Pandemic-era school grants are about to expire. Are Tarrant County districts ready?
In Tarrant County and across the country, students will see fewer programs this year designed to help them make up ground they lost during the pandemic.
Over the past three years, school districts across the country have used federal COVID relief grant money to hire tutors, extend their school days and expand learning opportunities on Saturdays and during the summer. But with that grant money set to expire at the end of the month, districts have had to scale those programs back.
Carmen Arrieta-Candelaria, chief financial officer for the Fort Worth Independent School District, said the district had to make tough decisions about which programs to keep and which to wind down. In cases where district leaders decided to continue a program that was launched with COVID relief money, they had to come up with another way to pay for it, she said.
For example, school leaders redesigned the district’s high-impact tutoring program, which offers extra help for struggling students. With the end of the pandemic relief grants, campuses will have to pay for those programs using Title I funds, a separate stream of federal money that goes to districts with large percentages of low-income students. Other grant-funded programs, including expanded summer school, will also continue, she said.
Some schools will also use Title I money to continue to pay for family engagement specialists, staffers the district hired to reach out to families of absent students to talk about what was keeping those students out of school.
After the pandemic, the number of students who racked up large numbers of absences skyrocketed across the country. Family engagement specialists work with families to find solutions when kids miss too many school days. District leaders say those specialists have helped thousands of students reduce the number of days they’re absent, which means those students are getting more instructional time per school year.
But the district wasn’t able to keep everything. Some programs that create more instructional time have already ended. One such program was Saturday Learning Quest, which brought students to school on 14 Saturdays a year for extra instructional time in reading and math, plus enrichment activities like art classes and robotics. The district scaled the program back last year, offering it at fewer campuses and opening it only to students at the 15 highest-need elementary campuses instead of all elementary students in the district.
COVID relief dollars expire this month
Nationwide, school districts are up against a deadline to spend the rest of their grant allocations from the last round of federal COVID relief funding. Any money they haven’t spent by the end of the month must be sent back to the U.S. Treasury.
With that deadline looming, districts spent the summer figuring out which grant-funded programs they would be able to keep, and what they would have to wind down once the money ran out. Last month, Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Angélica Ramsey told the Star-Telegram that the district had planned for the end of that relief money, and wouldn’t see a sharp fiscal cliff at the deadline.
That isn’t to say the district hasn’t had to make painful decisions. In February, Ramsey pointed to the end of pandemic relief funding as one of several factors leading to the elimination of 133 non-teacher jobs. Records released to the Star-Telegram showed that only a fraction of those positions were funded with federal money. District officials didn’t address questions about how those positions were funded, but said the number of open positions in the district “far outnumbered” the jobs that were cut. Most employees affected by the cuts ended up taking other jobs in the district, a Fort Worth ISD official told the Star-Telegram in July.
The following month, the Arlington Independent School District cut 275 jobs and encouraged those staffers to apply for other open positions in the district. A spokesperson for the district said most of the employees affected by the cuts stayed on with the district in other roles.
In the Lake Worth Independent School District, officials hired additional teachers to help students close gaps in learning left by school closures, and help students recover course credits for classes they didn’t pass the first time around, district spokesperson Noah Ceballos said. But the district couldn’t afford to keep those new positions once the federal funding that paid for them dried up, he said. The district has also had to cut four mental health providers it hired using federal funding, he said.
Lake Worth ISD also used relief money to hire instructional coaches and coordinators, buy a program to support emergent bilingual students and adopt a communications system to disseminate information to parents. With the end of federal funding approaching, the district cut some of those instructional coach and coordinator positions and asked those who remained to take on added responsibilities, Ceballos said. The district will be able to continue paying for the communications system and the emergent bilingual program out of its general budget, he said.
Planning for the deadline was a less painful process for some districts: In the fast-growing Northwest Independent School District, for example, officials used federal money to add English and math teachers at the high school level, allowing for smaller class sizes. But the district’s enrollment is growing fast enough that district officials expected the increased state revenue those new students bring to supplant the loss of the federal money.
