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If, as the saying goes, you shouldn’t let a crisis go to waste, then the federal government did just that when it passed the first round of multiple-billion-dollar payments to help shut-down schools reopen safely when the pandemic subsided.
Besides air purifiers and rapid tests, however, some cash-strapped districts used the windfall to pay for badly-needed investments: building renovations, teacher pay raises, tutoring for struggling students, after-school programs, in-school therapists. For Black schoolchildren, the upgrades not only addressed pandemic learning loss but helped slightly narrow the Black-white achievement gap.
After three rounds of allocations, however, funds from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Act will expire in September, and no future payments are on the horizon. That’s bad news for Black students, who gained amenities their white peers in better-funded districts take for granted.
“We’ve had these opportunities that have been created through the ESSER dollars,” says Jen Rinehart, senior vice president for strategies and programs for Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group. “With the deadline for the spending coming up, we’re concerned that many of those young people will lose out on programs that they and their families have really begun to rely on.”
A February report from the nonprofit Center for Budget Policy Priorities put a finer point on it.
After three rounds of spending, the end of ESSER “will create a fiscal cliff for school districts, which will need to figure out how to make up for the lost dollars or significantly reduce services,” according to the report.
“In states that reported data, nearly 50 percent of ESSER III funds have gone to labor costs,” the report states. “Those newly hired staff are now at risk of being laid off if states don’t increase funding from other sources.”
Reinhart says those layoffs will hurt students of color — a cruel irony since the pandemic “exacerbated many of the disparities that we saw, pre-COVID” between schools and districts that are well-funded and those that are barely getting by.
“Now,” she says, “we run the risk of returning to a situation where we’re going to exacerbate, yet again, some of those disparities.
Congress seemed to have school funding disparities in mind when it passed the first round of ESSER findings in 2020. The bill was structured in part to ensure high-poverty districts got their share of the massive aid bill — arguably the largest school spending package in U.S. history.
Between March 2020 and March 2021, Congress passed three rounds of funding for schools, totaling some $190 billion. Although districts had wide latitude in spending it, the money came with a catch: all funds that weren’t already spent or designated for a project by Sept. 30, 2024, would go back to the federal treasury, with few exceptions.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the impact of what experts are calling “the ESSER fiscal cliff” will fall hardest on low-income districts, which tend to be majority-Black and Latino districts.
“High-poverty communities will see sharper impacts to their school budgets in part because of how ESSER funding was structured: At the outset, ESSER funds were intended to provide greater levels of support for high-need schools,” according to a report from the Brookings Institute, a Washington, D.C. policy center. However, “as ESSER ends, those same districts now have more dollars to cut from their recent annual budgets.”
That’s because, for a variety of reasons, those districts have spent the money more slowly than higher-income districts, according to the report. The slower pace, the report states, has had the unintended consequence of leaving a district “with even more money in its 2023-24 budget, resulting in a larger year-to-year contraction as the cliff hits in fall of 2024.”
Since the lion’s share of a school district’s budget goes to staff, those schools will probably have to cut the counselors, tutors, and other hires that could help them not only reverse pandemic learning loss but close the achievement gap with white students, according to the report.
Those staffing cuts “can wind up hurting both educators and students of color the most,” with some districts already enacting hiring freezes and layoffs, according to the Brookings report. “If history is any guide, with these types of staff reductions, the most vulnerable students experience the most disruption.”
Reinhart of the Afterschool Alliance says it’s unclear what comes next after ESSER funds run out, but she hopes lawmakers on Capitol Hill — particularly those with children — can connect the dots between what they and their kids experienced during lockdown and how valuable extra programs can be for students of color.
“If you talk to lawmakers who have children themselves, or even school-aged grandchildren, they recognize the value of the programs that their kids and grandkids are participating in,” she says. “I think what gets lost too often is how big the disparities are.”
