Schools Ignored Congressional Intent for COVID Aid

You may not have noticed, but over the last few years public schools have scaled back their normal pleadings for more taxpayer money. That’s probably because school districts are flush with cash, thanks to the massive amounts of financial aid they received from the federal government during the COVID-19 pandemic.

School districts in Michigan received about $6 billion in extra funding in 2020 and 2021. Federal officials intended for schools to use this money immediately to combat learning losses caused by closing classrooms and forcing students into remote learning. But schools didn’t do that, and new Mackinac Center research exposes all the details.

Cassidy Syftestad Klutts, a doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas, conducted the research. She analyzed state financial reports that show how districts spend taxpayer money. This information is reported directly by school districts themselves.

Klutts found that districts are not nearly as nimble as federal government officials might believe. They spent only 1% of the extra funding they received in the first year of the pandemic. They didn’t do much better in the second year, 2021-22, spending another 15%. More than half was still left to spend after the third year. It appears that school districts are not good at quickly launching new programs and services, even if they might be critically important for student learning.

Instead, school districts mostly spent this extra money on hiring more employees and giving existing employees pay raises. It’s unlikely that giving current employees pay raises helped alleviate the learning losses districts created by closing schools for prolonged periods.

Klutts also puts this extra funding into its proper context. Six billion dollars is a lot of money, but school districts in Michigan already receive far more. In the three years since the pandemic began, districts spent $86 billion. Only 3% of that was from federal COVID relief funds. The emergency funds are a drop in the bucket.

There are important lessons here for policymakers. During an emergency, they shouldn’t assume that dropping a ton of cash on government programs will help them deal with the emergency. Michigan’s school districts did very little with their extra funds during the pandemic period. They reserved most of the money for after the pandemic and used a majority of the extra funds to support their existing operating model, not to expand or improve services for children. Money is not the answer to everything. Even in an emergency.