The amount of money spent on special education students in Washington varies widely by district.

That’s according to a new analysis of state data from July 2022 to June 2023 of Washington districts where there are over 2,500 students. According to the data, the amount each district spends per special education student ranges from $8,708 in Goldendale School District to $33,056 in Bellevue School District.

“Historically, our tendency is to look the other way on special education spending,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, . “It hasn’t gotten the same kind of scrutiny that other elements in the school district budget have.”

Special education is also consuming a rising share of Washington’s public education budget, now making up over 14.5% of that spending as of the most recent fiscal year, according to the Edunomics Lab analysis. That can force cuts elsewhere, Roza said.

Washington has of a district’s population that can receive special education funding. Some lawmakers and advocates have pushed for the Legislature to end the cap entirely, as many districts have identified more special education students than they’re funded for.

Both candidates running for superintendent of public instruction are also calling for more special education spending.

But there are concerns about how eliminating the cap could raise overall state spending. Legislators who have resisted the idea have said it would require scaling back in other areas.

More spending on special education doesn’t necessarily mean better academic outcomes for students, said Roza. That’s based on state-by-state comparisons by Edunomics Lab, which found that identifying more students with disabilities or increasing special education staff were not associated with better reading outcomes.

, specific learning disabilities, includes children who are dyslexic or have other neurological differences that interfere with their ability to process language.

More spending on special education per student doesn’t directly correlate with the number of special education students in a district, either. Instead, more spending on special education often tracks with district size, likely because larger districts use a standardized approach to serving special education students, Roza said.

The Edunomics Lab analysis found that instead of spending on special education specifically, what improved reading outcomes for students with disabilities was spending more on reading instruction for all students, regardless of disability.

To ensure districts are getting the most out of their money, the lab’s researchers recommend districts scrutinize their special education budgets and compare their costs and outcomes to their peers.

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But the social scientists who authored the research argue that federal dollars could have been spent in ways that would have helped scores bounce back faster. The per-dollar returns of ESSER, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, measure up poorly in comparison with those of previously studied efforts to boost achievement, from reducing class sizes to implementing more rigorous curricula.

Dan Goldhaber, the lead author of and the director of the , said he believed the crisis conditions of the pandemic made it “hard to spend the ESSER funding in thoughtful, effective ways.”

By his own estimate, 35% of the math recovery achieved during the 2022–23 school year was directly attributable to ESSER funding. Fully 87% of English recovery was credited to ESSER, though he found that gains in that subject were statistically insignificant. Still, he said, that upward movement was limited. 

“Candidly, I think the impact was small, and there are some reasons why it wasn’t larger,” Goldhaber said. “Only 20% of ESSER money was even earmarked for learning loss, and I don’t think there was a lot of oversight of whether that 20% was well spent.”

The findings offer a split verdict on the post-COVID academic recovery, while somewhat strengthening the case that putting more resources into schools can elevate their results. The advances measured in both studies are virtually identical not only to one another, but also to earlier, wide-ranging estimates of the impact of additional money on schools.

ESSER was one of the best-known and longest-lasting pillars of Washington’s pandemic response. Years after stimulus checks and free nasal swabs stopped arriving in the mail, many districts are still spending down the aid they received through the program. The last of the supplemental aid will not expire until this September, four years after schools first began to reopen for in-person instruction.

Notably, however, both papers project that American students will not have returned to their pre-COVID learning trajectories by then, and that the cost of a full restoration could amount to hundreds of billions more. With no sign of any further assistance coming from Congress, that bill will need to be picked up by states — if it is paid at all. 

In the meantime, ESSER’s backers can point to real, if incomplete, progress.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon helps lead the , which released a second study on Wednesday. In an interview, he noted that the federal cash injection was the equivalent of of the country’s annual K–12 spending, spread over multiple years. While it might have been used more efficiently to stem further learning loss, he added, both national and state leaders were simultaneously focused on goals like reopening schools and alleviating the severe emotional distress that many children are still facing.

“One can certainly imagine ways to spend the money that would lead to even more learning gains,” Reardon said. “But that wasn’t entirely what was on policymakers’ minds when they sent out the money.”

‘A huge missed opportunity’

To pinpoint the impact of additional money on COVID-era learning, the two studies take advantage of differences in how the federal funding was awarded to individual districts.

The total ESSER expenditure was fueled by three laws setting aside $13 billion in March 2020, $57 billion in December of that year, and a further $122 billion the following March. Because there was no data showing where learning loss was most concentrated at that time, dollars were allocated to school districts based on their pre-pandemic grants from Title I, the Department of Education’s main program benefiting disadvantaged children.  

But not all districts received comparable amounts, even if they served similar numbers of needy students. Instead, governing Title I — including rules that ensure small states receive minimum allotments, as well as larger sums being granted to states with higher per-pupil spending — introduced significant spending gaps between different schools. Those disparities were significantly magnified as each new emergency funding bill was passed, said Harvard economist Thomas Kane, Reardon’s co-author. 

“With the second two ESSER packages, the federal government was essentially pushing $175 billion through pipes that were meant to handle $16 billion in Title I,” Kane said. “So what might have been a $500 or $600 difference per student in Title I dollars became a $5,000 or $6,000 difference in ESSER funding per student.” 

Both Goldhaber and the Education Recovery Scorecard team accessed standardized test results from the Stanford Education Data Archive, which compiles student scores from different local exams to allow for cross-state comparisons. In each of their studies, $1,000 in ESSER spending per student was found to raise math scores by 0.008 of a standard deviation (a scientific measure showing the distance from a statistical mean).

In the world of education research, an improvement of that size is considered small: something like one-tenth of a medium-sized effect. But the average conceals substantial variation across different states, and many school districts received much more than $1,000 per student. 

As an example, Reardon, Kane, and their collaborators identified 704 districts in which over 70% of students were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch — a commonly used proxy for poverty — then compared the results for those that received unusually large ESSER allocations (more than $8,600 per pupil) to those that received much less (less than $4,600 per pupil). 

The differences were striking. The working-class district of Brockton, Massachusetts was awarded $3,224 per student from the second and third ESSER funding bills, and its students’ math achievement improved by the equivalent of .06 grade levels between 2022 and 2023; but in Dayton, Ohio, per-pupil funding increased almost three times as much ($11,444), and math scores jumped by a factor of 10 (.65 grade levels).

Goldhaber argued that figures like those cast considerable doubt on the proposition that the U.S. government’s emergency relief to schools was mostly wasted.

“One of the ideas that’s out there is that we spent $190 billion and got nothing,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the right answer.”

Yet he also voiced disappointment that neither Washington nor states had directly measured what kinds of ESSER spending (tutoring programs or school renovations, improved ventilation or increased staffing) were correlated with higher performance. Despite its huge cost and high stakes, Goldhaber concluded, ESSER was simply “not designed to learn from what districts do.”

“To my mind, that makes it a huge missed opportunity. We can see that there are pretty big differences across states and districts in the degree of catch-up.”

‘Who’s going to pick up the reins?’

While the studies can shed little light on the most successful aspects of ESSER, they will be collectively seen as a major contribution to the research on school finance reforms. This is true both because of the scale of the government’s intervention — perhaps the single greatest natural experiment on the effects of windfall cash on schools that has ever been attempted — and the consistency of the papers’ results. 

Not only do the findings of both studies mirror one another, they also hew closely to those of , published in January, that gathered the results of dozens of previous experiments in increased school funding. That paper also pointed to an average test-score increase of about .032 standard deviations per $1,000 spent over four years, or roughly .008 annually.

Marguerite Roza, head of Georgetown University’s finance-focused Edunomics Lab, called the coinciding findings “reassuring.”

Yet she also noted the “wildly expensive” cost of sending operating aid to states that was not specifically dedicated to learning recovery. According to Goldhaber’s calculations, the government would need to spend an additional $450–$650 billion to fund a full return to levels of academic achievement last seen in 2019; Reardon and Kane tallied a likely cost of just over $904 billion. 

Whether or not those figures represent the true price tag, Roza said, states that intend to replace federal dollars should be more consistent in disbursing them and more stringent about what they pay for.

“Why repeat the same strategy given how unevenly the dollars were distributed and how uneven the effects were on districts and states?” Roza asked. “Given what we know now, any new federal dollars for recovery should probably be structured differently.”

But in Kane’s view, that recommendation may be too optimistic. With just a few months left before the deadline to spend ESSER funds, he observed, too few state authorities had even committed to picking up the torch of learning recovery. 

“In most states, there hasn’t even been a discussion started about what the state role will be now that the federal money is running out,” he said. “Our results are basically saying that there was a positive effect, but it wasn’t enough. Now who’s going to pick up the reins?”

Officials are dipping into reserves to cover an $88 million deficit. They’re continuing afterschool enrichment programs, like STEM and basketball, and promising to protect teaching, counseling and school leadership positions even though the COVID relief funds that paid for many of them have nearly dried up.

In talks with staff and the public, the district heard that the extra support “dramatically moved the needle academically and should be continued,” said district spokeswoman Christina Clark. Philadelphia, she added, aims to become “the fastest improving, large urban school district in the nation.”

But for now, the budget doesn’t reflect what some experts call “right-sizing” — reducing staffing levels to reflect an enrollment decline that is expected to for another decade. 

“You’re making a big gamble,” said Daniel DiSalvo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “You’re either flatlining or increasing your school spending while the number of students is falling.” 

But Philadelphia, which is projected to run out of reserves in two years, is far from the only urban district in that spot. In a new paper released Thursday, DiSalvo and Reade Ben, an economic policy analyst at the institute, take stock of similar issues in the nation’s largest school districts. They show that while enrollment nationally fell 2% between 2013 and 2023, the number of teachers rose 11% and per-pupil spending continued to climb.

Prior to the pandemic, population and enrollment declines tended to hit certain pockets of the country, experts say; even Philadelphia closed more than 20 schools . But district and state leaders have no experience dealing with enrollment loss of this magnitude, which is exacerbated by expiring relief funds.

“Historically, when we’ve seen districts go through these things it’s been like a few of them at a time — not like all of the big districts at once,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. Those districts, she added, have “such a big impact on our country’s perception of what’s going on with public education.”

Feeling the ‘brunt of it’

The amount districts spend per student increased in all nine of the cities the authors examined — New York City, Houston, San Diego, Dallas, Austin, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Antonio and Los Angeles. Houston, for example, spent $8,011 per student in 2013 and in 2022, spent $14,183.

Total staff increased over that time period in four cities — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas. The number of staff members in New York City increased from 11,202 to over 12,700.

“It is evident that school districts have yet to adjust their staffing and budgeting to the reality of fewer students,” they wrote.

Their data, however, doesn’t reflect more recent actions in some districts. New York City Mayor Eric Adams $700 million from the district’s budget since November, but canceled a third round of cuts in February.

The story plays out a bit differently from state to state.

Philadelphia is looking for relief from the legislature, which is under a 2023 court order to remedy past school funding disparities. currently pending would close an annual $1.4 billion gap for the district over the next seven years and significantly reduce future deficits, Clark said.

The authors also focus on Texas, which, unlike Pennsylvania, is growing and is California as the state with the most students in public school by this fall.

But that growth is more in the and in “,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant who works with many districts in the state. He noted that school boards don’t get a lot of say in whether a charter opens in their district because the state education agency authorizes of them.

“If 5,000 students enroll in charters instead of district schools, then the district feels the entire brunt of it,” Eschbacher said.

Confronting that reality, the Plano district is , while leaders in Fort Worth have delayed for now. The Fort Worth district did, however, eliminate more than that were mostly paid for with relief funds, including “success coaches” who worked with high school freshmen, instructional specialists and assessment staff. Another victim of enrollment loss: Full-time , which some schools are cutting.

“Hopefully, kids will be selecting the right book because there’s not going to be anybody there to guide them,” said Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, who leads Parent Shield Fort Worth, an advocacy group. She doesn’t have a problem with the district closing schools, but understands why some community members pushed back. “Schools are like landmarks where parents and grandparents and older children have gone.” 

The outlook is more dire in California, which is another 660,000 students by the 2032-33 school year.

