergencies. Many offer families prepaid debit cards and pay for short-term hotel stays. One purchased bicycles to help students get to school. 

Experts say districts often the number of students who qualify for homeless education services, a fact the pandemic has only worsened. confirms the number of students receiving services dropped in more than 40 states after the pandemic began. Preliminary figures from a few states show the count continued to decline during the 2020-21 school year. Remote learning offered by district homeless liaisons. 

During the time they no longer saw students in person, educators missed the usual warning signs that living arrangements were unstable, such as students wearing the same clothes for multiple days or getting off at different bus stops. 

“Not very many thought that homelessness had actually decreased,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection. “The big trends in education that people are paying attention to — enrollment loss, chronic absence — homelessness is a churning factor behind all of that.”&�Բ�����;

Some families avoided homelessness last year because of federal and a temporary federal . But many homeless students didn’t qualify for the emergency aid. Experts note that homeless families often live under the radar because they’re in and out of hotels, double up in others’ homes and sleep in their cars. 

Colorado is among the states that continued to see the number of students receiving services fall during distance learning — a 26% drop, from 20,821 in 2019-20 to 15,374 in 2020-21. 

“It’s not because we solved homelessness,” Paula Gumina, the state education department’s coordinator for homeless education, said during a recent . In an email, she attributed the decrease to chronic absenteeism, students dropping out of school and staff turnover.

The state’s Cherry Creek district used its relief funds to purchase a van to transport homeless students to school and hire a specialist to support unaccompanied homeless youth in high school, according to the SchoolHouse Connection report.

Even in Florida, where schools were open during the 2020-21 school year, the number of students served fell from almost 80,000 in 2019-20 to less than 64,000. While the state mandated in-person learning, enrollment in virtual programs , contributing to educators losing connections with homeless students.

In the Orange County Public Schools, for example, roughly half of students opted for the remote LaunchED@Home program, according to a spokesman. That year, the district identified almost 900 fewer homeless students.

With staff training and a digital questionnaire for parents replacing a paper form, this year’s count is back up to over 5,500, but still below the pre-pandemic figure of over 6,000, according to Kimberly Gilbert, the district’s senior director of federal programs. 

‘Far more students’

Oklahoma was among the states that increased training requirements for liaisons, and those efforts have paid off, said Matt Colwell, executive director of school success for the state education department. 

“We still have several districts that report zero [homeless] students,” he said. “We know there are far more students experiencing homelessness in our state than we are identifying and serving.”

In San Bernardino County, Dowdy contracts with nonprofits like , which provides scholarships and recruits youth that were homeless, in foster care or had incarcerated parents to serve as mentors.

And she’s hired a second staff member to work with Lee.

When he visits schools, Lee talks about the one person who made sure he stayed in school, applied for college and followed up with phone calls to admissions directors — a counselor at Cajon High School in San Bernardino. 

“She just gave me her time when I needed to talk to somebody,” said Lee, who survived  gunshot wounds as a child. “Nobody in my family went to college. My mother and father didn’t even graduate from high school.”

Now 24, he’s earning a master’s degree in higher education while working to give other homeless students the same attention. 

At a recent school visit, a student told him he had slept on the street the night before. Teachers often miss signs of homelessnes, Lee said, and he views educating them as an important part of his job.

“The average educator might not know that there are youth in their classrooms that experience this on a daily basis,” he said.

They’ve been busy.

“Business is booming,” Kori Smith, an assistant special agent in charge, told district officials at a conference earlier this year on oversight of federal programs. 

He offered hypothetical examples of fraud and abuse of relief funds meant for pandemic recovery — for example, the purchase of 700 Chromebooks when a district only needed 500, or stockpiling masks and other protective gear at staff members’ homes. 

One actual investigation, turned over to the Department of Justice, led to of two Louisiana Christian University students who stole the identities of nine students and used their names to obtain in emergency aid intended for housing, tuition and food. In a more outlandish example unconnected to education, a Texas man is serving prison time for bilking that helped businesses pay their employees during lockdown out of almost $25 million and using some of it to buy a Bentley convertible.  

“We think it’s going to get worse,” Smith said. “It’s a lot of money that was unexpected.”&�Բ�����;

Indictments for defrauding the government make headlines. But they’re also just one lever in the complicated machinery of oversight districts face as they spend an unprecedented $122 billion from the American Rescue Plan. Districts face increased scrutiny from federal and state officials as they move from planning how to use the relief funds to signing contracts. But fear of audits has had an unintended consequence, some experts say: Districts are proceeding cautiously to spend funds meant to fix urgent problems.

“As compelling as it is to ask ‘Will this help our kids?’ the next question is ‘What will the auditors say about it?’” said Sheara Krvaric, co-founder of the Federal Education Group, a law firm specializing in federal K-12 programs.

That means Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s frequent calls for districts to use the funds as soon as possible to address student learning loss and other needs sometimes fall on deaf ears.

For example, some districts have been reluctant to spend relief funds on non-academic programs, like sports and physical education “even though there is pretty convincing evidence it helps with learning loss,” Krvaric said.

And despite severe staff shortages and turnover, some districts have opted not to use relief funds on retention bonuses or other incentives to keep teachers “because their states have signaled that would be unallowable,” she said. “This is despite clear guidance from [the Education Department] that it is allowable.”

