As enrollment in the public school system plummets, school districts across the country have yet to spend the vast majority of the funding set aside for them last year in the massive American Rescue Plan.
Much of the money that states and districts have managed to spend has gone to services, such as teachers and technology, that do little to address the reasons why schools have faced an exodus of students since the beginning of the pandemic.
But billions of dollars in relief money is still awaiting a destination from districts that are hemorrhaging students, with many families pursuing alternative education arrangements after public schools failed to provide reliable or comprehensive instruction for months.
THE PANDEMIC WORSENED TEENAGE DEPRESSION
Nearly 1.3 million students have left the public school system since 2020, according to a recent analysis.
That analysis found the districts that remained mostly remote through much of the pandemic lost the greatest numbers of students.
The ARP set aside $122 billion for public schools that Democrats argued last spring were in desperate need of support in order to emerge from the pandemic.
It was the third influx of relief funding for schools after two previous rounds of stimulus. The first two had been billed as necessary to help shuttered schools get their doors back open. In some of the most liberal school districts, officials kept schools closed despite receiving the aid.
In all, school districts have spent just 7% of the money allocated to them in the ARP, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Some individual states have spent even less.
Oregon, for example, has spent 4.6% of its funds.
In outlines of how the state plans to distribute its stimulus, Oregon officials used progressive language about the way they intended to spend the money, saying they would consider funding decisions through “an equity-informed, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive lens.”
But detailed breakdowns of precisely how states and districts have allocated their funding for schools are not readily available, leading to questions in recent months about where the money is going.
The United States has more than 13,000 school districts, and not all of them have submitted timely or comprehensive data, making a complete analysis of where the COVID-19 money is going difficult.
Some of the districts that have provided detailed breakdowns of their spending have invited questions about whether the decisions really address the COVID-19-created problems facing public schools as the pandemic draws to a close.
In the school district of Wayne Township in Indianapolis, for example, administrators have disclosed that they plan to spend $1 million on extracurricular activities and $6.1 million on new Chromebooks, according to Chalkbeat, an education publication.
Technology and after-school activities — two relatively popular destinations for the relief funding, according to the reports that are available — may not address the reasons families are fleeing the public school system, however, and relatively higher levels of COVID-19 relief spending so far does not seem to have stopped some districts from losing high numbers of students.
Elsewhere, Washington state has spent 11.1% of its ARP funds.
The state lost 3.8% of its public school student population since the start of the pandemic.
Oklahoma has spent 10.3% of its funds, and the state has lost about 6% of its public school student population.
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The steep enrollment losses in many districts have led to questions about whether they, when stimulus money dries up, will be forced to cut jobs or downsize the number of their schools. District funding is typically tied to the number of students.
The losses have also raised questions about whether investments in school personnel, whether those be for teachers or hiring counselors to deal with pandemic-related academic and behavioral setbacks, is wise given that some may need to be laid off in the fall of September 2024.
If schools have not spent the ARP stimulus money by then, the money will cease to be available.