The reaction to those forecasts has varied. Some districts, like San Diego Unified, announced — and then — layoff notices this spring, while others, including , issued pink slips. Some plan to not replace staff members who leave or retire.

“It’s a mixed bag,” said Michael Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which monitors districts in financial distress. The number of districts on his watch list actually dropped from 37 to 23 between December and March. “What that tells me is that school boards did what they needed to do, given the data about where they were headed.”

The greatest loss — 278,600 students — is expected in Los Angeles County, where some districts, like Inglewood Unified, began years before the pandemic. Home to massive new pro sports and entertainment venues that are pushing up the , Inglewood is closing at the end of next school year. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in the county, is currently from firms that will “attract and retain students.” But the district is also closing one under-enrolled school this summer, and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has that more are to come.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has from a shortfall in state revenues so they can adjust more gradually to the loss of federal aid. But school board members and the say the plan, which includes borrowing from reserves, is risky and could end up costing districts more in the future. 

To DiSalvo and Ben, that pushback shows that unions will push for a “new normal” of lower staff-student ratios and higher spending.

“This will put policymakers in a bind,” they wrote. To avoid cuts, they’ll have to either “increase taxes or find other ways to pay for schools with more teachers and staff but fewer students.”

Asking voters to approve a tax hike is also a risk, Roza said. In Vermont, for example, where residents vote on school budgets, many are their district’s proposals.  

“Vermont has had steady enrollment declines for decades,” she said. “So communities are like, ‘Why do the costs keep going up?’ ”

There are still pockets of layoffs due to unique local circumstances, but they are by no means widespread. 

Still, widespread staff reductions seem very likely to happen in the very near future. Marguerite Roza at the Georgetown Edunomics Lab the expiration of federal relief funds in September 2024, combined with unprecedented , a “perfect storm” for school budgets. 

As a result, it’s likely that school districts will have to trim their staff in the next two to three years. No one knows exactly when the storm will hit or how bad it will be, but I estimate it could easily result in 136,000 fewer teacher jobs. 

Where will layoffs hit the hardest? This question is easy to answer at a high level: The districts most at risk will be those that have lost the most students and those that got the most ESSER money. Those tend to be large, urban, high-poverty districts.

Education Resource Strategies took look at which states are most at risk, starting with how much the ESSER money represented compared with their typical education budget. Assuming that districts spent the federal money evenly over the entire grant period, this figure ranged from 4% to 5% in states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Colorado and Utah, and up to 12% to 17% in states like Alabama, New Mexico, Louisiana and, especially, Mississippi. 

But state-level data are not sufficient to drill down to find districts most at risk. While some places received no ESSER funds at all, the highest-need districts saw influxes totaling up to 40% of their annual budgets.

So, to get a more precise estimate, I looked at staffing ratios and how they have changed over time. About three-quarters of school districts across the country have reduced their student-teacher ratios over the course of the pandemic. That is, they have more staff per student than they used to. For this analysis, I looked to see how many teachers a district would lose if they went back to the same staffing ratio it had in 2018-19. 

Take Chicago as an example. According to the , its student-teacher ratio shrunk from 16.5 students per teacher in 2018-19 to 14.5 in 2021-22. Over this three-year period, it added 5% more teaching staff even as student enrollment dropped 8%. For Chicago to go back to the same staffing ratio it had just a few years ago, it would need to shrink by 2,873 teachers. 

Districts Most at Risk for Teacher Layoffs

All told, if every district in the country went back to the same staffing ratio it had in 2018-19, the nation would lose 136,000 teaching positions. 

Districts wouldn’t have to lay off all those teachers; they could start by letting attrition and slower hiring rates reduce their employee headcount. If state budgets , that might allow many places to avoid, or at least limit, the number of layoffs. 

But it’s also possible that my 136,000 estimate is on the low side. For one thing, districts tend to protect full-time classroom teachers from layoffs, especially higher-paid veterans. That means they would need to many more junior teachers and other part-time employees to make up the difference. Given the makeup of the teacher workforce, that would have devastating effects on diversity efforts aimed at bringing more young Black and Hispanic educators into the workforce. 

In one historical parallel, schools lost of teachers from 2009 to 2010 as the Great Recession began to hit school district budgets. When that happened, it wiped out a decade’s worth of staffing gains as schools a total of 364,000 jobs. 

So, when might layoffs hit schools? At the moment, the economy looks quite strong. Inflation is , and the is as strong as it’s ever been. But the last and biggest pot of federal relief money, $122 billion in ESSER III funds, expires at the end of September 2024, and Congress has given no signs that it will extend that deadline, let alone authorize additional funding to soften the decline. 

So school districts mustn’t get complacent. Large urban districts with high concentrations of poverty will likely need to downsize. Districts that spent less of their COVID relief money on labor will be less at risk of needing to make big layoffs. Districts that are packing a higher share of their spending into this final year are especially vulnerable to hitting a big fiscal cliff. 

There are a lot of uncertainties about the exact timing and magnitude of the impact, but districts will have to scale back their budgets in the coming years. By my estimates, that could mean as many as 136,000 fewer teachers. 

As it became clear the pandemic was accelerating widespread enrollment declines, demographers, economists and school funding analysts started counseling that communication is key to winning buy-in from angry parents. Few education leaders heeded their advice, instead ducking the topic. 

Now, school finance experts are watching to see whether things will go more smoothly in the San Antonio Independent School District, which last spring announced it will shutter a yet-unspecified number of schools at the end of the 2023-24 academic year. The district’s decision-making process, they say, appears to be unusually transparent. 

Describing the contraction as long overdue, San Antonio officials at the June school board meeting by showing a PowerPoint slide from 2008, making the case for confronting what was then 40 years of enrollment declines. At the top of the image, under the headline “Critical Junction,” two yellow school buses start down divergent paths: “Stay on Course” and “Change to a New SAISD.”

The same illustration could be used today. Over the last 15 years, enrollment has dropped from more than 55,000 students to less than 45,000. Twenty years ago, the district operated 106 schools. Now, it has 98, 35 of which have undergone some form of transformation in recent years. 

Many reorganized around popular curricular themes, such as dual-language immersion, Montessori or gifted-and-talented academics. As a result, more than 2,200 students from other communities now attend SAISD schools, making it the most popular interdistrict-enrollment option in its Texas region. 

But even with a boost from outside students, enrollment is expected to continue to decline over the next decade. The number of district residents under age 18 has fallen 14% since 2010, and births have declined 36% since 2007. Enrollment losses are likely to accelerate as older students graduate and there are too few kindergartners to make up for them. 

Such seismic demographic shifts are taking place virtually everywhere. Between 2019 and 2023, public school enrollment nationwide , or 2%. Schools are projected to lose another 3 million students by 2029. 

In most states, education funding is meted out according to enrollment, so even a small change to a student body has budgetary ripples. Adding to the pressure, many districts used their share of $188 billion in temporary federal pandemic relief to stave off what, amid fights over everything from face masks to teaching about race, was just one more explosive conversation. 

“Most district leaders, in anticipation of angry backlash, just don’t raise the topic,” says Marguerite Roza, head of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “We’re seeing a lot of districts right now say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not talking about school closure.’ And [leaders] thinking, ‘If I can just make it a few more months, then I’ll say it, because I don’t want to deal with it right now.’ ”

Postponing the painful conversation has financial consequences, she says, but that leaders could have spent engaging the community about their priorities for a streamlined district.

“The public needs its opportunity to weigh in and marinate,” says Roza. “Not everybody’s going to be happy, but our experience is that when people have seen , and they’ve had an opportunity to go back and forth, if it doesn’t have to be a situation where you’ve eroded trust in the leaders.”

In February 2022, Oakland, California, school board members voted to close 11 schools over two years. Protests and a hunger strike ensued, several sitting board members lost re-election and last January the board changed the plan to . 

In St. Paul, where public outrage had stalled past consolidations, lame-duck officials scheduled a vote on long-postponed closures to occur during the short window between elections and the seating of new board members. The timing enabled the district to invest more of its federal COVID-19 recovery funds in academics than many districts.

Contentious discussions about closures have also , Los Angeles, Minneapolis and other shrinking districts. New Orleans, which has had a formal process for shutting underperforming schools for years, is struggling to determine how to shrink its all-charter school system.

Last fall, following a , the board of Colorado’s Jeffco Public Schools voted to shutter 16 elementary schools. In June, it followed with of one middle and one high school into a single 6-12 facility. The process was emotional, but no one was ousted.

Newly installed as San Antonio’s superintendent, Jaime Aquino was watching. Last spring, he took a delegation from his district to Jeffco, and also arranged conversations with officials in Cleveland, which has scrambled to address population declines. Taking what they learned, and heeding the experts’ advice about communicating clearly and early, San Antonio officials focused not on a budget crisis, but on the need for equity within the district.

“We are not right-sizing because we’re approaching a fiscal cliff,” says Aquino. “We’re doing this because we need to deliver on the promise that we make to our students and our families that no matter where they attend [school], they’re going to get an excellent education.”

Right now, the district’s larger schools subsidize their underenrolled neighbors — which still can’t afford a full array of basic academics and extracurricular activities. 

Operating an elementary school with 644 students costs $6,888 per child, according to a district analysis, compared with $16,261 where there are 109 students. Despite the higher per-pupil funding, some of the undersubscribed schools can’t pay for math and reading teachers with expertise in each grade, mental health workers and extracurriculars. 

Particularly in early grades, it’s harder for teachers who have students from more than one grade to deliver instruction. And even where educators can focus on one age group, not having colleagues with whom to share strategies can pose problems. Meeting the needs of students still learning English or with disabilities is harder with a small staff.

Aquino started talking about the need for a district contraction in spring 2022, when he was appointed superintendent, describing the excess capacity as a barrier to equity.

More recently, district leaders shared information on how many students schools are drawing from their assigned neighborhoods and other parts of the district, as well as how many children from those communities are enrolled elsewhere, either in a San Antonio ISD school or one outside the district. The .

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S.H. Gates Elementary, for example, is at 25% of capacity, built for 615 students but serving 156. Meanwhile, 202 students who live in its attendance zone attend schools elsewhere in the district. Approximately one-fourth of its third- through sixth-graders were reading and performing math at grade level at the end of the 2021-22 school year.

Meanwhile, Bonham Academy has 599 pupils — 13 more than its official capacity. Four hundred of those students live outside its assigned residential area, while 114 neighborhood kids either attend non-district schools or programs in other zones.

Bonham does not outperform Gates in math, but its pupils read at grade level at twice the rate. It is a dual-language immersion school, an especially popular model in a majority-Latino city. 

Advanced Learning Academy, one of several magnet schools created as a part of a district’s 2018 academic reorganization, has space for 927 students but enrolls 1,047. At Douglass Elementary, half of the 385 kids come from the surrounding neighborhood, which sends an equal number to outside schools.

To Roza, these numbers underscore an important and frequently misunderstood element of closure discussions: People typically protest shuttering any school, even if its poor performance means they won’t send their own children there. 

“Communities will just react so negatively, like it’s a punishment that you’re closing us because we were doing poorly,” she says. “But the truth is that parents already do that when they have a choice. What we tend to see is that the underenrolled schools aren’t the higher-performing ones.”

In addition to enrollment, capacity and cost per pupil, the “right-sizing” criteria detailed on the district’s website include academic performance, investments in buildings and partnerships with local industry, colleges and other organizations. No school will close until it can be determined — using the same criteria — where its displaced students can be accommodated.

Partly because he anticipates better distributing the district’s existing staff and allowing its educator corp to shrink through attrition, the superintendent doesn’t anticipate large-scale layoffs.

On Sept. 18, SAISD leaders will present the school board with a proposed list of schools for closure or consolidation. In the six weeks that follow, the district will hold a series of community meetings about the initial recommendations, with a particular focus on where, if the changes are implemented, students would end up and how they would progress from elementary to secondary school.

On Nov. 13, the board will vote on final recommendations as a package — which means it will not make exceptions for individual schools. Because this will be complicated by the need to accommodate English learners, students in dual-language programs and other children receiving unique services, each school to be closed will be assigned an enrollment specialist to help families with placement.