Those contradictions give district and state officials extra reason to be on their guard. “There’s a ton of confusion still about what you can spend the money on,” she said.

Meanwhile, auditors with the independent Office of Inspector General aren’t necessarily digging for subtlety. Just , they cited Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office for failing to keep more than $650,000 in relief funds from being spent on arcade games, Christmas trees and 131 sets of cookware. The state set up an $8 million program to offer $1,500 grants to low-income families and contracted with ClassWallet, an online payment platform for educators, to run the program.��

Auditors said the purchases didn’t meet the standard for “emergency educational services” and called on the state to return the funds spent on the “unallowable” items. In a response, the state blamed ClassWallet for the “deficiencies” and said it has improved oversight. 

‘A moving target’

A year ago, parents, teachers and community members were invited to advise districts on how they should spend the considerable federal windfall. But as auditors dig into the details, many parents accuse districts of stashing the money away and continue to clamor for increased and other opportunities for their children to catch up. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, argues that many parents haven’t seen these funds benefit their children. She meets every two weeks with Cardona or his staff, where the use of relief funds comes up frequently.

“He wants districts to be acting with urgency,” she said, ‘“but they are saying, ‘We don’t know what to do.’ ”

By law, districts can’t just hold onto the money. They have to obligate it by the end of September, 2024. While the department has said it will consider some extensions, their approval is not guaranteed.

At the same time, the rules, which require districts receiving at least $750,000 in federal funds to undergo an audit, are shifting rapidly. 

“I’m talking total reversal. It literally is a moving target,” said Bonnie Graham, a partner with Brustein & Manasevit, a law firm specializing in federal education policy. “School districts are in a tough spot. You can’t afford to make a mistake.”

In 2020, the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget districts were not required to track employees’ hours charged to Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief — known as ESSER. The 2021 and 2022 versions of the document said the . 

Districts are also allowed to use relief funds to pay themselves back for money they spent at the start of the pandemic, but their documentation often doesn’t go back that far, said Cathy Harlow, manager of an accounting firm in Pennsylvania that conducts district audits.

A former superintendent for the Tyrone Area School District — situated midway between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia — she sympathizes with districts.

“Our firm leans on the side of leniency,” she said. “We’re holding districts accountable, but understanding that the landscape has been changing rapidly as they’re going through it.”

‘New territory’ 

Sometimes audits don’t tell the whole story.

The inspector general’s office also reviewed how the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education used to connect more students to the internet. 

Due to a clerical error, the state didn’t reach all eligible districts, showed. What it didn’t show was that officials used ESSER funds to cover the rest. 

“We just had to make peace with it,” said Chris Neale, the department’s assistant commissioner. “We know there will be a ton of auditing that has never gone on before. It’s new territory for everyone.”

That’s particularly true for smaller districts and charter networks, which normally don’t spend enough federal funds to trigger an audit. The Colorado Charter School Institute has some charter management organizations facing the process for the first time.

“The question that I get from CMOs is, ‘Do we really have to do this?’” said Andi Denton, director of finance and operations. Most, she added, just don’t want to spend the $10,000 or so to pay an accounting firm to complete it. She reminds them they’ve gotten “a lot of money.”

As districts and charters apply for relief funds, some state officials are kicking those requests back for more information before approving them. 

In Georgia, for example, the state audit department initially rejected districts’ requests to use relief funds to cover salaries. They interpreted the law to mean those funds could only be used to make up for a drop in state revenue, said Matt Cardoza, a spokesman at the Georgia Department of Education.

To clear up the confusion, federal officials sent a letter explaining that using relief funds to pay staff is “not dependent on a shortfall in state and local funding.”

Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said some officials might not have kept up with the “twists and turns” in messages from the education department about “allowable” expenses. 

Relief funds for education, the law says, are meant to “prevent, prepare for and respond to” COVID. The most recent from the department says districts should use the funds to “emerge stronger post-pandemic” and address needs exacerbated by COVID. 

Districts are now submitting reimbursement requests to their state education departments, which typically turn around approvals quickly — except for a few questionable items.

“A couple districts asked for pressure washers to clean sidewalks. It’s very hard to connect that to COVID,” Cardoza said. “We don’t try to be so over the top [that] they can’t spend their money, but we’re trying to keep them from being audited.”

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 ��������’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.”&�Բ�����;

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 ����Ӱ�� 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.”&�Բ�����;

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.”

During Tuesday’s State of the Union address, the president turned his attention to the American Rescue Plan and said the legislation “gave schools money to hire teachers and help students make up for lost learning.��

“I urge every parent to make sure your school does just that. They have the money.” (Read Linda Jacobson’s full speech recap)

For the average American watching at home, it might have seemed like a throwaway line in a wide-ranging speech. But for education experts who have long warned about a lack of specific guidance surrounding how these funds should be prioritized by school districts, it seemed like something more: 

Last month, we published an essay from Georgetown’s Marguerite Roza who made the case that school leaders needed a clearer “North Star” for how to prioritize relief dollars — and how to then measure the success of those decisions.

