Timing: All at Once, and Then It’s Gone

As noted above, the three ESSER allocations were all authorized within a 12-month period, and districts were given four and a half years to spend the money, with different specific deadlines for different traches of funding. The specifics of the timing of ESSER funds—the limited but multi-year timeline, the time it took to spend on planned projects, and the fact that so many different districts and government entities received COVID relief simultaneously—significantly affected practitioners’ experiences with the money.

In addition to the interactions between the grant size and the spending timeline already discussed, the limited-time nature of the funds also affected districts’ choices about how best to use them. Limited-time funds are, by definition, supplemental dollars, because they will not be integrated into districts’ regular operating budgets going forward. Jess Gartner, CEO of the school finance services company Allovue, commented on the potential of this kind of funding:

There's a unique opportunity for innovation and experimentation with ESSER funds. In an environment of highly constrained resources like we traditionally see in K–12 finance, there are very few incentives (and, in fact, there are often disincentives) for trying anything new unless the current practice is widely acknowledged to be a spectacular failure, with a clearly superior option in reach….If you look at how private companies approach research and development, they typically don't abandon their current product offerings while developing something new—they might test several new products behind the scenes and pick the most successful ones to expand, all while maintaining their current offerings. K–12 has very little in the way of research and development dollars, which means they often default to maintaining the status quo. This is why supplemental resources can be hugely valuable.

Many districts focused on new initiatives in academics and student services. The Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration in North Carolina was focused on pointing local education agencies towards potential innovative uses of the money and providing access to data to help guide local decisions. The office directly supported ideas like the Summer Career Accelerator grant program, through which districts and charter schools could offer students work-based learning opportunities in local and regional businesses, and math enrichment programs offering both academic and social-emotional learning opportunities.¹ The office also highlighted promising district practices to encourage imitation, like a program at Macon County Schools focused on engaging students in science and engineering through hands-on activities facilitated by external partnerships; teacher-sharing across multiple districts in a rural area in order through hybrid remote and in-person learning arrangements; and the hiring of bilingual parent educators in Burke County Schools.²

Some school systems in the country also sought to innovate in the realm of district policy. For instance, Miriam Rubin, former budget director for Boston Public Schools, noted that her district used some of its ESSER funds towards an effort to develop a new funding model for schools. The updated system seeks to address a number of challenges with the prior model, including some revealed by the pandemic experience, like its lack of accounting for out-of-classroom concerns like student mental health. This policy change will hopefully improve support for students many years into the future. All of these new efforts drew on COVID relief dollars.

Keri Randolph, former chief strategy officer of Metro Nashville Public Schools, affirmed that because these were extra funds, and decisions about them couldn’t imperil core staff or services, “we could really dig in on strategy.” One example was her district’s ESSER-supported shift to a new English language arts curriculum. The emerging research consensus about the best way to teach literacy pointed away from the district’s former approach, but new curricula are expensive and require a significant investment in staff training to implement well. With the support of ESSER dollars, the district was able to purchase and fully implement a high-quality, research-backed curriculum. “And,” Randolph adds, “we could afford the professional development to go with it. We could support our educators and have strong implementation. That was really important, because normally we’re scrimping and saving and often making tradeoffs—purchasing materials but not getting all the professional development supports.”

Randolph now works in Chattanooga, and its school district, Hamilton County Schools, made a similar investment. She said, “That was a really effective use of funds that would have been really nearly impossible for both districts, because of funding models, to do on their own in such a robust way.” In addition to trying new things, Randolph said, “we tried to use this as an opportunity to let go. I think it's so hard…as a school K–12 person, where you often feel like you're operating from a mindset of scarcity, it's really hard to let anything go.” With extra dollars, it was possible to have more critical conversations about current services, programs, and staff roles, and schools became more willing to jettison ineffective approaches. Schools and districts could also set aside funding to assess the impact of new initiatives. Although not many interviewees mentioned doing this, Metro Nashville budgeted for evaluation of a number of ESSER-backed experiments in the hope that evidence of success would inspire state and local lawmakers to sustain those efforts after ESSER dollars were gone.

