COVID Relief Funds: Still a Potential Source of Funding for Boosting Career and College Readiness

By Catherine Brown, Senior Director of Policy and Advocacy 

Reading time: Seven minutes

Introduction

The recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) score release documents concerning disruption in educational progress. Math scores declined for the first time in history. Reading scores fell by the largest amount since the 1980s. While the results vary among states and subgroups, they clearly suggest that children across the board – and especially those who are Black and Hispanic and have traditionally been the least well-served by their schools – need substantial support and intervention to even get back to pre-pandemic academic achievement levels.  

Over the last two and a half years, the federal government has provided $274 billion to address pandemic-related education challenges. On July 13, 2022, the Department of Education (ED) released the final installment of the Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) Fund, which was aimed at stabilizing the finances of colleges and universities and their students. With that funding out the door – and the urgent needs of students further revealed by the NAEP scores – we thought it would be a good time to look at how much federal relief money has been spent, what we know about where the money has gone, and most importantly, how much may still be available to help address learning loss and get students back on track towards college and career.

Summary of Education Federal Relief Funds 

First, a quick summary of the resources that were made available. Federal relief funding for schools and students was provided through four different funds across three different bills. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act or, CARES Act, was enacted on March 27, 2020; The Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, or CRRSA, was enacted on December 27, 2020; and the American Rescue Plan was enacted on March 11, 2021. These bills included dedicated resources for public K-12 schools (ESSER, or the Elementary and Secondary Education Relief fund); private K-12 schools (Emergency Assistance to Non-Public Schools); and colleges and universities and their students (HEER). There was also a discretionary fund for governors (Governor’s Emergency Education Relief fund), which could be spent on K-12 or higher education.  

ED has released a portal that shows how much money each state has received and spent, by fund, thus far. We dug into that data to share some high-level takeaways. We have also pulled the data together and are making it available here in spreadsheet form to allow for easier comparisons between states and funds.   

Education Stabilization Fund (ESF): $274.3 billion total

ESSER funding, the largest pot in total and of which there are still funds available, can be used for a wide variety of purposes related to helping strengthen students’ postsecondary pathways. The authorized activities are broad. They include: 

• Any activity currently authorized under ESEA or IDEA.
• Preparedness, prevention, and response efforts related to the coronavirus.
• Providing principals and other school leaders with the resources necessary to address the needs of their individual schools.
• Addressing the unique needs of low-income children or students, children with disabilities; English learners, racial and ethnic minorities, students experiencing homelessness, and foster care youth, including outreach and service delivery.
• Developing and implementing procedures and systems to improve the preparedness and response efforts of LEAs. 

Helping address learning loss is specifically noted in the statute:

• Address learning loss through the implementation of evidence-based interventions that address respond to students’ academic, social, and emotional needs.
• Address the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on underrepresented student subgroups, among other activities. 

In fact, 5% of the funds must be used for evidence-based interventions to address learning loss. And while the ESSER funds were divided among three different bills, the ARP ESSER funds can be used for the same allowable purposes as ESSER I and ESSER II.

Spending Analysis: What Do We Know 

Overall, 49% of the total ESF has been spent, but there are wide variations between funds and states. A much smaller proportion (34%) of the funding for K-12 schools and systems, ESSER, has been spent than for colleges and universities, which have nearly depleted their allotments. The fund dedicated to private schools has an even lower spenddown rate than the one for public schools, with only 26% of the funds spent so far. The GEER has a spenddown rate that falls between HEER and ESSER, at 70%.  

State and district spending varies widely. Iowa has spent the most of its federal relief funding, with almost 70% out the door. Vermont in contrast has spent less than half of that at 34.5%. 29 states have spent between 45% and 55% of the total ESF funds.

The top-10 lowest-spending states are:

The top-10 highest-spending states are:

Looking strictly at ESSER, which is by far the largest pot of education-specific federal relief money, and the pot with the lowest spenddown rates, there are 30 states that have spent less than a third of their allotment. They are listed below. In sum, these states have almost $53 billion in ESSER funding left. We do not know how much of this money has been obligated – that is, not yet spent, but allocated for a particular purpose. State education agencies and local school districts may have already committed the funds by signing contracts for services that have not yet been provided. If so, those funds would not be recorded as spent, but could be dedicated to meeting a vital need. 