As Roza wrote then: “When it’s all said and done, how should ESSER investments be judged? That depends on what we hope to get from the $123 billion pumped into public schools. Here’s the problem: No end goal, no focused objective, no common yardstick has ever been attached to this mammoth federal investment. The ESSER money lacks a North Star.��

“Metaphorically speaking, a North Star is the mission statement. It’s a fixed destination to aim for even as the world changes. A well-designed North Star could put every leader on a mission to remedy those gaps.

“Shifting the focus from what districts are purchasing to what progress students are making would be a game changer. First and foremost, it’s a shift that requires school systems to start tracking and regularly checking whether they’re making headway, and for which students.

“There’s no need to wait for federal leaders to establish the North Star. A state leader could outline goals and create mechanisms for districts to track progress. A district leader could do the same for its schools. A principal for the school.

“Measuring and tracking outcomes doesn’t just let districts pivot when things aren’t working as intended — it gives staff and students alike a much-needed chance to celebrate progress, even if they’re still way behind where they want to be. This is the way to learn what works. This is how we learn from each other. And this is how to ensure that the money helps kids.”

Read Roza’s full essay: “Without Clear Rules, There’s No Way to Judge How School Relief Funds Are Being Spent. Setting Student Progress as a North Star Would Be a Game Changer”

The state will divvy up more than $150 million, much of it from its American Rescue Plan funding, through a new grant program called .

Maryland Leads is “a choose-your-own adventure style program … with a curated list of options that only includes programs and strategies we know can effectuate positive results for children,” Choudhury wrote in a statement to ����Ӱ��.

“This is about Maryland doing the work, leading the way.”

The seven strategies that the effort highlights are:

• Grow-your-own staffing programs to develop teaching talent in-house
• Staff retention programs that improve teachers’ schedules, boost mentorship opportunities and give pay incentives for those who stay from one year to the next
• “Science of reading” approaches that systematize literacy acquisition
• High-quality tutoring during the school day for students that fell behind during the pandemic
• Restructuring schedules to allow for afterschool learning, summer programming and more effective family engagement
• Collaborations with industry leaders and higher education institutions to prepare students for college and careers
• Community school models that engage families and connect them with needed social services

Districts may invest in as few as two or as many as seven practices to receive funds. School systems that scale up science of reading approaches unlock an additional $2 million in funding, while those that build grow-your-own staffing programs receive an extra $1 million. Funds must be spent before the end of the 2023-24 school year.

“It’s a really ambitious approach,” Phyllis Jordan, associate director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank, told ����Ӱ��. “The issues that the state is singling out … are the evidence-based practices that are going to get you to make a difference for students.”

FutureEd has states’ and districts’ American Rescue Plan spending rollouts, and Jordan said that Maryland stands out for its effort at guiding districts toward approaches that have been proven effective. 

“Districts often like to make their own decisions. And this way, [Choudhury] is not dictating what they should be doing, but he is giving them incentives,” the researcher said. “Providing this sort of menu of options that can bring them extra money seems like a smart approach.”

“It’s exciting to see Maryland leading through this new program that aims to use American Rescue Plan funds in innovative ways,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in the release. “I’m heartened that Maryland Leads will help districts and schools both respond to the challenges posed by the pandemic and seize the opportunity our current moment offers to reimagine education.”

The grant builds on an ongoing effort in the state called the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future to uplift schools and support historically underserved students. The 13-year plan seeks to boost teacher pay above a $60,000 starting salary by 2026 and convert nearly 1 in 3 schools into community schools that help struggling families access nutrition and health care by 2035, among a number of other goals. 

The funds provided by the new grant will remain a fairly small percentage of the total money many districts in the state received in COVID relief. Baltimore City Public Schools was allocated $443 million, according to FutureEd’s numbers, while Montgomery County received $252 million and Prince Georges County got $272 million.

Still, the state effort “gives [districts] some guideposts about the right sort of programs,” said Jordan.

Initiatives to help districts grow their own staff can help recruit a more diverse and qualified set of teachers, successful models show, and can help retain staff. Science of reading approaches have been hailed by educators and researchers alike. Community schools approaches, known to support students and families living in poverty, have been a key part of the Biden education agenda and recently made headlines when Mackenzie Scott donated $133 million to the nonprofit Communities in Schools. And high-quality tutoring can provide a potent academic boost to students who have fallen behind, research shows.

Districts may apply for grants through the Maryland Leads program through April 7, and grants will be awarded April 22. The grants will be non-competitive, with the possibility that each of the state’s 24 school systems, which serve entire counties (with the exception of Baltimore City), could receive funds. The Maryland Department of Education will hold sessions to inform school leaders on the slate of approaches throughout February and March.

“A return to normal is not good enough,” Choudhury wrote in a letter introducing the Leads grant. “Gaps existed then and they will persist now unless we do something differently.”

Go deeper on the some of the strategies specified in Maryland’s plan:

—Grow Your Own Teacher Programs: Efforts to train a more diverse, home-grown teacher workforce in Rhode Island and Colorado (Full RI story & full CO story)

—Science of Reading: Texas educators help students gain literacy skills through the pandemic (Read the full story)

—Community Schools: Inside MacKenzie Scott’s $133 million donation to America’s top organization focused on preventing student dropouts (Read the full story)

—Summer Learning: Tulsa returns 11,000 students to campuses in July by putting fun before academics (Read the full story)

—High-Quality Tutoring: As schools push for more tutoring, new research points to its effectiveness — and the challenge of scaling it to combat learning loss (Read the full story)

With school systems beginning to spend an unprecedented $125 billion in pandemic aid, how well are states fulfilling their obligation to ensure the money goes toward helping the most disadvantaged children recover from COVID-19’s disruptions?