An experimental approach is far less likely with recurring dollars. For instance, a 2018 U.S. Department of Education report on Title I funds found that 80 to 90 percent of principals reported no or only minor changes in how they used these funds over the previous three years.³ When a funding source becomes a normal portion of annual planning, districts tend to use those funds in standard ways—something affirmed by several interviewees for this project when they were asked about comparing ESSER with Title I. This suggests that providing time-limited funds can be an effective way of spurring innovation.

Of course, not every district applied its ESSER funding in innovative ways. One interviewee lamented that in the absence of a clear vision or strong ideas from district leadership, staff were focused less on creativity and more on spending down the funds so that they wouldn’t be confiscated at the end of the grant period. He recalled one senior official driving around the district looking for library furniture that needed replacing, dryly commenting, “stuff like that probably wasn’t the best use of the funds.” The district might have benefitted from the creation of a new state office, like the Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration in North Carolina, that provided guidance to districts about high-impact potential strategies. Such support, coupled with flexibility over limited-time funding and an emphasis on the importance of evaluating investment impact, can do much to foster experimentation and innovation.

Another timing factor that emerged as important to district experiences with ESSER funds was the speed with which they were able to use the funds. Districts heard calls from many lawmakers and the press to spend down the relief money quickly, and some accounts cast unspent aid balances as evidence that districts lacked urgency about the crisis or that the funding was unneeded.⁴ The truth of the matter, however, is that school systems were not always able to spend money at their preferred pace. Quick early outlays gave way to slowdowns as district officials encountered logistical challenges crafting and implementing their ESSER plans.

Many interviewees talked about very fast initial spending of ESSER I funds on things needed for immediate operations at the height of COVID. Several mentioned immediately purchasing personal protective equipment and paying for increased cleaning and sanitation. Districts also had to stand up COVID testing operations and contact-tracing and reporting systems. Another common theme was needing to quickly purchase computers, internet hot spots, and other items required for remote learning. Matthew Lentz of Upper Moreland School District also remembered how important it was that the district could apply the ESSER I award retroactively to COVID-related expenditures that had occurred even before the grant was awarded, because so much unanticipated spending had to happen so quickly.

For subsequent ESSER allocations, though, it was sometimes difficult for districts to plan for and use the funding in the time provided. Planning was a particular challenge for ESSER III, which was by far the biggest tranche, at $122 billion, and which was authorized by Congress less than three months after ESSER II.⁵ This large allocation carried a new, potentially time-intensive federal requirement to consult with community stakeholders about how the money should be used.⁶ Despite this requirement, some states set quite a short timeline for districts to complete and submit their ESSER III plans. Money reached states in the spring, and some set a deadline in the fall, essentially allowing districts to use the summer as a planning period.⁷ Others offered less time; Texas, for instance, gave districts only until July 27, 2021, just three months after the state education agency announced districts’ ESSER III award amounts.⁸

When it came to executing initiatives beyond those first expenditures on safety and remote learning, districts’ urgent plans often ran up against practical barriers. Miriam Rubin, former budget director of Boston Public Schools, spoke about staffing-related slowdowns. “Even ideas that were good and are going to be sustainable,” she said, “it just took a long time for them to get up and running for a variety of reasons, hiring being one.” She added, “Our vacancy rates were so high across the board.” This affected school sites and the central office. For instance, some schools identified literacy coaching as a pressing need but couldn’t fill coach positions. Important school building improvements were proposed, but the district office struggled to staff up its infrastructure team to support those projects. Applicants were sometimes hesitant to take on a role once they heard it was funded by the temporary ESSER funding. Similar challenges affected many of the interviewees’ districts.

Availability was a problem for materials as well, not just staff. “The supply chain challenges made it really difficult for them to spend the ESSER II bucket of money on [capital projects] and get projects completed because they couldn't get equipment,” said Hannah Barrick, executive directorPennsylvania Association of School Business Officials. The budget director of one large midwestern school district affirmed that this was a challenge, and said, “We couldn’t buy anything…. We still have probably $70 million in bond proceeds sitting in the bank from before COVID that should have been spent, but those projects were just delayed and delayed and delayed, because we can’t get anything… So the supply chain stuff was really hurting us, making it hard to actually expend that money.

