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 Biden’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.” 

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ 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.” 

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.”

The question then turns to: how do we get from here to there?

Implementation is always tricky, all the more so when you’re trying to largely build a system from scratch (many child care advocates rightly say we have a child care ‘non-system’ at the moment). Happily, a recently released resource from Bank Street College of Education offers up some guideposts. Earlier this year, Bank Street convened a group of early childhood thought leaders—of which I was honored to be a part—to consider the question of what it looks like to establish child care as a public good. The of the same name puts forth the group’s recommendations.

The principles offered are:

• Update and Expand the Value Proposition
• Invest In and Plan for the Long-Term
• Design for Anti-Racism
• Commit to Quality
• Partner with Educators, Families and Communities Throughout Policy Design and Implementation

The last three points are particularly relevant for implementation. The brief notes that “we must name the system design components that perpetuate inequities, inefficacies, fragmentation and unintended consequences. At the same time, we can build from aspects of our system that have centered around anti-racism and equity … Designing an anti-racist ECE system requires a shared commitment to a concept of quality that includes equitable experiences of quality among the children and families it serves, allowing space for the definition of ‘quality’ to be expansive enough to include a continuum of preferences, priorities and values that represent the cultural diversity and needs of all learners.”

There are many racist (and classist) components to the current system: for instance, the process of applying for and acquiring child care subsidy — assistance disproportionately used by people of color—can feel designed to be a discouraging and brutal Kafka-esque journey. This is no accident; as historian Sonya Michel , the 1996 welfare reform bill turned child care “into a lever for punitive policy toward poor and low-income mothers.”

Similarly, suspensions and expulsions of young children occur among children of color than their white peers. (ELN also recently wrote about pre-K expulsions.) One thing I learned when reporting on the excellent design of Multnomah County (OR)’s universal pre-K initiative was how vital it is to have diverse parent voices involved to avoid the very unintended consequences the brief warns about. For instance, it was the parents’ involvement in setting the campaign’s policy priorities that ensured the initiative bans preschool suspensions and expulsions.

Quality is another area in need of a reckoning. There may be a temptation among policymakers to reach for public school analogues when it comes to quality metrics. While there are lots of times when schools make good comparisons for early learning settings, this isn’t one of them. Quality for younger children often looks and feels different (frankly, schools could take a few lessons from ECE!). Moreover, the traditional quality rating systems in early childhood have come under in recent years for privileging a particular perspective of care.

We can do better. In a blog post, Bank Street’s Brandy Jones Lawrence and Emily Sharrock a vision for how considering child care as a public good can lead to better quality, writing that “America has made the decision not to invest in quality care. But it does not have to be this way, and changing our approach does not have to be incremental.”

It is unbelievably exciting to be talking about the potential implementation of a real child care system instead of arguing about whether one should exist. The implementation phase is not, however, going to be easy. Starting with ‘first principles’ like those laid out in the brief will smooth what could be a rocky road — and no matter the state of the path, we are finally, finally, finally headed in the correct direction.

The child care and universal pre-K proposals in President Joe Biden’s social spending plan have survived efforts to slash the original $3.5 trillion price tag down to a figure more acceptable to two fiscally conservative Democrats in the Senate.

But the new $1.75 trillion released Thursday, leaves out some programs that would have directly impacted the K-12 system, such as funding for school construction, while reducing original amounts reserved for student’s at-home internet access and teacher and principal preparation. Progressive leaders in the House say they still want to see the of the reconciliation bill before agreeing to vote for a separate $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill — another major piece of Biden’s first-year agenda. That leaves both bills in jeopardy for now.

“No one got everything they wanted — including me,“ Biden said after meeting Thursday with Democrats at the Capitol.

Two years of free community college, another signature Biden campaign promise, has been eliminated from the package. It extends an increase in the child tax credit, but just for one year, instead of the four Biden wanted. There will be enough to expand free school meals to 8.7 million students for five years and provide 29 million children with $65 per month for food during the summer.

The bill is a “commentary on what is achievable with such a small and slim majority in the Senate and the House,” said Sean Worley, a senior policy associate at EducationCounsel, a consulting firm advising districts on policy and legal issues. The Biden administration, he added, proposed a “very robust … new vision for what education speeding could and should be. They just ran headfirst into some political headwinds.”