That was the key issue behind a special Jan. 26 panel discussion moderated by ����Ӱ��’s Beth Hawkins and presented in conjunction with Education Reform Now. Among the central questions: Are state plans ambitious enough to help students recover missed learning? Do the plans incorporate evidence-based solutions and reflect the priorities of parents, educators and stakeholders? If the response in your community is lackluster, how can you succeed in holding officials accountable? What specific improvements can you demand? 

You can stream the replay above (if not displaying properly, ); panelists include Nicholas Munyan-Penney, senior policy analyst, Education Reform Now; New Jersey state Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz; Terra Wallin, associate director for P-12 federal policy, The Education Trust; Shirline Wilson, director, Education Reform Now Washington; and Dr. Christine Pitts, resident policy fellow, Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Follow all our latest news coverage surrounding unfinished learning, school recovery, and relief funds by signing up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter. 

Then the whole family, Hudson’s partner included, got sick with COVID-19. They found themselves overspending on a laundry service because they couldn’t go to the laundromat and ordering take-out meals because they were too weak to cook.

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Even when she could gather the strength to help 10-year-old Emerson with his schoolwork, Hudson said “teaching him at home was way out of the realm of things I’m good at.” But now, the $500 she’s receiving each month in federal child tax credit payments allows her son to attend an afterschool program three days per week and Hudson to return to her classes.

“He’ll get to play with other kids again,” she said. “And he’s going to be getting professional help with his homework.”

The monthly deposits, which began in July, are a temporary boost to the bank accounts of most families in the nation — a result of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Congress passed in March. Benefiting roughly 61 million children, the legislation increased the annual credit from $2,000 to $3,000, or $3,600 for children under 6. Adding a provision that disburses a portion each month has allowed families to buy more and catch up with , initial surveys show. Making the payments permanent is a major priority for progressive Democrats, while President Joe Biden has proposed a more limited extension. Either way, the policy is a focal point of the left’s efforts to pass a major reconciliation bill over Republican opposition.

“In my mind, there’s not a more important education reform that you could pass than making the Child Tax Credit permanent,” Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado told ����Ӱ��. The former Denver Public Schools superintendent is one of six Democrats in Congress pushing to ensure the payments continue.

But Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat who has said he won’t vote for a $3.5 trillion package, questions whether the extension should move forward without that recipients are working.

continues the credit for four more years, and makes it permanently refundable, meaning that even if parents earn too little to pay federal taxes, they’ll still get the credit. But that was when Democrats were set on passing a $3.5 trillion package. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has acknowledged that the final figure is likely to .

The impact of the tax credit on families has been of particular interest to Phil Fisher, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. Not long after the pandemic began, he began tracking the extent to which financial strain, vanishing child care and family isolation led to increased parental anxiety and greater irritability among children. Families — especially those who are low-income, single-parent, Black and Hispanic — whether they would be able to cover their housing, food and other basic needs from one month to the next. That unpredictability only contributed to the stress.

“If you’re worried about how much food you’re going to have on your table, if you’re worried you’re going to be evicted, it’s harder to be responsive to your kids,” Fisher said. “These payments are a big shot in the arm for families that are in need.”

The effects of economic hardship on young children go beyond crying spells or tantrums — and could add to the challenges educators face as those children enter school. Children born during the pandemic have lower language, motor and cognitive skills than those in a pre-pandemic sample, according to from researchers at Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital.

“Work-from-home and shelter-in-place orders, for example, along with closed daycares, nurseries, and preschools may have dramatically changed the quantity and quality of parent, caregiver, and teacher-child interaction and stimulation,” they wrote, but added that development among young children in more well-off households has been less affected.

The findings have not yet been reviewed by other researchers, but the conclusions add to the results of of Massachusetts parents with young children. Fifty-eight percent said the pandemic has negatively impacted their young children’s academic development.

‘Working, married or misusing the money’

Measuring how families spent the additional money — and whether guaranteed income actually improved children’s well-being and ability to learn — are key policy issues for policymakers and researchers.

That’s why many are anticipating the results of a timely study that aims to answer those questions. , a $17 million project launched in 2018, doesn’t focus specifically on the child tax credit, but rather examines the impact of a similar, unrestricted monthly payment, which the families will stop receiving when the children reach 3 years and 4 months. Most are just now turning 3.

The researchers recruited 1,000 low-income mothers with infants, gave them debit cards and randomly selected them to receive either $333 or $20 each month until the children were old enough for preschool. The researchers are tracking the children’s brain function and development to measure the impact of a poverty-reduction program during the early years.

Initial results will be released later this fall. The researchers are also examining whether the mothers are still employed and whether they’re using the extra income for drugs or alcohol — questions that lead researcher Greg Duncan, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, has come to expect based on decades of work in this area.