Will the process go more smoothly than in other places, or touch off the kind of political churn that has led some districts to back off of closures in the face of community anger? The executive director of the San Antonio parent advocacy group MindshiftED, Maribel Gardea, says the process so far seems very different from poorly led closure conversations in neighboring districts.

“It looks like they are trying to be as transparent as possible at the forefront,” she says. “But parents are just kind of waiting for a list of possible schools that will close.” 

Announcing up front that the board will vote on the entire list, and not bow to pressure about any given schools, is smart, says Gardea. She is less convinced that the contraction will boost academic achievement at the low-performing schools that remain open but have not received the same district investment as the ones reorganized in recent years.

Board Chair Cristina Martinez is more optimistic. “This is a real opportunity to really help families find a school that’s going to meet the needs of all of their children, because none of our schools are the same,” she says. “It’s also an opportunity to make sure those students who might not have been receiving some offerings really do have those options now.”

The expiration of these funds in about 14 months could be the biggest jolt to school finances that districts have ever faced. But an analysis by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ has found that the majority of states lack laws to protect districts from a fiscal emergency like this one — a fact that could leave school systems unprepared for the upheaval to come.

“Deficits will creep up quickly and really destabilize a district,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “In the end, the students will suffer if districts wait too long to rein in their spending.”

School systems currently face compound pressures. Declining enrollment means less state funding, and they’re paying because of a tight labor market and more for supplies because of inflation. To better withstand the strain, experts like Roza advise districts to estimate their revenues and spending a few years in advance, taking into account enrollment trends, taxes and the potential for an economic downturn.

But only six states have such requirements. Experts also recommend setting aside money for fiscal emergencies, but just 10 states mandate the practice. 

Most states view district budgets as a local matter. Officials say they can offer little more than advice as the education system heads for what Roza calls a “.”

“For these next few years, 
 state monitoring of finances is an absolute must,” she said. Relief funds have “distorted district finances. Many are overcommitting at a time when they should be downsizing.”

She pointed to the San Diego school district as an example. In June, the board approved for teachers to avoid a strike, at a cost of $517 million. But projections show a nearly by the 2024-25 school year.

The end of relief funds could also in some states, further impacting what programs, like tutoring and summer school, districts will be able to sustain. In addition, Congress’s recent deal to prevent the government from hitting a debt ceiling and defaulting on its financial obligations could affect how districts wean themselves off pandemic money. 

between conservative Republicans and the White House wiped out the chance for an increase in federal K-12 spending next year — money that could have cushioned the blow once COVID money dries up. Now the House is proposing a in the education budget.

“If I’m a state budget director, the debt limit deal tells me I’m on my own to try to soften the cliff landing with added revenue,” said Jonathan Travers, managing partner at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that advises districts on financial matters. “I might have been holding out hope for help from Title I, but that seems gone now.” 

Planning for Fiscal Emergencies: Three Maps

‘Grounded in the truth’

Districts have been down this road before.

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in the wake of the Great Recession, was at the time the federal government’s largest one-time investment in schools, providing districts close to $71 billion in extra funding. When those funds ran out, however, many districts were unprepared: They , imposed and increased .

A from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General examined spending decisions in 22 districts, including the Wichita Public Schools in Kansas. 

Susan Willis, the district’s payroll director at the time, remembers a “pretty ugly” seven-to-eight year period with no raises for teachers. The district eliminated its grants department and several facilities and professional development positions. Enrollment was growing, so leaders “couldn’t be looking into the classroom for reductions,” said Willis, now the district’s chief financial officer.

A decade later, Wichita’s enrollment is , and as pandemic aid expires, leaders are looking to eliminate positions they could have cut earlier, but didn’t — particularly at the elementary level. The challenge, Willis said, is how to offer salaries high enough to compete against suburban districts while continuing to fund that she thinks have back above 80%.

The 2012 report said that a funding cliff doesn’t mean that districts didn’t make good use of temporary funds or that the relief funds weren’t the “right call.” Leaders just need to be “grounded in the truth, no matter how brutal,” Travers said.

Budget reserves

Whether the fiscal cliff turns out to be a gradual slope or a precipitous drop could hinge on how much federal money a district received. A from Education Resource Strategies identified 15 states where the expiration of those funds will hit harder because they received more federal aid and have a lot of districts with high poverty rates. 

Travers said it will be easier to identify which districts “have the potential for a painful landing” later this summer when auditors review districts’ finances from the past year. It’s “critical,” he added, that states keep a close watch on districts where relief funds total more than a quarter of their annual budget. The more money districts received, the harder it could be to reduce spending once the funds disappear. That could include some of the nation’s , including New York City and Houston and those with high-poverty levels like Detroit and Philadelphia.

To prepare for lean years, Ohio, for example, requires districts  to estimate their budgets five years in advance. Washington mandates four years. But in some cases, school finance officials’ desire to plan ahead conflicts with budget timelines.  

“We can’t forecast because we never know what our state aid is going to be every year,” said Susan Young, executive director of the New Jersey Association of School Business Officials. 

The state doesn’t require districts to put aside funds for emergencies. But those that choose to could find themselves brushing up against a state cap that limits reserve funds to 2% of their budget. Young’s organization would like lawmakers to raise that limit, especially as relief funds expire. Some have already made and are asking voters to raise property taxes. 

Reserves can help school systems with a temporary shortfall, but can’t do much for a financially strapped district that has or failed to issue layoff notices in time for the next school year. Like COVID aid, reserves eventually dry up.

“There are no reserves that are going to buy you a whole school year,” said Michael Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which was created by a state law in 1991.

The California law also created an early warning system in which county education agencies must sign off on district budgets and, when a district is headed for insolvency, can wrest authority from a superintendent and school board.

Sixteen states have similar processes, some more extensive than others. , for example, grades districts on whether they pay their bills on time and post financial information. The Kentucky state board monitors any district that adopts a budget with less than 2% of its revenues set aside for reserves. 

In California, are now in serious financial trouble. Ten may not be able to meet their financial obligations in the next couple years, and three, Fine said, “are running out of cash.”

Given the pandemic windfall, he’s surprised any hit that point. But with the state’s , he expects more to find themselves on the list. 

“The news probably only gets worse for 2024-25, not better,” he said.

In southern California’s San Bernardino County, where 33 districts are spread over 20,000 square miles, Thomas Cassida, director of business advisory services, expects the majority of them — 28 — to have a budget deficit in 2024-25 or the year after.

They still have time to scale back. For example, some have spent relief funds to open health centers, but might have to cut positions for the counselors and other mental health professionals hired to run them. 

He’s most worried about districts that were in bad financial shape before the pandemic. When the relief funds are gone, they could find themselves in the same place.

“Every county has at least one district that is a problem child,” he said.

In Ventura County, it was the Ojai Unified School District, where Fine said leaders ignored multiple warnings about the need to cut roughly $3 million. About 30 minutes from the coast, Ojai is known for boutique hotels and wellness retreats. But tensions ran high at a  Feb. 21 school board meeting where Fine showed up unannounced to deliver a sobering message.

“You are beyond financial trouble, and you are in fiscal distress,” he and superintendent. “If you were a private business, you would now be out of business.”

Less than a month later, the board and . 

“Parents were extremely frustrated and upset by the news of the budget deficit,” said Sherrill Knox, an Ojai native and former assistant superintendent who took over as the district’s new chief this month. The crisis, she added, was “nestled in an ongoing, long-term issue of the need to downsize our district.”

While Ojai was an extreme case, Fine said is affecting districts statewide, and smaller school systems can quickly downgrade from financial difficulty to fiscal distress. He largely blames “inadequately trained” school board members. 

“In most cases, it’s stupid governance and leadership that got them into this spot,” he said, “and it will be good governance that gets them out.”

But those days are over. Thinking of quitting in the next few months or years? Think twice. Because odds are you’ll have a tough time finding another education job in the next several years.

That’s because the job market for teachers is about to do a U-turn with the hiring spree of the last few years set to stall out before coming to a screeching halt at the start of the 2024 school year. 

In some areas, the reversal has already started and districts are pulling down their “help wanted” signs.  and  issued a  this spring. , , and Baltimore County .  and Seattle are already doing . And this is just the beginning. Last month, at an education finance training we conducted at Georgetown University, we heard from dozens of school officials from all over the country whose districts were already making similar moves or are poised to in the next year.

What’s behind the flip? In the last few years, the hiring bonanza has been fueled by a flood of federal pandemic relief funds (ESSER). Districts across the country used that money to add staff that they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Now, that funding is set to disappear by the fall of 2024, which means districts are paying for more employees than they can afford.

​​To make matters worse, during the same time period, districts have been losing students. That means that state and local dollars (which tend to be driven by enrollment counts) are unlikely to make up the gap.

Staffing-enrollment mismatch spells big financial trouble ahead

With all these extra staff in schools and declining enrollment, a rightsizing is coming. These trends aren’t just afflicting large urban districts, either. Rather, in states where we have the data, the patterns are playing out statewide. Over the last decade, districts have grown staffing rolls by 9%, all while student enrollment fell by 8%.

In , staffing is up by 8%, while enrollment is down 7%. Same trend in . Even in , where there’s been enrollment growth of 3%, it won’t be enough to sustain the 20% jump in staffing over the same time period.

True, . So, job seekers might find more opportunities there (though both states offer notoriously low teacher salaries). And just as staffing and enrollment patterns can vary by state, same goes for districts within states, too. Even so, when job openings are down statewide, it means the available candidates are vying for a smaller number of positions. (States or districts wanting to better understand their own staffing and enrollment patterns can use .)

ESSER hangover 

Federal COVID relief funds fed a hiring habit that can’t be sustained.  was once treated as some abstract future threat. But we’re now watching that threat play out in real time as districts work to finalize next year’s budgets this month.  released by schools this spring. 

With last week’s debt limit deal, it’s clear that more federal funding won’t come to districts’ rescue. And states aren’t likely to fill the hole either, as . 

Georgia recently  a one-year drop of 16.5% in net tax collections. Massachusetts had a whopping 31% year-over-year . And 

For educators in high-demand roles, like , there will still be jobs. But for others, it’s likely to get much tougher as districts start to shrink their labor force to align with their new enrollment numbers.

The public discourse about widespread teacher shortages may be confusing to some, particularly when the data show we’ve just finished a period of staffing up our schools. In most regions, however, the new reality is this: Those seeking jobs in schools will soon be facing a job market quite different than what we’ve seen for several years.The upside for districts that are hiring? When there are fewer jobs and more job seekers, districts can afford to be choosier, and the  of new hires rises.

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.” 

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 delay is significant, experts say, because points to a direct correlation between the closures and lost learning.

Of the nation’s 25 largest districts, those that were in remote learning for at least half of the 2020-21 school year have spent an average of roughly 15% of their relief funds from the American Rescue Plan. 

compiled by the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University shows that Los Angeles Unified, where schools stayed closed until April 2021, didn’t start spending any of its $2.5 billion until this fall. And the Chicago Public Schools, which reopened the same month, has spent just over 6% of almost $1.8 billion.

“What opportunities might we be missing for kids to catch up?” asked Jana Wilcox Lavin, CEO of Opportunity 180 in Las Vegas, where the Clark County School District never fully reopened that year. The nonprofit helped gather ideas from the community on how to use the funds, but the district has so far spent less than a quarter of it. Parents, she said, “can’t point to where they see that money showing up in the classroom.”

The dire consequences of school closures were reinforced last week when the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed sharp declines for 9-year-olds in reading and math since 2020.

From the moment the U.S. Department of Education began distributing $122 billion in relief funds in March 2021, officials emphasized the need to act swiftly to help students make up lost ground.

“It’s hard to argue with the importance of addressing lost instructional time for all students,” Roberto Rodriguez, the department’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “We want to see these dollars put to work now.”

But some districts haven’t spent the first dollar, much less the minimum 20% specifically spelled out for academic recovery.