Lowest Spending ESSER States

There is not a lot of information available about how these funds have been spent so far, but the portal provides some clues. In certain states spending has been categorized into activities. Based on the report Alabama submitted for March through September of 2020, more than half of funding was spent on education technology, with a quarter going to sanitization. Only 5% was spent on supporting underserved students. March through September of 2020 was early in the pandemic, and it makes sense that a lot of funding was devoted to technology and sanitization, as those were pressing needs or many schools at that time. The Council of Chief State School Officers, CCSSO, released a recent analysis of the state set-asides in ESSER, which suggests that academic support, including tutoring and extended learning time, received the greatest investment of any category. More updated information from ED would help illuminate how the rest of the money has been spent. 

It is worth noting that the funds had different deadlines for spending the money and different rules for the way the funding had to be allocated: 

• HEER – The higher education fund distributed the funds directly to colleges and universities through a formula and required schools to distribute half of the money to students in the form of emergency aid. Institutions of higher education are required to spend the HEER money by June 30, 2023.
• ESSER – The K-12 fund was distributed to state education agencies, which were required to send it to local education agencies, including charter schools. They had a great deal more flexibility in how the funds were spent and a longer runway in which to spend them. ARP ESSER funds, the last ESSER funds to be appropriated, must be obligated – not spent – by September 30, 2024.  

The spenddown rates that ED is reporting suggest that states and districts are responsive to the program deadlines and are not accelerating their spending when they do not have to to meet the program requirements. If the ESSER funds are not obligated by September 30, 2024, the federal government will take them back, and the funds will revert to the U.S. Treasury.    

What’s Next 

This analysis suggests that there may be substantial amounts of money still available to help underserved students get back on track to fulfilling their college and career aspirations, but there is also a lot that is unknown. We encourage program leaders to speak with their state and local officials about funding that may still be available to serve students who have fallen behind and need extra support. Some of the questions this analysis raises include: 

1. How much of the Education Stabilization Fund, and particularly the ESSER fund, is still available to be spent (i.e., not obligated)? If ED would share this information, it would empower leaders on the ground to reach out to policymakers to discuss the needs they are seeing in their communities and ways to use the money to address the pressing needs of underserved students.
2. If significant funding is still available, as the percentage spent suggests, why has it taken schools and districts so long to get these funds out the door? Are there obstacles to spending the funds that Congress did not anticipate?
3. How were ESSER funds spent by most states? And specifically, was a greater percentage dedicated to serving underserved populations in other states across other time periods than the report cited from Alabama cited above suggests? If not, can states devote more funding to this purpose now that the urgent needs, such as sanitization and technology, have been largely addressed?
4. Most importantly, how can stakeholders dedicated to helping BIPOC and low-income students work with policymakers to ensure that the remaining funds are spent on the very significant challenges brought on by the pandemic that are still confronting our students? What can program leaders and policymakers who want to ensure that the remaining funds are used to drive towards more equitable educational outcomes do to ensure the remaining funds are directed at the purpose? 

The 2022 NAEP scores provide clear evidence that student learning has suffered amidst the pandemic. The key question confronting us now is: what do we do? Invest Forward has a suite of resources and policy ideas to help maximize the impact of the stimulus funds to position all students for postsecondary success and long-term economic opportunity. With greater transparency, policymakers and advocates could understand the resources that are still available and help devise solutions to the challenges facing our schools. States and school districts could also share best practices and learn from each other’s successes in order to accelerate student learning and narrow achievement gaps going forward.

Sarah Abernathy, Executive Director of the Committee for Education Funding, contributed thoughtful comments and edits to this blog post. 

Read More:

• Congress Finalizes Funding to Avoid Government Shutdown, Provide Additional COVID Relief
• Here Are the Education Provisions in the Biden Administration's $1.9 Trillion COVID Relief Package
• What NCAN Members Need to Know About How the Government is Responding to COVID-19