“You never see the political debate focus on anything other than whether the mom is working, married or misusing the money,” he said. “It’s never about the child.”

In fact, restrictions on who should be eligible for such payments have been among Republicans’ stipulations for expanding the credit. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s would double the amount available to married couples — $12,000 annually, compared with $6,000 for single parents. Like Manchin, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah say to receive the credit. In addition, some Republicans have argued the rush to set up the monthly payments could or improper payments to those who aren’t eligible.

But Fisher said the pandemic makes it harder to determine whether some families are more deserving than others. His research shows that many families “went over the edge very quickly” because they didn’t have any savings or were unable to get a credit card.

‘The biggest difference’

Initial surveys show most parents have used the child tax credit funds to cover basic necessities, such as food, utilities and rent. But from ParentsTogether Action, a national advocacy group, showed more than a quarter of the 1,200 parents responding put the money toward enrichment for their children and 12 percent spent it on education.

After a year of turning down her daughters’ requests, Christa Jimenez of Denver said the extra $500 per month means she can say yes to things like new art supplies and a streaming service so they can watch PBS shows in Spanish.

The pandemic has been a “straight-up period of no for parenting,” she said. “No, you can’t see Grandma. Now you can’t go to the park. No to afterschool activities.”

She doesn’t know if her children’s school will offer enrichment programs this fall, like chess club and choir, but that’s another way she hopes to use the funds. Federal relief bills included three rounds of stimulus payments for families — totaling $3,200. But Jimenez, who saw her work as a and small business owner dry up last year, said the child tax credit has been even more helpful.

“It’s made the biggest difference for our family,” she said. “It’s monthly, so you can plan for it.”

But for how long?

The current proposal extends the credit through 2025, which would cost by $450 billion, according to the nonprofit Tax Foundation’s .

would extend it for three years. But Bennett said making the increase permanent would impact millions of children and cut the nation’s 16 percent in half.

“Our job as proponents is to push as hard as we can to extend it for as long as we can,” Bennett said.

Democrats saw a chance for a bipartisan approach to the issue earlier this year when Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah proposed a that would also send monthly payments to families. But Bennet said as long as the GOP isn’t willing to reverse any of former President Donald Trump’s , there’s no room for negotiation.

That could change in two years if Republicans gain control of the House, said Katharine Stevens, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She and colleague Matt Weidinger have their that would allow parents to bank future tax credit funds in advance — as much as $15,000 per year — so they can either work less during their child’s earliest years or afford quality child care.

She called the Democrats’ plan “short-sighted” and recommended they at least evaluate whether children’s lives improve under this policy before extending the increase indefinitely.

“Money does not enhance early development,” she said. “What money can do is help create the conditions that support early development.”

Middle- and upper-income families were more likely to say their schools solicited parent opinions than those with household incomes of less than $50,000 a year. Just 17 percent of low-income parents say they were asked how the money should be used, versus 28 percent of those earning $75,000 or more.

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Echelon Insights surveyed 1,000 parents on behalf of the organization from Sept. 9 to 13, after the school year had begun in most places. Slightly more than half, or 51 percent, had heard little or nothing about the funds, while just 13 percent said they have heard a lot.

The parents union pegged the release of its latest poll to the launch of a campaign called Everyday Parents Impacting Change, or EPIC, with the aim of holding local officials accountable for how they spend their American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER lll) funds.

“Since we weren’t invited to a full seat at the table, we really need to play a watchdog role,” says Keri Rodrigues, parents union president and co-founder. “If you aren’t going to engage us on our priorities, we are going to hold you accountable for where every single one of these dollars is going.”

District spending plans are due to be submitted to states Oct. 1, but early glimpses show that in a number of places, school system leaders have committed to expenditures that will create steep fiscal cliffs when the stimulus funds run out in three years. Among these is increasing salaries, plugging pre-pandemic budget deficits caused by long-term enrollment declines and hiring new permanent staff.

While the federal funding can be used for an array of expenses, Congress has sought to prod schools to spend a hefty portion on among underserved children who were already at increased risk of performing below their affluent classmates.

Ninety percent of the funds are being sent directly to districts according to a formula that prioritizes schools that enroll large numbers of disadvantaged students. School systems are supposed to spend a fifth of the money to address pandemic learning losses using strategies backed by hard evidence.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents surveyed by the parents union said their top priorities for the funds include computers, high-speed internet access, services for students with disabilities — who were particularly impacted by COVID-related school shutdowns — face masks, hand sanitizer and free food. Three-fourths would prioritize counselors, social workers and psychologists, career and college prep programs, staff training on creating inclusive environments and individual learning plans for each student.

Schools that fail to solicit community input, parents union leaders say, are missing an opportunity to seek guidance from families who have gained a much keener sense of their children’s interests and struggles since the pandemic forced them to supervise distance learning.

“Black and brown families throughout the pandemic have been more engaged than ever,” says Rodrigues. “To now turn your back on them and say, ‘We’ve got it from here’ really underestimates these families.”

The poll diverged on one major point from another recent survey by the journal Education Next, which found diminished appetite for change among a weary public. The parents union’s monthly polls continue to find a strong desire for schools to come out of the pandemic with better instruction and climate.