The sluggish pace has caught the attention of House Republicans, who last month sent Education Secretary Miguel Cardona asking how districts are using the funds to “remedy the acute learning losses brought on by prolonged school closures.” Experts expect the tempo to pick up this fall, but education groups are with the department to stretch the to the end of 2026.

The disconnect is frustrating for parents and local politicians seeking evidence the money is being used to boost student performance.

The reopened on time in the fall of 2020. But as in many urban districts, high percentages of Black and Hispanic families So far, the district has spent just 6.8% of its $804 million.

“We’re going to get to the end of the next two years and nothing is going to look different for the school system,” said Sue Deigaard, a Houston school board member. “We’re not, so far, demonstrating consistency of any result, nor do I even see the dollars being spent in a way that looks particularly strategic and targeted.”

She points to from the 2021-22 school year showing that third graders not only didn’t reach the district’s literacy goal, but performance actually dropped between winter and spring.

District leaders insist they’re not just sitting on their hands. Projects have been bogged down in supply chain delays and staff vacancies have been difficult to fill. Changes in leadership have also taken a toll: Among the 25 largest districts, 16 have lost at least one superintendent during the pandemic.

While superintendent turnover might not change a district’s spending plan, it can have a “cascading impact,” said David Rosenberg, a partner at Education Resource Strategies, which advises districts on budget issues. 

Staff vacancies and burnout can drag down even the “highest-functioning and most stable district teams,” he said. “Layer in superintendent turnover and potential turnover at the level below them and the work gets even more complicated.”

Houston, which superintendent Millard House II has led for about a year, is one district experiencing such churn. 

Click here to view full chart.

August Hamilton, special assistant to House, said he’s grateful for the federal funds. But he doesn’t hold out much hope students will make rapid gains.

“I think we have to understand that you have first graders who never went to pre-K, never went to kindergarten — a first grader who’s now being asked to take a [state] test in 3rd grade,” he said. “That is going to be the challenge of this work. It’s a long time to have virtual instruction.”

That’s one reason, he said, why the district moved $6.1 million in relief funds to aid the academic recovery of its neediest students this year. Officials said they no longer needed that money for masks and other COVID mitigation strategies.

‘Backfilling’ budgets

To pinpoint spending patterns, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ reviewed relief fund data from the and checked it against state figures. Districts provided details on when they fully reopened five days a week in 2020-21 — if they did. And the , led by Brown University economist Emily Oster, offered additional data on the extent to which districts remained open, closed or in hybrid mode.

Districts generally haven’t made it easy to track how the money is being spent. Some states, like California,  how their districts are spending the 20% targeted specifically for learning loss. But most do not. 

New York state doesn’t post any information on relief fund spending. The Georgetown lab had to use a public records request to get any data, according to director Marguerite Roza. That showed that New York City, the nation’s largest school system, had spent none of its $4.8 billion. A spokesman for the district, which is tied up in  over its budget, declined to give an actual figure and called it a “moving number.” 

The halting pace ignores what researchers say is needed to lift performance in high-poverty districts that spent most of 2020-21 online. The authors of a May said districts need to spend all of their American Rescue Plan funds on extra instruction to help students recover — not just the 20% the law requires. The longer they wait, the authors wrote, the greater the “implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality.”

Districts closed the longest have also seen the most enrollment loss. On average, enrollment in those districts has fallen by 4.4%, according to from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Because state funding is tied to enrollment, some are now “backfilling” budgets with relief dollars to make up for the losses, said Roza. In fact, she expects spending partly for that reason. 

“In the ones that were closed longer, it’s been harder to get kids to come back,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. She points to districts such as the Seattle Public Schools, which plugged federal funds into its last year, and the , which described its use of relief dollars as an effort to “ensure continuity of existing programs and services.” 

In Los Angeles, enrollment fell almost 6% this year and is expected to drop below a year from now. The district waited to dip into its $2.5 billion because it still all it received from the first two rounds of federal aid, said board member Tanya Ortiz-Franklin. 

Statewide, California schools were among the last to bring students back in person. Unlike some governors, California’s Gavin Newsom didn’t order schools to reopen. 

Click here to view full chart.

Several districts in the state never resumed in-person instruction that spring, and some have yet to spend any of their funds from the March 2021 bill. They include the Simi Valley Unified School District, where Ron Todo, associate superintendent of business and facilities, said the district is hanging on to its $13.8 million for now. The deadlines to spend the earlier relief funds are more pressing, and the newest grant, he said, has a “longer shelf life.” 

Roza has heard such explanations before. But Congress designed the third round of funding to be different from earlier relief bills: It appropriated almost twice as much as the other packages combined and specifically required districts to address learning loss.

Districts “should be well into” spending it by now, she said.

Under the legislation, districts have to obligate the funds by September 2024, and have through March 2026 to spend them. But Roza asked, “If the money was intended to get kids back on track, why wait two years?”

Education advocacy groups, like AASA, the School Superintendents Association, want the department to extend that deadline until the end of 2026. 

“I definitely have concerns about spending it all in time — not just for the practicality of getting it done,” Ortiz-Franklin said, “but also strategically to best serve our students’ short- and long-term academic and social-emotional recovery.”

Extending the timeline has political ramifications, Roza said during a recent .

“The accusation will be that we didn’t really need it, or at least if you needed it, you’re not even spending it on the kids that were impacted in the pandemic because they got older and they graduated,” she said. 

In Simi Valley, Todo said his district plans to use the funds this school year for additional elementary counselors, social workers and intervention teachers to help students who have fallen behind. But a plan to get math teachers to work an extra class period met with resistance. 

“We have teachers who have survived the pandemic, and they are too tired to be in the classroom an extra hour,” he said. Despite the exhaustion, Todo added, he sees a benefit to the current spending deadline: “When there is at least a healthy sense of urgency, we push ourselves a little harder.”

A year after the nation’s schools experienced a historic decline in enrollment, new data shows that many urban districts are still losing students, and those that rebounded this year typically haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Whether families withdrew to enroll their children in online charters, school them at home or fled to far-flung suburbs with more affordable housing, the pandemic has triggered population shifts that could change the composition of U.S. school districts for years to come.

Data from Burbio, a company that tracks COVID-related education trends, offers the first look at the degree to which states and districts have recovered from a punishing year of lockdown and remote learning. Out of 40 states and the District of Columbia, few have seen more than a 1% increase compared to 2020-21, when some states experienced declines as high as 5%.

Flat enrollment this year “means those kids did not come back,” said Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University. “Parents were making these enrollment decisions last summer. There was still a great deal of uncertainty. Parents wanted stability for their kids.”

shows that last year’s losses were concentrated in the early grades. Those who opted not to enroll their young children in public schools last year, or found an in-person option somewhere else, might never return for middle or high school, Dee said. 

While enrollment in many of the nation’s urban districts was already shrinking before the pandemic, school closures and economic upheaval forced many families to make decisions they might have put off otherwise.

Barring further pandemic disruptions, student population trends will likely return to their pre-COVID pace, Dee said, but added, “The effects of the sharp, recent enrollment declines may be long-lived. The fiscal consequences will remain for some while.”

New York experienced the sharpest decline, a 2% drop — more than 48,000 students — since last year. That’s on top of the previous year’s 3% decline. Enrollment in Florida saw the biggest bounce at 4%, or more than 111,000 additional students — a reflection of higher birth rates, job growth and fewer COVID restrictions under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, experts say. 

Of the 10 largest districts in the nation, only Florida’s Orange and Hillsborough counties, home to Orlando and Tampa respectively, saw enrollment surpass pre-pandemic figures.

“Florida was continuing to grow when other states came to a plateau,” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist from the University of South Florida. “Things were open and you could still work.”

State data offers a glimpse of what will likely be further enrollment growth in Arizona, Florida and Utah — states with more affordable housing, growing tech sectors and outdoor living that became an important draw during COVID. At the same time, fewer people are moving to the Northeast from other states and countries, citing . 

District-level figures — provided exclusively by Burbio to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ â€” offer a richer picture of what happened to students after the pandemic began. The data, combined with state-level reports and interviews with district officials and parents, shows many urban districts lost students to growing exurbs. And some districts with no population growth added thousands of students in virtual schools.

Districts with enrollment loss could face tough decisions about layoffs and school closures in the near future. Meanwhile, smaller districts that are rapidly gaining students are struggling to hire staff and preserve the kind of close-knit environment that drew many parents in the first place.

“The pandemic kind of accelerated some of those pre-existing trends,” said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a think tank. While school closures forced many parents to look for other options, housing and rental prices were also pushing families out of major metro regions. “All you have to do is go to Zillow and see the year-over-year changes,” he said.

In December 2019, Tanner and Miranda McCutchan relocated from northern California to Boise, Idaho — one of 10 metro areas that saw the most growth between 2020 and 2021, according to recent . That leaves two fewer children who will enter California’s schools in the coming years. Miranda stays home with 4-year-old Paige, who attends a Montessori preschool, and 18-month-old Emery, while her husband runs a glass company. 

“We couldn’t afford a house where we lived,” she said. “It was keep renting or move somewhere we could buy a place.”

The fiscal cliff & ‘Armageddon’

In California, Burbio collected data only from Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego. All three saw declines, due in part to California’s high-priced . With the state’s school-age population expected to keep over the next decade, district leaders are bracing for a to their budgets.

The Oakland Unified Public Schools offers a preview of what other districts with declining enrollment and birth rates will soon confront — the painful and unpopular decision to close schools. In February, the district, which saw a 5.6% enrollment decline compared to last year, decided it would over the next two years. Four others will merge or reduce grade levels.

In the Granite School District, near Salt Lake City, enrollment fell 2.4%, down to 60,371 this year, even though the state’s overall enrollment is up. 

The district has seen a decline in birth rates and an increase in families fleeing to “cheaper areas to build larger homes within [Salt Lake County],” said Benjamin Horsley, chief of staff for the district, adding officials anticipate “leveling out around 55,000 students.” The district has already closed three schools and expects to shutter 10 to 14 more in the next five to seven years. 

Districts experiencing similar losses should have been making those tough calls before the pandemic, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

“Federal [relief] money is delaying it a year or two, and the fact that state budgets are healthy is delaying it a year or two,” she said about closing schools. Roza advises a network of over 40 urban districts nationwide, the majority of which are shrinking. “Federal money will run out, and enrollment for some of them isn’t isn’t going to come back. These cost factors are going to just slam down on people.”

Los Angeles Unified, for example, saw a 5.9% decline this year and is expected to by fall of 2023. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said Monday that he’s not yet considering closing schools, but added that at the end of his first 100 days — in about two more months — he will discuss “technical corrections” and “belt tightening” measures to respond to the loss of students. 

He agrees with Roza about the dangers of the approaching fiscal cliff, and didn’t mince words about what would happen to the district if it didn’t turn enrollment trends around by the time federal relief funds dry up in 2024. “Armageddon,” he said. Then he added, “It’s going to be a hurricane of massive proportions.” 

The student population in the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, began dropping about five years ago. Superintendent Jesus Jara attributes much of the decline to the growth of charter schools. 

“The anti-charter discussion — that was in the ‘90s. They’re not going away,” Jara said. “The discussion is how are we more flexible and how we are more agile for our communities.” 

Despite declining enrollment, the district needs to build and renovate 33 schools to better serve its current population, he said. That includes breaking up some large, 4,000-student high schools to offer more “boutique” and career-focused programs to compete with charters.

‘Has not slowed down’

Districts with falling enrollment are strategizing how to keep the students they have. But accelerated growth comes with its own challenges, Roza said, putting pressure on leaders to act fast, especially if they need to recruit staff amid a nationwide hiring shortage. Schools might be “digging deeper and deeper into applicant pools” and not necessarily choosing the best candidates, she said. 

Liberty Hill Independent School District, northwest of Austin, Texas, didn’t lose students during the pandemic. Enrollment, at 5,539 last year, is now over 6,800 — a 23% percent leap. It’s a bedroom community that just got its first H-E-B, a “big box” grocery store, and is conveniently located near a toll road with easy access to Apple’s new complex near Austin. 