The hard-won agreement over the size of the legislation was expected to be a step toward getting a vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which includes electric school buses, broadband access and eliminating lead pipes from schools. But progressives have repeatedly threatened to withhold their support for the infrastructure bill until they have a guarantee that the social spending package will pass. With a budget process known as reconciliation, the president doesn’t need any Republicans to vote for the plan, but he’s had a hard time getting consensus within his party. It took multiple meetings with Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to reach this point. Experts note that just because some of the family and education programs have been cut from the legislation doesn’t mean they won’t resurface in a future bill, and Congress still has other unresolved budget issues to address in early December: approving a budget for fiscal year 2022 and lifting the federal debt limit to continue paying for past spending bills. 

For now, however, Biden is aiming for a win with an early-childhood proposal that would reduce families’ costs for child care and allow states to launch or expand universal pre-K programs for 3- and 4-year-olds

“This is a fundamental shift in education,” he said Monday while visiting at East End Elementary School in New Jersey’s North Plainfield School District. “We’re going to make sure it’s available for everybody.” 

The fact that the plan — paid for with taxes on corporations and those earning over $400,000 a year — still includes $400 billion for both child care and pre-K “speaks to the recognition of early care and education as critical to our nation’s infrastructure and the well-being of families,” said Lea Austin, executive director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. She said both working mothers and those with a background in the field — including Senate education committee Chair Patty Murray — have come together “to change the conditions.”

The child care provision promises to limit costs to no more than 7 percent of a family’s income and increase wages for staff. But Austin said she wants to see pay and working conditions for providers match those for preschool and elementary school teachers.

Some experts say it doesn’t make sense to expand pre-K without also improving preparation programs for K-12 educators. Biden’s original plan would have included $197 million for grow-your-own programs that recruit and train young people to become teachers in their own communities, as well as $198 million each for teacher residency and principal preparation programs. Those three provisions have been reduced to $112 million each. 

“It would be a head-scratcher to pump all this money into pre-K but not also bolster the educator pipeline – it’s core to successfully expanding high-quality pre-K,” said Danny Carlson, assistant executive director for policy and advocacy at the National Association of Elementary School Principals.

In a statement, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the plan makes “historic down payments” on pre-K and child care, but she didn’t address the lack of K-12 programs in the plan. 

“Any transformational change is hard to get done, and this historic compromise is no different.” the statement said.

Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, which advocates for modernizing schools, was more direct.

“We are deeply disappointed that funding to repair or replace crumbling schools in our most underserved communities has been left out of the final [Build Back Better Act],” she said in a . “The disparities in conditions result in disparities in education delivered and student achievement.”

Worley said there’s a chance Democrats would either try to add those initiatives to the fiscal year 2022 appropriations bill — which Congress has to address by Dec. 3 — or revive the proposal next year in a fiscal 2023 budget. But he notes that the administration already  faced a tough time winning support for proposed increases to Title I for low-income schools. And that bill would have to win support from Republicans, who have so far rejected most of Biden’s attempts to increase government spending.

Biden’s free community college plan could also make a comeback in a reauthorization of the HIgher Education Act, which is now 13 years past due, said Carrie Warick, director of policy and advocacy at the National College Attainment Network.

During a last week Biden said it looked like he would still be able to get a $500 Pell Grant increase into the bill.

“Increasing the Pell Grant is meaningful to … recipients, but the size of the bump will determine how much so,” Warick said, adding that “an emergency as low as $300 can lead to a student dropping out.”

The nonprofit’s shows a gap of $855 between the current Pell Grant award of $6,495 and the average community college student’s expenses. A $500 increase, plus another $400 proposed increase in the fiscal 2022 appropriations bill, would cover that gap.

Another signature piece of Biden’s plan would have been a four-year extension in the higher child tax credit that was included in the American Rescue Plan last March — $3,600 a year for  children under 6 and $3,000 for older children. Now the increase will last for one year.

Any extension is good, said Chris Swanson, who leads the Institute for Innovation in Development, Engagement and Learning Systems at Johns Hopkins University. But he added, “The reality is things are not getting better for the American people. We still are in the midst of a pandemic coupled with major shifts in economics and employment.”