Sixty percent of respondents told parent union pollsters they want schools to find new ways to teach children as a result of the pandemic, while 57 percent said education leaders should use the infusion of funds to make “bold changes.” A third (34 percent) want the money to be used to return to the status quo.

Both the Education Next and parents union polls found strong support for continued annual testing of students, with the new survey finding 55 percent of parents want exams to continue and 39 percent thinking tests should be skipped this year.

are available on the parents union website.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation, the City Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to the National Parents Union and .

Enter American Rescue Plan’s Elementary & Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, about $200 billion with $22 billion dedicated specifically to address learning loss using “evidence-based interventions” focused on the “.”

This historically large investment provides an unprecedented opportunity to learn what kinds of interventions work well for America’s students — but we will squander this opportunity if state officials don’t create the right infrastructure to make sense of what is taking place.

The U.S. has nearly 14,000 school districts making choices around COVID recovery. Districts are likely to try different recovery strategies, but we won’t be able to learn about these approaches without officials collecting the right information, including which students are getting them.��

This requires a degree of collective action currently lacking among states. The window of opportunity is short to get this right. With loose federal requirements, states and districts need to assume the lead role in ensuring ESSER funds change the trajectory of students’ lives.��

Our team recently analyzed state ESSER plans to better understand the level of guidance provided around recovery initiatives (described in more detail in a recent CALDER ). Most state plans call for programs that specifically target students who have been hit hardest by the pandemic. However, they’re often hazy on the specifics of how such targeting will take place.

 The plans tend to include little information on how students will be identified for interventions or how interventions will be matched to specific student learning goals. They are even more vague on data collection, with general language indicating they will collect data required for the ESSER reporting, but only about half the plans explicitly described concrete steps for how they will collect data on the impact of ARP ESSER funded programs.

How can states increase the likelihood that ESSER spending leads to collective learning? At a minimum, states should mandate reporting around three specific questions:

• What recovery interventions are districts using and what are their key features?
• Which students are targeted for recovery efforts?
• Which students are actually participating in and regularly attending recovery initiatives?

More broadly, states hold powerful levers they can use to increase the likelihood that districts will be equipped to support and learn from individualized intervention programs. These include, but are not limited to: 

• Building Capacity for Local Data Use: Local data is more timely and detailed than state data, yet, many districts struggle with the capacity to analyze and use data resources effectively to target individual students’ needs. States can use their funds to increase districts’ capacity to identify and address students’ individual needs by, for example, creating opportunities for enhancing local data systems, for professional development, or for regional data supports.��
• Contributing to a Culture of Learning and Continuous Improvement: Ultimately, states and districts have an incredible responsibility to help students recover from the pandemic and achieve their full potential, and should be held accountable for this responsibility. At the same time, it is likely some interventions and other ESSER-funded activities along the way will not work. States can create opportunities that focus on the importance of continuous improvement, while equipping districts to engage in that work too.��
• Encouraging Student, Family, and Community Engagement: Fundamental to the idea of offering individualized support is student and family engagement, without which districts will have an incomplete picture of the interventions that are needed and will work. At the same time that states encourage evidence-based academic interventions and supports, they should help equip districts to foster authentic engagement opportunities that can help shape the use of ESSER funds.��
• Peer to Peer Networking and professional development: Because states have cross-district data, they often have greater insight into which districts are struggling with similar challenges. States can use their data to connect similar districts who face similar challenges, creating opportunities for those districts to share knowledge, experiences, and resources.
• Using Cross-Sector State Level Data: States generally have extensive data resources that they can use to help districts understand where individual students are in their learning and identify students at-risk. States can enhance their reporting tools so that districts have access to actionable information about their students (e.g., Early Warning Systems, individual-level assessment reports tied to state curriculum standards).
• Grant Opportunities Requiring Individualized Supports: States may use state activity funds to create grant programs that target a high-need area (e.g., chronic absenteeism, math) and require districts to implement and collect data on targeted interventions as part of the grant program.��

That this is an unprecedented amount of federal funding to be spent over just four years cannot be overstated. To consider both the urgent needs of today with what we will need to know in the next three to five years is a balancing act. If we focus only on the immediate needs of the moment, we will miss the opportunity to answer the key questions that could shape the next several decades of education policy. We urge state and district leaders to keep broader learning goals top of mind as they design, implement, and adjust learning acceleration efforts.��

Heather Boughton, Ph.D., is director of research, evaluation & advanced analytics at the Ohio Department of Education. Jessica de Barros is director of policy, practice & outreach for the CALDER Policymakers Council at American Institutes for Research. Dan Goldhaber is vice president and director of research for CALDER for the American Institutes for Research. Sydney Payne is a research assistant for CALDER at the American Institutes for Research. Nate Schwartz is a professor of practice at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

At the state level, financial support for college has steadily grown more generous, as nineteen states have enacted free community college tuition over the last four years. This shift represents a major investment in providing community college for all, even if many of these programs are “last dollar” programs that kick in after all other grants have been applied to their tuition, while students still pay other significant costs – room, board, transportation, and books.

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��������’s proposals and these state programs aim to spend more public money on the same systems, based on the premise that many students would complete either a two- or four-year degree if only costs were lower. But increasing educational opportunity is more complicated than that. The President’s plan acknowledges the complexity of the issue, including “$62 billion to invest in evidence-based strategies to strengthen completion and retention rates at community colleges and institutions that serve students from our most disadvantaged communities.”