During the pandemic, the community “actually saw a 40 percent rise in residential home builds, and it has not slowed down,” said Superintendent Steven Snell. The district has eight schools now and will open a ninth next year. 

Parents value the district’s small-town atmosphere and the sense that educators know their families well, he said — connections that could be hard to maintain as the district adds 1,000 students a year. Meanwhile, the district has raised salaries for substitutes because of shortages, and there’s a scarcity of available bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers.

“When you have a salary that is causing you to live paycheck to paycheck, you’re going to jump ship for a little more money to survive,” Snell said.

Many of the enrollment swings this year reflect the success of online programs in meeting the needs of families for consistency amid the pandemic’s many disruptions.

For some virtual charters, the enrollment spike was temporary. Oklahoma’s Epic One on One, an online program, had 17,106 students in 2019-20. Enrollment roughly doubled last year and is now down to 23,156, according to state data.  

“Many parents decided to enroll their student in Epic once the pandemic hit, but it appears that trend has slowed with this year’s enrollment numbers,” said Carrie Burkhart, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Education.

But whether parents are concerned about COVID or found that online school better suits their children, virtual programs remain in high demand. 

South Carolina’s enrollment has increased almost 2%, due in part to “skyrocketing enrollment in virtual charters,” said Ryan Brown, spokesman for the state’s education department.

The student population in the Huntsville Independent School District, about an hour north of Houston, shot up 40% this year because it operates the Texas Online Preparatory School. And in Colorado, Harrison School District 2, near Colorado Springs, began a partnership with The Vanguard School, a virtual program and one of three charter systems affiliated with the district.

“Many might see it as a public school district versus charter battle,” said Harrison Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel. “We believe this makes us stronger and responds to the needs of the community.”

Homeschooling trends

While Burbio data offers an incomplete picture of where lost students have gone, others have been trying to fill in the missing pieces. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey showed that homeschooling jumped from about 5% of households to the fall after the pandemic began. By the start of this school year, it had settled back down to about 7%, according to August 2021 data.

Others have left for more established private schools. Michelle Walker, an Oregon mother who became an advocate for school reopening last year, withdrew her daughter from the Canby Public Schools, near Portland. She secured a spot — and financial aid — at a private school for fourth-grader MacKenzie. She also took out a loan and received money from family to help cover tuition.

“I drive 80 miles roundtrip every day to make sure she goes to a good school,” she said. “It would take a lot for me to put her back in public schools.”

shows many other parents are following suit. According to Burbio, most districts in Multnomah County, which includes Portland, and nearby Clackamas County have seen enrollment declines this year. 

Some district leaders are still hoping to lure back students they’ve lost. The Bernalillo Public Schools, north of Albuquerque, serves families in Pueblo and Hispanic communities, including many in multi-family households concerned about COVID risk. 

The district was the last in the state to lift its mask mandate. Superintendent Matt Montaño said he’s encouraged that enrollment, while still below pre-pandemic figures, has picked up slightly since last year. 

The district’s pre-K program, with 190 students at three schools, earned a five-star rating from the state education department — an accomplishment Montaño hopes will help recruit new students.

“Once we get them in our doors,” he said, “there’s no reason why they should leave us.”

That’s how long it’s been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era.

On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Within nine days, the nation’s remaining districts followed suit.

Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents; teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract, as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance.

To mark what will soon stretch into a third spring of educational disruption, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ spoke with educators, parents, students and researchers about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” They talked movingly, often unsparingly, about their missteps and occasional triumphs, their moments of despair and fragile optimism for the future. [You can scan through our expanding archive of testimonials right here.]

As spring approaches, there are additional reasons to be hopeful. More children are being vaccinated. Mask mandates are lifting. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities long baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. Teachers are burning out.

“There are kind of two camps,” said Beth Lehr, an assistant principal of Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson, Arizona. “There’s the one camp of ‘This too shall pass,’ and then there’s the other camp of ‘Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.’”

But none of this was on anyone’s mind on March 16, 2020.

The World Health Organization had a pandemic only five days earlier. Two days after that, then-President Donald Trump called a . And in the Northshore School District, a system of 22,000 students northeast of Seattle, schools had already been closed for over a week. In late February, one of its schools shut for deep cleaning after an employee traveled out of the country with a family member who had become ill. The district’s closure offered a glimpse into what many thought would be a short-term disruption.

‘I realized it wasn’t science fiction’

Susan Enfield, superintendent of Highline Public Schools in Washington: A very good friend of mine who works in the called me, end of February, and said, “I think we’re going to close 
 and I think the rest of you won’t be far behind.” I said, “No way, there’s no way they’re going to close schools.” I mean, I really was incredulous.

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education: I was having brunch with my sister in Kirkland, Washington, when the news broke that there were multiple cases and deaths at the Life Care Center nursing home just a few miles away. My husband sent me a text telling me to get out of Kirkland right away, and everything felt ominous.

Marguerite Roza, Seattle-based director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University: My daughter and I were driving to go pick up some fish for dinner. In the car, they announced the governor’s order — it was with a bigger lockdown kind of order — and we walked into the fish market place, and the guy behind the counter goes, “Have you heard anything yet?” We were like, “Yep.” And he goes, “What did he say?” We said, “Lockdown.” And he [grunts], “Uhhhh.” Already, the streets were pretty empty, and the first person we talked to was the guy packaging up our salmon.

Tony Sanders, superintendent, School District U-46, near Chicago: I was asked to serve on a statewide panel of superintendents 
 to provide guidance to school district leaders across the state. Our first meeting, held on Sunday, March 15, was attended by prominent legislators, state health officials, the deputy governor for education and state superintendent of schools. Hearing the projections of worst-case scenarios should we not “flatten the curve” was surreal. At the conclusion of that meeting, where we worked to socially distance, but had no idea yet about the need to wear a mask, I made the four-hour journey home in complete silence and disbelief.

Michael Mulgrew, president, United Federation of Teachers, New York City: We started tracking this during the Christmas holiday. We had some teachers who were in China. We had them quarantine when they came back. I didn’t realize [things had changed] until March 16, the day after the New York City public schools closed. I was in my car driving around the city and I was shocked that the streets were empty. That’s when I realized it wasn’t science fiction. 

Bridgette Adu-Wadier: freshman, Northwestern University, graduate of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandra, Virginia: By the end of March, Gov. Ralph Northam basically announced that all the schools would be closed due to the pandemic for the rest of the school year. I watched the livestream, and I was texting my friends. One of them was actually really upset and crying about it, just because it was such a stressful situation to be in — like, things are never going to be the same again.

‘We were completely unprepared’

Parents, superintendents and others — many in a state of shock — had little time to plan as events unfolded at frightening speed.

Toni Rochelle Baker: family liaison for Oakland REACH, a parent advocacy organization, Walnut Creek, California: They gave us curfews in our city and then they told us to stock up for food. I don’t live my life like that. I’m a single mother. I go grocery shopping when I can. We get what we need, and now you’re telling me to stock up on food? That was scary. I didn’t have a deep freezer. I didn’t have extra money just laying around [to] go spend $300 on food. I didn’t have Wi-Fi at the time because I didn’t really need it. I have my phone, and now I need Wi-Fi for three people.

Maria Amado, family child care provider, Hartford, Connecticut, who opened her program for school-age children during remote learning: [Translated from Spanish] Educators, including myself, sewed masks for the children, and we looked for resources to support each other. Some gave fabric to make the masks, others the elastic. It may not have been in big ways, but they all contributed. And now I remember this and think, “Where did I find the time to make the masks?” It was the adrenaline to survive, knowing this would protect me and I had to do it.

Tony Sanders: We needed to place emergency orders for Chromebooks and other devices. We had to completely transform our approach to food service so that by March 17 we were feeding our students and community at food pickup locations throughout the district. There were decisions that had to be made that I would never have thought of. We had to determine how we would ensure employees would continue to be paid. During the first days of the pandemic, I recall sitting alone in my office. The view from my window was a large parking lot with one vehicle.

Sherrice Dorsey-Smith, deputy director of programs, planning and grants, San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families: I had to figure out how we were going to open what we called emergency child and youth centers. These were spaces for essential workers to leave their children for the day while they were at work. Child care centers were closed, schools were closed, but some people needed or were required to continue working. They needed a safe place for their children during the day. I had to figure out how to get breakfast, lunch and snacks to all the sites. I remember working through the weekend nonstop, literally 48 hours.

Michael Mulgrew: It was a mad scramble to get everyone trained quickly how to get their classrooms up. How do we teach parents how to help their kids? It was non-stop. It was hundreds of decisions every day. Even though everything was closed, we were still moving stuff literally, like laptops and iPads and different things, trying to get them to our members’ houses so they had something to work off. [Former] Mayor [Bill de Blasio] had resolved never to close the schools, so he would not allow the Department of Ed to put any contingency plans in place. On the Friday before the schools closed, at 3 p.m., the mayor would be banging on the table saying he was going to keep the schools open. And that Sunday afternoon he closed the schools. So we were completely unprepared.

School, interrupted

As the deadline for lifting lockdown kept slipping away, some took longer to grasp the new reality: Life wouldn’t be returning to normal anytime soon.

Mariela Garcia: freshman at the University of Houston, graduate of Eastwood Academy High School in Houston: It was during spring break when we ended up having two weeks instead of one. And two weeks turned into three. This went on for a couple of weeks before we noticed that we weren’t going to go back to school. Stores started closing down, schools started closing, many things started closing because everyone was scared. That’s when I noticed that this was becoming very serious.

Dale Chu, senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute: I realized everything had changed 
 on May 10, 2020. How do I remember the date? My at-the-time 5-year-old daughter — after nearly two months on Zoom — drew a picture of her class for me. Seeing Kellan’s classmates through her eyes on a Zoom grid really hit things home for me.

Ricardo Miguel Martinez, president, Latino Parents for Public Schools, Atlanta: I had people worried about getting kicked out, evicted, lights being turned off, not having groceries. These are people who weren’t making excuses. The people who are fighting masks and stuff, they have a choice to either follow the data or not follow the data. God bless them in their fight. But these people didn’t have a choice. They got thrown into the chicken factories and died. They got thrown into manufacturing and died so that we could have chicken at the grocery store.

Mourning the lost

Some felt the pandemic’s effects up close: sick parents, dead teachers. This month, the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. , with an estimated 2,200 of them educators. Many of the effects have been harder to measure, but are certain to leave lasting damage. Recent four out of five secondary school principals experienced “frequent job-related stress” last year, and educator surveys show over students’ mental health, including anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

Susan Enfield: We lost two middle school students to suicide early in the pandemic. We lost staff members.

Michael Mulgrew: I had to read the names of our members who passed away. I had to make the phone calls to those families. We lost a lot of members, and I always think that if we could have closed earlier, how many more would we not have lost.

Shawnie Bennett, a COVID-19 investigator, Oakland, California: I lost my brother [from COVID] in May of 2020. He was only 32. As a family, when we would gather to try and go see him or just sit outside the hospital window. We were afraid to touch each other, so it was hard to comfort each other. [My son] came home [from college] for Christmas, and he saw me so weak and broken. He had always seen a very strong Black woman as a mother. I was gone, emotionally wrecked, mentally, physically, and it broke him down to the point that he did not want to return to school. He’s in Atlanta now, got an apartment and he’s just trying to figure life out. He was very close to my brother. That loss, on top of what he physically saw me go through, was detrimental for him.

David Brown, principal, Hillcrest Heights Elementary, Prince George’s County, Maryland: Family vacations, going out to eat, visiting family — I think all of those things disappearing created a milieu where it was tough to manage. And when you’re in charge of leading a large group of individuals, how do you help and support them? How do you keep your teachers upbeat? Because the mental health of every adult who receives a paycheck from our county impacts the mental health and the wellness of children who are just simply here to learn. I remember there was discussion that we’ll be able to eat and enjoy ourselves come the 4th of July, and then that didn’t happen. You’re holding out hope that it’s going away, but it’s not, and [you’re] trying to remain that positive, invigorating leader that the principal has to be.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier: Graduation was a really tough time. I don’t remember enjoying it, honestly. Just collectively, it was like a year or so of the pandemic, and then also, my family was impacted a lot financially, which was stressful. I was basically helping my two younger brothers through virtual school for the whole year. I had a lot more family responsibilities, and it took a toll on me mentally. I had trouble balancing things, especially with Zoom class sessions while my brothers needed help or were playing loudly in the other room. I relied on music and audiobooks as a form of escape.

