Schools have raked in roughly $190 billion in COVID-19 relief funds that education advocates argued were desperately needed to help the system recover from the pandemic.
But more than two years into the recovery, some schools have not yet spent piles of cash Congress handed them through three separate stimulus bills.
And in places where the spending is underway, COVID-19 relief dollars have sometimes funded projects that have seemingly little to do with the stated aim of returning public schools to normal.
“The good news is the federal money helped, and it made a difference,” Ralph Martire, executive director at the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, told the Washington Examiner. “The bad news is, the reporting requirements are lax enough so that we’re not going to fully understand exactly how much it helped and where the money went to determine whether or not the money went to generate better outcomes.”
“I don’t think we’re going to have that kind of accountability,” he added.
Schools received aid from the federal government in three batches over the course of the pandemic. The first tranche of relief funding came from the CARES Act that President Donald Trump signed in March 2020. That bill provided $13.2 billion to schools.
Trump signed another stimulus bill in December 2020 that included $54.3 billion for schools.
But by far, the largest infusion of funding for education recovery came in the American Rescue Plan that President Joe Biden signed in March last year. That plan dumped another $122 billion into schools.