Funding for federal programs expires on Sept. 30, but that’s just one budgetary challenge facing Democrats in the coming weeks as they seek to pass President Joe Biden’s massive agenda for schools and families.

The House has already , known as a continuing resolution, to keep funding programs at the same level through early December. That would give lawmakers more time to work on the fiscal year 2022 budget.

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On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared open to removing a provision to increase the debt limit, which Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, has threatened to block. The standoff was leading to a potential . To pass in the Senate, the bill would need 60 votes — or 10 Republicans in addition to the 50 Democrats.

“We will keep government open by Sept. 30 …and continue the conversation about the debt ceiling,” she said.

Democrats will need to find compromise as well in order to pass Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan to lead the nation out of the pandemic — even though they control both houses of Congress and the White House. Majority leaders in the House and Senate are trying to balance competing priorities among progressive and more fiscally conservative wings of their parties. Those differences could impact two major pieces of the president’s agenda apart from the fiscal year 2022 budget — a $1 trillion infrastructure package that is scheduled for a House vote on Thursday and a much larger $3.5 trillion proposal that includes universal preschool, school construction and free school lunches for more children.

Democrats are using what is known as a budget reconciliation process for the $3.5 trillion plan, which means they can pass the package without a single Republican vote in the House or the Senate. But experts say they still may have to scale back the size of the package in order to secure enough Democratic votes.

Biden met with leading Democrats Wednesday in an effort to to bridge some of their differences, but according to the White House, “there is more work ahead in the coming days.”

‘Game of chicken’

While federal law dictates timing for the annual budget, Democrats are also treating Biden’s legislative agenda with a sense of urgency. Sean Worley, a senior policy associate at EducationCounsel, a consulting firm advising districts on policy and legal issues, suggested that it would get harder, politically, to pass either package if they drag into next year because of mid-term elections.

First up is the infrastructure package. That plan includes $200 million over five years to replace lead pipes in school, $5 billion for electric school buses and an increase in funding to $1 billion a year to improve safety for students biking and walking to school. Another $65 billion would go toward improving the nation’s broadband access and making the internet more affordable.

Pelosi originally scheduled the vote for Monday as part of a deal with moderate Democrats who said they would withhold their support for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill unless the infrastructure bill made it to the president’s desk first. But  have issued their own ultimatum, arguing they won’t support the infrastructure legislation unless they simultaneously vote on the larger reconciliation package. Now a floor debate is expected Monday.

Worley predicted this “game of chicken” could lead to the infrastructure bill’s failure.

“I would expect progressives to vote against the bill and an insufficient number of Republicans will vote in favor,” he said. “This could deepen rifts within the party and will make intraparty negotiations on the [$3.5 trillion] bill that much more difficult.”

The infrastructure deal with Republicans does not include facility improvements for the nation’s schools. But the current version of the reconciliation bill — what Biden calls a “human infrastructure” proposal — would provide $82 billion for school construction and renovation projects. The plan’s $3.5 trillion price tag, however, looks shaky with Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona breaking with their fellow Democrats over the cost.

Manchin, earlier this month, called for a on the plan, saying it’s not smart policy to pass such a large package amid rising inflation. In addition to funding for school construction, the package proposes almost $200 million each for teacher residencies and , more than $100 billion for two free years of community college, $35 billion to provide free meals to more children and $450 billion for child care and preschool.

So far, early-childhood education advocates aren’t ready to settle for less.

“It’s sizable, but it’s sizable for a reason, because there is that much need,” said Sarah Rittling, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, which focuses on federal early-childhood policy.

Biden’s plan seeks to limit the cost of child care to no more than 7 percent of a family’s income, increase wages for child care providers, and work with states to make universally available to 3- and 4-year-olds.

Rittling said she doesn’t expect the early-childhood provisions in the package, which have broad support among Democrats, to get cut. “It is so incredibly popular on top of being so incredibly necessary,” she said.

The reconciliation bill includes much of Biden’s agenda for social and education programs.The also features major increases for programs such as Title I, special education and Head Start.

The House passed the 2022 appropriations bills at the end of July, but Worley suggested that even without the debt limit debate, those increases “were going to be difficult to see across the finish line.”