Ashiley Lee, tech and operations coordinator, Para Los Niños, a Los Angeles charter school, where last year she taught seventh-grade history: I remember being in a class full of blank screens, because we no longer required cameras on, and then after that, putting my grades in for the semester and realizing just how low they were. I was trying to brainstorm with my team: What is something, anything, we can do to encourage our students to at least get the one assignment we post a week in by the end of the semester? My kids, it was so funny, we started a joke where I would call on a student to answer a question and they wouldn’t be there — kind of a ghost in the call. And the kids would comment in the chat, “Ghostbuster! Ms. Lee caught him.”

Marguerite Roza: The hardest part was when it looked like there was no reopening school. This was November of 2020. The governor had established these metrics by which you could open schools, and as far out as the modelers had modeled, it was never going to reopen. My then-high school daughter [a cross-country runner] was getting more and more discouraged. You could just see it was really not healthy for her, just to be home all alone every day. And you, as a parent, start to feel desperate. I used to listen to press conferences constantly. You could see that there wasn’t going to be any movement. I was very worried about her. The sports season had come and gone. School was online. I think that was probably the darkest time, which coincides in Seattle with it being really dark, [at] like 3:45. 

Mariela Garcia: Hundreds and thousands of people were dying because of COVID, and I was scared. I remember I had no interactions with the outside world for — I kid you not — at least three months straight. My family just did not want to leave our home. At the time, we had to adjust to online school. I had no Wi-Fi or laptop at the time, so it was hard to be in class and even submit assignments from my phone. It was definitely a very hard time, especially when family members started to get COVID.

Toni Baker: I had two kids at the table with computers doing virtual learning and I had no idea what that meant. They told us to sign on to some Zoom that I’ve never heard of before. I’m in love with my kids, but my kids were on my last nerves during the pandemic. Those four walls just weren’t enough.

Couch sitting, watching ‘Friends’

The monotony of being stuck at home sparked new coping strategies: Cooking, at-home workouts, walking the dog — and of course . Some took long couch breaks. Others became entrepreneurs. Mariela Garcia started baking and ran a business from a local farmer’s market.

Mariela Garcia: My family actually bought the DVD set of “Friends” and we just watched “Friends” over and over and over. We’ve already seen each episode at least 10 times. We just keep it playing throughout the whole day because we don’t have any Wi-Fi or anything at home. I would not have started my business if it wasn’t for being in quarantine. I had so much more free time. I hate being that person, but the first time I ever tried my empanadas, they came out great, and I have not changed anything. 

Susan Enfield: A group of female superintendents from around the country — we refer to ourselves as “sister supes” — had a standing Sunday afternoon Zoom where we would just check in and get together. In the early months, that proved to be incredibly helpful, just remembering that we weren’t alone. Going for walks with my husband and also, frankly, allowing myself to feel pain and to grieve. I think as leaders we do need to inspire hope and let people know it’s going to be OK and be strong, but we also have to balance that strength and courage with vulnerability. There were weekends where I didn’t get off the couch. I’ve been pretty honest about that in conversations with others. I said to someone once, “If one more person says, ‘You got this,’ I’m gonna smack ‘em.” A year and a half ago, I didn’t “got this,” and people were just lying. I’m sorry, they were just lying. I don’t think we do ourselves or our colleagues or anyone any service by faking it.

Beth Lehr, assistant principal, Sahuarita High School, Sahuarita, Arizona: I do not check my email at all on the weekends.

Toni Baker: I had a support system. They gave us vouchers for food. They gave my kids free computers. They gave us Wi-Fi. They had these teachers — I don’t even know where they found these beautiful teachers with these loving hearts for these kids. There was a teacher who had a grandma’s touch and a mom’s heart, and she was just so warm. This is through a computer. I’ve never met this woman to this day in real life. I had the community of Oakland REACH behind me. I wouldn’t have made it without them.

David Brown: When we were in person, I had “lunch bunches” where I would eat lunch with the kids. So I went back to eating lunch virtually with the kids, and I found that really gave me a lot of positive energy. You find that you are equally, if not more, excited to see them in this virtual world than they are to see you. So it’s the, “Hey, Mr. Brown.” It’s the big smile. It’s the camera coming on. It’s the home environment. It’s the parents waving in the background. I think all of that does a good amount to lift your spirits.

‘The system itself is not changing’

Confusing guidance and vitriolic debate left many parents feeling lost. They watched helplessly as their children disengaged from learning, but also worried that their kids would get sick if they returned to school. School leaders were caught in what felt like a non-stop, high-volume war of words with unions, parents and state officials. 

Pedro Martinez, CEO, Chicago Public Schools; former superintendent, San Antonio Independent School District: Texas did not prioritize teachers [for vaccines] in the first round, but they were pushing hard and threatening districts about keeping schools open. Meanwhile, the positivity rate, I remember in San Antonio, was over 21 percent. The death rate was five times higher in my district than it was in the more affluent parts of the county. I just remember the frustration. You want these things, but yet you’re not providing vaccines to my staff, who actually want to keep the schools open. 

Michael Mulgrew: The city doctors are telling us it’s going to be nothing but a cold and the schools could remain open. The kids are going to be fine. They’re not going to get it, and we’ll create herd immunity, and we’ll be safer faster than everybody else. Literally, that’s the conversation I was having with the mayor and his doctors. Our doctors are telling us the absolute opposite. They’re saying, “Listen, children might not be getting this at this point in time, but this is a serious virus and people are going to die.” The big conflict was that first one. 

Marguerite Roza: I’m a data person. I really study the numbers, and I didn’t understand how a lot of people were driven by fear and couldn’t recognize what I was seeing. [They’re saying], “Your child could die,” and I was like, “Well, not really. The numbers here say, really, your child isn’t going to die. I promise you, driving to Grandma’s is more dangerous for your kid than this thing.” You’re having two different conversations if you’re talking about numbers and you’re talking about fear. The fear was so dominant that the numbers people probably felt, out of respect, we should step back and be quiet. I don’t want to tell somebody who’s having a panic attack, “You’re overreacting.” Looking back on it, I think that I probably kept my real views about the data quieter than I should have. I thought people were going to bounce out of it.

Mariela Garcia: We were able to pick whether to go back in person or stay online. I definitely wanted to go back. I missed my friends. I missed having class with a teacher right in front of me. My parents thought it was not a good idea. I was conflicted in making a decision, but for the good of my family, I decided to stay online for my whole senior year. That also meant no sports. I was so heartbroken because sports meant everything to me. I was unable to play my senior year. I had already claimed the captain position in my previous year playing, and I was looking forward to a great season. 

Parent power

The pandemic has dramatically changed parents’ relationships with their public schools, prompting some to seek new options and others to demand more from the schools their children attend. “I think the pandemic has created some sort of awakening in parents that we’ve not seen before,” Roza said. “I don’t think there’s any putting that genie back in the bottle.” 

Wendy Neal, executive director of My Child My Voice, a Houston-based advocacy group: I’m not saying the teachers are bad, I’m just saying that the parents were finding creative ways of being more of a teacher to their own child. Some parents were like, “Well, if you’re not going to help my child, I’m pulling my kid out of your school. Either I’m going to homeschool, go to an education pod or go to a private school.” Some of these parents really didn’t believe in charter schools either, and then all of a sudden, they’re putting their kid in a virtual charter school.

Marguerite Roza: In March of 2021, [my daughter’s school] finally got around to having their cross-country season outside, and they banned all parents from coming. They run three miles. They’re outside. It just got to the point where it was eye roll upon eye roll. A lot of parents showed up anyway, ’cause how are you going to keep parents off of a three-mile course, right? And we’re popping out of the bushes waving at each other. [It had been] a year, and we knew better. I should have marched out and said, “The evidence suggests we’re fine here,” but they were going to ban you and ban your team if you weren’t cooperating.

Sonya Thomas, executive director, Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy group: You would think that a pandemic would bring about a sense of urgency. We’re talking about decades of educational inequities, and what I’m seeing is that the system itself is not changing. It has actually grown richer in money. It has grown more savvy in messaging. And it’s hurtful. I’ve got tears coming down my face now. I just had a friend who died this weekend. He couldn’t read. And I have to ask myself, “What has changed?” 

Toni Baker: When this school year came around, the COVID was just everywhere. The previous year, they did the COVID tests, they did the sanitizer, they did the masks, they did all these precautions. And when school started back the next semester, all of that went out the window. I let it slide the first two days of school, but by the third day, I’m like, “What’s going on? Where are the masks? Where is this? Where is that? We’re still in this stuff, and it’s worse now.” I had to make an executive decision as a parent. My kid’s class got exposed and I didn’t like the safety of it. I was worrying, like I had knots in my stomach. I had to remove my children from there. [My son’s] class went on quarantine for a week and then I just never took them back.

Beth Lehr: I have one teacher. This is her ninth year. She has already resigned for next year. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I dread coming to work every day.” She goes, “You know, I love the day-to-day of being in front of our kids. The second I have to open my email or grade their assignments is when I realize why I resigned.” The emails. The constant onslaught of the very vocal unhappy parents. We have some amazing families, but we don’t hear the “Thank yous” as often as we hear the “You sucks.”

Lost learning

Educators love jargon. It’s not surprising, then, that lockdown introduced new terms like “COVID slide” and “pandemic learning loss” to describe the academic fallout students experienced from months of remote learning. In June 2020, researchers at nonprofit assessment group NWEA were among the first to predict the extent of the chaos. The return to in-person learning helped. But as recently as December, from McKinsey & Co. showed that academic recovery has been uneven and gaps between Black and white students have widened. Educators also report challenges with student behavior, which many to the lack of socialization during remote learning.

Beth Lehr: The learning loss is going to be there. There’s going to be a new norm, but trying to jam more and more and more down their throats is not helping. Continuing to create these high-stakes environments and making kids feel less than because of something that was totally out of their control is not helping. Meeting kids where they are is. Why do they have to learn all these things, right? They have to learn it to be successful in the future. Great, what does that success look like? How are we redefining success, because honestly, right now, for some of these kids, success is getting out of bed and showing up.

Mariela Garcia: I’ve always struggled in math, and since it was online I feel like I wasn’t really learning as much as I could. When I got to college, I took trigonometry, and it was difficult. I had to get a tutor or stay after school. I had to study more on my own time. I had to take a test in person for the first time in two years. I struggled the first couple weeks, but once I got help and once I started studying, it’s just like riding a bike.

Ricardo Martinez: Seems like we’ve already stopped talking about it. A lot of people refuse to acknowledge it. They’re trying to change the conversation to CRT [critical race theory], anti-CRT. Let’s not worry about what’s not really happening and worry about what’s actually happening. Kids are getting more aggressive. They’ve lost social skills. We’ve lost a lot of learning, and I don’t think that the parents have been able to help because we barely know how to do what they’re asking us to do. I hope that we’re talking about learning loss until we catch back up, which should be in a few years.

Beth Lehr: [Students are experiencing an] emotional stuntedness, for lack of a better term. Freshmen are notoriously immature, but what we’re used to seeing as freshman behavior isn’t even freshman behavior. The “devious licks” stuff [a TikTok challenge that included school property damage] — that was 100 percent only freshman. Oh my God, the soap dispensers were destroyed over and over and over again. We had to replace sinks. We had to replace toilets — not because they were stolen, but because they were destroyed. The older students were super-annoyed by the freshman because then we ended up having to lock our bathrooms during lunch. We’ve also had an increase in sexual infractions — not necessarily assaults. It’s consensual, but it’s much more frequent on our campus this year. This is my seventh year as assistant principal, and this year, hands down, we have had more issues with kids getting caught in positions that high schoolers should not be in.