With the nationwide completion rate for two-year Associate’s programs at 42.1% percent after four years, the need for new approaches is clear. Hopefully, the administration will recognize the structural issues with community colleges and consider alternatives to the current system as it invests in education.

My on the City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) community colleges offers an instructive case study in the problems with our current approach. At the root of the issue is the misdirection of too many low achieving students to academic study eventually requiring four-year degrees. The most recently available results from CUNY show that only about a quarter of the students who entered two-year Associate degree programs in 2015 were able to earn their degree within four years. The long-term outcomes for an earlier group of students were also sobering. Ten long years after beginning their college careers in the community colleges, only 21 percent of students earned a bachelor’s degree and 17 percent earned an associate degree.

These results should hardly be surprising. Many students enter CUNY’s community colleges after barely eking by in the city’s lowest performing public high schools. While CUNY’s Senior Colleges generally admit students with high school Grade Point Averages in the mid 80s to 90s (A and B students), CUNY’s community colleges admit students with GPAs in the range of 77-79 (C students). Data from the City’s high schools indicate that many of these students came through that system’s least selective and lowest performing schools. Their graduates are ill-prepared for college.

And yet, these students are preparing for four-year degrees. Once admitted to CUNY’s community colleges, 42 percent of students are enrolled in liberal arts programs and another 24 percent are enrolled in other associates degree programs designed to move them on to bachelor’s programs. Given the low completion rates of students for these students, many would be better served by more expeditious programs to prepare them for entry level positions with a living wage.

There is one bright spot in the CUNY community college system, which could be a model for improving completion rates beyond New York – the Accelerated Studies in Associate Programs (ASAP). Independent evaluators have found it to be clearly successful in increasing both student retention and graduation rates.

Originally begun with students who had attained full proficiency for college level work, the program has evolved to include students who need developmental course work in one or two areas. Once admitted, in return for tuition waivers, free Metro-card passes and financial support for books and other expenses, the students must follow an individualized course plan, check in regularly with dedicated counsellors and maintain their grades and progress toward graduation.

ASAP certainly qualifies as a successful “evidence-based strategy to improve completion rates” that the administration should consider supporting, but even these sorts of programs won’t be the best fit for everyone. Young people who persevere through high school passing, but just getting by, are not well served by the current system. They need programs that will allow them to quickly find success in the world of work, gaining agency over their own lives, while allowing them the opportunity to later pursue continued college education or training at their own choosing.

An equally hopeful trend on the national level is the growing use of certificate programs to quickly move students to the workforce (in 2019, close to 620,000 certificates were by community colleges). These numbers are encouraging; by targeting higher education to specific skills and courses needed for a certain industry, certificates save students money, and prepare them for the outside world more quickly. But still too many students are unsuccessfully pursuing Associates degrees designed as pathways to bachelor’s degree programs. More money will not solve that problem, but money tied to incentives for community colleges to continue to expand their work with local business and trade groups might well create much greater opportunities in underserved communities.

Longtime education analyst Bruno Manno has a name for this paradigm shift: opportunity pluralism. As he has described, programs focused on workforce preparation “foster opportunity pluralism, creating new options to the ‘bachelor’s degree of bust’ mindset.” He stresses that in order to be successful, these programs must have clearly sequenced curriculum, “aligned with labor market needs.” Where these programs have been successful, they are guided by formal agreements among schools, colleges, local governments and trade associations or organizations.

Last year, Opportunity America, a think tank led by Tamar Jacoby, convened a panel of experts to consider reimagining the nation’s community colleges as the country rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic. Their report called for community colleges to focus more directly on preparing their students for entry into the workforce. Whenever possible, their programs, the report emphasized, “should be offered in partnership with employers who help design the content and stand ready to hire graduates.” These programs need to be judged by their success at job placement: “community college funding should be geared more closely to job placement and wages” and engage in “day-to-day” collaboration with employers.

These findings suggest that a fundamental reorientation could replace the shortfalls of the CUNY community colleges and similar systems across the country with true paths of upward mobility. By seeking an institutional alignment with the business sector, community colleges could provide students a rapid jump start to meaningful careers, and allow students pursuing higher education to succeed rather than stagnate on their way to a degree.

Community colleges will not undergo this seismic shift on their own, as many of them remain rooted in the notion that four-year college degrees are the only path to success. But if Congress pursues broad structural reforms as it considers the President’s plans, it could uplift students left behind by the current educational system and build a more inclusive economy. At the federal level, legislators should resist the urge to throw more money at the problem. At the state and local level, policymakers should work creatively to offer all high school graduates a path to the world of work.

If today’s leaders can pursue meaningful reform to the community college system, and operate within a paradigm of true opportunity pluralism, the next generation will have broader educational opportunities, better employment outcomes, and perhaps even a new definition of success.

Ray Domanico is a senior fellow and director of education policy at the Manhattan Institute.

“Some politicians are trying to turn public safety measures — [such] as children wearing masks in school and the political disputes — for their own political gain,” he said in comments at the White House. “Some are even trying to take power away from local educators. The intimidation and threats we’re seeing across the country are wrong.”