These realities must be borne in mind as we consider the timing and execution of districts’ plans: Not all final spending choices and timetables reflect districts’ original plans for the money. In some cases, the lack of availability of staff or materials forced slower or second-best expenditures.

The bills that authorized ESSER funding, and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in particular, included huge aid allocations not only for the vast majority of school districts, but also for other government entities. The immense amount of simultaneous funding had the effect of creating an environment of both competition and collaboration.

Multiple interviewees mentioned challenges completing building improvements within the ESSER timeline because so many districts were seeking to hire the same contractors at once. This had the effect of creating some of the slowdowns and project cancellations discussed in the above section.

Other interviewees talked about competition for staff when so many districts had relief money to offer. Travis Reeves, Superintendent of Surry County School District in North Carolina, said his district used some of the relief funding to offer a retention bonus of $1,000 to staff, but “two counties away, they paid $5,000. You know, that created a lot of pressure on everybody across the state: ‘Well, this county’s giving this and this county’s giving that.’” He said, “that creates jealousy with teachers and a lot of finger-pointing.” In the end, Reeves worried, the bonus may have actually been harmful for morale.

This competition may have especially disadvantaged higher-need school districts. Districts serving higher concentrations of students in poverty, students of color, and English learners already face challenges in attracting experienced and skilled teachers and staff.⁹ When ESSER money was given to so many districts at the same time, prospective staff suddenly had openings to choose from in many lower-need districts, making it even harder for higher-need districts to fill vacancies and staff up new initiatives. To address this equity problem, policymakers should consider targeting funding not only in amount (as with Congress’s decision to send more ESSER money to districts serving higher percentages of students in poverty) but also in timing, sending the money sooner to higher-need districts. The need for ESSER I health and safety expenditures hit all districts at the same time, but later tranches of the funding could have been provided in need-based stages, allowing higher-need districts to be first in line for staff, materials, and services.

Simultaneous funding also had the positive effect of creating opportunities for collaboration between governments. Many school districts were located in counties or towns that received their own sizeable relief allocations, because ARPA also included $350 billion for the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) program.¹⁰ While ARPA included an explicit requirement to meaningfully consult with local stakeholders when crafting spending plans, the fact that other local governments also had relief money to spend was itself a prompt to coordinate efforts.

Some interviewees reported drawing on municipal or county aid to provide community-based tutoring, food aid, and summer programs offered in partnership with agencies like town departments of parks and recreation. Dorrell Green is Superintendent of Red Clay Consolidated School District, in New Castle County, DE. The county received quite a lot of recovery funds—it was in the 96th percentile of recipient counties nationally. Even before ARPA, the county provided grants to help districts implement distance learning.¹¹ Green said that once ARPA passed, “New Castle County got a substantial amount, and a lot of that funding was focused on supporting schools,” with funds from “the county [for] wastewater treatment and testing to see the prevalence of COVID in our schools, and [for] outdoor classrooms.” Red Clay “It was really looking at the braiding of the funding to see how we can maximize the funding we received,” he said.

The realities revealed by the pandemic, Green said, made clear the need for collaboration and a focus on community issues beyond academics. “Even now, I think a lot of folks are just focused on [academic] proficiency and proficiency rates. And I think we all want students to be proficient, but I think what we’ve learned through this COVID process is that schools,” he said, “serve a broader need for children, for a family, and for the community at large.” He mentioned feeding families through expanded school nutrition programs that have now ended, and the challenge of sustaining funding to meet the “legitimate and real needs” that are not traditionally thought of as educational concerns, but that were revealed as school functions when they were impacted by building closures and the transition to remote learning.

Because these needs are community-wide, Green said, “anytime we can look at this from a collective impact framework, I think it helps all of us align goals, even strengthen policymaking, because… the same community-based organization, school, employer, faith-based organizations and groups, we all serve the same community. And I think we were forced to collaborate and work together, and we formed some amazing partnerships,” he said, since the community “maximized our collective efforts to support the children and families that we all serve.” While successes like those Green described in Red Clay were certainly not universal, they do support the idea that there may be value in funding different but geographically overlapping units of government at the same time, promoting collaboration between school districts, towns, counties, and other entities that have distinct capabilities but are responsible to the same communities.