Hosea Born, art and robotics teacher at Hope Academy of Public Service, Hope, Arkansas: We will be talking about it as long as there is the overwhelming reliance on standardized testing. The pandemic has shown us that adaptability is key, yet we are still measuring our students on how well they can take a test. Teaching a non-tested subject has allowed me to see the flexibility and amazing ways that students learn when there isn’t a looming requirement hanging over their heads. Some of my students haven’t had an art class since the start of the pandemic, but it is key for students to be able to create, and when given the opportunity, they have jumped right back in, and to me, are exceeding all expectations. 

Pedro Martinez: Last year, our district had 100,000 students who were disengaged, including seniors who would have dropped out. We got the majority of seniors to graduate. Same thing happened in San Antonio. What I heard from teachers directly was, “These kids are coming every day. These are the same students who we couldn’t get to engage in remote. They’re coming every single day.” I saw the first-quarter grades. There are still gaps, but significant improvements over the remote year, and specifically with our kids of poverty and kids of color. That gives me a lot of hope. When we have the children in our schools, they actually do perform better.

Robin Lake: I think we will grapple with [learning loss] for as long as the COVID generation is alive. We’ll be looking at the immediate impacts for probably a decade, but there are sure to be lasting effects on individuals and on the economy for many decades unless we can change the trajectory of our response. The question is how we’ll be talking about it. Will the story be that we failed this generation of children, or will it be that we pulled together and found solutions for this generation, and designed a better education system for future generations?

A ‘five-alarm crisis’ for teachers

As they looked back, some recalled moments of doubt about perservering. According to from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, more than half of teachers intend to leave the profession sooner than they originally planned. While some are dubious about “the Big Quit,” NEA President Becky Pringle called teacher burnout and staff shortages a “five-alarm crisis.”

Michael Mulgrew: I think most people in this profession thought of quitting throughout this thing. There were some really really tough times. The only way out of this is to go through it.

Susan Enfield: I don’t think I ever thought of quitting. There were moments where I thought I don’t know if I can do this, but that’s different than quitting. I never just was like, “I’m out of here,” and my was not a response to the pandemic. I’m ready for a fresh challenge and Highline is ready for a fresh leader.

Beth Lehr: I’m so torn. I’ve applied for a principal position within the district, but at the same time I’m like, “Why? Why did I just do that? What am I thinking?” I haven’t yet gotten to the point where the stuff that I dislike about my job has outweighed the stuff that I like about it, but it’s hit or miss on a daily basis. 

‘I don’t use the term normal anymore’

Like a sequel to a bad horror movie, the Omicron variant arrived just as educators and families thought they’d made it through the worst of the crisis. The sparked a spike in cases, resulting in further school closures and quarantines. But now, with increasing vaccination rates and a recent decline in positive cases, some states are lifting mask mandates. The nation’s three largest districts aren’t ready to let masks go, but some are starting to use a word they haven’t uttered in a while: hope.

Pedro Martinez: We’re now at a point where cases have been very steadily declining. Our city is now close to an over-70 percent vaccination rate. There are still gaps within my district, but I’m seeing good momentum, especially with 5- to 11-year-olds. We’re close to maybe half of our district that should be fully vaccinated within the next couple weeks. Over 90 percent of my staff are fully vaccinated. So it really gives me hope that we’re on the other side of this. There’s a chance that by springtime we could be talking about not wearing masks.

Susan Enfield: I am hopeful that in the coming weeks and months we are going to collectively adapt to a way of living, a way of working, that will feel more familiar to what we knew prior to the pandemic. I don’t use the term “normal” anymore. I think entering that phase gives me hope.

Michael Mulgrew: The buildings built after the last pandemic have these really big windows. They actually were built that way so that you could open them to keep ventilation in case there was another pandemic. That literally became part of the code for schools after the pandemic of 1918. For a period of time last year, the teachers kept opening up the windows the whole way, and it’s like 7 degrees out. So, we had to produce this video for all the teachers about how you only have to open like half the windows about 3 inches each and you’ll be fine. One of the first cold days when we got back last month, I was in a school, and one of the teachers had windows open all the way. And I’m looking at the windows, and she touched my arm and she goes, “I know I don’t have to open it that much, but my team teacher for 20 years died of COVID a year ago.” I said, “You keep that window open any way you want.”

Shawnie Bennett: I don’t think I will ever take off my mask.

Mariela Garcia: I’ve always been the type of person to talk to anybody, but it was different seeing people that I’ve never met before [at the University of Houston]. People have been socially awkward, and it’s hard to start a conversation. With my personality, I’m a happy person and I talk to anyone. So I’m going up to someone [last fall] like, “Hi, nice to meet you,” and they’re just like, “Whoa, 6 feet apart.”

Beth Lehr: It’s so hard to see the end, and it’s so overwhelming. What I’ve heard more this year from my teachers than anything is, “We thought that last year was hard. This year is 10 times harder.” We’ve had very, very low turnover. I do not foresee that being the case next year. There are kind of two camps. There’s the one camp of “This too shall pass,” and then there’s the other camp of “Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.”

‘A true hunger for doing things differently’

Two years of scrambling and false starts has offered ample opportunity to think about what has — and perhaps more to the point, what hasn’t — worked for schools. If there’s another pandemic — and scientists say there undoubtedly , and soon — will anything change?

Christopher Nellum, executive director, Education Trust West: I think we now appreciate mental health in a different way. The past two years have been traumatic. We have been scared, sick, overworked, unemployed. We have missed vital human connection and even lost loved ones. We have witnessed a surge in racially motivated hate crimes and a national reckoning over police brutality toward Black and brown Americans. It’s OK to be struggling to feel OK in the face of all of that. It’s OK to talk about it. And we all deserve access to the resources we need to address it. 

Sonya Thomas: Parent engagement is not what we want. When you engage us, what you’re doing is bringing your own agenda and you’re saying, “This is what we’re going to do, so get with the program.” That’s what engagement means, right? “I’m bringing something to you, this is what you’re gonna get and you gotta just walk in line with it.” I think what they’re learning is that we’re not going anywhere and we want parent partnership. We don’t want to be engaged. Throw that in the trash. That has never gotten anything for our children. What we want is true partnership. We want school districts to partner with us, intentionally take our feedback and use it. That builds trust. It’s not a talking point or a PR move. 

Dale Chu: If anything, we’ve learned what doesn’t work. For example, asynchronous learning [without live teaching ] — homework, study hall — stunk. We also learned that huge doses of it left millions of students isolated from their peers, the toll from which we’re just starting to come to grips with.

Robin Lake: I hear a true hunger for doing things differently. People are saying, “You know, the way we ask teachers to teach alone in a classroom, trying to be expert in all things and serve vastly different needs, is crazy.” I believe there is a powerful confluence of parents, educators and civic leaders who know things have to change and are determined to make that happen.

Michael Mulgrew: We never said [remote learning] was going to be the be-all-and-end-all. It was always a way for us to keep in contact, to keep our students engaged. Through the end of that [2019-20] school year, it really was more of a lifeline between teachers and students and their families. We thought it should have been more of a centralized process, but [the department] figured it’s better off to just let every teacher do their own thing. The majority of students really do regress in a remote setting. There was a small percentage of students who actually thrived in remote, so that says there’s something there we have to look at. If there’s a subset of children who were not doing well when they were going to school — and there’s all sorts of different reasons for that — who all of a sudden did really well in a remote setting, we have to look at this going into the future.

Marguerite Roza: We have seen districts jump in and be nimble in a way that we never thought districts could be nimble before. People always say, “You know, turning a district around is like turning an aircraft carrier.” I’m like, an aircraft carrier turns around in a day. Why is everybody using that as something that’s slow? I was in the military. [From 1988 to 1992, Roza served at the Navy Nuclear Power School in Orlando.] Aircraft carriers are pretty maneuverable. There are thousands and thousands of people on an aircraft carrier, and that thing could spin around and change direction with the wind. I do think that we had thought districts couldn’t adjust, and many of them did.

Beth Lehr: I’ve had a lot of teachers really rethink their philosophies — some of my most dyed-in-the-wool [teachers]. This has truly opened their eyes when they’ve seen the disparities. Not everybody’s home looks the same. When we first started doing all of the remote, we had a lot of really serious conversations about requiring cameras to be on or not. A lot of our teachers were like, well, “Why wouldn’t the camera be on?” They never took into account that there might be 10 people in a two-bedroom house. There might be somebody being slapped, hit, cut, whatever while they’re there. They might be embarrassed because they’re doing your class from their car in the McDonald’s parking lot.

‘So long and so short’

Seven hundred days have flown by for some and painfully dragged on for others. For many, it’s been a bit of both. 

Michael Mulgrew: It feels like 7,000 days.

Laurie Corizzo, counselor, Ridge Ranch School, Paramus, New Jersey: This whole pandemic, the virus, the water cooler conversations are never-ending. If someone isn’t discussing a vaccine, a booster, the virus, who has it, who had it, who passed, it seems that conversations are stagnant. My point is, it encompasses every single aspect of our lives. It is as if there were some sort of imaginary force field that prevents any semblance of any other conversation to happen anywhere on the planet. In a word, it is quite exhausting.

Christopher Nellum: I hope that 700 days in, we are seeing our education systems for what they are and what they have been for a long, long time: profoundly inequitable.

Susan Enfield: I didn’t know that 700 days could both seem so long and so short simultaneously. I think the last couple of years have felt like a lifetime in and of themselves, and yet, at the same time, it feels like it’s gone by in a flash.

Marguerite Roza: I mean, wow — what a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Normally, we would say a 1 percent change in enrollment from one year to the next is earth-shattering to finance. We’re seeing 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 percent enrollment shifts in some districts. And some of those are large districts. Those kinds of things are going to change the structure of education forever.

Lead Image: Rippowam Middle School principal Matthew Laskowski looks on from a socially distanced cafeteria in September 2020 in Stamford, Connecticut. (John Moore / Getty Images)

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured South Bend, Indiana’s Madison STEAM Academy in September, he made a quick impression on the district’s superintendent, C. Todd Cummings. 

Cummings remembers the secretary’s interest in COVID protocols, the facility’s STEM makerspace, and that he spoke Spanish to students at the bilingual school. By the time the visit ended, he came away feeling like he could pick up the phone and call Cardona if needed. 

“He’s done a lot to make the department more approachable,” Cummings said. “He understands running a district, but he also understands teachers in the classroom.”

Having one of their own helming the U.S. Department of Education has gone a long way toward mending the fractured relationship between district leaders and the agency that existed under Cardona’s predecessor. Betsy DeVos was the consummate outsider. She warred with unions, made comments that many teachers found , and attempted to direct relief funds meant for the public system to private schools. In contrast, when the former Connecticut state chief meets with superintendents and school leaders, “he’s talking shop” on everything from bell schedules to graduation rates, said Ronn Nozoe, head of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

But almost a year into Cardona’s tenure, and with the pandemic showing no signs of abating, his department has sometimes struggled to keep up. COVID-19 has thrust the agency into the public eye almost as much as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and, like the CDC, it has often come under fire for being slow to respond to a fast-changing virus. To some, Cardona’s camaraderie with educators helps explain why he has sometimes appeared reluctant to embrace another constituency, whose power and visibility has grown with the pandemic: parents. 

Sarah Carpenter, executive director of The Memphis Lift, a nonprofit that trains parents to advocate for their children’s educational needs, said she hasn’t forgotten that parent leaders weren’t asked to speak at Cardona’s first virtual summit on reopening almost a year ago. 

“They know we’re here, and we’re just not accounted for,” she said, adding that parents “in those communities where this pandemic hit the hardest” should have had a voice. A June event focusing on equity didn’t feature parents either.

Cardona hasn’t ignored parents, and often reminds the public that his two teenage children, still attending public school in Meriden, Connecticut, have endured their own disruptions in learning. His first act as secretary was to write to parents and students acknowledging the hardships caused by the pandemic, and he has urged schools to rebuild trust with families.

More recently, when schools began to shift to remote learning because of the Omicron variant, Cardona told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, “Our parents have done enough.” That same week, the announcement of another round of grants to state came with Cardona’s statement that, “Meaningful parent engagement 
 has never been more important.”