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Cardona elaborated on in a Wednesday, saying: “the Department may initiate a directed investigation if facts indicate a potential violation of the rights of students as a result of state policies and actions.”

He noted that the department’s Office for Civil Rights investigates allegations of discrimination against students and the Office of Special Education Programs monitors whether students with disabilities are receiving a free and appropriate public education.

In a Wednesday with the New York Times, Cardona further expanded on the department’s rationale. “The fact that they’re not adjusting based on the illness, and the outcry from medical experts, is astonishing,” he said. “But we cannot sit around. We have to do everything in our power, including civil rights investigations and even referring matters to the Department of Justice for enforcement if necessary.”

https://youtu.be/22-bI7dBLEM?t=2037

��������’s to the department references Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance regarding children under 12 not eligible for vaccines, saying the agency “has provided clear guidance to schools on how to adopt science-based strategies to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

While he doesn’t mention specific states, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has essentially been in a standoff with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Abbott, who both refuse to back down from their stance on masks.

But some districts continue to defy governors’ orders and are instituting mandates anyway. The Florida State Board of Education earlier this week said it will take against two counties with mask mandates in place. And the Miami-Dade County school board was discussing Wednesday whether to . Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has already said he’s in favor of it, despite any retaliation from the state.

Fortunately, with the passage of the American Rescue Plan, the federal government has made one of the most dramatic attempts of our lifetimes to give communities the tools to rebuild. With $123 billion flowing to K-12 education, it is an opportunity to not only address gaps created by the pandemic, but to invest in long-term solutions that can serve as a down payment on economic opportunity and mobility for students.

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However, pathways to postsecondary education and training are not showing up as a major investment priority in states’ and districts’ rescue fund spending plans. Just 12 percent of mention designated funding for supporting students’ postsecondary readiness. Given the critical importance of education beyond high school, this is a troubling sign.

A targeted focus on can make the difference between a community that is an engine of economic mobility and one that is stagnant. To capitalize on the wide latitude they have on the spending of relief funds, school systems will need to look beyond the guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Education for ideas.

To provide inspiration and, more importantly, a clear set of shovel-ready investment strategies, my organization is collaborating with other national and regional partners to identify strategies that work in closing postsecondary readiness and transition gaps. The initiative is called “,” and it includes the following priorities for K-12 school systems’ rescue fund spending plans:

Build college and career momentum early in high school

Students who successfully complete core courses by the end of ninth grade are significantly more likely to enroll in college immediately after high school. Yet schools too often wait until junior or senior year to engage students in college and career planning, and low-income students and students of color are much less likely to have access to quality advising and counseling than their more privileged peers. As schools bounce back from the pandemic, it’s an opportune time to ensure that early and integrated is an expectation for every student, not an enrichment for some. Delaware, for example, is planning to use a portion of its rescue funds to expand advising so students understand the connections between postsecondary education and careers, develop a high school plan, and set college and career goals.

Equip all students with the knowledge, experiences and relationships necessary for career success

When it comes to building a foundation for long-term career success, students need connections, skills and experiences in addition to strong academics. Districts should use rescue plan funds to expand peer advising, hands-on learning experiences and other strategies for building career pathways and boosting students’ social and network capital. Chicago Public Schools, for example, is investing $5 million to expand work-based learning opportunities throughout the city, and Tennessee is awarding $30 million in grants for districts to foster partnerships and prepare high schoolers for careers in their communities.

Increase the number of students earning college credit and credentials before graduation

Students are significantly more likely to access and succeed in higher education if they can earn college credit before high school graduation. Rescue plan funds provide the perfect opportunity for districts to make advanced coursework and dual enrollment — which can be prohibitively expensive — available to every student, and to provide the support and guidance needed to help them succeed. Milwaukee Public Schools, for instance, plans to expand dual enrollment access by supporting students’ transportation, materials and tuition costs, and Hawaii is investing $6 million of its its stimulus resources in a summer learning program, which includes access to dual-enrollment courses at the University of Hawaii.

Increase direct enrollment in postsecondary education or training programs that lead to a credential of value

High school graduation is not the end goal, so schools’ and districts’ responsibilities for students shouldn’t end there. To counter the growing gaps in college enrollment brought on by the pandemic, districts should invest rescue plan funds in keeping students on the postsecondary path and facilitating a seamless transition between high school and higher education. Texas and Indiana have used stimulus funds to launch statewide summer bridge programs; Texas has already seen a return on its investment, with more students enrolling and succeeding in higher education. Arizona plans to invest over $2 million to ensure students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and receive advising support through the summer transition. In New York, Buffalo Public Schools is investing in a postsecondary persistence tracking database to analyze trends in higher education, so it can more efficiently and effectively provide support to high school students.

Ultimately, I hope that schools and districts see the investment of their rescue plan funds as a long-term play. Though some of this money is undeniably needed to fill immediate pandemic-induced gaps, this is an opportunity for significant long-term investment that we are unlikely to see again in our lifetimes. Schools must make sure to spend these resources with the end goal in mind: equitable access to higher education and a better shot at economic mobility for millions of students across the country.

Matt Gandal is president and CEO of Education Strategy Group.