Likewise, officials in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District don’t expect program changes as federal funding ends, said Shiela Shiver, the district’s chief academic officer. The district used its relief grant money on a number of projects, including summer learning offerings, outreach to reduce absenteeism and programs aimed at boosting student performance in math and literacy, Shiver said. Over the three years the program has been in place, district leaders coordinated other funding sources to make sure those programs wouldn’t have to end once federal relief funds were exhausted, she said.
Tarrant County school districts feel budget pinch
The end of federal pandemic funding isn’t the only factor putting financial pressure on Tarrant County school districts. Texas hasn’t increased its per-pupil funding allotment since 2019, leaving school districts scrambling to keep up with rising costs. During last year’s legislative session, lawmakers proposed sending a portion of the state’s $38.7 billion budget surplus to school districts, but that proposal became tied up in debate over school vouchers.
Then, last month, the Tarrant Appraisal District’s board voted in changes to the county’s process for property value appraisals, moving from assessing properties annually to doing so every other year. District leaders in the county have warned that the move will lead to budget challenges because it will keep property values artificially low. Because the two-year cycle of appraisals wouldn’t begin until 2026, it would also mean districts would see stagnant revenue for three years, even as inflation continues to push costs upward.
During a Fort Worth ISD board meeting last month, Arrieta-Candelaria, the district’s CFO, pointed out that it’s possible that lawmakers will raise the state’s per-pupil allotment when they return to Austin next year. But barring that, she said, districts will most likely have to trim their budgets to offset rising costs.
School pandemic relief grants supported a wide range of work
The money expiring this month came from the third round of federal pandemic relief grants. The two previous rounds gave districts broad parameters for how to use it — HVAC upgrades, curriculum purchases and new classroom materials were all acceptable uses for that money. For the third round, Congress required that districts use at least 20% of the funding on programs to help students recover ground they lost academically during the pandemic. Federal lawmakers named expanded summer learning programs, extended school days and extended school years as examples of programs that would fall under that requirement.
That difference makes the expiration of this round of federal money an even bigger challenge for districts than the previous rounds, said Rebecca Thiess, a manager with the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Managing Fiscal Risks Project. Purchases like updated curriculum and new classroom materials are one-time expenditures. But programs like expanded summer school and Saturday learning are ongoing expenses, she said. If districts want to keep those programs because they’re working, they have to find another way to pay for them once the federal money is gone.
Thiess noted that challenge is likely to be biggest in high-poverty districts, because those districts received a proportionately larger amount of money, meaning their fiscal cliff could be greater once that money is gone. Researchers say high-poverty districts saw more severe learning loss and higher rates of chronic absences following the pandemic than their more affluent neighbors.
Federal cash led to limited gains, research shows
Research suggests the infusion of federal cash helped students across the country make academic progress — but not much. Two studies published last summer found that the programs funded by federal grant money helped students gain some ground in math, but had minimal impact on reading performance.
The two studies, one by researchers at the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes of Research and the other by Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research and the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, were conducted separately but released jointly last June.
In the Harvard-Stanford study, researchers noted that some districts had used federal money on projects that were seemingly unrelated to the purpose of the grants, like athletic facilities. They pointed to media coverage of a district in Whitewater, Wisconsin, a town about 40 miles west of Milwaukee, that used 80% of its grant money to build synthetic turf fields for its football, baseball and softball teams. In Texas, the McAllen Independent School District’s board voted to put $4 million of grant money toward the expansion of a city-owned nature center. The board later pulled back on that decision.
Researchers on the Harvard-Stanford study also noted that a large portion of the money from earlier rounds of grants went toward facilities work like HVAC upgrades — expenses that weren’t directly tied to academic recovery, but may have helped districts bring students back to school sooner. The U.S. Department of Education named ventilation and air-quality upgrades as an allowable use of that grant money.
Similarly, researchers working on the American Institutes of Research study found that federal spending made no statistically significant difference in reading. But in math, researchers found that federal relief money led to modest improvements — the equivalent of about six days’ worth of learning for every additional $1,000 in per-pupil funding districts received.
But despite those gains, researchers said evidence clearly suggests that students still haven’t caught up to where they were before the pandemic, and helping get them back on track could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
This story was originally published September 15, 2024 at 8:00 AM.