But observers say his messages tend to emphasize over student recovery. When the department last month to use federal relief funds for teacher pay raises and hiring bonuses, Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said “the balance feels a little off.”

The pandemic has mobilized many parents to take a more central role in their children’s education, and their frustration over extended school closures likely tipped the Virginia governor’s race in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, has tried to drive that point home. She regularly participates in “stakeholder” meetings with the department, and shares monthly parent survey data with Christian Rhodes, chief of staff for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. But she described the department’s parent engagement efforts as a “box-checking exercise.”

“That’s not what this moment calls for. It calls for listening to people’s pain,” she said. “Parents expect to be engaged on a whole new level because we had to hold it down for [schools] while they weren’t there.”

‘Not a slow-moving moment’

Leaders in education said Cardona has shown skill in managing the mountain of challenges he faced when he entered the job: more than half of schools still not fully open, expectations that he quickly reverse the previous administration’s stance on students’ civil rights, and low morale among what Nozoe called the department’s “beat-down career staff.” Cardona, he added, is trying to rebuild an agency that DeVos shouldn’t even exist.

Cardona said his top priority has been helping schools reopen and stay that way. Others credit him with steering billions in federal aid to states and districts on a short timeline.

“They’ve made a huge amount of progress in a very, very difficult time,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, a think tank. She led President Joe Biden’s transition team for education and as the nominee.

She specifically noted his team’s work to get the American Rescue Plan funding for schools “out the door with guidance and support for how to spend it” and early efforts to make the CDC’s “wonky and mysterious” school reopening guidelines more accessible to educators. Recent confusion over whether the agency’s updated quarantine guidance applied to schools, however, drew fresh .

Some noted that communication from the department often hasn’t matched the urgency state and district leaders have experienced during the pandemic. 

In November, the department said it was OK to use relief funds to pay for alternate forms of for students in the face of a bus driver shortage. But that was a month after New York , a Democrat, asked for the guidance, and two months after Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker called in the to drive students to school. 

In mid-December, the department issued a on jumpstarting school accountability systems, but state officials started calling for that in September. 

“They are slow moving,” said Roza, “and it’s not a slow-moving moment in public education.”

In an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Cardona said the department responds with guidance when “we hear from the field.” He noted the staff’s efforts to host multiple webinars and respond to questions from educators, but acknowledged that guidance from the department has sometimes lagged. He vowed to do better. “We have to stay ahead of things, and we’re going to continue to improve communications.”

‘More influence’

As he nears his first year as a cabinet member, Cardona reflected on what the department has accomplished under his leadership. 

While Omicron has led to short-term closures of as many as 5,400 schools, according to a frequently updated , Cardona noted that in-person learning had hit of schools by early December. And he takes pride that the department is addressing problems with Public Service Loan Forgiveness — a federal program meant to encourage students to go into nonprofit and public sector jobs, like teaching, in exchange for debt relief. Under DeVos, the department denied most requests for relief, and borrowers complained that loan servicers gave on how to meet the program’s strict criteria. The department’s management of the program prompted the American Federation of Teachers . Since Cardona started, the department has wiped out roughly $12.7 billion in college debt, including almost $2 billion for the public service program.

“Not only are we providing some loan forgiveness, but we’re fixing the systems that led to the problems that we have now,” he said, adding that he wants to continue to “make higher education more accessible to more students without having to be tethered in debt for the rest of their lives.”

Before Cardona was confirmed, there was speculation he’d be overshadowed by Biden’s White House advisers, who included two former high-level education officials from the Obama administration. More recently, Rodrigues quipped that , president of the National Education Association, likely has more pull with the administration than Cardona.

Conservative pundits have sized him up as Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, described him as “under-the-radar, except when he’s been waving the flag for partisan administration objectives.”

But those who support those objectives say Cardona has clout with the president. 

“I think with every passing day, he has more and more influence with the White House,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who first met Cardona when he was a teacher and now has a friendly competition with him over who has visited more states and schools over the past year. By late December, she’d hit 28 states; he’d made it to 25.

She said he advocated with the White House for changes to the loan forgiveness program and for putting teachers second in line to receive the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, after health care workers.

Interestingly, given the coziness many of his critics assume Cardona enjoys with the unions, he has had trouble with the one representing employees in his own department. 

‘The huge political divide’

In early December, the Federal Labor Relations Authority found the department guilty of 14 violations of labor law — actions that date back to 2018 when the employee union’s collective bargaining rights. A of federal employees showed that morale within the department had declined far more than in any other agency. Those grievances have continued under Cardona, according to Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel with the American Federation of Government Employees.

The complaints involve inconsistent policies for working remotely, employee evaluation procedures and denying staff union representation when they have a dispute.

Under DeVos, the department was “paraded out as an example to other agencies of the kinds of things they should be doing in the Trump administration,” McQuiston said. “There has to be a political will to come in and say, ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’ At education, we struggle to get that commitment.”

According to a department spokesperson, efforts to resolve the complaints are ongoing and the agency is “committed to making sure it is a great place to work.” Both sides are scheduled to meet Thursday.

While addressing internal issues, Cardona was hit with a summer storm of public controversy over mask mandates and school equity initiatives. Superintendents were targeted with death threats, brawls broke out at school board meetings and school leaders tried to make sense of contradictory court rulings and mandates over masks.

“I wonder whether he anticipated the huge political divide over masks or no masks,” said Deborah Delisle, who served as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration and is now president and CEO of ALL4Ed, a nonprofit education policy organization. 

In August, Cardona departed from his usual cordial tone to take a against states banning local districts from mandating masks. 

“Don’t be the reason why schools are interrupted,” he said at a , indirectly challenging the governors of Florida and Texas.

But unless Republicans pressed him during Congressional hearings, he avoided the fray over critical race theory — a legal argument that racism lies at the core of U.S. institutions to intentionally advantage white people — and even to the controversial 1619 Project and the work of author Ibram X. Kendi from a civics grant program.

“We don’t get involved in curriculum issues,” he said during a June budget hearing, but stressed his support for culturally relevant teaching. “When students see themselves in the curriculum, they are more likely to be engaged.”

Some observers suggest he could have done more. 

Hess, at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cardona could “perhaps carve out room for the serious center” by defending “a progressive vision” but denouncing some of the examples that critics have found so , such as asking students to label themselves as “oppressed” or “oppressor.”

But Julia Martin, legislative director at Brustein and Manasevit, a law firm specializing in education, said there was no political upside for Cardona to wade any deeper into those waters.

“These issues, by their nature, are local issues,” she said. “There’s no way in many of these instances to come out and make a principled statement that doesn’t bother some people.”

The typically controversy-averse Cardona is a departure from the activist chiefs who have occupied the department since the No Child Left Behind era. Unlike many of his predecessors, Cardona doesn’t have a presidential mandate to implement bold reforms. 

“We’re still in a crisis, versus coming out of a crisis back in 2009,” said John Bailey, a senior fellow at AEI. That’s when Arne Duncan became secretary under President Obama, with a far-reaching mission to incentivize states to embrace controversial reforms such as overhauling teacher evaluations and adopting Common Core standards.

Even if Cardona had such a mandate, Bailey said, the pandemic leaves him in the position of trying to provide a “rapid response during an unfolding crisis that continues to play out.”

If the pandemic doesn’t continue to steal most of Cardona’s focus, he said he hopes to shift attention in 2022 toward issues a little closer to his heart: “teaching and learning.”

As someone who attended a technical high school in his hometown of Meriden, Cardona wants to see “better pathways” for students to two- and four-year schools and the workforce, especially with the jobs that will be created as a result of the $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill passed in November.

“There’s funding 
 unlike we’ve seen in the 20 years that I’ve been in education,” he said. “We have an opportunity here to really lift our field 
 and to give our students opportunities that they’ve never had.”

Lead Image: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona testified during a Sept. 30 Senate education committee hearing on school reopening. (Greg Nash / Getty Images)

States have until Monday to distribute $81 billion in federal relief funds to districts — two-thirds of the total for K-12 schools in the American Rescue Plan. And while the law requires districts to put aside 20 percent of their funding to address learning loss, an early review of spending plans shows most aren’t adding tutoring programs, extending the school year or adopting other programs expected to help students catch up.

Instead, they are largely using the money to fill budget gaps, hire staff and issue “thank you” bonuses to teachers, Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said during a Tuesday webinar. Her team has consulted with district finance officials and reviewed school board documents and media reports.

“That surprised us because tutoring is sort of the darling … for how to spend federal funds,” Roza said Tuesday, referring to multiple studies in recent months about the effectiveness of “high-dosage” tutoring programs.

Chad Aldeman, policy director at Edunomics Lab, added there’s little evidence so far of efforts to focus on the needs of the most vulnerable students. “The pandemic has affected different students differently, and we’re seeing a lot of one-size-fits-all,” he said. Facility improvements, he added, might be a smart use of one-time funds, but they don’t really help students most impacted by the pandemic.

The relief bill, passed in March, represents the largest-ever, one-time influx of federal funds for K-12, setting up a “fast and furious” planning process for districts over the next few months, Roza said. According to the law, districts have to submit spending plans to their states in August and provide updates or revisions every six months. They have until the end of September 2023 to spend the money. Meanwhile, leaders are facing heightened scrutiny from parents and advocacy groups looking to hold leaders accountable for helping students recover from months of remote learning. District spending plans must demonstrate that officials made extensive efforts to involve parents, educators and students.

“That means districts can’t go into a dark, smoke-filled room and make a plan,” she said, urging officials to be more transparent than usual about hiring staff, launching new programs and issuing contracts for services. Some superintendents, she said, are still operating under emergency powers, allowing them to sign off on expenditures without school board approval.

‘They can do better’

The National Center for Youth Law, a nonprofit law firm based in Oakland, California, is among those closely tracking whether districts are spending the funds on students with the greatest need. On Tuesday, the organization joined with three other California groups to release of how 48 districts in the state planned to use relief funds from last year.

While there were some bright spots, the analysis showed plans often lacked detail, especially on how schools intended to respond to students with limited internet access, seek parent and community input, and target support to English learners, students in foster care and others likely to face the most earning disruption.

Vague descriptions of goals make it “hard for folks to follow up, so at the end of the school year, they can ask, ‘How did it go?’” said Atasi Uppal, an attorney focusing on juvenile justice and education at the firm. “We want to give some grace to districts that were planning last September, but we also just think they can do better.”

As districts in the state begin to develop plans for a combined $55 billion in state and one-time federal funds, the groups are calling for greater input from the public and offer a list of questions parents and others can use to seek details on programs and expenditures.

Roza and other school finance experts warn districts against using time-limited funds on raises, new staff and other recurring costs. But Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, one of the other California groups, added that schools in the state already have such large shortages of school counselors and nurses that it might be wise to increase staff. “There is a need for a lot of extra support now,” he said.

However, districts planning to hire may struggle to find enough qualified applicants, Aldeman said, based on labor market data showing districts have more job openings than they’re able to fill.

In Colorado, the Denver Public Schools tried to get a jump on the planning process by meeting with a budget advisory committee in December, even before the Biden administration took office and the relief bill passed. Those meetings — involving students, parents and union representatives — inspired a new $3 million to provide on-site mental health professionals at schools.

Chuck Carpenter, the district’s chief financial officer, said schools want to have “the most welcoming and ready environments” when students return in the fall. But the challenge is to avoid committing to new programs they won’t be able to sustain financially in the future. “It’s a grant and you have to treat it like that,” he said. “There will be a time when it’s not there.”

Meanwhile, not all states will meet the deadline to allocate funds to the local level. One possible complication is that they are holding onto the money at the state level as part of their annual budget process. And in some states, the legislature doesn’t approve the budget until the end of June. “If that’s the case, then generally those funds can’t leave the state treasury to be liquidated 
 until the state’s budget has been enacted,” explained Austin Reid, education committee director at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, some states have alerted the department that they will miss Monday’s deadline as well as the June 7 deadline to submit a state plan for using relief funds. A department spokesperson did not offer specifics, but said, “states are providing updates on a regular basis.”